The Political Economy of Food: The Rise and Fall of the Postwar International Food Order

The widespread perception of a "food crisis" since the early 1970s reflects a real turning point in the global structure of production and distribution of food grains. Scarcity is always an aspect of capitalist relations, but its specific form is determined historically through the international food order. The latter is a stable set of complementary state policies whose implicit coordination creates specific prices relative to other prices, a specific pattern of specialization, and resulting patterns of consumption and trade. The social consequences of those orderly international arrangements make sense within a Marxist conception of accumulation and class formation on a world scale. I present a historical analysis of the rise of an international food order after World War II whose principal axis was food aid from the United States to formerly self-sufficient agrarian societies. This order had contradictory effects, both economic and political, leading to a reorganization of aid and trade, higher prices, and a possible shift of grain specialization within the international division of labor. The postwar international food order left specific legacies for classes and nations. For example, the low prices of the postwar order contributed to both agricultural underdevelopment and urban concentrations of dispossessed people in the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s as a particular form of capitalist penetration. The elements left by the decomposition of the postwar order, however, are much broader and allow for alternative paths to the construction of a new international food order.