Review (Fernand Braudel Center)

Research Foundation of State University of New York

Introduction, Food, Energy, Environment: Crisis of the Modern World-System

Author(s): Philip McMichael
Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 33, No. 2/3, FOOD, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT:
CRISIS OF THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM (2010), pp. 95-102
Published by: Research Foundation of State University of New York for and on behalf of the
Fernand Braudel Center
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Introduction, Food, Energy,
Environment

Crisis of the Modern World-System

Philip McMichael
special issue of Review is the product of a colloquium mark
This ing the conjunction of crises in the first decade of the twenty
first century. The food and financial crises of 2008, accompa
nied by a simmering energy crisis, combined all three of Fernand
Braudel's social times: the longue dure of capitalist world-ecology
and its progressive simplification of agriculture and growing de

pendence on fossil-fuel energy, the conjoncture of neoliberal finan

cialization as hegemonic decline, and the immediacy of price in
flation of foodstuffs driven by financial speculation and the rush
into biofuels as a "green fuel" (McMichael, 2010). In this sense, the
events of 2008 (spiking oil and food prices; the release of the U.N.

sponsored International Assessment

of Agricultural Knowledge, Science
and Technology for Development report alongside of the World Bank's
2008 World Development Report, refocusing on "agriculture for de

velopment"; and the June Food Crisis Summit at the FAO in Rome),
hard on the heels of the Stern Review (2006) on climate change,
signaled a turning point, or transition, toward a very uncertain
future. The essays assembled here address aspects of this multi
dimensional crisis through the lens of its three phenomenal sub
stances: food, energy, and environment.
The turning point can be understood in two related ways:
1) materially, "development" is now increasingly about how we sur
vive the future, rather than how we improve on the past; and 2) in
tellectually, we need new conceptual and tools to
methodological
interpret and navigate this uncertain future, governed as it may be

by permanent food, energy, and environmental crises. The collo

quium provided the opportunity to reflect on this state of affairs,

producing some significant rethinking. Here, I want to underline

review, xxxiii, 2/3, 2010, 95-102 95

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96 Philip McMichael

the fundamental significance of agricultureboth in contributing

to the crisis conjuncture, and as a palpable solution to the crisis in
these three substances.
In the popular and social scientific
imagination, agriculture
operates under the radar. For example, it is striking that neither
AI Gore (in An Inconvenient Truth) nor Jeffrey Sachs
(in Common
wealth) connected the rise in greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to

agriculture, when we know that agriculture (including land clear

ance) contributes up to one-third of GHG (McMichael et al., 2007).

And this includes industrial biofuels, which the World Bank blamed
for 65 percent of the surge in agricultural prices (Berthelot, 2008:
27), and which various scientists have noted increase, rather than
lower, emissions via a "biofuel carbon debt"
(Fargione et al., 2008;
Crutzen et al., 2007). Industrial agriculture, whose inputs and

productsthe "oil we eat" in Richard Manning's telling imagery

(2004)depend so much on fossil fuel for production and circula
tion, embodies all three crises. Further, the recent "land grab" is
the vehicle for financial speculation, as firms, philanthropic capi
talists, financial houses, pension funds, and states all invest in what
is now regarded as one of the safest, or lucrative,
port investment
folios (Houtart, 2010). As Jason Moore (2011) might say, all of these

phenomena are part of a general ecological crisis imminent in the

history of capital, and now manifest in the disorder of entropy and

the finality of enclosure in the twenty-first centuryas addressed in
various ways by the authors in this special issue.
The ecological crisis has roots in the fatal separation over the
last two centuries of the natural from the social sciences. Mod
ernization or development has been fashioned as if human soci
eties had no ecological basis. And yet modern development has
informed agricultural and industrial practices that fully depend
on extractions from nature. Such extraction
(and degradation) has
continued as if nature is a free gift that keeps on giving, with capi
tal devising forms of "biophysical override" (Weis, 2010) or enclo
sure to sustain accumulation, and the illusion of disunity between

humanity and its ecosystems

(Friedmann, 2000).
Although some
might say that population growth and coloniza
tion of the earthwith the resulting rapid reduction of wild spaces

(wetlands, forests, grasslands, etc.) that sustain biodiversitycauses

ecological crisis, the problem is deeper than this. In a critical eval
uation of conservation efforts, Shahid Naeem observes:

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 INTRODUCTION, FOOD, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT 97

The more we relegate wild species to parks, zoos, gardens

and seed banks, and the more we place domestic species
[e.g., cattle, commercial plants] in their stead, the more ho
mogenized the world becomes As the average number
of species found in each square of Earth's surface declines,
so too will its biomass, its biogeochemistry and its contribu
tion to a stable, life-supporting biosphere.

His point is that "almost all aspects of human well-being and pros
perity trace back to biodiversity for their foundation" (2009: 103).
The radical simplification of farming, it into an eco
converting
nomic sector called "agriculture" (but without farmers),1 which
mimics industrialism via energy-intensive nutri
inputs, ruptures
ent cycles (the "metabolic rift") and knowl
appropriates ecological
edge, has far-reaching consequences 2010; Foster, Clark &
(Araghi,
York, 2010; Schneider & McMichael, 2010).
The Stratigraphy Commission of the of
Geological Society
London (the world's oldest association of earth scientists) warned
in 2008:

The combination of extinctions,

global species migrations
and the widespread replacement of natural with
vegetation
agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive con
temporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are perma
nent, as future evolution will take from surviving
place (and
frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks (quoted in
Davis, 2010: 31).
Bill McKibben, U.S. environmentalist, author of Eaarth (2010) and
creator of 350.org, echoes: is no a
"global warming longer philo
sophical threat, no longer a future threat, no
longer a threat at all.
It's our reality. We've the planet, it in large and
changed changed
fundamental ways" (2010: xiii). This recalls the "environmentalist's
paradox":

Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosys

tems more rapidly and than in any comparable
extensively
period of time in human to meet rapidly
history, largely
growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and
fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irrevers

1
"Agriculture without farmers" is La Via term to describe industrial
Campesinas
agriculture.

