 Let us begin. Welcome to this seminar in the Development Studies seminar series on agrarian questions now and then. My name is Jens Lerke. I am the editor of Journal of Agrarian Change and I'm chairing this session. I'll first briefly introduce you to the panel here and then we will proceed by presentation from each member of the panel. We've got Henry Bernstein here. We've got Barbara Harris-White and we've got Jan Darf van der Plerk here. You may notice that the first member of the panel, Terry Byers, is absent. Unfortunately he is unwell so could not make it today. But Henry Bernstein will cover some of his views just to make sure that those views are represented anyway. Anyway, let me say a few more words by word of introduction and then we can start. I will introduce the speakers in some more details. And I'll start with Professor Barbara Harris-White who is the director of Wolfson's College South Asia Research Cluster and of Area Studies Research Project on the materiality of India's informal economy also at Oxford University. She was also the founder-director of Oxford University's contemporary South Asia Studies program and the organizer of the world's first MSc in contemporary India. Now of course Sours has one too but as it were this was the first one. She's written numerous books and articles of course and just to mention two, India Working from 2003 I think and Rule Commercial Capital which won the grand prize here at Sours. She works more generally on India's political economy in particular on food and energy and on aspects of deprivations all through field research. She has more or less single-handedly established the field of study of agrarian markets and agrarian traders in India with a focus on rice traders in mainly two Indian states. She has also been a driving force in the in the recognition of the role of petty commodity producers in the non-agrarian economy. And she is today Emeritus Professor of Development Studies in Oxford, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and a Professor of Research Associate here at Sours in Development Studies. Henry Bernstein is an Emeritus Professor as well of Development Studies here at Sours. He has worked for several decades on the political economy of agrarian change, social theory, peasant studies and on the rural economy of South Africa. He has taught and researched in many different countries, Turkey, Tanzania, South Africa, the US and the UK and he came to Sours in 1995. From 85 till 2000 he was co-editor with Professor Terry Byers of the Journal of Peasant Studies and then he became the founding editor still with Terry Byers of the Journal of Agrarian Change from 2001 till 2008. He is now an Emeritus editor of that journal. He has been part and parcel of defining peasant studies or, as he prefers to call it today, the study of agrarian change. From his early argument that today's peasantry in South Africa should be understood as petty commodity producers within capitalism, to his development of the position that classic agrarian transition in the global South is no longer on the cards and to coining the concept classes of labour encompassing petty producers, seasonal workers and the like. He's had a major impact of the discipline. His book Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change has been translated into, he thinks nine languages but he's not quite sure, might be more and it's a neat little difficult introduction to his thoughts. Let me mention Professor Terry Byers who is not here. He is also an Emeritus professor of so as in the economics department where he has taught since 62. I won't say much because Henry will say more but he has been a central figure for the study of agrarian political economy across the globe for half a century both through his own work and through creating and being a central part of running the two most important agrarian political economy journals that I've already mentioned, Journal of Agrarian Change or Journal of Person Studies. Finally Yandawa Fender Plurk holds the Chair of Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and is also an adjunct professor of Rural Sociology at the China Agricultural University in Beijing. Yandawa combines practical insights into agriculture. He holds a degree as agriculture engineer and he runs his own farm as far as I'm aware. He combines that with the study of Rural Sociology and Development Sociology. He's also an activist closely involved in some of the grassroots initiatives aiming to develop practical new alternatives to the reigning model of ongoing scale increase and further industrialization of agriculture. His book The New Pesantries Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization where he argues that in many parts of the world a process of re-pesantization is taking place of a peasantry that does not fit the prevailing industrialized agriculture model could be seen as a political statement as well taking the sides of the peasantry. Another important book of his is Peasants and the Art of Farming, a Shia Novian Manifesto which in many ways points in a different direction to that of a classic agrarian political economy. So with that brief introduction which no doubt will be deemed as incorrect and from wanting by some of the people here but then they can correct it as they come to it we will proceed. Each member of the panel will have 15 minutes for their first statement although I've asked Henry Bernstein to cover for Terry Byers as well so he will he will be given 25 minutes all together and I think we should start with him as the representative of of the variety of agrarian chain studies that that existed so as and continue from there. Henry and please if you would mind. Well it's great to see this audience very intergenerational audience too. I don't know whether anyone gasped when Jens reported that Terry Byers joined Salas in 1962 which does indeed make him a historic figure and I get very sentimental about the Department of Development studies when I was head of department from 2000 to 2003 I inherited four permanent staff members and four temporary lecturers in the department a very far cry from where the department is today and it's gone from strength to strength. So had Terry been here he would have presented this brief overview of agrarian studies at Salas and I'm sure he would have done a more satisfactory job than I can. I haven't researched this thoroughly enough. Terry would have been very precise about names and dates and so on. I'm just going to give some impressions. First I'd like to tell you that Terry's not seriously ill. He has a peculiar condition which sometimes afflicts older people which is that he gets dizzy spells. It's not really medically harmful or dangerous but it means he has to restrict his activities which if you knew Terry you'd realize is very frustrating for him. He's somebody of great energy and who would love to be an occasion like this. Now also because he's not here it means I can center my brief overview of agrarian studies at Salas around Terry's career here in full appreciation. He arrived in 62 as a research fellow, became a lecturer in 64 and then went to India for a year which I think was a deeply formative experience for him. He became connected to and deeply involved with a really golden generation of agrarian political economists in India and I think in a sense was a an honorary or adopted member of that particular golden circle. Salas when he arrived was a very very different place and it is now he would be able to explain how and why it was still perhaps trying to escape from the legacies of its colonial and imperialist foundations. Social sciences at Salas then was still very young. They hadn't grown to the sort of scale and indeed diversity that they have today. So there were people of various kinds at Salas working on agrarian and more broadly rural issues which was not surprising because at that time most of the countries of Africa and Asia were of course still predominantly rural still predominantly agricultural economies however much they were trying to escape from that in their plans for national development industrialization and so on after independence and that was very very important to Terry. I mean his earliest writings on India concerned planning especially how to plan national development how to plan for industrialization which the Terry was central is central to development and I think his interest in agrarian issues and agrarian change in India came about through that process or through that interest. Now a very key moment here was 1973 when Terry started the peasant seminar at the University of London which ran for 15 years from 1973 to 1988 and he has a wonderful account of it which is really is a piece of living history in the third issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change in the first volume in 2001 and I think over those years there were 208 papers presented to the peasant seminar and it and those who presented them are a kind of roll call of the great and the good in critical social sciences at that time not only from Britain of course but very very international in fact and from the seminar series and the papers that were presented to it came the Journal of Peasant Studies which Terry founded in 1973. This was tremendously important we have some people in the audience I suspect who who grew up as graduate students as research students in the Journal of Peasant Studies and who have contributed to it and to the Journal of Agrarian Change which started in 2001. Now what is very remarkable about the first 12 years of the Journal of Peasant Studies was that Terry edited it virtually single-handed. He was a great animator as they say and French a great activator of course this is