Milking money: Exploring the Struggle for Autonomy from Theory to Practice

The ‘middle farmer’ is a key figure within the food sovereignty debates. Powerful actors within commodity chains exploit middle farmers globally while centralizing high profits and reducing small farmers’ autonomy. Yet despite this exploitative relationship, many farmers do not have the capacity to distantiate from the production of export commodities. The struggle for better terms of inclusion in commodity chains is largely unexplored by the food sovereignty movement where autonomy is largely understood in terms of partial delinking. This paper problematizes the idea of autonomy understood as either partial delinking from capital and market forces or as complete subordination to global commodity chains. By grounding the analysis on an empirical case, it is argued that struggles for autonomy are better understood on a practical level as they are intrinsically correlated to context specific constraints and opportunities for action. I have analysed an agrarian movement’s autonomy and capacity vis-à-vis industrial and financial capital in upstream and downstream markets throughout the current important period of agricultural restructuring. This theoretical framework moves beyond binaries and looks at demands for higher autonomy as dynamic and fluid processes rather than static goals. The movement taken into consideration frames its struggles in terms of delinking when it has the capacity to do so and when this will result in higher relative autonomy. At the same time, they also negotiate for better terms of integration in the dairy chain to increase their relative autonomy.