IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cnpexx/v19y2014i1p79-112.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System

Author

Listed:
  • Joseph Baines

Abstract

This paper outlines the contours of a new research agenda for the analysis of food price crises. By weaving together a detailed quantitative examination of changes in corporate profit shares with a qualitative appraisal of the restructuring in business control over the organisation of society and nature, the paper points to the rapid ascendance of a new power configuration in the global political economy of food: the Agro-Trader nexus. The agribusiness and grain trader firms that belong to the Agro-Trader nexus have not been mere 'price takers', instead they have actively contributed to the inflationary restructuring of the world food system by championing and facilitating the rapid expansion of the first-generation biofuels sector. As a key driver of agricultural commodity price rises, the biofuels boom has raised the Agro-Trader nexus's differential profits and it has at the same time deepened global hunger. These findings suggest that food price inflation is a mechanism of redistribution.

Suggested Citation

  • Joseph Baines, 2014. "Food Price Inflation as Redistribution: Towards a New Analysis of Corporate Power in the World Food System," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(1), pages 79-112, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:19:y:2014:i:1:p:79-112
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2013.768611
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13563467.2013.768611
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13563467.2013.768611?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nitzan, Jonathan & Bichler, Shimshon, 2009. "Capital as Power. A Study of Order and Creorder," EconStor Books, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157973.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Patricia Toledo & Roberto Duncan, 2024. "Forecasting food price inflation during global crises," Journal of Forecasting, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(4), pages 1087-1113, July.
    2. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2023. "Inflation as Redistribution. Creditors, Workers, Policymakers," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2023/01, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    3. Sylvie Bonny, 2017. "Corporate Concentration and Technological Change in the Global Seed Industry," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(9), pages 1-25, September.
    4. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2016. "Capitalizing Obesity," EconStor Preprints 157858, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics.
    5. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2023. "The Capital As Power Approach. An Invited-then-Rejected Interview with Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 2(2), pages 96-174.
    6. Fix, Blair, 2018. "Capitalist income and hierarchical power: A gradient hypothesis," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/06, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    7. Baines, Joseph, 2014. "The Ethanol Boom and the Restructuring of the Food Regime," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2014/03, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    8. McMahon, James, 2018. "Is Hollywood a Risky Business? A Political Economic Analysis of Risk and Creativity," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi, pages 1-24.
    9. Baines, Joseph, 2017. "Accumulating through Food Crisis? Farmers, Commodity Traders and the Distributional Politics of Financialization," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 24(3), pages 497-537.
    10. Baines, Joseph, 2015. "Fuel, Feed and the Corporate Restructuring of the Food Regime," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 42(2), pages 295-321.
    11. Fix, Blair, 2018. "Capitalist Income and Hierarchical Power," SocArXiv u8epv, Center for Open Science.
    12. Baines, Joseph & Hager, Sandy Brian, 2019. "Financial Crisis, Inequality, and Capitalist Diversity: A Critique of the Capital as Power Model of the Stock Market," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi.
    13. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2020. "Growing through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(5), pages 1-78.
    14. Nitzan, Jonathan & Bichler, Shimshon, 2018. "The CasP Project: Past, Present, Future," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(3), pages 1-39.
    15. Baines, Joseph, 2014. "Wal-Mart's Power Trajectory: A Contribution to the Political Economy of the Firm," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(1), pages 79-109.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jordan Brennan, 2013. "The Power Underpinnings, and Some Distributional Consequences, of Trade and Investment Liberalisation in Canada," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 18(5), pages 715-747, October.
    2. Joel Rabinovich & Niall Reddy, 2024. "Corporate Financialization: A Conceptual Clarification and Critical Review of the Literature," Working Papers PKWP2402, Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
    3. Fix, Blair, 2018. "The aggregation problem: Implications for ecological economics," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/03, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    4. Baines, Joseph & Hager, Sandy Brian, 2021. "Commodity Traders in a Storm: Financialization, Corporate Power and Ecological Crisis," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Latest Ar.
    5. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Public Debt as Corporate Power: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2015/01, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    6. Sheila C. Dow, 2014. "The role of belief in the debate over austerity policies," Working Papers PKWP1409, Post Keynesian Economics Society (PKES).
    7. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2021. "The Capitalist Degree of Immortality," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2021/06, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    8. McMahon, James, 2018. "Is Hollywood a Risky Business? A Political Economic Analysis of Risk and Creativity," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi, pages 1-24.
    9. Martin, Ulf, 2018. "The autocatalytic sprawl of pseudorational mastery (version 0.12)," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/04, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    10. Blair Fix, 2021. "How the rich are different: hierarchical power as the basis of income size and class," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 403-454, November.
    11. van Griethuysen, Pascal, 2012. "Bona diagnosis, bona curatio: How property economics clarifies the degrowth debate," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(C), pages 262-269.
    12. Fix, Blair, 2018. "A Hierarchy Model of Income Distribution," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2018/02, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    13. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2013. "Public Debt, Ownership and Power: The Political Economy of Distribution and Redistribution," EconStor Theses, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157991, September.
    14. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2020. "Growing through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(5), pages 1-78.
    15. Fix, Blair, 2021. "The Rise of Human Capital Theory," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 95, pages 29-41.
    16. Fix, Blair, 2015. "Putting Power Back Into Growth Theory," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(2), pages 1-37.
    17. Di Muzio, Tim & Dow, Matthew, 2017. "Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 30(1), pages 3-22.
    18. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Corporate Ownership of the Public Debt: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 13(3), pages 505-523.
    19. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2021. "Unbridgeable: Why Political Economists Cannot Accept Capital as Power," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue 95, pages 109-117.
    20. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103433, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:19:y:2014:i:1:p:79-112. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/cnpe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.