agriculture, governed by the principle of the profitability of capital, is localized in North America, Europe, the southern cone of Latin America, and Australia, and employs only several dozen million farmers who are not truly “peasants.” But their productivity—a function of mechanization (which exists almost exclusively in these regions) and the extent of the land which each possesses—leads to a yield of between 10,000 and 20,000 quintals1 of grain-equivalents per worker per year.
On the other hand, peasant agricultures support nearly half of humanity—three billion human beings. These agricultures are divided, in turn, between those that have benefited from the green revolution (fertilizer, pesticides, and the best quality seeds), but are still hardly mechanized, whose production yields between 100 and 500 quintals per worker and those that have not benefited from the green revolution, whose production yields only around 10 quintals per worker.
The gap between the productivity of the best equipped agriculture and poor peasant agriculture, which was 10 to 1 before 1940, is today 2000 to 1. In other words, the rate of growth in agricultural productivity has largely surpassed that of other activities, resulting in a real price reduction of 5 to 1.
Capitalism has always combined with its constructive dimension (the accumulation of capital and development of the productive forces) several destructive dimensions, such as the reduction of humanity to being nothing more than the bearer of labor power, itself treated as a commodity; long-term destruction of reliable natural bases for the reproduction of the means of production and of life; and destruction of sections of older societies and sometimes entire peoples, such as the North American Indians. Capitalism has always simultaneously “integrated” (that is, workers subjected to diverse forms of exploitation by expanding capital—by “use” in direct terms) and excluded (that is, those who, having lost the positions that they occupied in older systems, have not been integrated into the new). But in its ascendant, and historically progressive phase, it integrated more than it excluded.
This is no longer the case, as is specifically and dramatically evident in the new agrarian question. If, as dictated by the World Trade Organization since the Doha conference of November 2001, agriculture is integrated into the whole set of general rules of “competition,” thereby making agricultural and food products “commodities just like all the others,” there will be definite consequences, given the huge conditions of inequality between agribusiness, on the one hand, and peasant production, on the other.
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