not about one person but I think his imagination his energies his sympathies engaged very very wide networks of agrarian scholars who wanted their work to appear in the Journal of Peasant Studies. In 1985 I joined him as co-editor and we edited it together thereafter until 2000. What were the main preoccupations and concerns of the Journal of Peasant Studies from the 1970s onwards and this is disgusting greater depth in an article in the first issue of Journal of Agrarian Change where Terry and I reviewed some 30 years or so of agrarian political economy as represented principally but not exclusively within the Journal of Peasant Studies. So I think the shape and identity that Terry was so important in giving to the Journal and to everything that spun off it and into it was the idea of agrarian political economy. Well what is that? I'm sure if I asked you to recite it you would all know from the mission statement of the Journal of Agrarian Change which is it was to promote investigation of the social relations and dynamics of production property and power in agrarian formations and their processes of change historical and contemporary and that was I think that that sort of statement really is a very good summary of Terry's concerns and his achievements over the years. Historically this meant revisiting classic debates about original agrarian transitions to capitalism in Western Europe and also in Japan and in contemporary terms it meant looking at the prospects of agrarian transition in the newly independent countries of the south so that was the contemporary thrust of Terry's interest and also what what the Journal did and this included issues of well what was blocking or preventing agrarian transition in the countries of the south where that hadn't taken place and an important sub-component of that interest that theme was the effects of colonialism on agrarian structures in the south. For Terry it was always clear though this was not a monopoly or dogmatic position in the Journal that the interest in the agrarian change was to see whether or not it helped develop industrialization in the countries of the south and and the reasons for that and that included at least for a time which is probably behind us for the moment also looking at experiments of socialist construction in the agricultural sectors of certain countries in the south there was a great interest as you can imagine in China what was happening in China what was happening in Vietnam and in several other instances more recent cases for example Cuba, Nicaragua and so on. There was also a very strong interest in peasant politics. 1969, Eric Wolfe published his great book peasant wars of the 20th century which argued that peasant revolutions were actually key to the formation of the modern world in the 20th century. Dating Wolfe's examples I would say this was particularly so from about the 1910s to the 1970s. So one should recall this is actually living history for some of us here but perhaps past history well past history for many of the students was that in the 1970s the last of Wolfe's great or the last great example of Wolfe's peasant wars was still taking place in Vietnam until the victory of the national liberation from in 1975. Now something else about this political economy which it's worth mentioning if only briefly and Jens reminded me of is it was very anti-populist it was very anti-agrarian populist and I was rereading Terry's account of the of the peasant seminar and he says in 1966 three very important books appeared one was Barrington Moore's social origins of dictatorship and democracy another was Eric Wolfe's very small but incredibly impressive book on peasants which I reread this year and I was impressed even more than I could recall from before and Terry said these were not Marxist works necessarily but these were works by people who were sympathetic to a Marxist perspective who took class seriously and so on and therefore they fed into the current of interest in agrarian studies that soon afterwards led to the seminar and led to the journal. The third important book that appeared in that year 1966 was the first full English translation of Chyanoff's theory of peasant economy and Terry said this did not have the same effect on us because we rejected the kind of support theoretical intellectual support to agrarian populism that Chyanoff's book was led to and this of course a big story it may come up in our discussion I perhaps I'm a bit less implacable in my in my view of that but in any case as Terry says quite rightly that looking back writing a retrospect of the peasant seminar on the Journal of Peasant Studies it was not as dogmatic as some of his critics like to say in fact I just recalled coming here on the tube that there were two special issues of the Journal of Peasant Studies presenting previously untranslated work by Chyanoff so it wasn't that there was a battle of ideas if you like with populism but not not not a lot of sort of a dogmatic dismissal or refusal to engage it now as far as science is concerned and here I'm not going to listen read out a list of names but people are welcome to mention names if they wish to through the influence of Terry himself and other colleagues at SAAS through the influence of the seminar through the influence of the Journal there are several more generations of very able important younger political economists of a growing change some of them still at SAAS they loved it so much they couldn't leave when they finished their PhDs others now at other universities and working elsewhere and I think that is really a very very critical aspect of crucial aspect of Terry's achievement and of this tradition if you like of a growing political economy at SAAS that it has been reproduced it's been and it's been and it's been reproduced it's reproduced itself in times that have been very very hard for the left intellectually ideologically politically and so on I would say one example of that that success story just to embarrass him but he happens to be sitting in front of you is is Jens Leke who managed to get himself a very nice title at SAAS of reader in agrarian and labour studies which I think is from my point of view is what so much of this is about so I think that's probably enough although I'm very happy for others to add anything that I may have missed here it is exactly 15 minutes so I was 15 I'm sorry I thought it would be quicker so now I've got the job of presenting some of Terry's ideas he's written very widely on all sorts of things including very interesting ways on Scottish folk music but I'm going to concentrate on the framework that came out of an extremely important seminal article that he wrote in in the early 1990s and in it he distinguished three meanings of the agrarian question the classic agrarian question in Marxism first is a development of capitalism in farming and its effects for raising productivity the second is a growing transition understood as the ways in which agriculture contributes to industrialization and then the third is class political struggles over agrarian change both from above and from below now I'm just going to show you my own extremely concentrated summary of and really it has to be quick because yeah the historical case studies from from Terry's seminal article so the first part of a growing transition that he looked at was that of England the classic the original transition and I'm not going to go into details here if you're not familiar with this and it looks fascinating then you have to go and read it for yourself but I just want to draw attention to that first row at the top peasants and landlords the form of production that emerged in the transition and the character of the transition then he did a similar exercise for Prussia between the 16th and 19th centuries especially 19th century as a agrarian transition through class struggle from above then he did an analysis of the path of agrarian transition historically in the USA Prussia and the USA he later elaborated in a very important book called capitalism from above and from below where he takes the prussian and american case studies because these were just noted as examples though not explored in depth by Lenin and regarded by Lenin as very important as showing different paths from what happened in England the original agrarian transition then he looked at Japan late 19th and 20th century and then at South Korea first of all in the Japanese colonial period in the first half of the 20th century and then after World War II from the 1950s 1960s his interest in selecting these case studies were that they all of countries that were deemed to have successfully industrialized now I just want to make a few quick comments about yeah about Terry's framework which I have discussed a great deal he and I disagree and we this has led to something that Carl Ossoia calls the Bernstein Buyer's debate is the Bernstein Buyer's debate or Buyer's Bernstein I don't know maybe it's alphabetical order maybe it's Bernstein Buyer and the points I want to make which I'll take up maybe further in presenting my own views is that first of all Terry's interest in all this I think derived well both from his days as a research student which was spent looking at Scottish economic history his interest in the first agrarian question the development of capitalism in farming and in India this was concentrated especially around the green revolution in India from the late 1960s so the question for him was why hadn't India experienced an agrarian transition that is a transition to an industrialized economy the second agrarian question here like the historical case studies he'd examined and this question and the way of investigating it was generalized to other zones of the south