What Would it Take to Build a Post-Extractivist Agriculture?

By Will LaFleur

What is the relationship between extractivism, agriculture, and a sustainable future? As I started the fieldwork for my doctoral studies, this question sat at the heart of my inquiry. Developing a critical response started with renewing an analytical and theoretical conception of extractivism before I even began the fieldwork. That meant, first of all, framing extractivism historically.

Drawing from the work of historian Andrew Fitzmaurice, I followed the seed of an extractive relationship to the world from Ancient Grecian ‘natural law’, its codification into Roman law as ferae bestiae (‘the law of wild beasts’) and into early European law as res nullius. As European colonization accelerated while simultaneously attempting to adhere to the idea of the ‘rule of law’, res nullis became terra nullis—the notion of land without people—by the 19^th Century. This so-called ‘natural law’—which I argue is the extractivist relationality woven into the world-historical system, and thus figures as a precondition for the development of modern capitalism rather than being symptomatic of it—rests on the assumption that one’s humanity depends upon whether or not one owns property.

Under ‘natural law’, one’s humanity is recognised only through the exploitation of potential in the natural world—in other words, property (and thus humanity) could only be acquired through transforming an aspect of ‘nature’ into something else (for example, a forest into an agricultural field or building structures). Encoded in the law by European societies pursuing governance by the rule of law—and armed with linear conception of humanity as a progression from ‘savage to civilization’—the extractivist relationality of the old natural law now came to figure as the ordering logic inscribed in modern world system.

Extractivism versus Sustainability

Unsurprisingly, I and my co-authors concluded that a future in which extractivist relationalities remained the ordering logic of the world system would be antithetical to the sustainability of everything. One aspect of our framing focused on agriculture, specifically conventional agriculture. This is because conventional agriculture (which is, historically-speaking, rather unconventional) depletes the biological and chemical makeup of soil and the crops grown from it at unprecedented speed. This happens through processes of decoupling, both of humans from food production as well as the cycling of nutrients between humans, animals, seeds, and soils: synthetic fertilizers extracted from mines and shipped around the world; non-reproducible ‘F-1 Hybrid’ seeds that must be purchased anew each year; human labour either exploited or replaced with toxic pesticides that further degrade soil and ecosystem biodiversity. This extractivist fracturing of agricultural production portends a bleak picture for a sustainable future. Indeed, the FAO finds that 90% of the earths topsoil will be at serious risk if current conventional agriculture continues.

Why is it so difficult to spark a transition towards broadly acknowledged solutions?

The second part of my dissertation aimed to provide a different way of responding to the core question. Based on my sensory ethnographic fieldwork as a farm worker and apprentice at agroecological small-holder farms in northern Italy and southern Finland (as well as visits and interviews with farmers in central Japan), I examined agricultural practices that held a promise of being non-extractivist—such as agroecological styles of farming that by and large produce food for local consumption rather than for export. In these spaces I sought to learn practices and sensory ways knowing, doing, and organising that differed radically from extractivist agricultural ones. What I found was that the knowledges and practices in these spaces would need to feature as important aspects of a sustainable agricultural transition. Given that there seems, generally speaking, to be unanimous agreement among consumers and experts that agroecological practices are necessary transition goals, and that conventional agriculture is highly destructive, it seems perfectly reasonable to ask some very obvious questions. For example, if we know which practices work well, why does it seem so difficult to enact a transition to sustainable agriculture, and what are the barriers to making this transition a reality?

Through my research I learned the barrier was not, as it is popularly implied, that conventional farms are needed to ‘feed the world’ as the population grows. Based on the evidence, this is patently false. So what is the barrier then? Over the course of my fieldwork I ultimately came to understand what it was: Labour

From Slavery to hidden Slavery

Many activist groups, including the global movement La Via Campesina (‘The Peasant’s Way’) actually advocate for labour intensive forms of agroecology claiming, with good evidence, that peasant agriculture “cools down the earth”. This is because agroecological practices are primarily reliant on human power, and human power in agriculture means it is necessarily (re)coupled with nutrient cycles rather than the fossil fuels that conventional agriculture depends on. In fact, the non-profit ETC Group has repeatedly shown, using the FAO’s official statistics, that the energy required for conventional agriculture and food production accounts for 85-90% of all agricultural emissions, and occupies 75% of all agricultural land. This is especially significant when the same study shows that conventional agriculture and food production provides only up to 30% of all food consumed by humans, while 70% of the fresh food eaten by humans globally is grown by small-holder farmers (on 5 hectares or less), and procured by fishers, hunters, pastoralists and foragers.

