Article

Global Agricultural Agrarian South: Journal of

Political Economy

Value Systems and 8(1–2) 14–29, 2019

© 2019 Centre for Agrarian Research

the South: Some and Education for South (CARES)

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DOI: 10.1177/2277976019851929

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Praveen Jha1
Paris Yeros2

Abstract
Contemporary capitalism has been in a process of restructuring driven
by giant corporations for which the world as a whole has become the
playing field, more than ever before. As such, components of a single
end-use commodity/final output are conceived, designed, produced,
procured, and processed in different parts of the globe, before being
assembled at a specific destination for ultimate consumption, which
again may have a global reach. This is the crux of what is termed Global
Value Systems (GVSs) in this article, a notion which is introduced in its
conceptual underpinnings and historical significance. This then applied
to global agriculture, to argue that a key feature of contemporary capi-
talism is the expansion of Global Agricultural Value Systems (GAVSs),
alongside the GVSs in industry and services. GAVSs have contributed
to the strengthening of direct land acquisitions and contract farming or
out-grower models in the peripheries across the South.

1
Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
India.
2
Postgraduate Program in World Political Economy, Federal University of ABC, São
Paulo, Brazil.

Corresponding author:
Praveen Jha, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences-II,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067, India.
E-mail: praveenjha2005@gmail.com
Jha and Yeros 15

Keywords
Imperialism, global value systems (GVSs), global agricultural value
systems (GAVSs), peasantry, agricultural labor

Introduction
The most discussed features of contemporary capitalism during the last
half-century relate to the major restructuring of global trade, investment,
production and employment underway, driven largely by giant corpora-
tions for which the world as a whole has become the playing field, more
than ever before. Essentially, this restructuring of the world economy
implies that components of a single end-use commodity/final output are
conceived, designed, produced, procured and processed in different parts
of the globe, before being assembled together at a specific destination for
ultimate consumption, which again may have a global reach. This, in an
operational sense, is the crux of what we designate here as global value
systems (GVSs); we hope that the underlying logic for our preferred
phrase will become clearer as we proceed. It is also worth highlighting
at the outset that ‘global connectedness’ of accumulation processes is
hardly a new phenomenon, although the current phase has its character-
istic novelties, many of which have far reaching implications.
There is already a huge and burgeoning literature on this theme,
capturing its multiple facets and dimensions (Jha & Chakraborty, 2014).
One of the key features often highlighted is the ‘de-centering’ of
production in a whole range of activities from advanced capitalist
countries to a handful of developing countries where metropolitan capital
has strengthened its presence to take advantage of, inter alia, relatively
inexpensive labor and raw materials, as well as to tap consumer markets.
This has happened both through increases in foreign direct investment
(FDI), facilitated by global finance, as well as increased incorporation of a
whole range of economic activities whereby providers specializing in
specific tasks cater to the needs of transnational actors without necessarily
being recipients of FDI; hence, the latter are often described as ‘suppliers’.
Such a reconfiguration in spatial organization has been particularly
pronounced in the manufacturing and service sectors, although significant
inroads have also been made in primary/agricultural sectors. In the
standard language of economists, both the ‘factor’ and the ‘product’
markets, almost across all economic activities/sectors, have been
reconfigured in ways that have very strong transnational components.
16 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

The focus of this article is on the conceptual underpinnings of GVSs,

especially with respect to agriculture, at the current juncture in the South.
As already indicated, in a literal sense, such systems include a set of actors
linked in a sequence of activities, from bringing/supplying a product from
its raw material stage to the final consumer. In agriculture, such actors
range from large international and domestic corporates/business houses,
agri-business companies, public and private research and development
agencies, trading and procurement agencies and financial institutions, on
the one hand, to farmers, peasants and landless laborers, on the other.
Before we get into a discussion of issues relating to agricultural value
systems, it would be useful to provide a brief overview of some of the
analytical considerations relevant for an understanding of the contem-
porary GVSs in general, which is done in the first section of the article.
This is followed in the second section by a focus on some critical issues
relating to the incursion of capital from the North to the South in agriculture.
The third section provides some concluding remarks.