after the end of colonialism now several observations about this approach one is that it's what I call internalist if you look at that first row it's basically looking at and seeking to find explanation in class relations that are internal to the country side so different types of classes of labor peasants and others and different types of classes of landed property it was also very much internal to particular countries you know these were this was about national paths of development so that's why I call it internalist second his findings were original and provocative especially that this kind of transition the agrarian question three you could have a transition to industrialization sorry agrarian question two without the development of capitalism in farming now that certainly was a departure from some of the more established marxist orthodoxies let's say so his east asian examples in particular seemed to suggest that it was possible to have that agrarian transition second agrarian question without the first happening that is the the first the development of capitalist relations in agriculture and I think the something that dramatizes this very well is that terry also thought this applied to the united states in the 19th century or at least the northern united states that it was very dynamic petty commodity production it wasn't capitalist farming in his sense i.e big farms with wage labor and I think this shows that actually the principal mechanism in his account is ways in which surpluses are transferred from agriculture to industry so in the sense the form of production relations of production so on in agriculture are secondary become secondary to the ability of others particularly states to extract a surplus from agriculture and use it as an industrial accumulation fund this was particularly true if and if you look at his work of the east asian example so the state became very very important and that means that in practice in terry's own work in my view the third agrarian question class and political struggle does not actually play a very central role in his analysis in his arguments with that exception of agrarian transition from above where the state plays a central role in effecting a transfer of surplus from agriculture to towards infant industrialization if you like and one of the key sources of inspiration of that was actually from the soviet union in the 1920s and the ideas of praebozhensky praebozhensky's question was how do you achieve industrialization in the predominantly agrarian indeed predominantly peasant economy another thing is the question that terry took over and and informed his work um otherwise on politics although he didn't write that extensively about populism other than critiquing it in in academic and intellectual work like that of michael lipton he did write wrote that write an absolutely incredible long essay on a very important figure in india charan sing who was a populist leader presented himself as being at the head of india's peasantry and even became prime minister of india for a short time and i think that's a wonderful vivid concrete dialectical analysis that he presented on um populism in practice populist politics in the real world rather than simply in the imagination of michael lipton and other academics um that terry objected to now since in more recent years on the whole he has pursued more historical work so the book on the historic agrarian transitions in prussia in the united states that i mentioned and now he's completing although he said he's been completing it for at least three years so we'll hope to see it very soon is a study of 18th century scotland is scott scottish by the way and this tries to look at both turn to stop both the agrarian transition in scotland in the 18th century early 19th century and the politically economy that grew in scotland is an extraordinary flowering of political economy that took off in scotland in the second half of the 18th century so so so this one's Henry standing in for for terribires now is Henry standing in for himself 15 minutes i really do wish terry was here i can tell you right okay so um yence please keep me to time um um i think i'm it feels from here's if i'm missing out so much but clearly okay now um the title of this seminar i think is the growing questions then and now isn't it which was a title i coined in my critical appreciation of terry's book on prussia and the united states and it struck me of course that if one approaches things in the proper historical manner as terry has always done then and now the then and then and now has to be broken down into when we're talking about and where we're talking about the different and very different times and places of the history of capitalism now i'm going to present i'll try and do it quickly what i think are some key themes in agrarian change and the questions that go with them and the first set of themes and questions can be framed as internal to the countryside so these include the questions that were at the center of terry's um analysis of different parts of agrarian transition that i've just introduced the first i think absolutely fundamental is what i call the commodification of subsistence well i didn't call it that robert brenger called it that but i've taken up that phrase as very potent and very useful um our peasant farmers able to reproduce themselves outside competitive market exchange of what they produce sale of output and how they produce it purchase of inputs secondly commodification of land does agrarian transition necessarily involve dispossession of peasants small or family farmers farmers whether by direct means the enclosure model which marks are used mostly in relation to england or indirect means that's crises of reproduction of small farmers or peasants exerted by market pressures third question how are new classes of capitalist landed property agrarian capital and wage labor formed by what means and with what effects this was central to the debates about the english transition and very much informed uh terry's comparative analysis how in what forms and how far does accumulation of capital in the means of agricultural production land and instruments of labor proceed if is there accumulation from above and or from below the latter through the class differentiation of farmers and class differentiation of peasant farmers was really again one of terry's central themes and even led him to criticize robert brena for leaving it out of his account of the the english transition and sixth what are the effects for production growth in farming realized through the development of the productive forces and especially growth in labor productivity growth in labor productivity one of the absolutely central themes of all political economy as you may know now it seems to me that there are two further themes which push against limiting such processes of change to social forces within the countryside here we have to go beyond what i call the internalist problematic first so rural urban interconnections on the side of capital what is the significance and its effects of a growing capital beyond the countryside that invests in farm production directly or indirectly the latter for example through contract farming here i would include and it's a massive debate i'm just mentioning it here i would include merchant capital which has been very much emphasized in the work of gyrus banerjee and which has been pursued through amazing fieldwork in contemporary india by barbara harris wipe and on the side of labor what is the significance of rural labor beyond the farm involving rural industrialization older and more contemporary forms or regular rural labor migration as vital elements of the incomes and reproduction of classes of labor in the countryside even where they engage in some own account farming so let's say just roughly really roughly they're probably 300 million regular migrant workers from the countryside in china and india today at least 300 million they are often counted as peasants in official statistics and surveys of various kinds so those themes seven and eight together with six point towards the place of agriculture within larger national economies and that of course is connects with that interest of terribies how does agriculture agricultural change and growth contribute to industrialization to produce what he calls agrarian transition do particular states facilitate hinder or block the transfer of agricultural surplus to industrial accumulation directly or indirectly and the development of the home market integrating exchange between agriculture and industry to simplify it with horrible crudeness this was the big story for terry and a number of leading indian political economists in the 60s and 70s and 80s was that the indian state was unable to properly tax landed property and capitalist farmers rich peasants in india to secure the funds that could have been invested in developing industrialization more rapidly in india and here's a final thing what are the character and effects of the capitalist world economy what are the effects for agrarian change in particular places of particular times of the formation and interactions of international divisions of labour and agricultural production international trade and agricultural commodities how trade is organized and financed and international investment in agriculture and the effects of the international state system and how it changes how long have i got about seven minutes okay so what i want to say is that um these uh no what i'm going to say is this uh earlier this year i was on a panel in toronto with yandawa where we had a lot of fun talking about 50 years of peasant studies was it something like that you know what's changed and so on