The 2011 AIAS Summer School, running at Rhodes from 17 to 21 January, looks at the Agrarian Question which remains a fundamental challenge in all its historic dimensions: industrial transition and full employment; national liberation, unity, democracy and equality; gender equity and ecological sustainability; the role of traditional authorities, food sovereignty and regional integration.
These, together with more recent challenges such as ensuring biosafety, corporate land grabbing in Africa continue to require urgent answers in the midst of the current transition. The AIAS Summer Scholl will look at the challenges faced in this transition among countries of the South, and focus more specifically on the case of South Africa, which is the host of the Summer School.
One full day will be devoted to the Agrarian Question in South Africa, with specific reference to the State of South African Agriculture, in all its various guises.
Subsequent days will turn to general issues, of interest to all countries, specifically: the reconstitution of capital on a global scale and the new trends in agrarian relations; agrarian reform, sustainable development, regional cooperation; land, labour and gender; and the strategies of social and political movements.
The financial crisis of 2007 has posed serious problems for relations between capital and labour on a global scale as well as between countries of the North and the South. The unsustainable financialisation of global capitalism rooted in neo-liberalism has had a profound impact on the prospects for Agrarian Reform on the periphery. Over the last few decades, the unprecedented centralisation and concentration of capital in the hands of fewer but much larger financial corporations inevitably results in a disproportionate distribution of power with serious implications for popular democratic decision-making. The consequences of the crisis for the South and for the working classes in the industrialised countries need to be understood in a manner which opens up the possibilities for political alliances dedicated to the prospects of alternative strategies.
One major consequence of the crisis is the emergence of states and firms in the South which are challenging the established hegemony of Western positions in global markets. Another aspect concerns the forging of economic relations among Southern countries ¬– in trade, investment, and finance – which are taking advantage of the current crisis for their own benefit and thus contributing towards possible changes in the relations of forces on a global scale.
A third aspect of the crisis, of critical importance to this Summer School, is the growing importance of agricultural commodities and land. Whether by the predatory expansion of speculative capital or monopolies pushing GMOs, or in response to the energy/climate crisis, the transition to biofuels, and food insecurity, it is clear that there is an ever more antagonistic pursuit for irrigated land, as well as new production models being promoted.
The inherent pursuit of industrial capitalism for expanding production on an ever-increasing scale, fuelled by technological advances, has had the effect of undermining small scale farmers and the domestic production of food in the South. Over-production of commodities and the consequent under-consumption in the North where the agricultural sector continues to enjoy various forms of protection from competition via state subsidies lies in sharp contrast with the World Bank and the IMF’s neo-liberal insistence on the removal of subsidies in the South.
In short, there is a global food crisis as the increasing dependence of the South on expensive imports from the North raises very real questions about the prospects of Agrarian Reform in the former to support local self–sufficiency.
Nonetheless, the potential for autonomous development in these emerging global relations remains to be realised. An important contradictory tendency is that some African countries are re-positioning themselves in the world economy as exporters of primary materials and cash crops, while a new process of primitive accumulation also accelerates.
The AIAS has put together a group of internationally acclaimed scholars of the agrarian question including Prof Issa Shivji (Tanzania), Prof Sam Moyo (Zimbabwe), Prof Lungisile Ntsebeza (SA), Prof Fred Hendricks (SA), Dr Kirk Helliker (Zimbabwe), Prof Jha (India) and Prof Yeros (Brazil).
The Summer School, is organised under the auspices of African Institute of Agrarian Studies. It has already organised two highly successful Summer Schools in Harare (January 2009) and in Dar es Salaam (January 2010).