Some Analytical Considerations

Much of the contemporary scholarship on the ever-growing trans-
nationalization of economic activities and its implications has often
used analytical frameworks such as global commodity chains (GCCs),
global supply chains (GSC), global value chains (GVCs) or global
production networks (GPNs). Although these frameworks have some
broad similarities, and are often used interchangeably, among these the
GPN frameworks have been more adequate analytically, as they avoid
simplistic connotations of linearity (whether horizontal or vertical)
implied by the metaphor of ‘chain’, and have the potential to engage
with relevant issues in a fuller fashion. For instance, analysis through
the GPN lens investigates the ‘de-centering’ or ‘fragmentation’ of
production with respect to, at least, three conceptual domains—value,
power and embeddedness (MacKinnon, 2012, pp. 229–230). The
concept of value attempts to incorporate both the Marxian notion of
surplus value and the economic rent (Henderson, Dicken, Hess, Coe,
& Yeung, 2001). Power within the GPN is understood in terms of
corporate power, institutional power (local, national, or supra-national
institutions such as the EU, NAFTA, IMF and ILO) and collective
power (which includes collective actors such as employers’ associations,
trade unions, or NGOs within a given network) (Henderson et al.,
2001). Thus, departing from the narrow focus of GCCs/GVCs on the
Jha and Yeros 17

governance of inter-firm transactions, GPN attempts to incorporate the

relevant actors and relationships (Coe, Dicken, & Hess, 2008a, 2008b)
in a more comprehensive fashion and provides a multi-scalar approach,
while emphasizing that each stage of production/exchange is embedded
in much broader set of nonlinear relationships. Typically, three kinds
of embeddedness have been highlighted in the GPN literature: societal
embeddedness, to emphasize the broader regulatory and institutional
framework; network embeddedness, to emphasize the economic and
social relationships of firms; and territorial embeddedness, to ‘anchor’ a
GPN in different places (MacKinnon, 2012).
In short, the GPN frameworks appear analytically more promising
than the conceptual frameworks that hinge on the ‘chain’ metaphor.
However, even the GPN framework has at least one serious shortcoming:
it tends to miss out on sources and actors in the circuit of capital outside
the standard circuits of production and exchange. Suffice it to emphasize
here that significant shares of surplus value are appropriated by powerful
actors outside production and exchange in different stages and contexts
of capitalism, including in modern transnational circuits of accumula-
tion, not least global finance capital. For this reason alone, it may be
analytically better to work through the conceptual frame of GVSs,
instead of GPNs, to capture contemporary transnational accumulation
trajectories. The metaphor of ‘networks’, it seems to us, remains
inadequate in engaging with the deeper and systemic tendencies and
relations central to Marxian theoretical claims, that is, the relations of
production and exploitation and the ‘laws of motion’ and ‘immanent
tendencies’ of capitalism.
It is also worth noting that much of the recent explosion of literature
regarding transnationalization of production and exchange has come
from what may be called ‘management paradigms’ or ‘managerial
approaches’, concerned with assessing ‘costs and benefits’ and the
prospects of ‘economic and social upgrading’ associated with such
transnationalization. However, it hardly needs emphasizing that ana-
lytical engagement with the transnationalization of capital itself has a
long theoretical ancestry, especially in Marxist political economy.
Marxist analysis of capitalism typically analyzes the long durée of
capitalism, at a high level of generality, in two distinct phases: mercantilist
and industrial. The ascendency of merchant capital from the fifteenth
century onwards and its colonial expansion by European powers to
several regions across the South resulted in significant early prototypes
of GVSs. Well-known examples would be the sourcing of raw materials
from the colonies for processing and manufacturing in Europe and the
18 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

