Contenu du sommaire : Economies des vivres, vies de l'économie

The Economics of Food Crops, the Life of the Economy. An Introduction. This introduction explains the reasons that have led the editors to devote a special issue to the present day evolution of food economies. Among there reasons are: the relevance of the topic to world economic history; the movement towards worldwide economic exchanges in general and of food in particular; the specificity of changes in various economies, however comparable in their structures. Insistance is placed upon the need for sharper and more empirical descriptions, for specifying the categories of political economy according to historical situations. The anthropological dimensions of economic history should be emphasized.

China: A Subsistence take-off? During Mao Zedong's lifetime, the Chinese food policy was aimed at securing minimum for everybody: in the countryside, "basic rations" were distributed by the collective teams, and in the cities, grains and edible oils were strictly rationed. Rural collectivization and state monopolies, set up to implement this policy, had unfortunate side-effects: less efficient agricultural production, depressed sales from peasants, and the stagnation of average food consumption. Post-Mao policies of decollectivization and the reintroduction of market economics in the countryside have had the opposite effects. For the first time, a subsistence take-off has really occured. Will it be sustained? The fate of rural modernization in China depends on the answer.

Food Crop Production Trends in Contemporary India. This paper analyses the factors that involved the take-off of Indian grain production and per capita cereal availability during the last 20 years. It points out the role of state investments in the formation of production prices and storage. But it shows also the persistance of local and social inequalities which are one of the unknown factors of this evolution.

The Changing of Indonesian Agriculture. Cited as an example for other developing countries, Indonesian food crop agriculture has made tremendous progress during the last 15 years. This success is mainly due to the take-off of rice production, which has more than doubled between 1970 and 1985. After having long been the world's first rice-importer, Indonesia has reached a stage of self-sufficiency and could soon start exporting part of its surplus. The reasons for this are many; they have to do with the favorable conditions of the physical and human environment as well as with the policy measures taken by the government. However, agricultural modernization has many socioeconomic consequences and seems to lead to relative différenciation in the rural areas of the archipelago. Having overcome most of its age-old food problems, Indonesia is now confronted with new difficulties quite similar to those faced by industrialized countries with surplus agriculture. Is this not proof that this sector of the Indonesian economy is taken up in the development spiral?

The Common Market's Agricultural Policy and Third World Agriculture. Europe has a deficit in agricultural produce and thus needs to import. The difficulties of food production in developing countries, which need to export to obtain foreign currencies, result more from the poor organization of their markets than from an "ecological curse". To attain self-sufficiency in foodstuffs is not an absurd objective. Europe should treat imported products from these countries following the same logic that it applies to its own production: stable prices for fixed quantitites. However this type of organization should be made dependent upon these countries applying policies in favor of producing food crops. Eventual price increases for European consumers would be insignificant whereas they would be an appropriate means of permanently helping agriculture in these lands and would effectively help fight famine.

"Goodbye Heiffers, Cows... " The Evolution of Peasantry in Lozère in View of the Production and Commercialization of Cattle (1985). From 1960 until 1980, significant tansformations in the way of life and standard of living occured among the peasants of Lozère. Their holdings get larger, tillage has been modernized and productions adapted to new demands, particularly to the Italian one since the establishing of the E.E.C. This evolution has been initiated by a process that has also provoqued a serious economical dépendance (because of exagerate specialization), a deterioration of human relations (because of constant decrease of the farmers population) and of local commercial networks. The moutain might be deserted after one generation.

Small Agriculture in the USSR and Eastern Europe. "Small agriculture" refers to individual auxiliary farms. By its limited technical means and family labor, it is a form of household production. It can be analyzed as a food-producing system with supplementary functions within socialist agriculture. This system serves, in particular, as an economic and social regulator. Concerned with increasing the availability of food, recent governments have decided to encourage the development of small agriculture. Policies differ from one country to another: the Hungarian, Soviet and Rumanian cases are described.

The American Grain Economy and its Constraints. The role of the USA in contemporary changes in world food-production systems is so important that many observers fear a monopoly. The agribusiness industry is made up of giant food processors, grain merchants, farm machinery suppliers and, last but not least, farmers. They represent only 3% of the global working population, but the American Agricultural Policy has from 1933 to 1985 helped them in their world conquest. Building an export-oriented agriculture has been the main objective of this policy.