so i'm going to recap briefly some of the things i said then i think what has changed in the current moment compared to the then of at least 50 years ago is that there are no longer peasant revolutions that were so key to the 20th century and those peasant revolutions and the questions they raise excitement they generated was what brought many people of my generation of the left into agrarian political economy now i think this is connected though not necessarily very directly we no longer have state socialist experiments in agriculture state socialist agriculture has vanished in virtually every country of the world um also what has changed since then is um so-called globalization or neoliberal globalization and its impact that's my type four question um especially but not exclusively how it affects patterns and trajectories of agriculture in different places of the capitalist world economy and not least which is a preoccupation of my own the accelerated decomposition of small farmers into classes of petty commodity producers those who are able to reproduce themselves more or less through their own farming and rural classes of labor which reproduce themselves primarily by selling their labor power now arguments from globalization can easily acquire an externalist bias just as there can be an internalist bias um from the first six questions however i just want to make two points here first they don't apply the type four questions don't only apply to capitalism today although we undoubtedly live in an era of accelerated uh and and uh have accelerated um capitalist international economy um and i noted some examples of how the international economy was important in earlier periods of agrarian change um however and this is my argument against the externalist bias the sort of world system determinism is that the variable effects of globalization in different places for different agrarian structures represent you or changing conditions for the investigation of the other types of questions that i outlined um it's interesting that there is a kind of version of globalization as this great steamroller both on the right for those who love it and on the left for those who hate it as if it incorporates a kind of simplifying tendency so that things are moving towards more or less equivalent um conditions everywhere and i think one needs to investigate as i say the impacts of globalization all their variability through those earlier questions and then i'm going to finally this is my final just mention three brief points about um changes in the last 50 years that i mentioned in um in toronto first of all it can't be overstated is the importance of feminist work in the social sciences not least for the investigation of social relations of property production income and consumption or consumption slash reproduction and i think especially potent in agrarian studies because of the continuing power of household models in agrarian political economy established for example in the highly influential ways by china a second thing that i think has is a more recent provenance and enriches as well as challenging the the intellectual agenda of of studies of agrarian change is the importance of environmental change and arguments that today's globalization of industrialized technologies of farm production are causing irreparable environmental damage and then finally i don't know who's next is it barbara yandah okay well if you can remember this for yandah finally one must note the revival and vitality of agrarian populist politics today which might not have been anticipated 30 years ago 1150 years ago for example as exemplified by the transnational social movement la via campesina which means the peasant way and yandah is one of the leading theorists and intellectual advocates of a peasant way which is formulated illustrated applied in a whole number of works the peasant way is a prod political project to recognize consolidate and expand peasant farming as the basis of a more equitable and sustainable mode of agriculture than that characterizing capitalism and certainly characterizing capitalist globalization and i've spent many many happy hours days weeks i don't know what it adds up to debating these issues in very comradely fashion with yandah and i'm sure you'll hear more about that from him a bit later thank you Henry for the way you positioned your view in relation to world systems determinism and internal determinism and open the debates that we will no doubt return to as well barbara over to you now maybe that was in part of what henry said also something for you to set off from thank you thank you very much can you hear me yes firstly i feel extraordinarily privileged to be um in this session because um henry has grounded it in the history of agrarian studies in sars and i was um i failed to be appointed to a job in sars in 1971 um i came very late to the fold of sars i was only uh i had to be retired before i had some kind of status in sars and uh yet where i have worked oxford is a sort of offshore satellite of sars a very inferior one i think um i have also failed to produce a power point i have no excuse i'm very sorry for this um and but what i'm going to talk about is the political economy of staple commodity markets which generally everyone falls asleep um thinking about but why i find them very exciting and i want to begin with henry bunstein's interest in the expanded concept of the agrarium which he's just talked about um that accumulation and vertical concentration upstream and downstream of landed agricultural production including the power of mighty state institutions marketing boards and so on and so forth have had a very important role to play both in agrarian transitions and agrarian transformations the transition as he said the change is necessary for capitalism in agriculture and then industry not only differentiating out differentiating out to capital and labor but also transforming the peasantry to petty producers which then differentiate out into capital and labor through states of disguised wage work formally subordinated to traders and moneylenders capital or who persists as petty producers um independently involved in markets and what i would say is that whereas agrarian scholarship as focuses on the concept of transition there's a lot to be said about continuing research on transformations because agriculture doesn't stay still and nor do agricultural markets and so i want to i i want to address some theoretical and methodological issues about why they don't stand still but they produce extremely interesting paradox how can you have a agricultural growth without agricultural accumulation how can you have a great expansion of wage labor without an expansion of landlessness um why does petty production persistent isn't transient and can't be wished away as an archaic form of of of social um exchange and why is petty production so very common and not residual or something down which we look through a microscope it's just in our face everywhere this draws our attention to the importance of exchange in agrarian studies and here i want to pay tribute to Krishna Bharadwaj who theorized the different exchange relations of a differentiated peasantry but her market the market on which um traders transacted was completely abstract in her seminal paper um and Baderi also in his great work on exchange had producers as tenants and the market was a kind of great um conflagration of landlords traders moneylenders um and uh surplus was appropriated through rent and interest in the second example and through buying and selling in Krishna Bharadwaj's example so these characterizations of commodity markets were very useful to think with but they were nowhere related to ground realities in which there were multiple appropriate modes of appropriation of surplus in the post harvest system of markets surplus value of rent of labor um in production rent through interlock contracts with commodities um all kinds of exploitation on um the the real markets in which produce petty traders and petty capitalists have to transact in they have to rent premises they have to borrow money they buy raw materials they self finish products all those markets have relations of exchange and the possibilities of exploitation and a great deal of research still needs to be done about those kinds of relations of exchange throughout the system of buying and selling that is the post harvest market in india 95 percent of all firms have fewer than five laborers the average uh labor force has per firm has declined from three to two since 1991 under the labor laws all these firms are classified as labor so you have labor exploiting labor and under the laws the way in which these firms are configured um means that the state declasses petty capital and disenfranchises labor at the same time so these archetypes are useful to think with and have been very influential in shaping state legislation but the reality has to kind of um move in and out of these archetypes the political economy of markets starts as henry suggested with marks on merchant capital this has has been slightly distorted and very influential marks explain that when you buy and sell you're doing something which is not productive because you're not changing the physical character of that thing but it's necessary for the reproduction of society including the reproduction of production he also said that the developmental role of that kind of capital was ambivalent on the one hand it speeds up the fact that there are specialized traders speed up the realization of capital by concentrating capital they expand the possibilities for productive investment and um mark says they cosmopolitanized um capital on the other hand um they divert capital from