trading of finished products across the globe. Sectors like textiles and
commodities like sugar, tobacco, tea, cotton, opium and indigo are
among the prominent examples of such production and trade systems
associated with mercantilist capitalism in which gradually large trading
houses (such as the Royal African Company, the East India Company
and Dutch East India Company) came to rule the roost.
As merchant capitalism evolved into industrial capitalism, there was
indeed a deepening of such ‘networks’ across many other activities.
Typically, this involved sourcing of raw materials from the colonies for
actual production in metropolitan countries, while tapping the markets of
periphery for the sale of these processed goods. Of course, in a handful
of regions, such as North America, Oceania and parts of South America
and Africa, which became ‘colonies of settlement’ (after massive
genocides leading to near total decimation of native populations), there
was substantial mobility of capital and relatively robust diffusion of
capitalism. Furthermore, in some cases, such as European-owned mines
and plantations, pockets of ‘enclave capitalism’ developed through the
transnationalization of capital from the North. Examples of this are
evident in the Latin American and Caribbean plantations of sugar, cocoa,
tobacco and coffee, where prototypes of early GVSs were evident
through ‘triangular trade’ between Africa, the Americas and Europe.
England and other European powers procured ‘slaves’ who were then
transported to Caribbean and North and South American plantations,
while the produce of their labor was sent to Europe for processing and/or
final consumption. This ‘triangle’ can be considered among the early
examples of the GVS in world capitalism. There were other similar
connected value systems organized by European powers, an obvious
example being the (in)famous ‘opium connect’ involving India, China,
England (and other European powers on a smaller scale). A more
elaborate discussion of the value ‘networks’ associated with merchant
capital or the evolution from mercantilism to industrial capitalism is
unnecessary here; our main focus is on the contemporary GVSs,
particularly relating to agriculture.
With the maturing of industrial capitalism and monopolistic enter-
prises in metropolitan countries there was a growth of multi-national and
transnational corporations with a global reach. Although, as mentioned
earlier, these industrial TNCs have an apparent resemblance in certain
respects to the transnational trading houses driven by merchant capital,
the core activity of the new breed of TNCs has had much greater accent
on production (or production related activities) in select destinations
Jha and Yeros 19

located in the South. It is important to reiterate that capital from the

North, historically, almost always located production in the metropolitan
countries and its ‘colonies of settlement’ (such the USA, Australia, New
Zealand, parts of Southern Africa and some pockets in Latin America).
Otherwise there was no mobility of capital in production from the North
to the South; yet, clearly, we had significant presence of what we call
GVSs. In other words, the architecture of global capitalist economic
system, almost until half a century ago, was one where capital from the
North was rarely involved the ‘colonies of conquest’, which constitutes
much of the South, or other countries in the South (including areas of
influence or semi-colonies), except in very few activities, such as the
Railways in India and Africa, which had strong organic connections with
the logic of extracting resources, central to colonialism/imperialism.
This traditional segmentation has loosened considerably in recent
decades, particularly since the 1970s, as there has been a substantial
increase in the mobility of capital (in production and several other
activities) from the North to the South. This is indeed one of the most
significant new characteristics of the contemporary GVSs, which are
best viewed as a further deepening of the transnational concentration and
centralization of capital which became significant towards the end of the
nineteenth century.
Analytically, in the Marxian political economy perspective, the
phenomena of combined and uneven development and concentration
and centralization of capital help us understand a transition from a
relatively dispersed and ‘free’ competitive capitalism to an oligopolistic/
monopolistic stage in which giant corporations come to prevail in parti-
cular markets and industries. At certain junctures in their evolution, these
large conglomerates started expanding the frontiers of their activities,
and the process continued until the global economy as a whole became
their playing field. As Stephen Hymer (1970, p. 441), a major Marxist
theorist of transnational corporations, put it: ‘multinational corporations
are a substitute for the market as method of organizing international
exchange’. In similar vein, Barnet and Muller (1974, pp. 213–214), in
their justly famous book entitled Global Reach, argued that ‘[t]he rise
of the global corporation represents the globalization of oligopoly
capitalism’. They expand, of course, to reap a whole range of monopolistic
advantages by accessing cheaper sources of raw materials, relatively
inexpensive labor and access to markets. It is some of these major issues
which constitute the crux of the Marxist–Leninist theorizing about the
rise of TNCs or multinational corporations (MNCs) and the strengthening
of imperialism. In his much-cited introduction to Bukharin’s famous
20 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

book Imperialism and the World Economy, Lenin (2015) emphasized

the following:

[i]t is highly important to have in mind that this change was caused by nothing
but the direct development, growth, continuation of the deep-seated and fun-
damental tendencies of capitalism and production of commodities in general.
The growth of commodity exchange, the growth of large-scale production
are fundamental tendencies observable for centuries throughout the whole
world. At a certain stage in the development of exchange, at a certain stage
in the growth of large-scale production, namely, at the stage that was reached
approximately at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries, commodity exchange had created such an internationalisation of
economic relations, and such an internationalisation of capital, accompanied
by such a vast increase in large-scale production, that free competition began
to be replaced by monopoly. The prevailing types were no longer enterprises
freely competing inside the country and through intercourse between coun-
tries, but monopoly alliances of entrepreneurs, trusts. The typical ruler of
the world became finance capital, a power that is peculiarly mobile and flex-
ible, peculiarly intertwined at home and internationally, peculiarly devoid
of individuality and divorced from the immediate processes of production,
peculiarly easy to concentrate, a power that has already made peculiarly large
strides on the road of concentration, so that literally several hundred billion-
aires and millionaires hold in their hands the fate of the whole world.

