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Global food insecurity as a crisis of social reproduction for the classes of labour

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Coşku Çelik1

Abstract
In this essay, I argue that the ongoing global food crisis, beyond a conjunctural price increase, is an expression of the structural
crisis of social reproduction experienced by the classes of rural labour in the Global South. By interrogating the reports and
policy recommendations of international organizations on global food insecurity, the essay focuses on the internal relationship
between the crisis of social reproduction for the classes of labour who cannot produce and who cannot consume sufficient and
healthy food.

Keywords
Food insecurity, classes of labour, crisis of social reproduction, food crisis, dispossession of small-scale farmers

La inseguridad alimentaria mundial como crisis de la reproducción social de las clases

trabajadoras

Resumen
En este ensayo, argumento que la actual crisis alimentaria mundial, más allá de un aumento coyuntural de precios, es una
expresión de la crisis estructural de reproducción social que experimentan las clases de trabajadores rurales en el Sur
Global. Al cuestionar los informes y las recomendaciones de política de las organizaciones internacionales sobre la inseguridad
alimentaria mundial, el ensayo se centra en la relación interna entre la crisis de la reproducción social para las clases de trabajo
que no pueden producir y que no pueden consumir alimentos suficientes y saludables.

Palabras clave:
inseguridad alimentaria, clases de trabajo, crisis de reproducción social, crisis alimentaria, despojo de pequeños agricultores

