The problem is that I'm not making the Malthusian argument. I'm not arguing that the planet is beyond its supposed carrying capacity. I'm not even arguing that capitalism as it exists today is beyond its carrying capacity. What I'm arguing is that capitalism is on the verge of producing conditions where the material capability to feed everyone on the planet will exist (it already does), but that there will be no profit to be made off of feeding a full half of those people.
I'm not against this argument. I'm just against the simple argument that there will be mass unemployment, a lack of demand, and starvation all at once around the globe because of farming investment into Africa.
Hit the like button by accident, but whatever. I was going to hit it for at least one of your posts in this thread.
You're grossly over-simplifying and over-extending how my posts in this thread relate to the OP. This program will not cause 3,000,000,000 peasants to lose their livelihood. It will, however, cause some to. The program will be successful because it increases agricultural efficiency and is good business. It will be repeated in Africa and then tweaked versions of it will be exported across the third world. Modern agriculture supplanting peasant agriculture is inevitable and this will serve as one of the elements of that process. What I've been talking about is the effect of that process in general, not this program in particular.
It's not profitable to produce the capacity to produce food if you don't make money on the sale of the food. If they only profit from feeding no more than 7 billion people, then only 7 billion people can be fed at a short-to-medium term sustainable rate.
What I'm wondering is... why have the capacity to produce food for 10 billion people when you're only going to sell it to 7 billion? Isn't it reasonable to assume that if people can't get the food they want, they will be more willing to pay for the food? Wouldn't they sacrifice some luxury goods or put in some more time at work in order to get more pay to get more food?
It still hasn't been articulated why these people would be so quickly unemployed/underemployed and remain that way.
This is a really good distinction to make, and the question of "carrying capacity" and the internal dynamics of commodity agriculture are separate issues. However, I would stress that they do have a meeting point and that is the constraints for arable land, water, energy etc. that I've mentioned as well as the increase in population. The question "why is agribusiness looking at Africa now?" can only be understood by looking at the capitalist system--which understands itself as being subject to economic "laws" separate but parallel to physical reality--as it starts to hit some hard, physical limits. The fact is that we're looking at Africa because there's no other place to go, and commodity prices have risen to justify going there, even with all the potential headaches involved.
This is basically true, but as you pointed out yourself, there are material limits to consumer demand despite improvements made to advertising, retail psychology, etc. The post-War consumer boom was aided in no small part by the US being the only industrial power left standing. We've been on a long road to stagnation since then, and while our progress down it has been slowed by the expansion of credit, we're going to reach the end of that path. Social democracy is another way to keep consumer demand high (the capitalist class under social democracy gives more money to the working class so the latter will buy more crap from the former), but this also only goes so far.
And, of course, neither credit nor social democracy have ever had to stimulate enough consumer demand to employ 3,000,000,000 new workers. Like I said before, this is unprecedented.
'After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (
GOOG
), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."'
Right, and in the case of Africa a lot of the folks who will be disenfranchised probably wouldn't make good workers in the best of circumstances. It would take a lot of time, effort and money to break down all the divisions and complexities of African society in order to create an exploitable "working class." you throw in all the tribal and language differences, the aids phenomenon, the lack of basic education, etc. etc. and the task becomes impossible on the labor side in addition to the demand side.
Let's go back to my original post. 3,000,000,000 people currently make their living as peasant farmers. The establishment of 20,000,000 new modern farms will be sufficient to provide urban consumers with the produce they currently purchase from peasants. Modern farms by their nature have superior access to markets and will have little trouble replacing peasant produce with their own at market. This leaves 3,000,000,000 peasants with no source of cash income.
Let's look at the structure of peasant agriculture. Most peasants are tenants. Without cash they will be unable to pay the rent on their land and will be expelled. Even those who are not at risk of eviction will lack the cash to buy new seed, fertilizer, replacement tools, etc. Given that loaning money to people producing goods which cannot be sold is a losing proposition, these peasants will be unable to secure credit to purchase the inputs they need to feed even themselves through agriculture. We're not talking about a class of people who have luxury goods to give up or who have the option to put in more hours of work a day to remain competitive. These are people who are already dirt poor and are about to lose their only meager source of cash income. This will force them off of the land and into the non-agricultural labor market.
This process won't take place in an instant. The 20,000,000 new farms will employ some of the former peasants, but these numbers will be small. Modern farms have very few permanent employees and a large number of farms will employ the same casual migrant laborers. Those peasants unable to find work at the modern farms will seek industrial or service employment. Some will be successful, but their numbers will shrink as more peasants find themselves looking for non-agricultural employment. And even if this process takes a century, we can count on the 3,000,000,000 number to not shrink too terribly much due to the fertility of the poor and the ability of people to secure starvation rations through non-market means. Once the process is complete we'll have somewhere around 3,000,000,000 people who would have otherwise been peasants seeking non-agricultural employment or living apart from society (likely as criminals).
Yes, some of these people will find employment. But the prospect of the labor force doubling in size over a relatively short period of time (even a century) under modern conditions and somehow providing adequate employment for all beggars belief. Wages for everyone will plummet (thereby decreasing the consumer demand required to employ the new workers) and the vast majority of the 3,000,000,000 new workers will likely be unable to secure work. What will humanity do with a couple billion extra humans? What will those extra humans do to the rest of humanity?
But what is the "free market solution" to mass consumerism, an economy increasingly reliant on advertising, and a religion that posits continuous expansion and GDP growth as the metric of success? Do you believe like Chomsky, Lasch, and others that the masses need to engage in a massive program of "self-education" to insulate themselves from propaganda? Because history has shown that this is unlikely.
Like modern politics-- which assumes that instituting "freedom" or "democracy" is as simple as invading alien realms and drafting constitutions-- modern economics knows no limits, and it can only be up to the State to define and enforce those limits.
It was the same logic that compelled Sulla to annihilate the financial magnates during the mass proscriptions of 82 BC, because their power had grown to a level that subverted the authority and undermined the political will of the State. We are currently at a similar historical juncture, when the final battle between economics and politics sets in, when the latter finally
reconquers
its natural realm.