Periphery-core migrations and the global capitalist agriculture

Food production plays a structural role in capitalist accumulation as its value marks the cost of social reproduction by directly affecting the cost of labour, that is the principal source of surplus value. Producing cheap food at a systemic level has thus been key for every historical accumulation cycle where different strategies to ensure this process have been put in place. In the neoliberal phase, the Green Revolution of biotechnologies aimed at producing tons of cheap food but it failed because it was not applicable worldwide (an industrial agricultural sector was required) and did not eliminate the dependency on workers. While no new commodity frontiers have been appropriated, cheap food production in the global core has relied on the exploitation of migrant workers coming from the periphery. This chapter will show how the international mobility of migrant proletarians and their exploitation are central for the maintaining of global capitalism.