Land Matters : Agrofuels, Unequal Exchange, and Appropriation of Ecological Space

As a global society we are entering an era where land areas and land-based resources are coming to the fore once again for capital accumulation and economic growth, for the first time since the end of the 18th century when Malthus forecasted a contradiction between population growth and agricultural output. That constraint on economic growth, imposed by limited land areas, was overcome by the combination of fossil fuels (coal, oil) and appropriation of space overseas (colonialism, trade). Today we are entering a period of peak oil, and this restraint on growth is accompanied by the recognition that mitigating climate change requires a veto on the use of other fossil fuels as well as on further deforestation; thus peak oil co-exists with peak soil, at least this is the assumption on which I build my argument. Agrofuels cannot - not even in Brazil, my case study - help but intensify this conflict as each increase in land use has a tendency to lead to direct and indirect land use changes in the global system. The centrality of land areas and land-based resources results in a systematic appropriation of ecological space by the Centre from the Periphery, resulting in an unequal exchange of ecological resources, and a displacement of ecological loads from the Centre to the Periphery. In this way, the colonial pattern of appropriation of land areas is replicated today. At the same time, new powerful actors are entering the global scene, and Europe, Japan and USA now compete with China, South Korea and India for the limited land areas available. Conflicts over land-areas and land-based resources are what the future most likely holds in store, both in the form of resource wars, and in the shape of land grabbing. Thus I postulate a new agro-regime,where the appropriation of fungible land-areas for the production of food, feed, fibres and fuels, as well as for the mitigation of climate change, are highly conflictual processes

Land struggles & social differentiation in Southern Mozambique

This essay tells the story of an important area in the fertile Limpopo valley in southern Mozambique. It documents for the first time the rise and the fall of a major Portuguese settlement venture in Africa, and it pursues the story through the state farm epoch. In 1983, the agricultural development strategy changed, and land begun to be distributed to the peasants. This essay terminates by describing this latest phase, highlighting the strong differentiating effects and the class formation that is taking place in the area

How economists understand (or not) the relationship between the real and financial economy

Economists' attempts to understand the relationship between the real and the financial eocnomy, and the impact of the latter on the former, go back to the origins of economics but they have gained renewed strength with the financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting economic crisis. The relationship real-finance is variously portrayed as being non-important, mutually beneficial, or destructive, real economic activities losing out to pure speculation and wasteful consumption patterns. The various economics traditions' takes concerning the pro- and cons of the rise of finance capital is discussed, and summarized in a table. In the process, classical and neo-classical, as well as Marxist, Neo-Schumpeterian and Ecological perspectives are discussed (and summarized in the Appendix). Three levels of the economy are investigated: the financial, the real (where production of goods and services take place) and the real-real, where the physical pre-conditions for the other two are located. The conclusion is that the various sectors cannot be understood in isolation from each other, and that some of the recipes for a resumption of a healthy balance between finance and the real economy forget to anchor this vision in a clear understanding of the limits to growth suplied by Ecological Economics

Agrofuels, Brazil and Competing Land Uses

Biofuel production in the world has grown exponentially, stimulated by public policies, in countries of the North as well as of the South, and has been seen as one of the main drivers behind the recent food price hike. Thus conflicts over land need to be factored in when biofuels are assessed. Nowhere in the world is biofuel production seen to be more successful – economically, ecologically – than the Brazilian ethanol programme based on sugar cane. But this stance regarding Brazilian ethanol misses the direct and indirect land use changes that accompany the increase of sugar cane cultivation to meet the increasing domestic and international demand for ethanol. By comparing sustainability standards proposed (Roundtable on sustainable biofuels) with the ecological impacts including land use changes, the performance of Brazilian ethanol is seen to be much less impressive (although still "best in show"). Likewise, the social development potential of Brazilian ethanol can be questioned as evidenced by the alarming number of conflicts regarding land use, eviction, working standards, which have led to substantial critiques for violations of workers' and farmers' human rights, including murders of vocal workers and union activists. This leaves us with the conclusion that Brazilian sugar cane ethanol basically is a geopolitical project, which also is corroborated by the fact that it was initiated after the 1973 oil price hike in order to reduce Brazilian dependence on (expensive) imported oil. It is only in this sense, then, that the Brazilian undertaking may be seen as a success. It is argued here that a moratorium needs to be put in place to avoid further biofuel development as it today basically causes more problems than it resolves, at least in the realms of ecology and social development. This conclusion may of course be revised should second generation biofuel technology come on stream and prove economic viable and ecological sound, two propositions which so far remain doubtful. Furthermore, the availability of "degraded", "unused", "marginal", or "deserted" lands for the production of biofuel feed stocks should also be subjected to scrutiny, since such conflict-free "win-win" possibilities can be expected to be extremely rare in a global context where the competition for land is fuelled by a growing world population as well as by a large segments of South adapting new (i.e. meatier) life styles at the same time that land degradation and decreasing land yields have appeared

Commodity Currencies vs Fiat Money - Automaticity vs Embedment

Commodity currencies have been stood against fiat money in the discourses on the history of money, implying a development from primitive forms of money – which needed anchor in a real commodity to gain acceptance, for instance gold, silver or copper – to a more sophisticated monetary regime based solely on confidence and trust. This paper argues that the idea of a gradual replacement of the former form of money by the latter is an ahistoric construct: commodity and fiat monies have replaced each other over the millennia, and the latest craze for commodity currency was as recent as the 1920’s when numerous European currencies were based on gold. More fundamentally, money is here viewed as a social relationship, where the anchoring of money in commodities over the centuries may be seen either as strengthening the social contract between the regent and the people, or as undermining it by reducing the space of politics at the expense of automatic regulators. With the break-through of democracy in the early 20thcentury, the benefits of automaticity were increasingly questioned, and finally abandoned in the 1930’s. In this light, the Bretton Woods regime (1945-1970), although based on dollar-gold convertibility, is not to be interpreted as a commodity currency system but rather as one where politics took the lead over market forces, ushering post-WWII Europe, North America and Japan into a stage of embedded liberalism. It is customary to pin the demise of this era to the misuse of the USA of its de facto international currency monopoly, but the crucial shift was rather the advent of neoliberal political domination of the 1980’s which disembedded markets from politics once again, not the over-reach of the USA. The tying of the hands of politics, and thus of democracy, of disembedding the markets, took another leap forward with the convergence criteria established by the EU as a precondition for joining the euro zone. The paper concludes that just as the embedding of the markets post-WWII grew out of the interwar years’ dismal economic, social, political and military experiences, so, too, a re-embedment of markets may take its point of departure in the economic, social and political catastrophes following the financial crisis of 2008, and the difficulty of dealing with its consequences which have beset the euro zone countries ever since. If such a trend begins to take hold, it is argued, it is the political embedding of markets which we should focus on, not the tying of currencies to a commodity anchor