Bukharin, in the aforesaid book, going back to Marx, highlighted the

super-profits of internationalized monopoly capitalist firms that they
derived from the much higher rate of exploitation of cheap labor in the
periphery. By the middle of the twentieth century, there was already a
substantial literature highlighting the significance of the TNCs, not only
in Marxist political economy, but across different theoretical paradigms.
However, it was within the Marxist tradition that the most insightful
investigations of these powerful global actors were being undertaken,
particularly in the influential body of work by the Monthly Review
School (e.g., Baran, Sweezy, Magdoff, among others) and many other
scholars, several of them located in the South, most notably Samir Amin.
It is worth highlighting here that the generalized wave of decoloni-
zation and political independence in the South heralded a search for
autonomous development strategies which also put brakes, to some extent,
on the global expansion of the TNCs headquartered in the North. However,
from the 1970s onwards, with the ascendency of neoliberalism and the
demise of the relatively regulated phase of post-war capitalism, the world
economy has witnessed a dramatic strengthening of the tendencies of
Jha and Yeros 21

concentration and centralization of capital on a global scale. Furthermore,

as mentioned earlier, beyond the major features flagged by the earlier
generations of Marxist scholars, the current phase is characterized by its
own ‘novelties’, one of these being the abovementioned phenomenon of
de-centring production through significant mobility of capital from North
to South, and ever greater incorporation of the later through multiple
channels, including ‘arm’s length contracting’, across almost all sectors. In
other words, the ascendency of the current phase of GVSs or trans-
nationalization of capital needs to be located in the long-term evolution
of TNCs/MNCs, and the overarching relations of imperialism, which have
been central to the Marxist paradigm. The scale, depth, and sophistication
of the strategies employed by MNCs, or the machinations of globalized
monopoly-finance capital, have become increasingly more pervasive,
although a great deal of it remains invisible or disguised. Matters pertaining
to these are at the center of comprehending contemporary imperialism.
Thus, the mobility of capital from the North to the South ought to be
located in the overall context of imperialism and the ascendency of the
international oligopolistic system. In some of the recent literature, it is
often reduced to the so called ‘global labor arbitrage’ (a phrase often
attributed to Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley), which suggests that
powerful TNCs reap major advantages by exploiting the wage hierarchy
between North and South (Roach, 2004). Sure enough, significant wage
differences play an important role in the globalization of oligopoly, a
point which has been frequently recognized in the Marxist tradition; for
instance, in the work by Barnet and Muller (1974), the search for the
lowest unit of labor cost worldwide is central to the oligopolistic rivalry,
and it generates huge rents for the TNCs headquartered in the North.
More recently, the point has been driven home in the Monthly Review
article by Suwandi, Jonna, and Foster (2019). However, it is important
to emphasize that one needs to take into account other relevant costs
and dimensions of the accumulation processes, inter alia, costs of raw
materials, environmental regulations, infrastructure and tax regimes.
In short, adequate recognition of different social, political and economic
features constituting structures and regimes of accumulation need to be
engaged with (Jha, 2016). Furthermore, with respect to labor, the focus
on wage hierarchy needs to be connected with the inexorable tendency to
perpetuate and exacerbate the Relative Surplus Population (Jha, Moyo, &
Yeros, 2017). The maintenance of low wages and exacerbation of the
relative surplus population are among the central features of the trans-
nationalization of capital under contemporary capitalism.
22 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