productive use investing it in buying and selling is not investing it is something which is directly productive merchants capital destroys production for use for subsistence and at its worst it simply mediates between owners of surplus but the point made by marks by Henry and by anybody who goes out to do field work on markets is is that actually existing commercial capital is much more complicated if you're a merchant you can buy sell broker you can uh transport store and process you can finance production you can finance trade yes so what of a trading firm actually does is a great mix of things which are unproductive in the marxian sense but necessary with things that are productive and also necessary and in india a lot of theorists in the middle part of the 20th century very influential theorists felt that a lot of this activity was unproductive and not necessary as well which is one of the roots of the enormous edifice of state trading um in the subcontinent so in this sense markets and capitalist firms in markets can be considered to be potentially active in the formation of classes in markets as well as in production so there are a whole slew of research questions which people are still not addressing about how this is done um in 2012 Ali-jan who's where is he ah who's got off the floor and i published a paper in economic and political weekly where we outlined three roles that agricultural markets perform which need research one is the efficiency role this is the role that's um stressed in american textbooks on agricultural economics but what it draws our attention to in political economy is the terms of competition between firms um the evolution of firms through vicious competition um to uh buy at least at lowest price and sell at highest price and there's a big debate about whether you can actually make inferences from data on prices which is all there is or whether you have to go out in the field and get accounts and look at rates of return which is supposed to be very difficult it is very difficult anyway the efficiency role of markets is important even to political economists because without that we don't know how well the signs from consumers are transmitted back through the system of markets to producers yes so although it's common to sort of wish this away as saying or this is bourgeois economics this is not for the political economy of agriculture i think it's still very important there is then an exploitive role of markets uh of post harvest market systems in so far as firms have labor forces and labor forces um receive wages which are less than what they produce so that's a kind of secondary appropriation of labor um where at where the primary location of the appropriation of labor is in agricultural production itself so markets are exploitive they are also extractive and honey didn't say um much about this but terry bias had in the 60s and 70s wrote terribly influentially about the terms of trade as did ashok mitra um and the way in which the terms of trade can affect class formation they can affect capital and labor in agriculture and they can affect capital and labor in industry um we can study it through studying prices again which are the state the data that's available although this hasn't been done for a very long time um whether the the long-term trend of industrial prices is um against agriculture or whether against the long-term trend of agricultural prices or whether it's four okay um so those three roles are three ways in which um a wide range of theories and a wide range of approaches to the study of the economy can be mobilized to look at the role of firms in markets and their relation to class formation and i wanted to finish with three case studies but i've got five minutes i don't know how i'll do this but um what i want to say is that class formation within the system of markets and in agriculture itself is quite complicated now ali jan is sitting there in row three and will tell us when provoked in question and answer about at least two ways in which rural commercial capital um uh uh originates from agriculture and trade in the pakistan punjab henry used um a method filia viviria which he developed um into a kind of political economy of um stages of transactions after the harvest um in an influential paper published in 1996 um it is a massive development of a very um a simple approach to the study of markets which is basically follow a sack which leaves a lot of things out henry has started to bring a lot of things in and what he shows is that the concentrations of power upstream and downstream of landed property um reproduced white landed and commercial property and reproduced the black workers as a labor force um i've used a slightly different approach which um owes a lot to the idea of systems and it translates in the field into interviews with large numbers of traders and money lenders in which questions are interspersed which enable us to look at the origins of starting capital and the building of a portfolio over the working life of a trader or a businessman and inside that a a set a set of very minute questions i see this is a big sort of clock with a pendulum and then a little watch inside where we look at the money commodity money sub-circuit we look at the the conditions of costs and returns um in the latest period the latest post-harvest season so we look at a business history and the history of accumulation of bankruptcy of portfolio development which is in a way okay um the the the extractive role of of markets in relation to agriculture and then we also look at the rate of return the relationship between costs activities and profits um in trade so i've done this in two parts of india one over 25 years in west bangal and one over 44 years in northern tamalat and i suppose what i will finish with is that what we find is the coexistence of differentiation and accumulation on the one hand um with technological change um labor displacement accumulation on a much bigger scale than is possible in at landed agriculture itself um dive the the uh evolution of diversity in the modes of accumulation the entry of rentier accumulation ronty in portfolios um in parts of india that was riot worry which were characterized by smallholder agriculture um integration into the national and perhaps even international markets um and all this coexisting sort of micro conglomerate capital that's both and chat about his um phrase for it all coexisting with um petty trade and petty production in the system of markets just as petty production persists in agriculture itself so petty production persists in niches little processing um activity in separate circuits of the agrarian economy in the periodic marketplace system in particular sectors like bullet carts and lorries i'm going to finish new services like mechanical repair i'm it's okay i'm looking at time and what this means is that petty production um produces a social surplus it's not just simple reproduction that henry talked about ticking over nor is it expanded reproduction but a certain amount of social surplus is created in such a way that firms can expand by multiplication and so we have a quite persistent um uh subclass of petty traders petty service providers petty producers in the system of markets just as we have it in agriculture um which expand on inheritance or at marriage or by the shallow chari routes through savings which are more or less autonomous um and there's a politics can i'm stopping there's a politics of accumulation um which uh which is separate from the politics of petty production and why is this important well it may be considered to be a development problem it's a or it may be considered to be a development potential so if we go on i'm sorry right now it's being destroyed through demonetization i'm sorry that well this is this is these are heated moments when when when the chair intervenes i'm sorry if i intervene wrongly but i don't think so Barbara thinks so but thanks anyway for for for this outlining of petty production and how that is a system continues and continues to expand and and what that means for for agrarian change and and the issues we're dealing with here of course will be something we return to in in the question and answer session and now we will rush on to yandawa you will rush on to yandawa you said i just saw what rishin means thank you yens anyway good evening everybody uh i will talk about agrarian questions of today not those of the past i will focus on agrarian questions as they emerge in in our epoch this image will help a little bit introduction it refers to the flows the flows of agricultural commodities the enormous flows of commodities that go from one side of the globe to the other you never know exactly you might know what's in these silos but you do not understand whether it's for human food whether it's for animal feeding whether it's for energy production whether it's for speculation it might have different objectives and of course it implicitly refers to those who are in control those who control these flows nowadays have an enormous power when talking about agriculture we have to be keen on the fact that the way agricultural production is organized the way it's developing the way it's developing its resources is to be in balance with both society with the actors involved in agriculture and with nature yeah if if there are major dysarticulations along these axes then a agrarian question emerges we have had major dysarticulations between the way agricultural production was organized and nature for instance in the previous century in in the usa when the desert bowl swept the continent it's beautifully described by john Steinbeck in grapes of rars yeah that was a major dysarticulation between agricultural