The problem of the growing degradation of food system owing, among other things, to its genetic manipulation, belongs to that perspective of exasperated research through technology of a higher productivity of nature which has had and continues to have as a counterpart a history of privatization and expropriation of land and agrarian reforms aimed above all at restratifying labor worldwide.

These measures seek to impose in an increasingly pervasive way that class relation and that model of production which are peculiar to the kind of development we live in. In this sense the agrarian reforms and policies which have been implemented in this century have been characterized by guaranteeing a better nutrition to a few, undernourishment or hunger to many and especially as a powerful tool to break those organisational networks which various sections of the world's population had created in the struggle to assure themselves a better nutrition and a better life. Therefore we fully agree with the assertion that food crises are fundamentally products of the political economy of capitalism (Cleaver 1977). And their counterparts are those "technological miracles" concerning food production which, simulating the discovery of the source of abundance, on the one hand destroy the biodiversity and the reproductive powers of nature and thereby the only real source of abundance (Shiva 1990), on the other, through the manipulation of food and industrial and commercial policies that sustained it render food in reality ever more inaccessible for the vast majority of humanity.

This leads to not only the progressive destruction of the reproductive powers of nature, but also to the progressive annihilation - through wars, repression, epidemics, and hunger - of populations rendered superfluous by the expropriation and poisoning of lands due to the use of pesticides or anti-personnel mines. The ghettoization and enclosure of populations, deprived of their fundamental means of subsistance, first of all land, and variously confined from slums to refugee camps to jails, have their counterpart in the "enclosure" of food. This, in fact, already rendered inaccesible thanks to the combined policies of land expropriation, technological innovation in agricoltural methods and the relationship between wages and prices (when there is one), is always more subject to manipulation, made unavailable for use, privatized, monopolized, patented, put in the bank.

But how can we today pose the question of these policies regarding land and food? What is their role in the so-called new globalization of the economy (Wallerstein 1974; Mies 1986)?
It is necessary to clarify some premises regarding this.

The neoliberalism which characterizes the latest phase of accumulation, contrary to what is often assumed, is not a spontaneous process where the productive forces of the economy are simply set free to compete among themselves. In reality, neoliberalism is a capitalist strategy planned just as much as was keynesianism. Its aspect of being planned resides in that gigantic operation of underdevelopment of social reproduction represented by the policies of structural adjustment. Such policies were activated, in substantially identical ways at the planetary level, in an increasingly burdensome way during the 80's and 90's with the function of clearing the way for the unfolding of neoliberalism. The institutional summits which are assigned such planning of the underdevelopment of reproduction, which is above all an attack on labour and on the struggles of women, are represented by the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the WB (World Bank) which today represent the government without borders of international capital. If the former presides over the formulation of directives regarding adjustment policies, the latter launches development projects which are their corollary.

The current phase of accumulation rests in fact on two fundamental pillars. The first consists of the new international division of labour, which concernes not only the sphere of production but also that of reproduction (Federici 1996). Due to this ever more Third World women perform domestic work for the first world either remaining in their places of origin or emigrating to so-called advanced areas. But such a division of labour could not occur if the adjustment policies and the dramatic poverty which they provoke were not at the origin of this large migration flows which constitute a new stratification of labour in both production and reproduction. The other pillar consists of the new economic liberalism which, to the extent that it seeks more sacrifices and deregulation of labour to allow firms to better compete in the new globalized economy, assumes as well that reduction of contractual power which is the fruit of the extention of poverty primarily caused by adjustment policies.

However the underdevelopment of reproduction created at the world level by such policies, and which has constituted the base on which rest the new international division of labor and economic neoliberalism, was the reply to that international cycle of struggles which unfolded in the 1960's and 1970's. While following the 80's these adjustment policies, bringers of an ever more widespread misery, became the terrain of struggle and growing rebellion (George 1989; Midnight Notes Collective 1992; Dalla Costa M. e Dalla Costa G.F. 1993, 1996).

