1. Ukraine is 600,000 square kilometers in size with 170,000 square kilometers already bought up by major real estates oligarchs.
The Australian edition of National Review writes that three large American multinational consortia have bought 17 million hectares of Ukrainian agricultural land, equivalent to the agricultural land area of Italy.
2. The companies: Cargill, Dupont and Monsanto are funded by Vanguard, BlackRock and Blackstone. BlackRock manages $10 trillion in assets, Vanguard: $6 trillion, and Blackstone manages $881 billion – financial capitalists are cultivating future hungers.
3. Although Ukraine has some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world, the wealth of Ukraine’s agricultural sector has long remained beyond the reach of the country’s small-scale farmers. In the country known as the “Breadbasket of Europe”, agriculture has been dominated by oligarchies and multinational corporations since the privatization of public lands following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Over the past 30 years, no government has managed to challenge this established agribusiness order.
4. Similar agribusiness models and patterns exist in other parts of the world:
Under monopoly-capital, exorbitant imperial rents from the control of global production are obtained not only from the global labour arbitrage, through which transnational corporations with their headquarters in the Global North overexploit industrial labour in the periphery, but also increasingly through the global land arbitrage, in which agribusiness multinationals expropriate cheap land (and labour) in the Global South so as to produce export crops mainly for sale in the Global North, see Intan Suwandi, Value Chains (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2019), 32–33, 53–54.
The transnational-based nations known as the “Soybean Republics” ranging across south America in countries like Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. Their emergence has the resultant change, and socioeconomic impact, in ownership and control of national economies where new geography is embodied by emboldened changes in corporate management, organisational structure, global financial capitalization, intermediary subcontracting of various schemes, supply chain substitutions, digital leasing, and even transnational land pooling.
This global value chaining is the modus operandi of contemporary imperialism.
5. The IMF as the financier and the developmental implementor World Bank under its Structural Adjustment Programme often imposed upon African debtor countries to develop their exports of cash crops at the expense of imports and expenditure on social welfare, resulting in cutting subsidies into local food production.
According to the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private finance-armed division, lifting the moratorium on land sales would cause Ukraine’s annual GDP growth rate to increase by 1-2% for 5 years. However, this increase would be mainly due to “the ejection of agricultural producers with lower profits, and the extension of producers with higher profits, consequence of the rise in the price of land.” This means that the World Bank is avowedly counting, through this agricultural reform approach, on the disappearance of the smallest and most modest farmers in favour of the largest farmers.
This expression is contradicting its avowed objective where The World Bank Group does not support speculative land investments or acquisitions which take advantage of weak institutions in developing countries or which disregard principles of responsible agricultural investment.
6. On some other examples: trade terms in Jamaica mean that local food industries go out of business because of the dumping of cheap, subsidised food from the USA. Another instance, food aid is sent to Ethiopia, which could do a better job of feeding itself if the coffee price was not driven down by commodity markets in London or New York. Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, food aid does not reach all needy inhabitants because of their political affiliations. Often would Hershey purchases so many cocoa beans in the futures market that prices rose by more than 30 percent; the Ghana Cocoa Board accused the firm on the abuse of the derivatives market to impoverish the West African farmers.
7. Soy has become one of the world’s most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. However, the soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows and disrupted social relations deeply in contested ecologies and economies, see The Journal of Peasant Studies Soy Production in South America: Globalization and New Agroindustrial Landscapes and John Wilkinson, The Globalization of Agribusiness and Developing World Food Systems, Monthly Review, Sep 01, 2009.
8. The outcome is that prominent transnationals have had an important presence in the Brazilian agrifood industry since its birth; players that include: Nestlé, Unilever, Anderson Clayton, Corn Products Company, Dreyfus, and the Argentine transnational Bunge y Borne (now simply Bunge). They were later followed, as different markets matured, by Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods, and Cargill from the United States, and United Biscuits, Bongrain, Danone, Parmalat, and Carrefour from Europe.