Transnationalization of Capital in Agriculture

The transnationalization of capital for agricultural production in the
South is not a new phenomenon. Modest doses of agricultural invest-
ments by transnational corporations from developed countries were
important in appropriating ‘cheap nature’, largely as various raw mate-
rials, to facilitate the foundations of colonial capitalism. Sectors like
mining and plantations provide good illustrations of such investments.
However, these measures were not uncontested and saw extensive peas-
ant struggles which became inextricable parts of the national movements
in different countries, bringing into sharp relief the connection between
the agrarian and national questions (Moyo, Jha, & Yeros, 2013). The
post-colonial regimes, partly on account of the continuing pressures
of peasant and agricultural worker movements, adopted several policy
measures to ensure some autonomy from global capitalism, and these
included a degree of protection for peasants, small farmers, and petty
production. Of course, the trajectory of such policy initiatives did not
mirror each other in all countries of the South; rather they had diverse
patterns depending on, inter alia, class contestations and political mobi-
lizations. Nonetheless, almost all the countries in the South had shades of
dirigisme, and depending on the timing of their independence, obtained
national policy space in varying degrees to promote and protect different
economic segments. In most developing countries, state-led initiatives,
whether institutional or technocratic, were limited both in vision and
reach, and were often modest successes at best. However, in a handful of
cases (e.g., the so-called East-Asian miracles), such initiatives resulted
in quite impressive agricultural and economic transformations, and were
thus effective in addressing the problems of mass poverty; they were
also subject to Cold War logic in quite a unique way, undergoing deep
land reforms and receiving multifaceted support from the United States
in pursuit of its imperialist geostrategy. Given the scope of this article,
we need not pursue these alternative trajectories here. It is worth stress-
ing, nonetheless, that in most developing countries even in the post-war
dirigiste era, economic and political domination by landlords, settlers
and rich peasants continued to persist, typically with the support of the
United States under the same imperialist strategy (Moyo & Yeros, 2005).
Technological revolutions for increasing production (such as the Green
Revolution) also created further inequities and added to the already
existing large pools of labor reserves, leading to fundamental changes in
agrarian social structures and new forms of peasant resistance.
Jha and Yeros 23

With the ascendency of neoliberal regimes since the 1970s there has
been considerable and sustained dismantling of whatever protection was
available to petty production, in general, and agriculture in particular. This
transition has resulted in dramatic structural shifts in the organization of
entire economic activities across the globe, and has facilitated a remark-
able increase in mobility of capital, with very little restrictions on it.
As mentioned earlier, countries in the South have been drawn into new
patterns of production and trade, largely driven by the MNCs headquar-
tered in the North. Of course, dramatic advances in information and com-
munication technologies (ICTs) and lowered cost of transportation have
been critical in facilitating the changes in global patterns of economic
activities. As with manufacturing and services, the agricultural sector has
witnessed significant restructuring of its own global agricultural value
systems (GAVSs) during the last half-century or so. In the simplest sense,
the GAVSs can be explained as arrangements involving a set of actors
linked in a sequence of activities which add value in bringing/supplying a
product from its raw material stage to the final consumer. Such actors
range from large international and domestic corporate/business houses,
agribusiness companies, financial and insurance interests, public and
private research and development agencies, and trading and procurement
agencies, on the one hand, to farmers, peasants and landless laborers, on
the other. These actors are interlinked to each other in a complex of multi-
ple nonlinear mechanisms that are dependent on each other to complete
the production and marketing processes.
Activities of such networks are facilitated by the government
agricultural policies as also by the powerful international institutions.
Indeed, in the recent years multilateral agencies have emerged as strong
advocates of promoting so-called ‘responsible investments’ through
such GAVSs. These reports often provide very optimistic accounts of
GAVSs and they champion the role of big corporations in different ways,
as suppliers, distributors, traders, R&D facilitators, buyers of agricultural
produce and marketing strategists. These rosy accounts overlook several
adverse outcomes and processes associated with the ascendency
of GAVSs, including the monopolistic concentration and control of
resources, informalization and marginalization of labor, acceleration
of land alienation, loss of biodiversity, disappearance of livelihoods and
the weakening of food security in large parts of the South. In tandem
with the ascendency of neoliberal macroeconomic policies, the growing
power of oligopolistic corporations has created huge distress in several
countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Extreme
manifestations of agrarian crisis range from suicides by farmers in India,
24 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

