Political ecology and the industrial food system

Much agricultural production in the United States and Europe since the 1930s, and in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since the 1970s, can be called "industrial" to describe how aspects of farm production resemble processes in industrial manufacturing. This shift in agricultural logic moved millions of people out of rural communities and into cities, increasing total agricultural production while creating new markets for agricultural technologies and consolidating agricultural work through vertically integrated agribusiness. Meanwhile, food insecurity and rural distress have remained stubbornly persistent. In this paper, I explore the disjuncture of increased production and increased precarity through the theoretical framework of political ecology. I present data from ethnographic fieldwork in on genetically modified (GM) cotton farms in India to argue that solutions to precarity in the contemporary globalized agricultural system will require political and social change, not merely the addition of new technologies and new choices. In fact, increases in new branded products may exacerbate underlying risk and insecurity for farmer producers.