(Remember that U.S. Cargill is a Big Farm conglomerate n Ukraine, too.)
9. The consequences are that uneven, and often uncoordinated, foray of metropolitan corporate capital is subjugating the agriculture and domestic food markets of many developing countries, particularly smaller, peripheral ones undergoing rapid urbanization, to the needs of global agribusiness monopoly-capital.
This is where our local enterprising capitalists are connecting these nodes of land ecological destruction and labour deprivation, see Landless and a GLC and Beefing Capitalism.
Even the Brazilian government remains firm in its objective of handing over indigenous lands, which make up 12% of Brazilian territory, to private hands, preferably agribusiness and mining. In other words: it is not enough to steal, it has to destroy. Since he took office, Jair Bolsonaro has accumulated a long history of attacks on indigenous peoples with the argument that they do not offer any benefit to society, so they have to be “integrated” to become workers.
With that logic, the government dismantled the Funai (the body that should protect the indigenous people) and has turned a blind eye to all the attacks by grileiros (property grabbers on unclaimed land), jagunços (gunmen) and fazendeiros (land-owners) on indigenous lands. The clandestine mining and Big Farms’ deforestation activities have for the agribusinesses continue at full speed.
10. In Ukraine, the total area of land leased by the largest companies operating in the country would amount to more than 6 million hectares. The largest holder of agricultural land is Kernel, owned by a Ukrainian citizen but declared in Luxembourg, with approximately 570,500 hectares; followed by UkrLandFarming (570,000 hectares), the private US investment company NCH Capital (430,000 hectares), MHP (370,000 hectares), and Astarta (250,000 hectares). The owners of UrkLandFarming, MHP and Astarta are also Ukrainian, but these companies are also registered in other countries (Cyprus and the Netherlands).
Other major players include the Saudi conglomerate Continental Farmers Group with 195,000 hectares (Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Company, a company owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, is the majority shareholder), and the company French agricultural AgroGénération with 120,000 hectares.
11. Even in our country-case of the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) that was initiatied to cater for the settleless poors in the rural regions of peninsula Malaysia has evolved to a corporatised entity in the guise as the Felda Global Venture (FGV) that lost its investments and loss of incomes to its tenants.
Collectively, Felda settlers are only owners of amalgamated plots within a FELDA scheme, but with an aging population where 70% are aged 60 and above, the settler-owners are under undependable moment to be overtaken by Big Capital Big Farms.
12. Marx had warned that the development of productive forces and technology under capitalist relations of production does not adequately prepare the conditions for human emancipation, but on the contrary, causes a deep alienation of human beings from their environment in the form of a “metabolic rift” – the ecological disruption in their interrelations with nature, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), ix.
Although modern human societies have attained an unprecedented levels of wealth, there is a significant amount of the world’s population continues to suffer from hunger or food insecurity on a daily basis.
In Agriculture and Food in Crisis, Fred Magdoff and Brian Tokar said that nowhere more evident than in the production and distribution of food.
One needs to know that the Big Farm production is shaped by a system that is geared towards capital creation and generarion of profit above all else, with food as nothing but an afterthought.
EPILOGUE
Technically, it is possible to feed to world’s people, but it is not possible to do so as long as capitalism exists.
We need to create a human-centered and ecologically sustainable system in food production, from viability to maintainable livelihoods.
However,
“Agribusinesses,” Rob Wallace writes, “are moving their companies into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor and cheap land,” and “spreading their entire production line across the world.”
In reality, Global North monopoly-capital investment in Global South is little more than a collaborating strategy for profiting on planetary destruction.
First posted in
2ND August 2022
Related
Toward an Agrarian Revolution, May 13, 2022
Capital Formation Capital Accumulation and Capital Flight, April 30, 2022
Ukraine conflict and the Geoeconomic Welfare, May 29, 2022