to horrific deaths across migration routes, sexual exploitation of destitute

women and girls, drug trade engulfing small producers, and violent
conflict involving youth as foot soldiers.
Conceptually, in the GAVSs, as in any GVSs, core dimensions of the
embedded relationship among the different actors hinge around business/
work/labor relations and distributional issues. Although, in a juridical
sense, different actors in value systems may appear to be independent of
each other, in reality they are entangled in highly unequal power relations.
Whether it is economic transactions relating to inputs or outputs, it is the
lead firms that call the shots, with farmers, peasants and agricultural labor-
ers being at the receiving end. Analysts often distinguish between vertical
and horizontal relationships in these value networks: the vertical relation-
ships generally denote the hierarchy of actors, essentially to capture the
underlying power relations, from the lead firms to the final producers such
as farmers, peasants and agricultural laborers. The horizontal relationship
is essentially about the relationship between those who are on a similar
footing. These vertical and horizontal relationships in the GAVSs are criti-
cal in influencing distributional outcomes as well as the conditions of
working people, including their employment and wages, access to land
and the ecological challenges. The world of work for the majority of such
producers consists of fragile and vulnerable conditions and the over-
whelming majority makes a living through a collection of diverse eco-
nomic activities, spanning agricultural and extractive activities, across
rural and urban areas and even across international boundaries. One may,
justifiably, quibble over fine-tuning of the relevant concepts, but it would
be hardly off the mark to consider this large and heterogeneous segment as
being co-terminus with Marx’s relative surplus population.
In general, the MNCs and private capital headquartered in the North,
given the huge economic power they wield, are able to control and
influence the entire spectrum of activities and outcomes in the value
systems, be it the provisioning of inputs, production and labor process
and costing arrangements. For example, the provisioning of inputs in
global industrial agriculture, until about a couple of decades ago, was
largely controlled by six companies, namely BASF, Bayer, DuPont,
Dow, Monsanto and Syngenta. However, after the 2008 crisis, these
companies (except BASF) began talks of mergers among themselves.
As the Agrifood Atlas 2017 (published by the Heinrich Boll Foundation,
2017) reports, two US corporations (DuPont and Dow Chemical) have
already merged, Chem China has bought the Swiss company Syngenta,
and the German chemical giant Bayer is going to take over the US-based
company, Monsanto; net outcomes of these mergers would result in the
Jha and Yeros 25

control of over 60 percent of the markets for commercial seeds,

agricultural chemicals and genetically modified plants. Similarly, the
domination of post-harvest processed food markets by big corporations
such as Nestle, Kraft and ABF are well known.
In recent years, the push towards industrial agriculture in several
developing countries has contributed to the strengthening of direct land
acquisitions and contract farming or out-grower arrangements models
which differ from region to region given the diversity of agrarian systems
and structures. Of course, these have different implications for labor
relations, but are, almost invariably, shaped by the power of agri-business
backed by corporate capital, both domestic and, even more importantly,
international, often headquartered in the North. It may be useful to flag
some recent evidence.

Land Acquisitions and Leases

The fact that there has been a significant acceleration in transnational land
acquisitions in the South, particularly in Africa, in recent years is well-
documented. Elsewhere, we have analyzed these developments in some
detail (Moyo, Jha, & Yeros, 2019; Moyo, Yeros, & Jha, 2012) and have
argued that the intensification of land grabs constitutes a ‘scramble’ in
the classic sense of the term; this has meant accentuation of primitive
accumulation by monopoly finance capital and has unfolded a new
chapter in the centre-periphery contradiction. Land Matrix data, which is
considered to be one of the most credible sources on land acquisitions,
provides information on ‘transactions that entail a transfer of rights to
use, control or own land through sale, lease or concession; that cover 200
hectares (ha) or larger; and that have been concluded since the year 2000’;
as per a recent report based on this data source, ‘1,217 agricultural land
deals, amounting to 83.2 million ha of land in developing countries’ were
concluded since 2000 and 2012 (Anseeuw et al., 2012, p. vii).
These deals have taken the form of lease/concessional agreements,
whereby large corporate capitals are allowed to use land for specified
number of years or direct acquisitions. The regional differences in the
pattern of deals show that, within Asia and Africa (with more than 67%
of total deals), the contracts have been largely for lease agreements and
concessions to use the lands, whereas in South America they have been
largely outright acquisitions.
The other interesting aspect of these deals is that they have been
largely done for either biofuels or food crops. Almost half the deals in
26 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

Latin America are for food crops while a third are for biofuels. Africa
remains a target for investors for both biofuels and food crops; in Asia
non-food crops form the bulk of the investments. Among the crops for
the biofuels, oil palm, jatropha and sugarcane are the most prominent for
which land has been acquired. These acquisitions and shifts have resulted
in huge adverse impacts on already vulnerable peasants and other
segments of agrarian population.
Another aspect highlighted in the relevant literature is the role of state
policies in ensuring tenure security and a range of favors for agri-
business, or the so-called promotion of the ‘ease of doing business’, to
attract investments. Very often land is given away at throwaway prices,
rendering local people helpless and dispossessed. Several instances in
Africa show that even though lands have been acquired by companies,
projects do not take off, leading to protests and sometimes even with-
drawal of contracts, as in the case of Indian company Karuturi in
Ethiopia. Growing incidence of outright purchases and leases accentuate
labor reserves further and reinforce the wage hierarchies in favor of agri-
businesses. However, it remains impossible to gauge how many farmers
have actually been displaced by GAVNs.

