Feeding the world with hunger: the agrarian question in Brazil and the global agrarian crisis

Taking as a launching point the fact that most of the poor and hungry people in the world today are ‘peasant’ producers, smallholders, landless rural workers in developing countries, this paper suggests the ‘food crisis’ exposed in 2008 derives from an ‘agrarian crisis’, characterized by a process of rural deprivation. Concerned with the ‘new international agenda for agriculture’, which approaches hunger by modernizing production in agrarian economies, this research paper studies the process of agrarian capitalist transition and modernization in Brazil, investigating the mechanisms that could explain how poverty becomes a social condition of existence among the rural population. This paper discusses how an ‘unresolved agrarian question’ is determined since colonialism and recreated in different periods of the economic development of the country. The ‘agrarian question’ of today is no longer national, but global, characterized by transnational capital reproduction and labour degeneration in the periphery. As the ‘new agenda for agriculture’ reinforces the ‘dynamics of capital’, it is likely to reproduce both, the agrarian and the food crisis. Relevance to Development Studies The perspective from which the Food Crisis and the dramatic problem of rural poverty and hunger are understood in this study contributes with critical elements of analysis, particularly important at this moment that agriculture is “back to the international development agenda” – which will shape investments in developing countries in the years to come. This study also shows that the Agrarian Political Economy that derives from Marx’s critique is still relevant and insightful to the Rural Development Studies.