production and nature when the prospects and interests of the farming population are really trodden by the mainland labor institutions then you have let's say the classical agrarian question then often land reform is emerging as in need that happened in the past that's still happening today that was what happened in China when the collectivist organization of agricultural production ran counter to the the interests and the few of the farming population and this gave rise to the enormous unweary rebellion that that changed the landscape in China and of course it is to be there is to be a balance between society at large and agricultural production an example of this array emerging there are the current food scares but then there is definitely something wrong agricultural production is to be in balance with these different blocks and when a major dysarticulation occurs we have an agrarian question we have an agrarian crisis now talking about the agrarian crisis of today we have to take into account that it's a global crisis it emerges everywhere although in different ways with different forms but they are interconnected yet the fate of the peasantries and global laws in the global south are interconnected it is a global crisis it is a crisis that for the first time in history regards all these balances all these balances currently are in this array and it's in the third place a kind of gordian knot it cannot the more you try to resolve one problem the more you aggravate the other problems that's it's really a gordian knot it's very difficult to to get and this relates very much with the markets this is an image of markets in the past a previous century in the west of russia yeah markets then were regional markets it was an archipelago of different markets interconnected but always a little bit at the same time independent yeah they met local history they met local ecological conditions now it's still remarkable that worldwide 85 percent of all food is traded still within regional markets only 15 percent of food crosses literally nation of boundaries becomes part of the world market nonetheless a world market of course is terribly important because it's where these these the food empires are located these are the large global networks monopolistic networks that increasingly control both the production of food the processing of food the distribution of food and increasingly as well the consumption of food yet these networks these food empires control the different regional markets can impose the regime in the parameters their conditions in all these different localities yeah and this gives rise to new relations relations of domination and relations of appropriation increasingly it's a kind of appropriation of the extractivist kind these empires grow very quickly mainly through takeovers they represent an enormous power are at the same time a fragile and they exert a range of consequences about agriculture about agriculture where but it's located the first is loss of control states and farmers are increasingly out of encroach food sovereignty is indeed a threatened this is an image of latin america i like it very much it's enigmatic you don't understand very well whether the peasants fringe of the system or whether they are still in the center of it or whether this is both the case i will return to this one later on apart from loss of control there is increasingly an artificialization of food yeah food is to be transported of long distances in time and space this is having negative consequences for society as a whole there is a tying up of the squeeze on agriculture incomes are poverty is increasingly a widespread phenomenon there is financialization you could say that that agricultural systems are what Greece and Italy are for for the european union yeah the degree of financialization and both primary production and in processing is extremely high and this introduces all kind of new dangers and the risk of volatility finally there is a massive destruction of nature and all this of course is having very multiple consequences for food security at the same time this makes that as a reaction that new needs new scarcities are emerging worldwide but especially in Africa but in other places as well there's a very urgent need for rural employment sweetwater is becoming one of these new scarcities to have enough food of good quality of reasonable prices is becoming again an urgent priority in many places in the maghreb is just one example but far from being the only one having an attractive countryside both in China and in Europe this is a very important issue when it comes to the nature side the issue of climate change all the environmental problems that they are massively and they are enlarged increasingly they are to be resolved and then finally they're again throughout Europe throughout Central Asia and other places in Canada it's the same yeah the need for acceptable incomes everywhere farmers and peasants are downtrodden the possibilities to develop their own farms are limited and at the crossroads of these new needs new scarcities yeah and these are major major ingredients of the new agrarian crisis of the global agrarian crisis we are witnessing at the crossroads of these needs these needs that cannot be resolved by capital rather it's the other way around they are aggravated by capital four minutes how many minutes four you're very generous thank you i will argue that at the at the crossroads of these new needs these new scarcities a transition is going on a new agriculture is being rolled and there are emerging new peasantries those are peasants different from the peasants of the past also there is a quite some continuity but they articulate in a new way towards current society these are three young peasants from where i come from from Friesland and the Netherlands they are engaged in the management of landscape and biodiversity here what is very important for them is having an autonomous resource base which allows which allows for a defense against capital against food empires what's very important for them is also to be non-dependent only of farming but to be engaged in a wider range of activities like the management of nature landscape here or being like this example from Italy being directly engaged in processing a fresh milk and in its commercialization as a matter of fact you note everywhere in Europe but also in Asia in the Americas the emergence of new markets the the the big markets are controlled by food empires yeah the food empires are an obligatory passage point for products to go for the flows to go from producers to consumers what you increasingly see is that new markets are being constructed yeah they emerge as a kind of bypasses the peasant markets are constructed that allow for direct context direct transactions between producers and consumers and indeed this means that you you have to study very carefully the markets yeah the India argument of Barbara is now valid this is emerging everywhere more generally speaking I think what can argue that the multiple contradictions between food empires and new peasantries contradictions that are deepening will be our major fields of combat where capital is contested and these struggles are especially stronger here comes an important point because peasants wherever it is in the global north and the global south can draw on two very important commons they have access to land to nature to resources to seeds to animals and if not they can fight for it they can defend it yeah but that's one thing and the other common is the right to food as existing a society at large in the cities and by combining by drawing upon these two commons peasants are able to face food empires to respond actively to it they are not any more the sub-ordinated peasantry of the past they are actively constructing new alternatives they start small are increasingly interconnected and become a main driver of further transitions one last point often the question is asked can they feed the world these peasants these new peasants we did in Italy a study that went on for some 40 years now comparing a peasant agriculture yet taking data from Italy itself with entrepreneurial farming and you see that i will not go into details the the important point is that time in the game be it in the 70s in the 80s 90s and in this century peasant farming was more productive than entrepreneurial farming the very system integrated high technology etc peasant farming was more productive and it became more productive over time i stop here thank you thanks for these very rich presentations which we will now have a have a have a round of questions but before that i will i will allow for a quick comment from each of the of the panelists if if you so want to comment on no you're saying no would you like a quick comment on any of the other aspects that have been brought up here they're issues of global systems where they clearly are differences there are issues of which classes are we talking about here where they clearly are differences just to mention two we will move straight to questions there are many hands let us start from where should we start jonathan we will take a number of questions and then return to to the panel for comments please yeah a question to Barbara which i think is similar to the first question outside and not being a developed studies person could you explain to someone like me what's the direction of travel in these markets spoken about a sort of micro way what i know about India outside the neoliberal policies of the last 25 years the impact of globalization what's it doing to those markets in which way are they moving and from that can you say something about the sort of perspectives that were opened up by jan in the last presentation