is tied to the phenomenon of cheap, unhealthy food, which is easily ‘disposed of’.
Third, this system increasingly displaces peasant farming and production, with the associated loss of indigenous knowledge systems.10 This is sometimes referred to as the ‘last great dispossession of the peasantry’. It is happening in the context of the economic liberalisation of the farming industry and when farmers are locked into being dependent on industrial fertilisers and genetically modified seeds for cash-crop production (Shiva 2013). In Mexico, South Korea and India, this system has led to widespread dispossession because of debt among farmers. In India alone, over 200 000 suicides among farmers have been reported. Another driver of dispossession is sovereign funds and foreign investors, who are buying prime agricultural land in Africa and other parts of the global South. Increasingly, the trend for land grabbing creates enclaves of export-led agricultural food production and biofuel production.
Fourth, although the transnational industrial agricultural system produces cheap food, it is mainly unhealthy food. This is not to argue a case for expensive food, but to recognise that industrial agriculture and its corollary of fast food have devastating effects on human life. Increasingly, obesity is becoming a worldwide problem along with various attendant health issues, like diabetes and heart disease. In the US obesity increased by seventy-one per cent between 1991 and 2001, and this is mirrored in various parts of the world as national studies and public discourse recognise the urgency of the crisis. However, the media and food corporations tend to claim this crisis is the result of bad choices by individuals, rather than the result of an ‘impoverished range of choices’ (Patel 2007: 273). With growing income inequality worldwide, obesity correlates with ill health among the working class and the poor.
Fifth, transnational industrial agriculture is considered to be one of the most ecologically destructive sectors in the global economy. There are several reasons for this. Oil is used in the manufacture of various agricultural inputs, such as fertilisers, and as fuel for machinery and transport vehicles. Carbon emissions are released in the value chains and particularly in the shipping of food. Cattle eructation and flatulence release immense amounts of methane into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. The quantities are significant, considering that there are about 27 billion head of livestock on the planet, which consume 750 million tonnes of fertiliser-intensive grain feed and 200 million tonnes of pesticide-intensive soybeans as feedstock (Roberts 2013: 26). Industrial agriculture is also implicated for the most intensive use of water of all sectors. The chemicals used in industrial farming pollute water systems and oceans. And, most importantly, mono-production of industrial crops kills off biodiversity and limits the capacity for organic plant varieties to adapt to climatic shifts. In short, the system is unsustainable.
Transnational industrial agriculture is destructive to human society and nature. It leads to food crises that tend to be genocidal and ecocidal, and hence it is a key historical expression of the crises of capitalist civilisation. Moreover, it is exacerbated in its links with other systemic crisis tendencies, such as financialised chaos, climate crisis, peak oil and the securitisation of democracy.
The securitisation of democracy
Modern democracy is about a people’s history of struggle to limit the power of capital and broaden modern citizenship to embrace non-property holders, women, non-whites and immigrants. It is also the story about the democratisation of the US constitution, particularly after the French Revolution (Wood 2004). In essence, modern democracy, through its advocacy of rights, freedoms and forms (representative, direct, participatory and associative), has embodied an impulse against capitalism as the expression of the will of the people. At the same time, capitalism has generally involved a formal separation between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’; the state and market are deemed separate and distinct spheres of society, which is specific to a capitalist society. But, in practice, state intervention is crucial to realising the systemic imperatives of the market (Wood 2003). Liberal ideology has further authorised this separation, so that democracy is understood as separate from corporate power and is necessary to protect the individual from the abuse of state power; thus democracy is ‘for the people and by the people’. In the US, liberal democracy has been undergoing fundamental changes over the past few decades. In theory and practice, democracy has been reduced to certain basic freedoms: the rule of law, separations of power and basic procedural performance, such as electing representatives by means of periodic elections. Money has also come to play a crucial role in determining representation and the ‘people’s representatives’.
At the same time, US foreign policy, both during and after the cold war, has trumpeted the virtues of the US liberal model as the standard of democracy for all to follow. This model has become a major export of the US superpower. With the demise of the Soviet Union, a wave of democratisation, including in Latin America, Africa, Asia and former Soviet Bloc countries, entrenched the US liberal model of democracy as the global standard (Robinson 1996). However, the nature of democracy coming to the fore in the US and other parts of the world is prompting serious questions about the character and content of the US democracy standard. Since President Reagan, US democracy has been firmly locked into a path of neoliberalisation, which has conjoined capitalism and democracy as market democracy. This has increased the power of corporations in the political system by allowing greater funding to political parties’ (effectively buying lobbying influence), and has reduced electoral politics to a media-driven marketing spectacle requiring large sums of money.11
In the meantime, since 9/11, national security concerns have trumped domestic democratic rights and freedoms. The sweeping powers claimed to fight terrorism domestically amounted to secret detentions, suspected American citizens being designated as ‘enemy combatants’ without any rights, the use of torture in anti-terror police work, scrutinising adherents to the Muslim faith, and the use of assassinations to deal with terrorists (Falk 2004). In this endless War on Terror, privacy has also been a casualty and has been undermined, domestically and internationally. This has been brought to the fore by WikiLeak’s revelations, as well as by whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden (see Harding 2014; Leigh and Harding 2011). Moreover, the War on Terror has violated various international laws and standards, and has purely been driven by the logic that might is right. The illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, holding prisoners at Abu Ghraib without due process, the interrogation methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency on suspected terrorists, and the use of special killing squads and drone attacks have all raised questions about the nature of US democracy – and how it provides licence for wanton violence, gross abuses of power and violations of international law.
Basically, US democracy is securitised through two tendencies. First, it is narrowed by national-security imperatives, in which freedoms and rights do not matter if you are an enemy or suspected enemy in the endless War on Terror. National security trumps all due process and rights, for both American and non-American citizens. In other words, democracy has become militarised. Second, democracy has become securitised in the economic sense of ensuring that capital, particularly finance capital, prevails over democratic imperatives. Put differently, history has come full circle and so-called free markets are given more power through market democracy – a situation that is similar to the advent of industrial capitalism in Britain, when democracy did not exist. The economic securitisation of democracy ensures that market imperatives come to the fore to secure stability, technocratic forms of governance are strengthened, the power of the media