Paradoxically, in particular in Italy, the political debate, whether institutional or not, does not usually mention the adjustment policies, thereby hiding how the continuing cuts in public spending for social consumption and privatisations belong to a concerted strategy at the international level. But even less does the debate address the privatisation and expropriation of land which are at the heart of the entire imposition of underdevelopment of reproduction and which constitue the main source of the much denounced world hunger and the operations of annihilation and enclosure of ever greater sectors of the population. Correspondingly, from my point of view, another function which points towards the same road of attack on social reproduction has remained hidden - namely, the progressive poisoning of the land. And this is because land, ever further outside the control and knowledge of local populations, must guarantee instead an always higher productivity and always higher profits for international industry and commerce of food. In the same way the expropriations of land and forced transfer of populations (to which improbable resettlements are promised), for the central role they play in the various programs of the World Bank have remained unmentioned in the Italian debate.

If these operations on the land and consequently on the populations, are crucial constants in the policies by which IMF and World Bank, as institutional summits of international capital, guarantee the further expansion of capitalist relations, which are increasingly encroaching on and devastating the territory of the reproductive powers of nature, what are the implications for us? I will mention here only a few comments while directing your attention to a more extensive treatment elsewhere (Dalla Costa, M. 1997).

First of all, following the above, we can state that such operations must be at the center of our political thinking and activity because the expansion of capitalist relations leading to the commoditization, as is increasingly happening , of every form of life, constitutes a state of siege which threatens all of us here as well; and especially because it is from such operations that the possibility to continually refound and restratify the condition of class relations in the world results. Therefore, to express an anticapitalist resistance capable of confronting the new phase of accumulation, to defend ourselves as a class of the global economy, means in the first place to give support to the struggles over the land in ever more regions of the planet, and to develop a political recomposition at the international level on this question in all its varied aspects.

In this sense, it is fundamental then, to seek to learn and tell others about the struggles against this process all over the world, and to act in support of them. This may contribute to damming a flooding river which is rushing towards us. And above all we need to spread word of the victories which have already occurred. It helps us to shake the belief in the inevitibility of capitalist development.

Above all, it is fundamental to pose seriously to ourselves the problem, even in the advanced areas, of which relation to the land from many different points of view.

The lessons of the indigenous movements and of the women's movements in the South of the world in general have revealed that there are no mechanical or chemical short cuts, to say nothing of biotechnological ones when it comes to the land. There are no simple technological solutions to guarantee the fruits of the earth and the renewability of its forms of life. The earth needs reproductive work - it is necessary to care for it through human presence and activity and it is necessary correspondingly to give back as much as is taken - this is just as true also for human beings who are after all themselves a part of the life of the earth. Technology in both cases can only perform a marginal role. It can serve to cut grass in the same way that a washing machine can do the laundry but not to raise a child. This understanding compels us- as I tried to demonstrate more extensively in the above cited work - to rethink the working day, just as when we take into account the reproductive work involving human beings. The lack of any serious response on this terrain, as has been the case up until today, combined with the lack of any serious response over the question of land, can only render even more tragic the difficulty of human reproduction. But if the technological solution is not the solution, this leads to the conclusion that the liberation from agricultural work based on it was a false liberation for a labour-force which was, on the one hand, simply wanted unemployed, and on the other freed for more intensive use on other fronts. To relocalize development here means above all to restore a human presence which, beginning with new relations among humans and between people and nature, will be able also to invent a technology appropriate to new relations between living things. The refusal of the countryside by women in Italy was not only a refusal of hard work but also of hierarchical control by the old and by men in the narrowness of the village. But today ever more women and men all over the world are experimenting with practical alternatives in land use beginning with practical alternatives among themselves within a context rich in potentialities of communication and exchange without frontiers. In this sense also the rising of Chiapas (Esteva 1994) has constituted and constitutes a great laboratory .

