Pigs, accumulation and cheap nature production

Abstract

The objective of this article is to explore the world-ecology of capitalist pork production, based on the theoretical approaches of Jason W. Moore, according to which the nature produced by capital implies overcoming the Cartesian distinction between the exploitation of labor and nature. This article focuses on the historical moment of the constitution of a neoliberal and global regime of the pork meat industry. Between 1950-1970, the intensive diet restructured the livestock production of pigs in Spain and many other geographies of the world-economy. This, in turn, laid the foundations for the transition to the corporate or global regime (1980 to the present), according to a new world-ecology of production of “capitalist pigs”.
The first part the ecology-world of the pork industry is approached on the basis of the periodification of food regimes proposed by the sociologist Philip McMichael. An approach to the main features of pork production and trade is made in order to grasp its global organisation. The vertical integration of the different productive links, as well as the concentration of the productive units of each link in the chain (feed, producers, slaughterhouses, meat industry, distribution), are the most characteristic aspects of the global chain of pork. In Spain, this restructuring began in the 1960s, with the crisis of traditional livestock farming and the integration of farms in the compound feed production complex. This vertical integration introduced a livestock model strongly dependent on imported inputs (cereals, livestock varieties, etc.). Since the mid-1980s, with the entry of Spain into the EEC and the beginning of the export orientation, the slaughterhouses and the meat industry have gradually assumed a leading position in the chain. Finally, with the turn of the century, the meat industry and large distribution have formed the main nucleus of the integrated pork chain.
In the second part, following the “Four cheaps” approach of Jason W. Moore, we show how pork meat has historically been constituted as a cheap food, in the context of the expansion of an internal demand derived from the integration of the working classes in the new norm of mass consumption. We take Spain as an empirical reference, and specifically the Region of Murcia as a new productive pole of pork. The frontiers of cheap labor and cheap nature are analyzed to detect the sources of unpaid work that have made capitalist valorization possible.
On the side of the cheap labor frontier, the vertical integration of pig farming operations in meat factories is analyzed as a historical moment for the expropriation of peasant knowledge, making it available to the new business regime of the "family farm". This entails, moreover, a huge amount of unpaid work time since in the “peasant habitus” there was hardly any disposition towards the rational calculation of work time, the preference instead being non-quantified work. The frontier paradigm of cheap work will be women from integrated livestock farms, whose unpaid work will be socially invisible and without legal recognition as “family help”. Subsequently, the entry of Spain into the European Economic Community and the export reorientation of pork production has led to a profound restructuring of the historical nature towards the disappearance of the family farm and the emergence of "large farms." This represents a contraction of the “great frontier” of cheap labor. The rational calculation of abstract labor time is now fully incorporated, the organic composition of capital rises considerably with all kinds of technological innovations, and the appropriation of unpaid labor finally decreases. Now cheap labor has to be obtained through the wage ratio. Macro-farms and, in general, family farms, have replaced family work with salaried work.
In terms of cheap nature, capitalist power manifests itself in the appropriation and grabbing of land to produce soybeans and other oilseed plants necessary for the production of cheap alimentation for pigs (compound feed), and also the role of science through the huge amounts of investment in the research and development of high-yielding varieties of pork. In our research in the Region of Murcia we have addressed another cheap frontier that is crucial for the expansion of large pig farms and the management of polluting waste emissions. It is defined by the search for rural lands with low demographic density and availability of natural resources (water and soil) for the location of large farms outside the traditional locations of pig farms, where a high degree of saturation has been reached.
The article concludes by arguing that highlighting the sources of unpaid work that underpin the spectacular growth figures for pork raises numerous uncertainties and questions that could be gathered around Jason W. Moore's diagnosis of the capitalist crisis: the exhaustion of human and extra-human natures in the capitalist world-ecology. The article provides numerous indications of this exhaustion. With regards cheap labor, the macro-farms show how its end came about through de-peasantization (also that of female labor as family help in the small farm), while the workers in the meat factories become exhausted (physically and psychologically) and try to regulate their working conditions so that the reproduction of their workforce is part of the salary relationship (breaks and other limitations to the rhythms of the working day, denunciation of false self-employed workers, collective agreement, etc.) .
Regarding cheap nature (pigs, compound feed, soybean plantations, etc.), there is also evidence of depletion: there is increasing social resistance to the expansion of macro-farms in rural areas outside of pig production (or that they are exploited very little), given the problem of waste and polluting emissions that characterise the farms; animal welfare regulations try to "civilize" the intensification of the working rhythms of pigs; the housing and large concentration of pigs in farms propitiate the appearance of viruses of rapid circulation throughout the capitalocene as has been shown by swine flu; finally, pig alimentation prices have risen sharply since 2007 and they are expected to continue to rise and fluctuate.
The research work underlying this article is based on numerous qualitative interviews with social actors directly or indirectly involved in this problem (politicians, ranchers, trade unionists, workers, environmentalists, neighborhood leaders, etc.), as well as observations on the ground and the use of secondary sources (official statistics, corporate web pages, official documents, etc.).