Introduction issue stemming from fluctuations in demand and supply. As

On 13 April 2022, the Heads of the World Bank Group,
International Monetary Fund (IMF), United Nations World
Food Program (WFP) and World Trade Organization
(WTO) released a joint statement calling for urgent action
on food security. Accordingly, the fallout of the war in
Ukraine in the third year of the ongoing global pandemic
has resulted in food inflation and food shortage which espe-
cially threatens the poorest segments of the lower and
middle-income countries. In fact, issues such as food crisis,
food insecurity and food inflation have been on the global
economic agenda since the previous crisis in neoliberalism,
namely, 2007–8 global financial crisis. Even though the pan-
demic and the political conflicts have severely impacted the
food security of the working classes worldwide, it would
be wrong to consider the global food crisis as a conjunctural
questioned by Henry Bernstein in the introduction of his cel-
ebrated book Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change (2010: 2),
‘[W]hile more than enough is produced to feed the world’s
population adequately, many people go hungry much or all
of the time’. Global food crises under neoliberalism, includ-
ing today’s food crisis, reflect the contradictions of global
value relations formed under the corporate food regime
since the 1980s, and they cannot simply be resolved
through demand–supply management (Araghi, 2009b).
1
York University, Canada
Corresponding Author:
Coşku Çelik, Department of Politics, York University, 4700 Keele Street,
Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.
Email: cosku.86@gmail.com
2 Human Geography 0(0)
In this essay, I aim to examine the global food crisis and
food insecurity from a social reproduction lens by unpacking
the internal relationship between the subsistence crisis of the
small-scale food producers of the Global South under the cor-
porate food regime since the 1980s and the risk of hunger the
working classes of the world are currently facing. I argue that
food insecurity indicates a crisis of social reproduction for the
classes of rural and urban labour. The term classes of labour
refer to ‘the growing numbers depend – directly or indirectly
– on the sale of their labour power for their daily reproduc-
tion’ (Panitch and Leys, 2001, as cited in Bernstein, 2007)
who have been dispossessed of sufficient means to reproduce
itself (Bernstein, 2010: 110) due to the capitalist develop-
ment in agriculture. The corporate food regime of neoliberal-
ism has transformed rural livelihood through agricultural
policies such as the removal of state subsidies for small-scale
farmers, privatization of agricultural state economic enter-
prises, trade liberalization and rising control of agribusiness
firms on agricultural production. These have resulted in the
dispossession and proletarianization of small-scale farmers
of the Global South; increasing market dependency of small-
holding farmers to access means of production and social
reproduction; and a subsistence crisis of the classes of
labour. Today’s food crisis and food insecurity of the
classes of (rural and urban) labour are the expressions of
the structural shifts, including the development of capitalism
in agriculture; the commodification of the production, circu-
lation, distribution and consumption of food; and disposses-
sion, impoverishment and proletarianization of small-scale
farmers of the South. Therefore, its analysis necessitates
attention to the internal relationship between the social repro-
duction of those who cannot consume and those who cannot
produce enough and healthy food (Bernstein, 2014).
To reveal the continuity between the crisis of social repro-
duction of the producers and consumers of food, the essay
begins with a discussion on the crisis of social reproduction
experienced by small-scale farmers and patterns of proletar-
ianization by paying attention to the formation of classes of
labour in the agrarian South under neoliberalism. It then anal-
yses today’s food insecurity as a structural crisis of social
reproduction by critically interrogating the policy recommen-
dations of the international organizations. Finally, the essay
concludes by arguing for the internal relationship between
the precarious conditions of producing and consuming food
under the corporate food regime of neoliberalism.
Crisis of social reproduction for the classes
of rural labour under neoliberalism
The concept of social reproduction refers to the daily and
intergenerational processes involved in producing, maintain-
ing and reproducing labouring populations, such as the
provision of food, clothing, housing, healthcare, education
and basic safety (Bezanson and Luxton, 2006: 3). Capitalist
social reproduction is based upon the interplay between the
states, markets and households whose relationship may com-
plement and/or contradict each other. Changing forms of the
relationship among the states, markets and households bring
different regimes of social reproduction having peculiar con-
tradictions and crisis tendencies under various phases of cap-
italism. For instance, neoliberalism brought a new social
reproduction regime based upon state and corporate disin-
vestment from social welfare and externalization of care
work onto families (i.e. women). Yet, neoliberal regime
of social reproduction also brought a shift from the
‘male-breadwinner/female caregiver’ model of household
under the state-managed capitalism of the 20th century to
the ‘two-earner family’ through the feminization of paid
workforce (Fraser, 2017). Furthermore, social reproductive
contradictions and crises are endemic to capitalism as such
since, on the one hand, social reproduction is a necessary
condition for sustained capital accumulation; on the other
hand, capitalism’s need for unlimited accumulation destabi-
lizes the patterns of social reproduction on which it relies
(Fraser, 2017: 22).
The social reproduction of the rural populations under differ-
ent phases of capitalism and the question of how the conditions
of production and social reproduction of the peasant households
are determined by the operations of capital and of the state
(Bernstein, 1977) require particular attention. Capitalism as a
system in which the direct producers’ access to the means of
production, to the means of labour and to the basic conditions
of their survival and self-reproduction is mediated by the
market (Wood, 2009), has restructured the ‘imperatives of
social reproduction’ (Mezzadri et al., 2021) for the peasantry
who traditionally ‘reproduce themselves through their own
