Resources: Agriculture

Logistics -- now a $4.7 trillion industry and said to be the world's largest employer -- is reshaping global production, distribution and consumption.

The implications for labour are profound. Automation in combination with just-in-time logistics regimes are subjecting workers to degrading just-in-time labour practices. More work is now contingent piece work; workers are increasingly subjected to electronic monitoring; work is increasingly degraded; and new forms of unpaid labour are proliferating, particularly online.

For the world’s richest and most powerful men -- men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates -- the global environmental crisis has finally arrived. But what it means for them is not what it means for most people.

The last 10 years have seen unprecedented efforts to automate whole new ranges of human and nonhuman activity: trust, recognition, identification, care, respect, translation and interpretation itself.

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.

Effective research and other action in the field of environment and law requires an understanding of how profoundly both have changed under neoliberalism. The growth of the neoliberal state amid productivity crisis and the move to a more financialized, rent-based global economy has been accompanied by sweeping legal innovations relating to property, trade, investment, rent and criminality as well as an expansion in the mass of written law and in the gaming of legislation.

 Some 154 million people were reportedly driven further into poverty in Southern countries as a result of speculation-induced food price hikes in 2007-08. What are the best strategies for bringing about the structural change needed that progressive activists can lend their support to?

This workshop presentation, while endorsing regulatory measures including banning certain investment vehicles such as exchange-traded funds and vetting of derivative-based financial instruments, cautions against becoming focussed on regulation alone as an answer. Also crucial is the promotion of non-derivative, socially-based mechanisms to protect farmers and consumers from volatile food prices, as well as price interventions that do not pit Northern farmers against their Southern counterparts.

The biotechnology industry claims that genetic engineering in agriculture is necessary to feed a growing world population. Yet, far from preventing world starvation, genetic engineering threatens to exacerbate the social and ecological causes of hunger by forcing farmers to pay for their right to fertile seeds, threatening crop yields, undermining biodiversity and reducing the access of poorer people to food.

This 1991 article describes a non-aggressive form of irrigation formerly common in Northern Thailand, in which land, water, forest, agriculture and the spirits thereof form an ecological whole. The system holds signficant lessons for the current international discussion on the "rights of nature."