However, human labour is expensive. Needing a lot of it is not a viable business strategy for capitalist agriculture and is in direct opposition to the concepts of labour productivity and scalability. In fact, the labour bottleneck is a key reason that pesticides became desirable for farms to use in the first place. This is also why industrial agriculture has relied, from its very inception, on slavery and indentured servitude before moving into the current era of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, hidden slavery and highly exploited and imported labour. In fact, a key finding of my dissertation is that agricultural labour can never be proportionally compensated in a capitalist political economy. How should one think, then, about labour in small-scale agroecology—an agricultural mode that requires more manual labour compared to conventional agriculture, is place-based, and knowledge-intensive?

Rethinking the fundamentals of food production in line with degrowth

The ways and means through food is procured necessarily shapes (and is shaped by) the ways all societies are organized, the pace of life, their size, and more. What I came to find so striking in my research is that all of the farms I encountered relied on unpaid labour in the form of horticulture interns or eager volunteers trading their labour for room and board, or a hands-on farming apprenticeship. Yet despite this free labour, the long-term viability of these farms was never certain. This did not mean the labour on these farms amounted to a form of slavery, or even exploitation (although there were instances, when it came to the institutional requirements of students, where this possibility lingered). The volunteers and students were genuinely eager to work in the name of education, and often in the name of solidarity. There was undoubtedly some other ‘will to work’ going on here that couldn’t be accounted for in capitalocentric terms. Yet under the societal conditions imposed by global extractivist capitalism, this labour could never be more than temporary for farmers and farm volunteers. For me, the only obvious conclusion would be to rethink the very fundamentals of how food production, and thus society, could be organised.

If we know, then, that agroecology is better at actually feeding people, is far more ecologically friendly than conventional, but requires more manual labour, and that under certain conditions there are people more than willing to engage in this kind of labor, one must ask: what other kinds of futures might be possible?

The insights and first-hand experiences from my fieldwork led me to start thinking about the implications of labour in agriculture generally, and a sustainable agricultural transition in particular. Generally, one comes to understand why any agriculture operating in an extractivist capitalist environment cannot help but require unpaid labour (e.g. slaves, indentured servants)—because it can never compensate this labour according to its true value. In particular, the ecological imperatives of the farmers I worked with unavoidably imply a new, post-extractivist economic era is the only way forward. I thus concluded the dissertation by briefly entertaining new sets of principles and policies, many of which have been put forward by degrowth activists and scholars. Much research and prefigurative action is underway in this regard, and much more is needed.

Conclusion: nothing less than completely reorganising societies

The implications of the dissertations findings cannot be overstated. They suggest nothing less than radically rethinking how societies are organised ecologically, politically, economically, and technologically. These might include de-commodifying food, making it a public good, or considering it a part of public infrastructure, as well as implementing a universal basic income for farmers and farm workers, along with a jobs guarantee in agricultural work. While undoubtedly politically difficult, such potentials also promise to be the most plausible pathways toward enacting a truly sustainable agricultural transition.

Where do we go from here? At the very least, the next steps must be to continue learning from those communities, activists, and pragmatic practitioners who are figuring things out and sharing their learning as they go along.

Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of the EADI Debating Development Blog or the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes

Title Image: By the author: Late autumn cover crops in Finland

Will LaFleur is a teacher and a political and ecological anthropologist with a background in cultural anthropology (B.A.), pedagogy and education (M.A.) and global development studies (Ph.D). His long-term research consists of multi-sited sensory ethnography of small-holder agroecological farms in Europe, Japan, and the United States, drawing from analytical traditions in human geography, political ecology, sensory anthropology, philosophy, history, and critical agrarian studies. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki where he is affiliated with Social and Cultural Anthropology through a Kone Foundation Grant (#202102129), and as a postdoctoral researcher in the BIOSENSE project, which focuses on small farmers’ sensory knowledge in relation to biodiversity, and synthesizing ways of knowing biodiversity between science and everyday farming practices. He is also a Core Member in the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) and a member of the Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT).