Die Neue Zeit
27th October 2010, 06:32
National-Democratization, Industrial Complexes in Food Production, and Agrarian Populism
“The agrarian questions are too important to be passed in silence for, in spite of all technical revolutions, agriculture remains the basis of our existence. And the farmers are too powerful a class to be indifferent to their antagonism. But though different interests may divide the proletariat and the farmers, which make it impossible to unite them in the same party forever, still they have many points of agreement as against other classes that make a temporary alliance not only possible, but also desirable. And a great many antagonisms are really founded on prejudice and may be overcome by enlightenment. Not party membership, but a better understanding of our aims and a temporary alliance, that may be gained by our agitation among farmers. Indeed, situations may arise, in which it will be very valuable to have them as our allies. Agitation among farmers in this sense, wherever conditions seem favorable, is not only worth considering but very desirable, providing it is not carried on at the expense of the industrial and rural wage workers.” (Karl Kautsky)
While Kautsky’s views on die Agrafrage (“the agrarian question”) were more fully expressed in his 1899 work of that same German phrase, he made more political remarks in his article on farmer agitation in the US. Only after a few years after defending the exclusively worker character of the then-Marxist Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) from opportunists who wanted to admit small tenant farmers and sharecroppers into the party (a lesson that the most prominent of this theoretical mentor’s followers abandoned in early 1923 despite his political testament), Kautsky nevertheless committed to better understanding between worker-class political forces and the forces of agrarian populism, agrarian radicalism, agrarian socialism, etc.
In order to obtain an understanding of this micro-political dynamic in food production, consideration should be given first to industrial, macro-political, engineering, and historical dynamics in food production. Starting with the industrial, one can find that food production is indeed as much an industrial complex as the military- and energy-industrial ones, spanning agricultural inputs, aquaculture, food processing, industrial fishing, and much more. Moreover, food production is no exception when it comes to the concentration of capital, as noted by Timothy Wise and Sarah Trist in their August 2010 analysis of hog markets:
The U.S. Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Agriculture (USDA) have focused attention recently on rising levels of corporate concentration in agricultural markets and the challenges that may pose to U.S. anti-trust enforcement and agricultural policies. Both agencies have raised particular concerns about dominant firms’ exercise of buyer power over farmers, especially in livestock markets controlled by a shrinking number of large multinational meat packers.
U.S. hog markets have undergone rapid concentration in the last twenty-five years, with the top four packers now controlling two-thirds of the market. Mergers and acquisitions have left Smithfield Foods, the industry leader with 31 percent of the market, as the only buyer in the Southeastern part of the country. While President Bush’s Justice Department approved the 2007 merger that made that possible, questions remain about how independent hog farmers in the region can receive a fair-market price for their animals in such concentrated buyer markets.
Buyer power can operate in many ways. With one or two buyers, farmers may have little competitive bidding for their animals. Direct packer ownership or control of hogs through production contracts may thin the spot market to the point that packers can manipulate prices to their advantage through their own sales and purchases. Bank financing may become harder to secure without a contract from a packer, and contracts themselves present a variety of issues, as they can become take-it-or-leave-it propositions for farmers lacking other offers.
Moving on to the macro-political dynamics, one can find that much of the problems of underdevelopment in places like sub-Saharan Africa can be attributed to subsidy largesse for food production in the more developed states, as noted most poignantly by Julio Godoy in an article during that same month:
Subsidies for agriculture in the industrialised countries of the world grew again in 2009, benefiting the largest companies and land owners, such as Prince Albert of Monaco and Queen Elizabeth of Britain.
The latest increase came despite repeated and consistent evidence that such subsidies contribute to the destruction of the livelihoods of poor farmers in developing countries, especially in Africa, and that they distort international trade.
[…]
Due mostly to over-production, the European milk prices for farmers were in early 2009 extremely low at less than 0.20 euro per litre. Instead of reducing the production to stabilise prices, the EU reintroduced subsidies for milk in 2009 to support producers.
"As consequence, the EU is again exporting milk to the whole developing world, especially towards Africa, at ‘dumping’ prices," Wiggerthale said. "By so doing, the EU is destroying the livelihoods of farmers in the poorest countries of the world while artificially maintaining a too high level of production."
To add insult to injury, the EU is simultaneously forcing developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific to further open their markets through the trade deals called economic partnership agreements.
Earlier, in January 2009, Bolivia under President Evo Morales became the fifth country in the world to stipulate the concept of “food sovereignty” into its constitution. This concept goes further than the more technical concept of “food security” and the liberal concept of “food justice.” Despite inherent limitations, the program of food sovereignty encompasses:
1) Rights-based assertions on universal access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain healthy lives;
2) Land redistributions to sharecroppers and indigenous communities without discrimination on the basis of gender, race, class, and religious or political beliefs;
3) Sustainable care and use of natural resources without intellectual property rights as obstacles, most notably patents (as discussed in Chapter 6);
4) Self-sufficiency in food production;
5) Drastic reductions in influence over agricultural policies held by multinational corporations;
6) Social peace on the question of food, ranging from food not being used as geopolitical weapons to combating racism on the part of small farmers; and
7) Greater democracy in formulating agricultural policies from the local level to the global level.
Turning to the engineering dynamics, I wrote in my earlier work that food production should meet a demand from three sources: organic food consumption, biofuel production, and typical food consumption. The shortsighted but prevailing approach today is one of further development of agricultural technology in order to increase production for the two latter demand sources, thereby freeing up land for organic food production. However, there is only so much arable land on the planet. It is here that radical engineering should be considered, most notably the concept of vertical food production. According to Dr. Dickson Despommier of The Vertical Farm Project, the concept has at least the following advantages:
1) Because multiple floors are being used, one indoor acre is equivalent to several outdoor acres;
2) Droughts, floods, pests, and other weather-related crop failures are avoided due to growing the crops inside, capitalizing on ongoing research and development on light-emitting diodes (LED) as grow lights;
3) Organic food production and overall food production can be increased at the same time, with vertical farms having the ability to produce food organically without pests as a problem;
4) Some industrial equipment, such as tractors, will be rendered unnecessary; and
5) With all the current discussions on carbon emissions and global warming, external farm land can be freed up to allow the restoration of ecosystems, which in turn will absorb more carbon.
Despite ecological pretenses and the inadaptability of certain agricultural products to growth within such an environment, vertical food production is as an industrial a form of food production as more stereotypical factory farming. Just the mere construction of these more than offsets the non-industrial absence of tractors and pesticides. Indeed, vertical food production as a form of industrial food production was illustrated in May 2010, as noted by James Murray of BusinessGreen.com:
For years the concept of vertical farms has been consigned to the pages of architect's notebooks, but now a British-Canadian firm is poised to turn vertical farming into a reality – albeit on a smaller scale than the farm skyscrapers you find in science fiction novels.
Cornwall-based Valcent Products has developed a vertical horticultural system that promises to slash the amount of land, water and energy used to produce crops typically grown in greenhouse conditions.
"The idea of huge farm skyscrapers is really exciting, but even those who have produced the concepts accept that they are not currently practical or cost effective," said Tom Bentley, manger of business development at Valcent. "But smaller-scale systems using vertical growing rigs can work really well in a warehouse or greenhouse and use a lot less energy."
According to Valcent, the automated vertical growing rigs mean one greenhouse can deliver eight times more produce than a conventional greenhouse of the same size, while cutting energy use by 40 per cent. The system also uses an automated watering system that means farmers use about five per cent of the water they would need for field-grown crops.
Moreover, in February of that same year, a vertical food production model encompassing both agriculture and aquaculture was proposed by Mary Rhinehart in Dr. Despommier’s own city:
A “vertical farm” may seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking to some, but Mary Rhinehart is convinced it could be an alternative to a proposed motorsports complex at the old Cooper Stadium site in Columbus.
[…]
Looking for a quieter alternative, Rhinehart is developing a business plan with cost estimates for a vertical farm where produce and fish would be raised inside an environmentally friendly, multi-story building on the stadium site. Once her plan for Sky Gardens is completed, she will seek investors and business partners to advance the first-of-its-kind project.
“This would put Columbus on the international map,” Rhinehart said. “It would bring in people from all over the world to study it.”
Besides becoming an ecotourism attraction, the vertical farm would be in use year-round and provide jobs, she said. It would produce vegetables, fruits, flowers and fish on climate-controlled floors of a glass-walled building that could go as high as eight stories.
Although national-democratization of the entire industrial complex in food production, with due consideration of food sovereignty issues and at least cooperative distribution, is the most obvious concluding political point of this discussion, historical tragedies behind past attempts should be neither forgotten nor distorted. Obviously what is being suggested here is the history of Soviet agriculture. The main thrust of “socialist primitive accumulation” in Soviet economic development was the extraction of large surpluses in food production in order to pay for necessary industrial machinery being imported from abroad (despite the Depression) and to feed a growing industrial workforce. How this extraction was to occur was subject to debate, and not a planned as some sort of genocidal “Holo” (for “Holocaust”) conspiracy against Ukrainians.
According to historian James Heinzen, there were at least three forms of collective farming proposed: common use of land only (“Association for Joint Cultivation of Land”), agricultural artels, and agricultural communes. Add to that the choice between collective farming and proper state farming, and what resulted were kolkhozy – collective farms legally owned by those operating them, with the underlying land owned by the state – and sovkhozy, state-owned industrial farms wherein every labourer was a proletarian working under the directorial likes of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. Besides problems with the natural environment, the famine in the Ukraine is largely attributable to the wrong form of collective farming implemented. Not only were the kolkhoz farmers, or kolkhozniki, in the Ukraine required to sell procurement quotas at state-imposed price ceilings (beyond which surpluses could be sold at market prices), but their legal ownership status exposed their income to significant profitability risks. The kolkhozniki’s savage destruction of their own food production precipitated needless urban food shortages like during city sieges, and invited swift and equally horrible vengeance from the state authorities.
Eventually the ability to earn income on the side through private-plot production was conceded to the kolkhozniki, although it should be noted that the higher productivity could not have been made possible with the disproportionate usage of public resources from the kolkhozy, and of additional land for private pasturage – the total land for private plots and pasturage amounting to about a fifth of all Soviet farmland. Elsewhere, however, the collective farming situation was more productive, precisely because larger former landlord estates were transformed into sovkhozy, where profitability risks were borne by the state. With the end of “socialist primitive accumulation” – anywhere between one or two years before Stalin’s death to 1955-56 with the implementation of mass housing programs and a minimum wage – came the mass consolidation of less solvent kolkhozy into additional sovkhozy for taking advantage of economies of scale, the elimination of state control over kolkhoz access to tractors and other farm machinery (concentrated in machine tractor stations), and even the eventual implementation of wages and benefits for the kolkhozniki.
Now that the industrial, macro-political, engineering, and historical dynamics in food production have been considered, one can obtain a better understanding between worker-class political forces and the forces of agrarian populism, agrarian radicalism, agrarian socialism, etc. As Kautsky noted, there are fundamental differences between the political interests of the former and those of the latter. Even more basic measures like the shortening of the workweek without loss of pay or benefits and the prohibition of child labour within families would drastically increase the costs of food production for small tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Nonetheless, on the level of radical reforms, there can be an accommodation between national-democratized vertical and other industrial food production, on the one hand, and on the other some specific cases of rural and coastal egalitarianism based on equal rental tenures (including redistributions of land every now and then) and equal private ownership relations in small-scale food production equipment like tractors and small fishing boats.
At the core of such accommodation is fully national-democratized food production for achieving and maintaining the food sovereignty program, except for the second point on land redistributions, in metropolitan and even megapolitan areas. This goes back to the earlier discussion on full communal power and its relationship with those highly urbanized areas. Vertical food production and related development in the cities, with no private-slot production inside the buildings, is the engineering mechanism for this food sovereignty. Further outward are the industrial farms, other facilities for industrial food production, and other areas worked by proper farm workers, all of which as elements of the industrial complex in food production should undergo national-democratization and produce for food sovereignty (except again, without the second point on land redistributions) without need for private plots nearby. Combined with the national-democratization of the agricultural input industry as well as of all aquaculture, all food processing, all industrial fishing, and so on, commanding these economies of scale can then allow the accommodation of the inevitable inefficiencies resulting from populist redistributions of remaining landholdings, small fishing boats, and other capital assets to the likes of small tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and non-industrial fishermen.
REFERENCES
Socialist Agitation Among Farmers in America by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/09/farmers.htm]
How We Should Reorganise the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/23.htm]
Buyer Power in U.S. Hog Markets: A Critical Review of the Literature by Timothy Wise and Sarah Trist [http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/WP10-04HogBuyerPower.html]
Rich Countries’ Farm Subsidies Benefiting Royals by Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service [http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52401]
Food Policy for People: Incorporating food sovereignty principles into State governance by Sadie Beauregard [http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/uep/studentwork/09comps/Food%20Policy%20for%20People.pdf]
The Vertical Farm Project: Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond by Dr. Dickson Despommier [http://www.verticalfarm.com/Default.aspx]
Is land reform obsolete? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/land-reform-obsoletei-t74905/index.html]
UK firm turns vertical farming vision into reality by James Murray, BusinessGreen.com [http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2263276/uk-firm-turns-vertical-farming]
Crops, not cars, proposed for Cooper Stadium site by Jeff Bell [http://columbus.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2010/02/15/story3.html]
Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 by James W. Heinzen [http://books.google.ca/books?id=Zj83HmNUdYUC&printsec=frontcover]
Soviet Agriculture: A Critique of the Myths Constructed by Western Critics by Joseph E. Medley [http://www.usm.maine.edu/eco/joe/works/Soviet.html]
Agriculture Policy – Brezhnev [http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/cccp-ag-brezhnev.htm]
“The agrarian questions are too important to be passed in silence for, in spite of all technical revolutions, agriculture remains the basis of our existence. And the farmers are too powerful a class to be indifferent to their antagonism. But though different interests may divide the proletariat and the farmers, which make it impossible to unite them in the same party forever, still they have many points of agreement as against other classes that make a temporary alliance not only possible, but also desirable. And a great many antagonisms are really founded on prejudice and may be overcome by enlightenment. Not party membership, but a better understanding of our aims and a temporary alliance, that may be gained by our agitation among farmers. Indeed, situations may arise, in which it will be very valuable to have them as our allies. Agitation among farmers in this sense, wherever conditions seem favorable, is not only worth considering but very desirable, providing it is not carried on at the expense of the industrial and rural wage workers.” (Karl Kautsky)
While Kautsky’s views on die Agrafrage (“the agrarian question”) were more fully expressed in his 1899 work of that same German phrase, he made more political remarks in his article on farmer agitation in the US. Only after a few years after defending the exclusively worker character of the then-Marxist Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) from opportunists who wanted to admit small tenant farmers and sharecroppers into the party (a lesson that the most prominent of this theoretical mentor’s followers abandoned in early 1923 despite his political testament), Kautsky nevertheless committed to better understanding between worker-class political forces and the forces of agrarian populism, agrarian radicalism, agrarian socialism, etc.
In order to obtain an understanding of this micro-political dynamic in food production, consideration should be given first to industrial, macro-political, engineering, and historical dynamics in food production. Starting with the industrial, one can find that food production is indeed as much an industrial complex as the military- and energy-industrial ones, spanning agricultural inputs, aquaculture, food processing, industrial fishing, and much more. Moreover, food production is no exception when it comes to the concentration of capital, as noted by Timothy Wise and Sarah Trist in their August 2010 analysis of hog markets:
The U.S. Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Agriculture (USDA) have focused attention recently on rising levels of corporate concentration in agricultural markets and the challenges that may pose to U.S. anti-trust enforcement and agricultural policies. Both agencies have raised particular concerns about dominant firms’ exercise of buyer power over farmers, especially in livestock markets controlled by a shrinking number of large multinational meat packers.
U.S. hog markets have undergone rapid concentration in the last twenty-five years, with the top four packers now controlling two-thirds of the market. Mergers and acquisitions have left Smithfield Foods, the industry leader with 31 percent of the market, as the only buyer in the Southeastern part of the country. While President Bush’s Justice Department approved the 2007 merger that made that possible, questions remain about how independent hog farmers in the region can receive a fair-market price for their animals in such concentrated buyer markets.
Buyer power can operate in many ways. With one or two buyers, farmers may have little competitive bidding for their animals. Direct packer ownership or control of hogs through production contracts may thin the spot market to the point that packers can manipulate prices to their advantage through their own sales and purchases. Bank financing may become harder to secure without a contract from a packer, and contracts themselves present a variety of issues, as they can become take-it-or-leave-it propositions for farmers lacking other offers.
Moving on to the macro-political dynamics, one can find that much of the problems of underdevelopment in places like sub-Saharan Africa can be attributed to subsidy largesse for food production in the more developed states, as noted most poignantly by Julio Godoy in an article during that same month:
Subsidies for agriculture in the industrialised countries of the world grew again in 2009, benefiting the largest companies and land owners, such as Prince Albert of Monaco and Queen Elizabeth of Britain.
The latest increase came despite repeated and consistent evidence that such subsidies contribute to the destruction of the livelihoods of poor farmers in developing countries, especially in Africa, and that they distort international trade.
[…]
Due mostly to over-production, the European milk prices for farmers were in early 2009 extremely low at less than 0.20 euro per litre. Instead of reducing the production to stabilise prices, the EU reintroduced subsidies for milk in 2009 to support producers.
"As consequence, the EU is again exporting milk to the whole developing world, especially towards Africa, at ‘dumping’ prices," Wiggerthale said. "By so doing, the EU is destroying the livelihoods of farmers in the poorest countries of the world while artificially maintaining a too high level of production."
To add insult to injury, the EU is simultaneously forcing developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific to further open their markets through the trade deals called economic partnership agreements.
Earlier, in January 2009, Bolivia under President Evo Morales became the fifth country in the world to stipulate the concept of “food sovereignty” into its constitution. This concept goes further than the more technical concept of “food security” and the liberal concept of “food justice.” Despite inherent limitations, the program of food sovereignty encompasses:
1) Rights-based assertions on universal access to safe, nutritious and culturally appropriate food in sufficient quantity and quality to sustain healthy lives;
2) Land redistributions to sharecroppers and indigenous communities without discrimination on the basis of gender, race, class, and religious or political beliefs;
3) Sustainable care and use of natural resources without intellectual property rights as obstacles, most notably patents (as discussed in Chapter 6);
4) Self-sufficiency in food production;
5) Drastic reductions in influence over agricultural policies held by multinational corporations;
6) Social peace on the question of food, ranging from food not being used as geopolitical weapons to combating racism on the part of small farmers; and
7) Greater democracy in formulating agricultural policies from the local level to the global level.
Turning to the engineering dynamics, I wrote in my earlier work that food production should meet a demand from three sources: organic food consumption, biofuel production, and typical food consumption. The shortsighted but prevailing approach today is one of further development of agricultural technology in order to increase production for the two latter demand sources, thereby freeing up land for organic food production. However, there is only so much arable land on the planet. It is here that radical engineering should be considered, most notably the concept of vertical food production. According to Dr. Dickson Despommier of The Vertical Farm Project, the concept has at least the following advantages:
1) Because multiple floors are being used, one indoor acre is equivalent to several outdoor acres;
2) Droughts, floods, pests, and other weather-related crop failures are avoided due to growing the crops inside, capitalizing on ongoing research and development on light-emitting diodes (LED) as grow lights;
3) Organic food production and overall food production can be increased at the same time, with vertical farms having the ability to produce food organically without pests as a problem;
4) Some industrial equipment, such as tractors, will be rendered unnecessary; and
5) With all the current discussions on carbon emissions and global warming, external farm land can be freed up to allow the restoration of ecosystems, which in turn will absorb more carbon.
Despite ecological pretenses and the inadaptability of certain agricultural products to growth within such an environment, vertical food production is as an industrial a form of food production as more stereotypical factory farming. Just the mere construction of these more than offsets the non-industrial absence of tractors and pesticides. Indeed, vertical food production as a form of industrial food production was illustrated in May 2010, as noted by James Murray of BusinessGreen.com:
For years the concept of vertical farms has been consigned to the pages of architect's notebooks, but now a British-Canadian firm is poised to turn vertical farming into a reality – albeit on a smaller scale than the farm skyscrapers you find in science fiction novels.
Cornwall-based Valcent Products has developed a vertical horticultural system that promises to slash the amount of land, water and energy used to produce crops typically grown in greenhouse conditions.
"The idea of huge farm skyscrapers is really exciting, but even those who have produced the concepts accept that they are not currently practical or cost effective," said Tom Bentley, manger of business development at Valcent. "But smaller-scale systems using vertical growing rigs can work really well in a warehouse or greenhouse and use a lot less energy."
According to Valcent, the automated vertical growing rigs mean one greenhouse can deliver eight times more produce than a conventional greenhouse of the same size, while cutting energy use by 40 per cent. The system also uses an automated watering system that means farmers use about five per cent of the water they would need for field-grown crops.
Moreover, in February of that same year, a vertical food production model encompassing both agriculture and aquaculture was proposed by Mary Rhinehart in Dr. Despommier’s own city:
A “vertical farm” may seem like pie-in-the-sky thinking to some, but Mary Rhinehart is convinced it could be an alternative to a proposed motorsports complex at the old Cooper Stadium site in Columbus.
[…]
Looking for a quieter alternative, Rhinehart is developing a business plan with cost estimates for a vertical farm where produce and fish would be raised inside an environmentally friendly, multi-story building on the stadium site. Once her plan for Sky Gardens is completed, she will seek investors and business partners to advance the first-of-its-kind project.
“This would put Columbus on the international map,” Rhinehart said. “It would bring in people from all over the world to study it.”
Besides becoming an ecotourism attraction, the vertical farm would be in use year-round and provide jobs, she said. It would produce vegetables, fruits, flowers and fish on climate-controlled floors of a glass-walled building that could go as high as eight stories.
Although national-democratization of the entire industrial complex in food production, with due consideration of food sovereignty issues and at least cooperative distribution, is the most obvious concluding political point of this discussion, historical tragedies behind past attempts should be neither forgotten nor distorted. Obviously what is being suggested here is the history of Soviet agriculture. The main thrust of “socialist primitive accumulation” in Soviet economic development was the extraction of large surpluses in food production in order to pay for necessary industrial machinery being imported from abroad (despite the Depression) and to feed a growing industrial workforce. How this extraction was to occur was subject to debate, and not a planned as some sort of genocidal “Holo” (for “Holocaust”) conspiracy against Ukrainians.
According to historian James Heinzen, there were at least three forms of collective farming proposed: common use of land only (“Association for Joint Cultivation of Land”), agricultural artels, and agricultural communes. Add to that the choice between collective farming and proper state farming, and what resulted were kolkhozy – collective farms legally owned by those operating them, with the underlying land owned by the state – and sovkhozy, state-owned industrial farms wherein every labourer was a proletarian working under the directorial likes of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. Besides problems with the natural environment, the famine in the Ukraine is largely attributable to the wrong form of collective farming implemented. Not only were the kolkhoz farmers, or kolkhozniki, in the Ukraine required to sell procurement quotas at state-imposed price ceilings (beyond which surpluses could be sold at market prices), but their legal ownership status exposed their income to significant profitability risks. The kolkhozniki’s savage destruction of their own food production precipitated needless urban food shortages like during city sieges, and invited swift and equally horrible vengeance from the state authorities.
Eventually the ability to earn income on the side through private-plot production was conceded to the kolkhozniki, although it should be noted that the higher productivity could not have been made possible with the disproportionate usage of public resources from the kolkhozy, and of additional land for private pasturage – the total land for private plots and pasturage amounting to about a fifth of all Soviet farmland. Elsewhere, however, the collective farming situation was more productive, precisely because larger former landlord estates were transformed into sovkhozy, where profitability risks were borne by the state. With the end of “socialist primitive accumulation” – anywhere between one or two years before Stalin’s death to 1955-56 with the implementation of mass housing programs and a minimum wage – came the mass consolidation of less solvent kolkhozy into additional sovkhozy for taking advantage of economies of scale, the elimination of state control over kolkhoz access to tractors and other farm machinery (concentrated in machine tractor stations), and even the eventual implementation of wages and benefits for the kolkhozniki.
Now that the industrial, macro-political, engineering, and historical dynamics in food production have been considered, one can obtain a better understanding between worker-class political forces and the forces of agrarian populism, agrarian radicalism, agrarian socialism, etc. As Kautsky noted, there are fundamental differences between the political interests of the former and those of the latter. Even more basic measures like the shortening of the workweek without loss of pay or benefits and the prohibition of child labour within families would drastically increase the costs of food production for small tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Nonetheless, on the level of radical reforms, there can be an accommodation between national-democratized vertical and other industrial food production, on the one hand, and on the other some specific cases of rural and coastal egalitarianism based on equal rental tenures (including redistributions of land every now and then) and equal private ownership relations in small-scale food production equipment like tractors and small fishing boats.
At the core of such accommodation is fully national-democratized food production for achieving and maintaining the food sovereignty program, except for the second point on land redistributions, in metropolitan and even megapolitan areas. This goes back to the earlier discussion on full communal power and its relationship with those highly urbanized areas. Vertical food production and related development in the cities, with no private-slot production inside the buildings, is the engineering mechanism for this food sovereignty. Further outward are the industrial farms, other facilities for industrial food production, and other areas worked by proper farm workers, all of which as elements of the industrial complex in food production should undergo national-democratization and produce for food sovereignty (except again, without the second point on land redistributions) without need for private plots nearby. Combined with the national-democratization of the agricultural input industry as well as of all aquaculture, all food processing, all industrial fishing, and so on, commanding these economies of scale can then allow the accommodation of the inevitable inefficiencies resulting from populist redistributions of remaining landholdings, small fishing boats, and other capital assets to the likes of small tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and non-industrial fishermen.
REFERENCES
Socialist Agitation Among Farmers in America by Karl Kautsky [http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/09/farmers.htm]
How We Should Reorganise the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/jan/23.htm]
Buyer Power in U.S. Hog Markets: A Critical Review of the Literature by Timothy Wise and Sarah Trist [http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/WP10-04HogBuyerPower.html]
Rich Countries’ Farm Subsidies Benefiting Royals by Julio Godoy, Inter Press Service [http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=52401]
Food Policy for People: Incorporating food sovereignty principles into State governance by Sadie Beauregard [http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/uep/studentwork/09comps/Food%20Policy%20for%20People.pdf]
The Vertical Farm Project: Agriculture for the 21st Century and Beyond by Dr. Dickson Despommier [http://www.verticalfarm.com/Default.aspx]
Is land reform obsolete? [http://www.revleft.com/vb/land-reform-obsoletei-t74905/index.html]
UK firm turns vertical farming vision into reality by James Murray, BusinessGreen.com [http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2263276/uk-firm-turns-vertical-farming]
Crops, not cars, proposed for Cooper Stadium site by Jeff Bell [http://columbus.bizjournals.com/columbus/stories/2010/02/15/story3.html]
Inventing a Soviet Countryside: State Power and the Transformation of Rural Russia, 1917-1929 by James W. Heinzen [http://books.google.ca/books?id=Zj83HmNUdYUC&printsec=frontcover]
Soviet Agriculture: A Critique of the Myths Constructed by Western Critics by Joseph E. Medley [http://www.usm.maine.edu/eco/joe/works/Soviet.html]
Agriculture Policy – Brezhnev [http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/cccp-ag-brezhnev.htm]