Abstract
Karl Marx explained that public goods must be privatized if capitalism is to emerge. He used the term primitive accumulation to refer to “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1977:874–875). The dilemma, from the perspective of the capitalist, is that people capable of subsistence on common lands, along with people able to make livings as smallholder and petty commodity producers, can sustain themselves without joining the ranks of wage laborers. Therefore, land and labor need to be privatized and treated as commodities to enable capitalism to function. The act of seizing the means of production of the peasant and the petty commodity producer is what Marx called expropriation.
Gabriela Pechlaner argues that expropriation is occurring in agriculture today through genetically engineered (GE) seeds. She claims, “This commodification of the seed locks in high-capital farming with expensive inputs and eliminates an important economic strategy for farmers, particularly in the face of rising seed prices” (p. 240). Intellectual property struggles pitting the agribusiness giant Monsanto against farmers in Canada and the United States, according to Pechlaner, indicate that the grain-seed production process, which has traditionally been controlled by farmers, is being expropriated.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this book is the in-depth look at how farmers come to justify their participation in the system of expropriation that also reduces their control over management decisions. Farmers tend to choose the new technology because it provides a small yield increase or labor-saving benefit in a competitive market with tight margins. As they change their operations and as alternative technologies become less available, they become more dependent on that new technology. When prices for that technology rise, the farmers are left with little to do but harbor resentment and file lawsuits. As Pechlaner puts it, “In the manner of a death by a thousand cuts, this can be characterized as loss of control by a thousand schemes” (p. 205).
The frame of the argument rests heavily on Kloppenburg’s (2004) First the Seed, which explains how agribusiness has sought to secure profits from the crop production process through either technical or social (legal) means. One of the key obstacles to capitalist intervention into agriculture is that some agricultural technologies, such as plants and animals, are self-replicating. A farmer cannot plant a tractor to produce new tractors. But a farmer can save a portion of the grain harvest and replant it, and that is an obstacle to capital accumulation for agribusiness. Hybrid corn represented a technical solution to the problem because hybridization limits the farmer’s ability to replant harvested seed. The United States Department of Agriculture began promoting hybridized over self-pollinating corn varieties more for the built-in intellectual property protection than better yields. However, unlike hybrid corn, other major crops, whether conventional or GE crops, can be replanted. Therefore, agribusiness relies on social controls (utility patents) to prevent farmers from legally saving and replanting GE crops.
Despite the legal authority granted by governments to agribusinesses in the form of utility patents, according to Pechlaner, those pesky seeds are still self-replicating. Therefore, agribusinesses must be aggressive in enforcing intellectual property rights against wayward farmers. In the United States and Canada, which account for approximately half of all the genetically engineered crop acreage in the world, legislative, regulatory, and judicial oversight of the agricultural crop sector has repeatedly sided with agribusiness over farmers. Pechlaner contends that this has led to the “technology developers gaining some of the most important benefits of ownership while remaining exempt from its liabilities” (p. 13). To make her point, she carefully describes four legal cases in the United States and Canada where farmers violated, willfully or not, the strict enforcement of utility patents on seeds.
A recurring, and maddening, theme is that Monsanto’s powerful legal teams have gotten different courts to consistently decide in favor of Monsanto, even if the aggregation of the decisions is contradictory. As a result, Monsanto reaps the benefits of strong intellectual property policies, but bears none of the costs. For example, farmers cannot save a portion of their crops to replant the next year. But, in Canada, if that seed accidentally gets into a neighboring farmer’s certified organic field, Monsanto is not responsible. Pechlaner summarizes the contradiction: “it appears that corporate ownership over patented GM seed is seamlessly maintained through its regeneration and wherever it wanders, but stops at the first point of sale with respect to liability” (p. 170). In the United States, the contradiction is evident in the court decisions that the agronomic trait and the plant’s germplasm are separable in one case and inseparable in another. Monsanto is granted patent protection as though the trait and the germplasm are distinct, since the germplasm is naturally occurring and cannot be patented. However, a farmer cannot save seed, even after paying a royalty for the trait, because the courts agree with Monsanto that the trait and the germplasm are inseparable. Pechlaner masterfully describes the double standards and contradictions in the David-versus-Goliath cases.
As described in the opening paragraph of this review, Pechlaner seems to be using the Marxian concept of expropriation to describe the capitalist seizure of agricultural seed supplies. However, rather than acknowledge that connection, she instead uses the one reference to Marx in the book to claim a distinction. “The term ‘expropriationism’ differs from its conventional legal and Marxist usage of expropriation conducted by a public body ostensibly for public good” (p. 26). Pechlaner certainly is defining expropriation as something other than the current legal definition of seizing property for the public good. But Marx did not define it that way. Instead, Pechlaner follows in the Marxian tradition of describing the underlying logic of capitalism and the ways that logic manifests in economic and social arrangements.
Pechlaner’s decision to engage the debates from the 1980s on how agriculture is different from manufacturing, because of the reliance on natural processes in agriculture, is helpful only to a point. Those debates documented the myriad ways that capital accumulation can occur, even in a non-wage-labor process. However, assuming the uniqueness of smallholder farming in the United States and Canada reifies wage-labor as the measure of industrialism capitalism. Farmers in the United States and Canada have been petty capitalist enterprises at least since the early 1900s. And the demise of small farming as a primary source of family income is not so different from the story of big-box retail eliminating mom-and-pop retail stores or the demise of local banks in the face of the rise of too-big-to-fail banks. Furthermore, portraying farmers as outside of industrial capitalism is simply not accurate. According to a recent analysis by the United States Census of Agriculture, around 12 percent of large farms (annual sales exceeding $250,000) account for 84 percent of the value of agricultural production (Hoppe and Banker 2010:iv). Farm operators may not be wage laborers, but it is misleading to portray them as something other than capitalist firms that supply raw materials to a thoroughly industrialized and capitalistic agricultural system.
None of this takes away from the basic narrative and argument of the book, which is very valuable and timely. News headlines regularly alert us to cases of farmers fighting agribusinesses over seed patents. As recently as May 13, 2013, the United States Supreme Court sided again with Monsanto in a case against a farmer who planted soybeans that he had purchased as grain. Pechlaner gives the reader the tools to make sense of the dynamics behind such headlines. In that sense, the book is useful for the general public. It might even suit a course on intellectual property law. The book is also useful for demonstrating how expropriation is occurring in the twenty-first century, over 100 years after Marx explained that process. Therefore, it would be valuable on an agriculture and food sociology syllabus or a classical theory syllabus. In fact, I just recently added it to my classical theory syllabus.