Harriet Friedman's "The Political Economy of Food: A Global Crisis," a 1993 essay published in the New Left Review among other venues, launched a number commentaries on what she calls new agricultural countries (NACs). Countries like Brazil and Thailand, considered third world countries by Western policy makers, developed distributed systems of food and agriculture that modified and even defied the dominant U.S. mercantile practice of producing food surpluses, subsidizing domestic agriculture, and using embargoes to enforce third world countries' dependence on U.S. transnational corporations. Brazil, she explains, "shifted the focus of domestic policy from agricultural subsidies to agroindustry, which increased the value of commodities and did not create surpluses" (46). A shift in "focus," Brazil's emergence as a key global player in exporting value added soy meal marks collective shift in perception among Brazilians.
The first shift in perception occurs when collectives refuse and critique the vision of the Green Revolution, the view that third world countries "lack" Western technology--genetically modified crops and chemical fertilizers--and, thus, they require intervention from Monsanto. By rejecting this position of dependance, NACs open up new visions of market dynamics. The second shift might be called distributed visuality, "a strategic mix of agricultural settlement, credit, and taxation policies to create an intensive livestock sector based on nationally produced grain and soya." Defined against the background of transnational corporate agriculture, distributed visuality invite actors to envision the economic world-system as a decentralized network not as a system reliant on any single country, institution, or rule.
There is no governing equation to economic health, especially in terms of the Green Revolution. The sublimation of genetically modified crops and laboratory produced fertilizers, perceived as the solution to world hunger, has proven only to impede in the development of local agricultural practices. Local environments, for instance, cannot sustain nutrient and water demands of genetically modified plants. Instead, each actor--that is, each country--holds a unique relationship to the world-system, the emergent geopolitical whole. Exploiting this relationship and the capacities hidden within a country's agricultural system begins with a new vision, seeing the collective body as capable of more actions than the dominant food regime would allow.