Agribusiness and the State. The Case of the United States. Although US government ideology emphasizes the separation of government and business, the State is deeply involved in promoting the interests of US transnational corporations abroad and in transforming Third World food systems to suit American needs. Three cases are examined: OPIC, the agency providing Stateguaranteed insurance and other services for American agribusiness investment in developing countries; OICD, concerned with agricultural research as well as training of Third World nationals and biased towards capital-intensive methods, finally, the State-supported private agricultural trade associations that persue the goal of higher sales and of food-system transformations for attaining them (including the corn-soya animal-feeding model). All three increase agricultural and food dependency in less developed countries.

Oil Revenues and the Agricultural Crisis. Among developing countries, oil-producers rank first in terms of food deficit. Thanks to the two oil booms, these exporting economies had no problems solving traditional agricultural development problems, namely deficit financing and the insolvency of the internal market. But the massive inflow of oil revenues determines an economic development pattern that destabilizes rather than supports the agricultural sector. The state monopoly over oil revenues led to a new kind of patronage relationship that usually excluded the peasantry. The trends of oil economies in terms of inflation, the appreciation of the currency and the centralization of economic decision-making impede agriculture at the same time that the privatization of oil revenues squanders financial resources. The analysis of the agricultural situation of major oil-exporting countries leaves on pondering the usual interpretation of food- dependency in southern countries.

The Ruin of a Food Crop System in Burkina: Extensive Agriculture and Less Produce. In Northern Burkina the agrarian structure has regressed during recent decades because agricultural techniques have been set aside that used to intertwine permanent intensive agriculture with extensive temporary agriculture. Today, permanent agriculture is practised everywhere, but the soil cannot be restored. Consequently, output has been decreasing as has the man/hour ratio. This process is not only linked to population growth but also to the atomization of production groups.

The Future of an Illusion: the History of Food Crop Production and Policies in the Ivory Coast. The history of food crops in the Ivory Coast during the colonial period reveals large-scale transformations with a quantitative increase that are usually overlooked. The history of economic policies also shows the precocity and permanency of concern with the food problem as well as the repetititveness of applied measures and, in general, of their failure. Dominant discourse about the "native" (now called "informal") sector formed a "paradigm" perpetuated as a system of ideological and symbolic concepts. This paradigm, which does not take into account the efficiency and complexity of the system of production, is based upon an evolutionary model that historical reconstruction has invalidated. This nonanalysis of the food-producing sector in processes of global transformation makes it possible for State agencies to act without worrying about meeting up with "reality".

Rice for the Pigs ? The Problems of a Rice Society through the Example of the Central Highlands of Malagasy. The rice economy in Malagasy is characterized by: Rice to feed pigs but a poor marketing of rice, a lack of interest from peasants. Peasants do not carry out state- sponsored projects but cover the landscape with a patchwork of fields no longer producing enough rice to serve as the backbone of the economy. These are the Malagasy rice economy characteristics. Why has the situation occurred, particularly in the Central Highlands? For rural people, who are very sensitive to work productivity (i.e. money) and hindrances of marketing activities, time is becoming important: they would rather plant cash crops than rice and thus earn money to buy food to bridge the gap.

The Food Policy of the Khmers rouges. Until war broke out in 1970, Cambodia was an underdeveloped but happy country inhabited by a properly-fed population. Under the Khmers Rouge's rule, each administrative division was required to be self-sufficient: this principle led to an unequal distribution of food. Moreover, the leaders, obsessed by a likely Vietnamese attack, exchanged rice for arms and amunition. They also had strategic foods planted for the population, but these, in turn, had to be exported in order to obtain more weapons. As the rural scenery became uniform, starvation and death set in.

To Help or Too Much Help ? Changing Food Crop Economies in the South Pacific. The features and contrasts of food system transformations in Pacific countries and territories are scrutinized. The original systems, their historical transformations and their survival today are reviewed through various geosystems: plot, farm, territory, island, country, region. Nowadays there are no comprehensive food systems in the Pacific region. Dualistic systems have evolved under the constraints of external criteria (urban migrations and growth, public assistance, world prices, etc.) The gap between facts and the ideological discourse about self-sufficiency provides an insight into current trends.

Rice from Heaven, Rice from the Earth: Ideology, the Political System and Rice Production in the Tanala 'Kingdoms' of Ikongo (Southeastern Coast of Madagascar). A diachronic analysis of the connections between myths about the origin of rice and society leads to distinguishing two types of tales related to nobles and commoners. Through changes in the ways rice was produced from the 17th till the 19th century in Tanalaland (Ikongo), the complexity of the links between natural environment, land exploitation, social and political organization, and ideology are pointed out.