Understanding CF: CF as a Strategy to Enable Dispossession-Free Accumulation Strategy

In this chapter, the author argues that capitalist accumulation can indeed occur without dispossession. Here, David Harvey’s theory of Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD) that has been accepted by many progressive thinkers as, indeed, the dominant form of accumulation under the mantra of neoliberalism backed by the state policies, both in developed or in developing economies, has been critiqued. Further, an alternative is provided where it is shown how a class of petty capitalist farmers (petty, in comparison to corporate capital) is encouraged to maintain its private property (land) and to enter into commercial contracts with big productive capital/industrial (multinational) companies to deliver certain farm products at a predetermined price. These companies have no intention to dispossess the farmers, and they do not have to. As a structure of multiple class actors (big business; capitalist farmers; rural labour), contract farming is a process that represents centralisation (and concentration) of capital and points to the ways in which agrarian and industrial capitals are intertwined. An important fact that emerges from this narrative is that CF is about capital accumulation without dispossession of the farmer—i.e., without disturbing the farmer–land relation. This is a previously published paper.