But the question of what kind of relation with the land, according to the indigenous lesson, forces us to address the problem of what are our commons, commons that we want to preserve or reconquer. In my opinion, above all, they are the land as public space (against the policies that increasingly ristrict space for collective activity), the land as source of biodiversity, the land as source of natural evolution.

The struggle over time and over wages\income which has been so much in discussion in recent years (1) in the advanced countries is myopic if it is not linked to the struggle over the land question in order to change the current agricultural policies and those regarding raising animals in a way to reconquer that biodiversity, integrity, renewability of nature without which, even if the wage struggle is won, we would have no choice but to buy ever more poison, and with this our own extinction. There are instead, reproductive powers of nature and its biodiversity which, as the indigeneous communities teach, multiply instead of reducing and monsterizing our possibilities of life as is currently the case. But the construction of any practical alternative must gain strength from the struggles, from refusal and protest against the current policies.

It is important to know about these practises that are developing with many articulations in the advanced areas also, for example in the United States. While the waged economy through a growing unemployment dooms to live on the street without food or hope ever more women and men, these seeking alternative solutions to be able to feed themselves and to have a roof over their heads, are discovering new social relations and putting into place other economies and other relations with the land. I am alluding to those movements and those initiatives which we can group under the name "social ecology" or "bioregionalism" or "community economy" in its new forms (Dalla Costa 1997). Here the need to assure oneself nutrition is linked to attempts to relocalize development in the sense of keeping at a local level not only the availability of land but also the guarantee of healthy food, work skills and financial resources against allowing them to be devoured by the uncontrollable reign of the global economy.

One example among the more meaningful is that of the small city of Binghamton in the State of New York. Of forty thousand inhabitants fifteen thousand were fired by IBM, a firm which had never fired groups of people, but which closed down transferring production to the Third World. A short time later the supermarkets closed also. This was a collapse corresponding to what happened to many other US cities hit by high unemployement. One safety valve for the community, to be able to eat and live, was to rediscover the land, to create within the city biological cultivations which also found in this new situation some internal markets, and on the basis of the recovered time and land, to build new relationships as well with the indian communities and reservations elaborating therefore a new culture. This experience with community gardens following factory closing has happened on a larger scale in the former automobile capital of Detroit.

These are only two examples. But many others are developing and becoming widespread. Cities and communities are also constructing alternative circuits of local money, organizing on a large scale alternative networks of labor and professional exchange. There are also movements, as in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Vermont, around the question of bovine growth hormone, uniting animalists, ecologists, and white family farmers against agrobusiness. The ruin of animals indeed, is also the ruin of small scale economies and the environment. In Arizona the question of land has united for the first time white family farmers and indians against agrobusiness which wants the land of the farmers and against the mining companies which want the uranium, coal and oil underneath the indian reservation.

These examples, from my point of view, are very significant and full of implication which will become clearer in a large way in the near future. They therefore constitute examples to which we also will look to discover new practises of alternative economies and struggles. What is clear is that the Earth under a multiplicity of perspectives is emerging increasingly as an issue capable of recomposing in a powerful unification of struggles the many ethnicities of its children.


(*) This text originally appeared in Italian with the title "Neoliberismo, terra e questione alimentare" in Ecologia Politica Cns, n. 1, 1997 and has been published in English with the title "Some Notes on Neoliberalism, on Land and on the Food Question" in Canadian Woman Studies/ Les Cahiers de la femme, North York, Ontario, Canada, Spring, 1997.

Notes
1) See regarding this, the appeal of "the 35" published in Il Manifesto 27 October 1996. On the same question I dedicated further considerations in my essay "L'indigeno che è in noi, la terra cui apparteniamo" (The Native in Us, the Land we Belong to"), in Vis à Vis n. 5, 1997.


Prof. Mariarosa Dalla Costa
Facoltà di Scienze Politiche
Istituto di Scienze Politiche
Via Del Santo 28 - 35123 Padova - Italia


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See also: Debate on Agriculture and Alternatives:  http://www.all4all.org/2004/07/973.shtml
 http://www.all4all.org/land