so let us let us take answers now at least debates and we've had a number of questions that have been directed to individuals but i think you should treat them as directed to all of you because the issue of what is the peasants now why are they new for example is an issue that many of you might want to to to to come in on the start from my left yandawa yeah thank you for that question new peasants why why do a column that way in the first place being calls increasingly people are not constrained anymore to be a peasant being a peasant increasingly is in many places of the world the outcome of free choices of goal oriented choices people opt for being a peasant secondly peasants are not anymore a sack of potatoes they have movements they have organizations they have leaders they have their patterns and means of communication very important third this new peasantries create alliances and exist due to alliances with urban classes uh you could say because they constitute themselves as peasantry that's exactly what happened in china that's what happens in brazil due to the land occupations by the movement to douche santera and finally i call them peasants because because they call themselves peasants it's also a symbol of protest against the modernization script that has been used and imposed by the states both in the south and in the north and eastern in the west yeah and people take distance from that they do consciously so and they start to redefine themselves as peasants just as their main international organization is called explicitly that way and yeah and how do you see what what you're just saying there in relation to categories such as pity commodity production or such as classes of labor to take some of the other categories that have been put forward here yeah well analytically i've used the concept of pity commodity production also but i think it's it's not adequate anymore to describe the current constellation currently peasants produce for markets that's absolutely no issue of subsistence whatsoever they produce for markets but try at the same time to be as independent from markets as possible that is on the on the output side yeah they go to markets on the input side they try to be as self-provisioning as possible yeah they try to build their own self-controlled resource base so you could say this is a step beyond the simple concept of pity commodity production the more so when you take into account diversification and multifunctionality plurie activity that means being with one food in the countryside and other food in in the in the urban economies uh i think we have to enrich previous concepts in order to meet current conditions that drastically differ from those of the past thanks Barbara thank you for the questions um the first one was about demonetization um petty commodity producers and traders and service providers and petty money lenders are predominantly dealing in a cash economy when you take 80 percent of cash away you are um threatening their very livelihood in the english language indian press over the last three weeks since the eighth months since the eighth of november there have been a number of different reports about the effect of demonetization on agriculture um some say that because uh farmers don't expect there to be demand because the demand would have been in the currency notes that have been rendered illegal that supply has dropped to markets and so has demand so that there's been no change in prices raw shaker going out in behar a week ago found catastrophic declines in prices for vegetables and fruit um in markets in behar right now we only know about the likely effect through more or less um reason speculation and through case studies that journalists are making going out into the countryside but there is no evidence that petty producers are benefiting from demonetization the only evidence is pointing to a massive threat to their livelihoods um on political coherence um there is no political project for petty producers um they may be allowed to enter business associations of capitalists um but only but their demands are usually ignored as labor i expend in my talk they're disenfranchised petty production for itself politically only through sewa which has organized two million women which is a huge achievement until you realize that there are still about 150 million people left to organize um and the mowers who have an analysis a very nuanced analysis of petty production but draw the conclusion that they're reliable allies of the mowers um which is a dubious conclusion they there is a politics of organization in sectors which are dominated by petty producers or petty traders like bullet carts and lorries and that politics is defensive i don't have time to talk about it but um in the paper for henry i did describe it um james's question um could they persist indefinitely well they have persisted um long before they were labeled um and i think that uh provided they have means of transacting financial means currency notes they will continue to persist but it is true that if you look at the state and ask the question are does the state have an economic project as opposed to a political one for this form of production it's all over the place there are interventions which destroy interventions which create and support like microcredit interventions which tolerate like marketplaces and interventions like n raga which actors are kind of unintended outcome in support of petty production so my own personal conclusion is that there's a chaotic economic project for petty production and that some kind of uh coherence is needed um however the opposite is happening the last question i'm sorry i don't know you um what was the direction of travel what is the direction of travel the direction of travel seems to be the the coexistence of the two track in the countryside towards accumulation but also towards the persistence of petty production and i could talk about this at length but won't but in but there are huge trade-offs in the direction of travel it's causing a terrible crisis of water depletion and um those of you who think that organic rice is somehow better and more nature-friendly need to know that as long as organic rice is being produced with irrigation water then it has a co2 emissions factor which is almost as heavy as um as uh intensive rice because most of the co2 in rice production is is in the coal in the electricity that is used to raise the water i'll leave it there okay thanks Barbara uh could could i just ask you so so in your view uh do people become peasants by choice to take a point put forward before Barbara no i think there are no peasants anymore so peasants um if people call themselves peasants that's a term of art it's a political term but technically my own reading the literature is that peasants are people incompletely involved in imperfect markets who can withdraw into subsistence at times of crisis who are subordinated to other classes in the state and and that this capacity to withdraw into subsistence is something that the dutch peasants do not have i don't think so i would want to call them something else and that's why i use the term petty producer thanks Henry well james asked a very specific question which um it's a very straightforward question about an unbelievably complicated social reality which is that of the growing change in china today um there was a special issue of the journal agrarian change last year on this with all the substantive case studies by middle and younger generation Chinese scholars which makes it unusual um the general kind of position put there which is a kind of creeping development of capitalism in the countryside is very different from the position that yang dao has put together with um his colleague and indeed mine at the china agriculture university yijin jong in in a new book uh i would say the curious should read both uh but i think i think the point i was making was um about about collective forms or state collective forms of production which i i don't think exists in china anymore except on a few very big state farms um growing on you know grain and other field crops on the very large scale using mechanized means and so on it's very it's very complicated in china because there's an article a few years ago you probably know it by peter ho something like who owns the land in china and the answer i mean he's a chinese china scholar the answer is nobody really knows so it's not that there is a clear legal basis for common property rights or collective property rights and which rents can be drawn but people will fight over it and if you're if you're half your commune or your former commune farmland it sees the bill high rise luxury apartments then the people who may be moved out as a result of that think that they have a right to press for some you know share of the um of of the booty but what what's what's interesting and there are some examples in the contributions empirical contributions by chinese scholars in the especially should the journal of agrarian change is issues about renting out land for farming and for larger scale apicalized farming enterprises and then this extremely obscure and difficult issue about what cooperatives mean in china where the law as well as you know politics or at least railpolitik allows entrepreneurs to set up operatives as a particular form which enables them to access land and other resources well including political favours of course from local government and otherwise i just want to say that um i realize if i can briefly my presentation may have sort of um pointed too much towards the past i mean we i think the history is enormously uh important and it does enter barbra's work and yandawa's work as well of course um and one of