ABSTRACT
World-system scholars are well aware that no matter how the elusive term “sustainable” might be defined, conventional capitalist agriculture is anything but (Foster andMagdoff 2000). While for millennia social groups had indeed found ways to overproduce, to overuse, to ignore (often at their peril) the intimate links between agriculture and surrounding ecosystems (Chew 2007; Moore 2003), the capitalist conversion of agriculture revolutionized the scale of the flows of food, and other natural resources from the countryside to cities (Foster 1994, 1999). This process has led to various “crises of the soil” throughout modern history (Foster and Burkett 2000: 420). Indeed, agriculture is the classic example of how indiscriminately applying technology solely to maximize yields can cause socio-ecological destruction. For in agriculture, all the usages of the term “yield” are brought into play: yields in the sense that technologies are designed to expropriate from the soil (and from farmworkers) all its vitality; yields in the sense that the goal is to generate as much product as possible; yields in the sense that the product is a harvest, a living crop for consumption; and yields in the sense that the desired outcome is maximum economic gains.