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98 Philip McMichael

ible loss in the diversity of life on Earth These problems,

unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits
that future generations obtain from ecosystems (Millenni
um Ecosystem Assessment, 2005: 1).

The obvious (but no less difficult) solution is to restore biodi

versity. One response is that of the U.N. Millennium Ecosystem

Assessment (MEA), which observed: "existing national and global
institutions are not well designed to deal with the management
of common pool resources, a characteristic of many ecosystem
services The most important public policy decisions affecting
ecosystems are often made by agencies and in policy arenas other
than those charged with
protecting ecosystems" (2005: 20). Two
important lessons of this report were that 1) humanity has not un
derstood the social and environmental significance of its ecologi
cal base (sources and sinks); and 2) the interdependence of com
mon pool resources (ecosystems) are understood and managed by
precisely that world-majority population often deemed "poor" by
development agencies.
Modernity's ontological bias toward commodification obscures

socio-ecological services practiced by smallholders, fisherfolk, and

forestdwellers, discounting their potential as a source of resilience

knowledges to manage the future (Martinez-Alier, 2002; Escobar,

2008). Resolution of this bias requires incorporating values other than

price into the development equationwhich must now become about re

silience rather than endless accumulation. The majority of human

activity is local, non-monetized, and diverse, despite the reach of

the universalizing market. Hence the
sensibility expressed in the
Assessment, in advocating "use of all relevant forms of knowledge
and information in assessments and decision-making," women's in
cluded. It goes on to suggest that effective ecosystem
management
requires "place-based" knowledge about the specific dynamics of
an ecosystem: "Traditional knowledge or practitioners' knowledge
held by local resource managers can often be of considerable val
ue in resource management, but it is too rarely incorporated into

decision-making processes and indeed is often inappropriately dis

missed" (MEA, 2005: 24).
Here it is important to underline
that agriculture, once an ener

gy converter/provider, is now a heavy energy consumerthe indus

trial food system expends 10 or more energy calories to produce 1
calorie of food (GRAIN, 2007: 7). Instead of embracing live/biotic

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INTRODUCTION, FOOD, ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT 99

carbon, it burns dead carbon (Shiva, 2008: 19). The reality is, then,
that to preserve human civilization and its ecological base, farm
ing the land sustainably means expanding carbon sinks via agro

forestry, based on the biodiversity principle, or agro-ecology, as a

method of rebuilding soil carbonboth methods reducing carbon
in the atmosphere and regenerating nature in the process (Altieri
& Toledo, 2011).
This
is the approach recommended in the UN and World Bank

sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Science and

Technology for Development (IAASTD) of 2008.2 This report,

prepared by over 400 social and natural scientists and develop
ment practitioners, advocates a multifunctional role for agriculture
in reducing poverty and social/gender inequality, stabilizing rural
cultures, reversing environmental degradation,
globalandwarm

ing. Stating that "business as usual is not an option" in the face of

multiple crises, the IAASTD questions industrial agriculture and

transgenic food as solutions, since markets fail to adequately value

environmental and social harm (2008: 20). Echoing the Assess
ment, the Report recommends an integrative view of food,
ecosys
tem, and nutritional security, emphasizing that reinventing agri
culture as farming requires scientists (natural, social, and health)
to work with local farmers, governments, and civil society orga
nizations (2008: 17-18). It presumes the viability of the 350-500
million small farms accommodating two billion people, 80 percent
of agricultural land, and accounting for up to 70 percent of the
world's food supply (Altieri & Toledo, 2011; Entwick
Evangelischer
lungsdienst, 2008).
Complementing the now substantial literature on the greater
overall productivity (and sustainability) of small-scale farming
(Badgley et al., 2007; Pretty et al., 2001; 2003; UNCTAD & UNEP,
an IAASTD contributor noted: a "half-hectare
2009), plot in Thai
land can grow 70 species of vegetables, fruits and herbs, providing
far better nutrition and more than a half-hectare
feeding people
plot of high-yielding rice" (2008: 17-18). In order to strengthen and
secure small
farming, IAASTD recommends institutional
altering
arrangements to ensure agricultural in addi
multifunctionality,
tion to a "shift to nonhierarchical models,"
development building

2 this report
Unfortunately has been ignored by the development establishment
not simply because of its ambivalence toward GMOs, but also because it advocates a

paradigm shift.

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100 Philip McMichael

trust and
valuing farmer knowledge and natural and agricultural
biodiversity, as well as seed exchange and common resource man

agement systems (2008: 5, 7). IAASTD maps out a general strategy

to strengthen food system resilience in the face of environmental
and distributional crises, underlining the importance of a rights
based framework rather than a market-centric organization of
the agrifood system. This approach was advocated by the U.N.
special rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter,

addressing the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in March,

2011: "Agriculture should be fundamentally redirected towards
modes of production that are more environmentally sustainable
and socially just [Agro-ecology] helps small farmers who
must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more

productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global

warming and ecological destruction" (OHCHR, 2011).
In sum, at the conjunction of the three social times we have
seen a series
of high-level reports, which all rehearse the centrality
of agriculture to resolving humanity's crisis. Of course the irony
is that the fossil-fuel-based industrial experiment is proving un

sustainable, such that agriculture, once viewed as the baseline of

civilization, is reasserting itself as the indispensible vector of socio

ecological managementas humanity faces the specter of irrevers

ible climate change, and recurring food deficits.

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