labour’ (Bernstein, 1977: 61). For Bernstein (2010: 4), develop-
ment of capitalism in agriculture has changed the social charac-
ter of small-scale farming in two respects. First, it has led to the
commodification of subsistence by transforming peasants into
petty-commodity producers who are obliged to produce their
living through integration into broader social divisions of
labour and markets. Secondly, petty-commodity producers are
subject to class differentiation, leading to the class formation
of the classes of small-scale capitalist farmers, petty-commodity
producers and wage workers.
The development of capitalism in agriculture and proletar-
ianization of the peasantry have taken various forms and pro-
cesses under different phases of capitalism. Yet, as warned
by Lenin ([1899] 1974) and Kautsky ([1899] 1988), it is a
contradictory process, and there is no unique law of agrarian
development under capitalism (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2009:
10). While defining the dispossession and proletarianization
of the peasantry as a historical path of development of capi-
talism, both Lenin and Kautsky highlighted their persistence
by paying attention to the processes through which capital
dominate agriculture and transform not only property rela-
tions but also forms of exploitation. In the contemporary
Marxist literature, the development of capitalism in
Çelik
agriculture and the transformation of the peasantry is ana-
lysed as a process of permanent primitive accumulation by
referring to the ongoing strategy of capitalism to dispossess
small-scale producers and to integrate non-capitalist strata
(Luxemburg, 2003) into capital accumulation process.
By interrogating the linear analyses of agricultural mod-
ernization, the food regime analysis unveils how key histor-
ical contradictions of capital accumulation processes have
penetrated and transformed the production, circulation, distri-
bution and consumption of food (cf: Friedmann, 1993;
McMichael, 2009). Accordingly, different food regimes
reflect different forms of power relations embedded in ‘cross-
scale agrarian transformations’ which include ‘the exercise
of, and subordination to, episodic hegemonic political–eco-
nomic projects within the state system – embodying chang-
ing trade, investment, and financial strategies in the global
food system’ (McMichael, 2021: 218). In this context, the
first food regime (1870s to 1930s) combined colonial tropical
imports to Europe with basic grains and livestock imports
from settler colonies whereas the second food regime
(1950s to 1970s) gave priority to national regulation and
authorized both import controls and export subsidies to
manage national agricultural policies (Friedmann, 1993: 31;
McMichael, 2009: 141). Even though the integration of
farmers into markets, the transformation of peasants into
petty-commodity producers and the commodification of sub-
sistence were initiated under the second food regime of
post-World War II; this process indicated a ‘relative depea-
santization’ (Araghi, 2009a: 130) as the small-scale farmers
of the agrarian South were able to benefit from the protection-
ist policies such as the price supports, subsidies and financing
of agricultural inputs by the state. The Third Food Regime, the
corporate food regime since the 1980s, has deepened com-
modification and institutionalized market and property rela-
tions privileging agribusiness ‘in the name of production
“efficiencies,” “free trade,” and global “food security” …
[and] institutionalized subsidies for Northern energy-intensive
agribusiness production and export of artificially cheapened
foodstuffs’ (McMichael, 2012: 682) at the expense of both
farmers of the Global South and the global food security.
The corporate food regime of neoliberalism has trans-
formed rural livelihood in the Global South through policies
such as the decline or removal of state subsidies for the small-
scale farmers, privatization of agricultural state economic
enterprises, decreasing price support schemes, rising
control of agribusiness firms on agricultural production, the
diminishing availability of institutional credit mechanisms
for small-scale farmers and the expropriation of farmland
for non-agricultural purposes such as mining and energy
investments. The most immediate impact of these transfor-
mations on small-scale farmers has been the rise of input
prices and the fall of crop prices. This has led to an increase
in the market dependency of small-scale farmers for their
reproduction and, therefore, a subsistence crisis, as defined
by Bernstein (1977) as ‘simple reproduction squeeze’.
3
Simple reproduction squeeze under neoliberalism has been
manifested in the form of rising production costs relative to
farm incomes as a result of the rural development models,
which have encouraged more expensive and market-based
means of production (especially input prices such as seeds,
tools, fertilizers, etc.) due to the pressures exerted by com-
modity relations (Bernstein, 1977: 65).
Classes of labour rely on the combination of multiplicity
and highly fragmented forms of rural and urban, waged
and unwaged work to cope with highly precarious means
of livelihood and the crisis of social reproduction. First of
all, even though a significant portion of the dispossessed
farmers of the Global South have migrated to the countries
of the Global North or urban centres and constituted the
most precarious segment of the urban workforce, this has
not been a straightforward process, and a considerable part
of the population in the Global South is still rural. Unable
to meet the conditions of social reproduction merely
through agricultural production, rural populations in the
Global South have developed specific survival strategies,
one of the most important being diversification of income
sources in agricultural or non-agricultural activities.
Therefore, the classes of rural labour under neoliberalism
include ‘rural labour beyond the farm’ (Bernstein, 2010) sup-
plied by both fully proletarianized, landless workers and mar-
ginal and poor farmers who cannot reproduce themselves
merely through farming. Secondly and relatedly, under neo-
liberalism, there is a need to overcome the dualistic analysis
of the workforce such as urban/rural, agricultural/non-
agricultural, wage employment/self-employment and land-
owning/landless (O’Laughlin, 1996; Pattenden, 2018) as
these categories mostly overlap within the proletarian house-
holds as a means to cope with the crisis of social reproduc-
tion. Classes of labour under neoliberalism have been
formed through the ‘unlimited supply of surplus labour’
(Veltmeyer, 2013: 81) generated by the neoliberal transfor-
