Capital’s Food Regime

Class Struggle, the State and Corporate Agriculture in India

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Capital’s Food Regime: Class Struggle, the State and Corporate Agriculture in India analyses how India is being integrated into the global food regime at the current conjuncture, and with what consequences for the country’s classes of labour.

The book is an in-depth study of agrarian transformations in contemporary India through the lens of food regime analysis. While the food regime approach has emphasized global-scale studies, this book breaks new ground in downscaling the approach to account for specific historical-geographical cases. The book thus develops an innovative Marxist approach to food regime analysis that challenges prevailing scholarly accounts in agrarian studies and beyond.
Copyright Year:
2025
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ISBN:
978-90-04-71443-4
Publication:
09 Dec 2024
Hardback
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Published
ISBN:
978-90-04-71442-7
Publication:
06 Dec 2024
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Jostein Jakobsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. He works in agrarian studies and recently co-authored Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India (Routledge, 2024).
Acknowledgements

List of Tables, Figures and Maps

1 Introduction
 1 Downscaling Food Regime Analysis

 2 Beyond Reifications

 3 The Structure of the Book


2 The Travels and Travails of the Global Food Regime
 1 The Emergence of Food Regime Analysis

 2 Established Food Regime Periodisation

 3 Debating the Third Food Regime

 4 Beyond the Third Food Regime?

 5 Steps towards the ‘Concrete’

 6 Conclusion


3 Agrarian Change in Postcolonial India
 1 The ‘Resurrection’ of Agrarian Scholarship

 2 Beyond ‘cul-de-sac’: Agrarian Questions and Transitions

 3 India’s Integral State

 4 Neoliberalising the Indian State

 5 Conclusion


4 Crisis, Counter-Movements, Class Analysis
 1 Food Regime Crisis

 2 Enter Polanyi

 3 India’s Agrarian Crisis

 4 Towards a Peasant Counter-Movement?
 4.1 The 2020–21 Farm Law Agitations in Context


 5 Conclusion


5 Neoliberalisation, the State and the Case of Right-to-Food
 1 Challenging ‘Progressive’ State Action in the Global Food Regime

 2 The State and Neoliberalism in Food Regime Analysis

 3 The Contradictions of the Neoliberalising State in India

 4 The Right-to-Food in India
 4.1 Short-Term Neoliberalisation

 4.2 Longer-Term Neoliberalisation


 5 The ‘Long’ Green Revolution, Crises and Commodity Frontiers

 6 Conclusion


6 The Hybrid Maize Frontier
 1 Hybrid Maize in the Global Food Regime

 2 Commodity Frontiers

 3 Methods and Field Site

 4 The Hybrid Maize Frontier Seen ‘from Above’
 4.1 The Maize Frontier in Karnataka


 5 The Hybrid Maize Frontier Seen ‘from Below’
 5.1 Local Markets and Dealers in Hybrid Maize

 5.2 The Making of the Boom

 5.3 The Rainfed Dystopia and Classes of Labour

 5.4 Maize Materiality

 5.5 The Multiple Use-Values of Maize


 6 Conclusion


7 Concluding Reflections
 1 The Contributions of this Book


References

Index

This book will be of particular interest to scholars in critical political economy, South Asia Studies, students of agrarian studies and political ecology, academic institutions specialising in political ecology, and practitioners working critically with the global food system.
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Publisher:
Brill
Language:
English
Pages:
Approx. x, 249 pp.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004714434

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