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Malthus, Agribusiness, and the Death of the Peasantry

Of all the societal changes of the last half century, the most dramatic and far-reaching, according to Eric Hobsbawm (1994:289), is the death of the peasantry. Between World War II and the 1980s, percentages of populations involved in farming and fishing dropped dramatically worldwide. For instance, in Japan the drop was from 52% to 9%; in the United States, where Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz instructed farmers to “get big or get out,” less than .5% of the population claimed to run a farm as a principal occupation (NASS 1999: chap. 1, table 16). Yet in less developed countries there remain vast populations still engaged in primary agricultural production and with only partly monetarized economies. Are claims of the peasantry’s death exaggerated—or merely premature? Depeasantization is definitely afoot, and the prospect is ominous. Where it is difficult for cities to absorb greatly increased influxes, decimation of agricultural peasantries would be catastrophic. Depeasantization has been an issue of keen interest among historical materialists. Their analysis begins with the observation that capitalist development “stops at the farm gate” (Mann and Dickinson 1978), barred by the special properties of all of the main productive resources in agriculture: land is fixed, seed is produced by the farmer, and labor must be skilled and seasonally variable (and is therefore hard to commodify completely). Ask how agricultural capital has responded to these obstacles and you will be led to the playbook for depeasantization. Magdoff, Foster, and Buttel’s Hungry for Profit brings together many of the most important answers to this question. It is complemented by Ross’s The Malthus Factor, a sharp-edged analysis of the role of Malthusianism