Contract Farming/Out-grower Models

In its simplest, but most essential, sense, contract farming (CF) and out-
grower models are arrangements between a farmer and other economic
actors. We can visualize a whole range of economic actors who get into
such arrangements with farmers across time and space, across different
modes of production and social formations. There are several definitions
of such arrangements in the existing literature. Suffice to note for our
purpose here that the type of commodity, time of supply/procurement,
price and quantity of the crop are among the few key features in shaping
specific kinds of contract. The contracts can be formal and informal and
in the most developing countries, there is an overwhelming presence of
informal contracts, which do not show up in large-scale data systems and
government records. We can have a whole range of types of contracts,
such as: limited management contracts; full management contracts; pro-
curement contracts; partial contracts; total contracts; centralized models;
nucleus estate models; multi-partite models; informal models; and inter-
mediary models. These are obviously characterized by different kinds of
economic and transactional attributes; for instance, limited management
contracts are often characterized by the absence of real price guarantee
Jha and Yeros 27

to the farmers, or limited input provisions, whereas full management

contracts may be characterized by total specification of production con-
ditions and guaranteed marketing. In fact, there is already a large and
burgeoning literature on the typology of contracts, and it hardly makes
sense to slot them in strait-jackets and simplistic pigeon-holes.
It is quite clear that there has been a phenomenal increase in the reach
and range of agri-business and industrial agriculture models in the South,
and, typically, TNCs headquartered in the North are in the driver’s seat.
There are companies which source commodities from a large number of
countries, to feed the retailers across the globe; for instance, as reported
by UNCTAD, about a decade ago Olam from Singapore had con-
tracted two million farmers from 50 countries to supply 17 agricultural
commodities (UNCTAD, 2009). Substantial investments have been
pumped into export-oriented agriculture and processed foods (including
in horticulture and seafood) in several developing countries.
It is also well documented that the so called ‘global buyers’ (euphemism
for agri-TNCs), in the GVSs pass on the risks of production to the farmers,
as they are not directly involved in production, and retain flexibility
without making any long-term investments while exploiting the economies
of scale, especially through the control of inputs, credit and marketing
access. Furthermore, the onus of maintaining quality and standards is on
the farmers, and any risks arising out of production techniques have to be
borne by them. This is fundamentally due to the fact the overwhelming
mass of the peasant and agricultural workers in the South have been
trapped in extremely asymmetric power relations where corporate capital,
much of it from the North, call the shots, as is evident from a large number
of studies form Africa, Asia and Latin America (Little & Watts, 1994;
Moyo et al., 2019; Wise, 2019). Based on years of field work spread over
several continents, Wise (2019) argues that large capital and powerful
business interest have been phenomenally successful in influencing
agricultural policy regimes not only in the South but also in the North.1

Conclusion
The currently dominant models of GVSs, which are organically con-
nected to neoliberalism, are heavily stacked against the overwhelming
majority of the agricultural population in the South. Effectively, the
ruling neoliberal dispensation has contributed to the strengthening of
imperialism via GVSs, including in the agricultural arena, resulting in
the transfer of assets, wealth and incomes from the vulnerable masses
to richer classes and countries. Alternative models are, indeed, required
28 Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 8(1–2)

urgently outside the framework of currently hegemonic GVSs and

agribusinesses. There are enough historical experiences (not only from
erstwhile socialist contexts but also from regulated capitalist economies)
from which one can learn, but obviously these are contingent on the
power of political and social mobilization. In the ultimate analysis, it is
the asymmetry in the distribution of power and decision-making which
need to be addressed; the dice is currently heavily loaded in favor of
large corporations, whether domestic or international, and fundamen-
tally serves the interest of what late Amin (2013) described as the impe-
rialism of ‘generalized monopolies’.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article.

Note
1. For an excellent review of Wise (2019), see Sundaram (2019).

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