From Food Production to Commodity Production in Argentina’s Agricultural Sector

• Author: Tomás Palmisano
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782410
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 222, Vol. 45 No. 5, September 2018, 71–87

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18782410

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

71

From Food Production to Commodity Production in

Argentina’s Agricultural Sector

by

Tomás Palmisano

Translated by

Carlos Pérez

An analysis of the semiotic and productive transformation of food crops under

Argentina’s agribusiness model through a study of the diffusion of the term “commodity”

in the discourse produced/reproduced by the rural sections of the hegemonic media, com-

bined with statistical data that allow a dialogue between discourse and measurable quan-

tities, concludes that defining the Argentine countryside as a place for commodity

production is linked with increasing crop production for export that leads to the erosion of

food sovereignty and food security.

Un análisis de las transformaciones semióticas y productivas de los frutos de la tierra

bajo el modelo argentino de los agronegocios que examina la extensión del término com-

modity en los discursos producidos/reproducidos por las secciones rurales de los medios

gráficos de comunicación hegemónicos, entrecruzado con datos estadísticos para poner en

diálogo el nivel del discurso con el de las cantidades medibles, concluye que la consigna

que define al campo argentino como un lugar de producción de commodities se imbrica

con una tendencia a la intensificación de los cultivos orientados exclusivamente a la expor-

tación y la erosión de la soberanía y seguridad alimentaria.

Keywords: Agribusiness, Commodification, Financialization of agriculture, Food sov-

ereignty, Food security

One of the multiple impacts of the spread of agribusiness (Giarracca and

Teubal, 2008) in Argentina after the 1970s was the transformation of food produc-

tion into the production of commodities. This study focuses on the semiotic and

socio-productive changes that led to this transformation and hypothesizes that

this process was not simply nominal but involved a decline in the nation’s suit-

able food supply. I first present the theoretical-methodological guidelines of the

study and then go on to analyze the changes in Argentina’s agricultural sector

since the 1990s and the debates surrounding the developmental strategy under-

taken, which culminated in a capital-intensive model that consolidated the pro-

duction of wholesale commodities. Subsequently, I analyze the situation of the

food supply during and after the Argentine crisis of 2001–2002, which created

782410LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18782410Latin American PerspectivesPalmisano / FROM FOOD TO COMMODITY PRODUCTION IN ARGENTINA

research-article2018

Tomás Palmisano belongs to the rural studies working group at the Instituto Gino Germani,

Universidad de Buenos Aires. This article is based on his doctoral research. He is grateful for the

contributions of the LAP reviewers and the careful reading and suggestions of Julieta Godfrid.

Carlos Pérez teaches Chicano and Latin American studies at California State University, Fresno.

72 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

new discourses and policies that sought to confront the problem of food acces-

sibility. Finally, I critique these discourses and policies in terms of their negative

impact on the agricultural sector and on food security and food sovereignty.

THEORETICAL-METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The English word “commodity” has as its immediate Spanish translation the

word “merchandise” (mercancía), but in the past few decades its use in English

has been extended to include certain products that are primarily connected to

exports. Marx’s (1976: 131) Capital defines “commodity” as an object produced

by human labor, which is materialized in the object and thus permits an

exchange of use-values for other, social use-values. Following this proposition,

Polanyi defines a commodity as an object produced exclusively for the market

on the basis of the fiction of an equal exchange, reinforced by the role of money

as a general equivalent that interconnects all commercial relationships in “One

Big Market” (Polanyi, 1957: 72).

In general terms, the main production of the region of the Argentine pampas

has been destined for national and international exchange rather than domestic

consumption since the nineteenth century, but it was at the end of the 1990s that

journalists and academics began to speak in terms of commodities. Svampa

(2012: 16), for example, described “the Commodities Consensus” as “the new

political and economic order sustained by the boom in international prices of

the raw materials and consumer goods that are increasingly demanded by the

core countries and emerging powers.” For Svampa the increasing importance

of primary activities in the economy (primarily in foreign trade) and the inten-

sification of the dynamics of dispossession represented a type of extractive

development based on the overexploitation of natural resources and the expan-

sion of the area under production. This was articulated with an ambivalent and

contradictory narrative that interwove a neoliberal ideology with a progressive

neo-developmentalism that emphasized a critique of the consequences of com-

mercial and financial globalization, intensification of regional integration,

increased control over resources considered strategic, and income redistribu-

tion.

This dynamic, transcending the agrarian sector, allowed some writers to

define commodity production as “a type of financial activity that forms a

sphere of major investment and speculation with extraordinarily high levels

and rapid recovery of profits that mobilizes the futures markets and is directly

responsible for the increase in the prices of food and raw materials registered

on the world market during the past five years” (Composto and Navarro, 2012:

63). According to Teubal (2006), the transition to commodity production in the

Argentine countryside is based on the expansion of the technology of genetic

modification, the concentration and transnationalization of production, and

the increasing significance of financial capital and its almost exclusive invest-

ment in the export sector.

These definitions are directly connected to two features of the commodity.

The first is product homogenization, which allows for equivalence of the par-

ticular goods produced in various parts of the world (McMichael, 2009). Its