mation of agriculture who pursue their reproduction increas-
ingly in insecure and oppressive waged and unwaged
employment across different sites of the social division of
labour. Finally, classes of labour capture the multiplicity of
proletarian conditions along the lines of gender, race and
caste. As a matter of fact, since the 1980s, the global
labour markets have experienced widespread feminization
and racialization due to capital flows and the dispossession,
proletarianization and migration of the small-scale producers
of the Global South (Ferguson and McNally, 2015).
Food insecurity as an expression of the
social reproductive contradictions of
capitalism
Globally, the number of people facing acute food insecurity
and the risk of hunger has risen dramatically during the last
three years. As shown by the Food and Agriculture
4 Human Geography 0(0)
Organization (FAO), around 193 million people across 53
countries were acutely food insecure and in need of urgent
support in 2021 (FAO, 2022a) whereas almost 3.1 billion
people could not afford a healthy diet in 2020 (FAO,
2022b). In the reports and policy programs prepared by inter-
national organizations such as WFP (2022), World Bank
(2022a), IMF and WTO, factors that have triggered the
global food crisis are the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and
the climate crisis. To stop hunger, WFP calls private sector
companies, high net-worth individuals, influencers and
celebrities for technical assistance, knowledge transfers,
financial contributions and raising their voices against
global hunger. In its response to the rising food insecurity,
World Bank announced 30 billion dollars of assistance for
a period of 15 months to encourage food and fertilizer pro-
duction, enhance food systems, facilitate greater trade and
support vulnerable households and producers in several
countries in Latin America and Africa. Furthermore, in
their Joint Statement (World Bank, 2022b), WFP, WB,
IMF and WTO call for urgent action to address food insecu-
rity and support vulnerable groups and countries through
emergency food supplies, financial support and increased
agricultural production. Along with the call for the interna-
tional community to help support urgent financing needs,
the Statement urges the governments ‘to keep trade open
and avoid restrictive measures such as export bans on food
or fertilizer that further exacerbate the suffering of the most
vulnerable people’. For these international organizations,
food insecurity is seen as a supply-side issue whereas food
security is expected to be achieved through the trickle-down
effects of agricultural growth led by the private sector
(Vercillo, 2020: 237). Therefore, their reports have serious
shortcomings not only in suggesting wrong solutions but
also in failing to address the structural reasons behind the
current global food insecurity.
First of all, even though the ongoing simultaneous global
crises and conflicts such as the pandemic and the wars in
Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Libya and Ukraine have intensified
the global food crisis, they are the expressions of the structural
contradictions and crises of capitalism (La Via Campesina,
2022). On the one hand, the pandemic hit a world already
suffering from growing social and economic inequalities
and the devastating impact of the global financial crises
which started in 2007–2008. Therefore, the pandemic repre-
sents the acceleration of the degenerating economic, political
and social contradictions of neoliberalism (Saad-Filho, 2021;
Yalman, 2021). Furthermore, the pandemic-initiated crisis,
as a crisis of social reproduction (Mezzadri, 2020), has
unveiled the social reproductive contradictions (Fraser,
2017), which are endemic to capitalism as such and which
have been governed by financialization under neoliberalism.
The commodified world food system, from its production to
distribution, circulation and consumption under neoliberal-
ism, revealed its contradictions and fragilities under the pan-
demic to an unprecedented degree. On the one hand, the
agrarian capital faced significant challenges, especially
during the first months of the pandemic, due to the factors
such as the slow-down of commodity flows; on the other
hand, the classes of labour – small-scale producers and con-
sumer households – faced challenges such as the micro-food
crisis of difficulty in selling and buying products (Pattenden
et al., 2021; Stevano et al., 2021). These were the direct
reflections of the commodification of the means of produc-
tion and social reproduction under the corporate food
regime. On the other hand, it is obvious that Russia’s inva-
sion of Ukraine has aggravated global food insecurity as
Ukraine, the leading exporter of grain, has seen a drastic
decline in its exports. Therefore, the relationship between
the war and the global food insecurity is directly related to
the production of food for long-distance trade and depend-
ency of the circulation, provision and consumption of food
on international markets.
Secondly, however, international organizations such as
WB, IMF and WTO consider free trade as a solution even
though the transformation of food into a commodity pro-
duced for long-distance trade, along with long value chain,
is among the main reasons behind the global food crisis.
Under the corporate food regime of neoliberalism, food has
been transformed into a commodity produced and traded
for profits through the policies of trade liberalization,
which have undermined the role of governments in ensuring
the conditions of production for farmers and of social repro-
duction – that is food security – for the classes of labour.
These policies have given agribusiness increasing control
over food production and distribution through programs
such as privatization, market access and the removal of
restrictions on imports. Globalization of agriculture and
food was promoted under two arguments: (i) it would
increase food production as global corporations are more effi-
cient than small-scale peasant farmers (ii) it would make food
cheaper and, therefore more accessible for the poor. As a
result, for the purpose of promoting free trade under IMF
and World Bank guided economic reforms and the WTO dis-
cipline, the countries of the Global South have been urged to
dismantle their ‘outdated’ and inefficient policies promoting
self-sufficiency in food grains production and their domestic
systems of procurement of food grains and distribution at
controlled prices. Accordingly, they would benefit from spe-
cializing in non-grain crops in which they had a competitive