the you know key issues in the my debate with terry is whether that in turn this problematic of growing change growing transition can be carried over from those classic historical instances to today i mean that's actually one of the things that he and i um argue about otherwise i'm very pleased having argued these matters in the very comrading fashion for so many years with yandawa to hear this notion of peasants' choice because you know there's a social scientist which may may highlight my own shortcomings i never thought that people were members of classes or social categories but by choice and and there is i think an underlying logic to this i mean to yandawa's position which i think is very clear in his excellent little book on peasants and the art of farming is his chionelomian manifesto because um yandawa argues i don't think i'm misquoting him here if i hand me or correct me that the principal feature of peasant existence as well as peasant practice aspiration design and so on is for autonomy now for me i i i i understand why he's arguing it i can't see it as an empirical date i don't see it as an empirical reality and i i i would also ask barbara and this is not disingenuous this is from real curiosity whether the sort of new peasants that yandawa was talking about whether you know of their existence in india and on any significant scale and i will just let the two other members have a brief comment brief come into to these questions before we take more question yand well markets in which today's peasants are operating are imperfect markets because it are markets heavily controlled by food empires and these agricultural producers the peasants are incompletely integrated in these markets they try to keep markets at the distance especially the markets for the main resources seeds for animals for feed for fodder for fertilizers you mention it for capital so that's the first observation i mean i know very well this classical definition which has been specified further by frank ellis uh but if you take it seriously it means that you can uh uh receive peasant trees also in the in the northern parts of of the world then uh camp peasants uh for instance in the Netherlands this is a nice provocation of barbara uh uh could ditch peasants withdraw in subsistence all the point is this yeah there is a heavy economic and financial crisis which due to the financialization of agriculture beats very heavily but it's a partial effect yeah it's differentiated it are the big farms the entrepreneurial farms that have expanded quickly high tech uh are very dependent on inputs who suffer now periods of negative cash flow and there's nothing they can do yet the sparse dependency they are bound to this trajectory yeah and they go out you see this in the Netherlands you see this in Denmark you see this increasingly in other countries these subgroups of entrepreneurial farms who took and implemented the script of modernization they are entrapped indeed what I call peasants are able to face the crisis they are resilient I do not call it anymore subsistence but if you want to to fool around with all concepts yes they can they can defend themselves yeah they they have distanced themselves from the logic that food empires or more generally speaking capital has tried to impose on agriculture then coming to the issue of own choice as soon as you go to the detailed statistics you see first that uh over time there are farms that are continuous there are farms that disappear and there is always an inflow of farms young people they want to become farmer to become peasants themselves and there are mechanisms to do so increasingly the children of farmers whether it's in Peru or in the Netherlands or in Italy for that matter they decide themselves whether to continue a farm yeah or whether to stop or whether to change it completely to find new pathways more peasant like pathways so there is a considerable choice in all this you're not indeed you encounter the conditions yeah the historical conditions under which you operate you cannot change those but there is room for maneuver within those conditions yeah that that implied choices that implies struggles peasants experience their own choices as struggles there's an ongoing struggle to to to remain peasant and to defend their farm thanks Barbara I'm not sure about new peasants in India um there is a class of person who's highly educated who farms by choice um some of those are gentleman farmers so that wouldn't be what you're talking about I don't think we haven't really talked about scale in the project that we had in Oxford looking at greenhouse gases in this whole system of rice um about we discovered that about one percent of farms in Andhra Pradesh were practicing sr rice systems of rice intensification but that uses water and it also uses chemical inputs but far less than in intensive agriculture so the greenhouse gases are less than intensive agriculture but there's still quite a lot and as I said people who are practicing organic agriculture are really hard to find far fewer than one percent of farms they are scattered they do provide the kind of farmers market that you described they bypass the system of markets and they sell directly to retailers and that that rice is consumed on the basis of trust and that is because certification of organic rice is very costly and adds a premium to the retail price of rice so there is a system very close to what Yandor was describing but it's a minute proportion of consumers and producers that are involved in it thanks let us take a another round of questions there are um one two three four hands Ali thank you very much I just wanted to put around today's technology not having as much employment for the earlier and given that you know you've talked about a great question being a question of labor uh today increasing there can be a possible kind of meeting of places with the kind of present whatever reconstituting as present position in a situation where industry is not creating enough jobs and the MSD for example is actually being a movement not really of people who who are who were farmers but many who want to be farmers now that due to due to the fact there's a squeeze on on jobs that you think there can be a possibility of some sort of kind of coming together of these positions uh at least as far as policy and politics maybe thanks and I think the the person at the door reminds us that we have only got 10 minutes left and we have to be out here of here in 10 minutes so please very brief questions there's the lady behind yeah yes you thanks yeah please no I haven't noticed you I'm sorry there's no time but behind the I'm sorry I got the the band the blue shirt there sorry now interesting Steve shorts please and I've just been told we actually should be out of the door in one minute which I'm not going to stick to but this means that we really will have to have a last comment from the three panelists here just choose one of the issues that are raised here to comment on please and we've started there so let's start Barbara this time okay yes happy to start um I'd like to reply simply to Ali's and Steve's question on technology and mechanization and employment because in these systems new technologies are usually labor displacing the state aids and abets it by subsidies and is often very callous because never factors into any plan the costs of the alternative work or of provision of alternative work to the labor that's displaced it just goes into outer space however in India because of the social segmentation of markets which I didn't have time to talk about the law of one technology doesn't always hold that the most efficient technology prevails that doesn't happen in India and you have the coexistence of many technologies at different scales which then allow petty producers to compete and often outcompete petty capitalists and larger capitalists Henry I just say that listing the atrocities of contemporary capitalism of all kinds could I'm sure we could have a round robin here and all chip in many many factors I think part of the differences between us is understanding contemporary capitalism and its extraordinary diversity of forms and then proposing what are called solutions I actually don't have any solutions or at least solutions that I could explain in one minute I personally I would never choose to be a peasant but that might be my problem okay look because the processes of production are unmoldable you can shape them in different ways and of course this relates also with the technologies that are being used here we have to be very keen on the conceptual difference made by Francesca Bray there are mechanical technologies for the large-scale operations and you have skill-oriented technologies and especially this letter type of technologies yeah allow for a lot of employment and imply that agricultural development might occur as a kind of labor driven process yeah it's an intensification driven forward by the quantity and quality of labor this is a crucial point I think yes in as far as food regimes are concerned I can go a long way with Philip MacMichael I would I myself do not talk about corporate food regime as he does in relation to the third to the current regime I talk about the imperial food regime but anyway it's just it's not completely a matter of words but I stopped here here you open a very large discussion and that goes I'm sorry beyond my minute thanks and before before I thank everyone let me just announce that we have a drinks reception afterwards in the in the staff common room and the seminar series of course continue next term and there should be flyers lying around for the seminar series and now it's time for me to thank the panel for their excellent contribution