This panel aims to bring together research that situates agro-industry and the global food system in a broader analysis of racial capitalism, military industrial complex and the racial state.
It frames agriculture and food production in a dialectical view of history that understands industrial agriculture and modern food policy’s emergence among the “reconstitution of nationalism and the circulation of capital against the specter of agrarian anticolonial unrest and transnational labor militancy” in the 20th century (Ayazi). In this view, public debates on agricultural policy and politics, food scarcity and food apartheid (“hunger”), and public health are analysed against the processes of epistemic and social reproduction securing the accumulation of capital through the continued impoverishment and organized abandonment of the global poor (those waged and unwaged people whose lives are made disposable through the death-dealing operations of capital). Such a view also makes visible how the global processes of industrialization (“modernization”) of dominant agriculture and the coinciding consolidation of agro-industry have been continuously driven by imperialist state and Western hegemonic interests advanced through propaganda, coercive foreign policies and threat of total violence exercised through policing and murdering of land defenders by agribusiness paramilitias to dispossess Indigenous peoples and peasants of their Lands and livelihoods for the continued extraction and degradation of “ecologies” ().
The panel situates insurgent struggles against extractive agriculture, for food sovereignty/autonomy and land reform/access within the broader vision for the abolition of racial capitalism, borders, carceral states and property.
Possible topics can include
- histories and struggles for land reform, possibilities and limits
- eco-liberalism and cooptation of “regenerative agriculture” / “agroecology”
- histories of counterinsurgency and counterrevolution against landworkers’ and peasant organising
- right-wing and populist agrarian movements, eco-fascism
- carceral food systems and food as a tool of policing, prison food systems
- critical perspectives on food policy, public debates on food scarcity and “hunger”
- the racial and gendered politics of the figure of the “farmer” and the “family farm”
- soil degradation, agro-chemical pollution and other socioenvironmental violences of agribusiness
- solidarities and internationalisms of land-defense, landworkers, peasant and Indigenous struggles against agro-industry
Organizer: Sophia Doyle
Please submit your abstracts to Sophia Doyle at sophia.k.doyle@protonmail.com by 15 December 2023.
Modality: In-person