advantage by increasing their exports and importing their
staple food products (Patnaik, 2009; Patnaik and Patnaik,
2017). Overall, the product compositions in many countries
of the South have shifted from staple food products to the
crops prioritized by agribusiness and this has resulted in
dependency on imported staple food products.
The global food crisis has proven the argument that free
trade would bring food security wrong. On the one hand,
industrial food production is less productive as it is extremely
resource and energy intensive; on the other hand, one third of
the world’s food comes from small farms (Ritchie, 2021),
Çelik
whereas agribusiness produces commodities such as fertiliz-
ers, pesticides and cash crops. Furthermore, as food produc-
tion has increasingly become dependent upon these inputs
produced and circulated by agribusiness, global financial
crises since the late 2000s have directly led to the rise of
food prices. Rising food prices do not benefit farmers as
the cost of production also increases (Shiva, 2016b: 90–
95). Therefore, rising food prices have not only hit low-
income urban and rural consumers of food but also small-
scale producers within the classes of labour. Overall, under
the corporate food regime, nutrition and food security of
the masses in the South is directly affected by international
factors such as market fluctuations, foreign exchange rates,
terms of trade, or conflicts. Therefore, as depicted by La
Via Campesina (2022) and food sovereignty movement,
the current food crisis is structural as the mode of organiza-
tion of the system has transformed countries into food
import-dependent countries and food into a commodity pro-
duced for long-distance trade.
Thirdly, the commodification of food and the market
dependency of classes of labour in the processes of produc-
tion and social reproduction is inherently gendered. As agri-
culture and food systems become increasingly
commoditized, production, provisioning and preparation of
food which operate through gender division of work, tend
to shift (Vercillo, 2020: 237). On the one hand, the ecological
impacts of transformations such as land expropriation for
off-farm investments and the dominance of resource inten-
sive corporate agriculture such as biodiversity loss, water
pollution and soil deterioration have limited women’s
access to the means of production and triggered a shift
from subsistence to market dependent forms of rural liveli-
hood. This has left rural women who have traditionally
been ‘the subsistence farmers of the planet’ (Federici,
2004) at the mercy of the market for both production and con-
sumption of food. As argued by Shiva (2016a), corporate
production and distribution system has been a significant
impediment in women’s access to the conditions for produc-
ing food. On the other hand, the relationship between women
and food security needs to be situated in the context of
women’s paid and unpaid work (Stevano, 2019). As men-
tioned above, the neoliberal regime of social reproduction
is characterized by simultaneous disinvestment from social
welfare and feminization of the precarious paid workforce
(Fraser, 2017). In this context, women in the classes of
labour have been forced into informal, marginalized and
extremely low-waged forms of paid labour and precarious
conditions of reproducing the household due to the limited
access to healthy food, housing, etc. Furthermore, in many
cases, limited access to rural commons (such as land, water
and firewood) has led to intensification of reproductive
work of classes of rural women, especially the time and
effort spent on preparing food, caring for dependents and
producing basic goods and services at home. This, in turn,
affects women’s labour force participation (Naudi and Rao,
5
2018; Rao, 2018). Therefore, under food insecurity, women
in the classes of labour who have traditionally been responsi-
ble for feeding their family through their unpaid care work
face the triple burden of (i) intensification of reproductive
work, (ii) limited income and time stemming from their
heavy working conditions outside the home and (iii) rising
food prices.
Conclusion
In this essay, I examined the global food crisis as a structural
expression of the social reproductive crisis of capitalism that
cannot be solved through policies of demand and supply
management within the free market logic. In fact, while
more than enough is produced to feed the world’s population,
millions of people face the risk of hunger and malnutrition
(Bernstein, 2010: 2), and this is an expression not only of
the fluctuations in food prices but also of the situation of
food within the global value relations. Food crises indicate
neither a simple mismatch between the world’s population
and the food output nor a conjunctural implication of price
fluctuations, health crises, or global conflicts. Instead, they
are embedded in the contradictions of production and
social reproduction under capitalism in general and neoliber-
alism in particular. As put by Araghi (2009b), the global food
crisis is a manifestation of accumulation by displacement and
the neoliberal restructuring of global value chains. This
global dispossession and displacement have created under-
reproduced rural and urban classes of labour who have lost
non-market access to their means of production and social
reproduction.
All in all, even though hunger and malnutrition are con-
sidered merely as implications of poverty and unequal rela-
tions of distribution, they indicate a more complex crisis of
social reproduction for the classes of labour which include
the millions who cannot buy and who cannot produce
enough and healthy food. Therefore, its analysis requires
attention to the continuity between the precarious conditions
of producing and buying food under corporate, industrialized
agriculture.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Professor Raju Das for the encour-
agement to write this piece and Dr Ecehan Balta for her valuable
comments and suggestions on the earlier drafts of the manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship
and/or publication of this article.
6 Human Geography 0(0)
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Author Biography
Coş ku Çelik holds a PhD in political science from the
Middle East Technical University. Currently, she is a visiting
scholar at York University, Canada. Before, she worked as a
visiting assistant professor at the same University and taught
courses in the Departments of Politics and Social Science.
Her research lies at the intersection of labour studies, feminist
political economy, and the political economy of rural
development.