Cimarron County, Oklahoma, USA, 1936. Public Domain.

In a famous passage of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, a tenant farmer and a man on a tractor debate the bank’s demand that the latter demolish the former’s house and drive him from the land his family had cultivated for generations:

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you’re wrong there – quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

The “monster” that men created, but could not control, did not die with the Great Depression. It continued to resurface, assuming different names and forms across time and changing economic and political contexts. According to current neoliberal beliefs, for example, there is a growing need for refined theoretical methodologies, technical procedures, and privatisation policies to develop what are increasingly known as effective ‘agriculture value chains’: i.e. the integrated range of value adding activities that theoretically should link farmers to new global or regional markets, improve and ‘rationalise’ agricultural production, and keep prices low for a growing global population.

As often happens, however, the naming of a concept like ‘agriculture value chain’ carries with it unintended meanings and a certain degree of bitter irony. For those who have dedicated themselves to the study of old and new slaveries and forms of labour exploitation in the agrarian sector, for example, the word ‘chain’ acquires obviously a very different connotation. Of course, there are strong differences between the iron chains that trapped men and women during the Middle Passage and the ‘immaterial’ economic chains that oblige present-day, formally ‘free’ small farmers to sell their products, their labour, and often their land at miserable prices. The labour conditions of slaves in the American plantation system of the past and those of (migrant) agricultural labourers ‘freely’ choosing to work for landowners today are also different. Yet, because slavery in the past was so often linked to agricultural work, the current expression ‘agricultural value chain’ evokes a number of questions about who today possesses the power to forge, enlarge, and hold these chains, to make huge profits out of them, and to trap others within them. Slavery has been formally abolished everywhere, but capitalism has found new ways to ensure a supply of cheap labour at its disposal.

Who controls the chains?

Part three of Shadows of slavery: refractions of the past, challenges of the present seeks to provide answers for these questions as they relate to global agriculture – from Tanzania to the Dominican Republic, from Italy to Costa Rica, from Chad to Madagascar. Its contributors discuss the working conditions, the dynamics of exploitation, and the degree of unfreedom for all those trapped on the wrong side of local and global agriculture value chains. All contributions draw on extensive fieldwork, and explore individual and collective histories to shed light on the changes and continuities of labour exploitation in agrarian sectors around the world.

The cases of migrants, small farmers, women, and sharecroppers allow us to compare how past and present interlace across a variety of contexts to produce labour exploitation and social marginalisation. The causes have to do with neoliberal reforms and large-scale investments; the political and legal frameworks transforming migrants into easily exploitable manpower; the gendered nature of labour exploitation; the multifaceted forms of debt linking small farmers to local and global markets; and the legacies of past forms of slavery that continue to exclude individuals and groups from landownership. Only by considering the articulation of these different causes can we understand how old chains broke and new ones appeared, how forms of labour exploitation and bondage reformed after the formal abolition of slavery, and how current processes of capital accumulation chain people to lives very different from the positive images found in neoliberal rhetoric.

By considering the case of a privatised estate in Tanzania, for example, Joanny Belair explores the collateral socio-economic impacts that neoliberal reforms have had on local peasants. Going beyond the self-promoting images of a big private company working in the sugar industry – which emphasises the company’s attention to employee needs as well as its overall importance as a regional employment generator – Belair demonstrates how workers must face exploitative labour conditions, social insecurity, and chains of indebtedness, while villagers are exposed to increasing land dispossession. Belair questions whether those at the bottom of the local social hierarchy truly benefit from large-scale agricultural investments. Answering her own question, she demonstrates how locale elites seize new opportunities while the most vulnerable Tanzanian citizens bear the social costs of these investments.

The pains associated with neo liberal reforms of the agricultural sector are also described by Raúl Zecca Castel in his account of the working conditions of Haitian labourers who migrated to the Dominican Republic. Zecca Castel provides a vivid picture of how the recently privatised Dominican sugarcane plantations profit from the increased socio-economic vulnerability of migrants, who constitute a cheap and unorganised workforce. The Dominican government, which from the 1950s to the 1990s promoted the migration of unskilled labour from Haiti, is now denying citizenship to thousands of those initial migrants’ descendants, effectively pushing them into the ranks of irregular migrants who make up the plantation workforce.

The exploitation of migrant labour is at the centre of Irene Peano’s contribution. By analysing industrial tomato production in Foggia, Italy, Peano explores the formal and informal methods of controlling migrants that structure local dynamics of exploitation. In this context, asylum-seeker reception centres, migrant detention centres, shantytowns, labour camps, and prisons contribute to form a ‘special economic zone’ that disciplines, governs, and extracts profit from migrant labour. At the same time, Peano points out that containment and control are never total, and draws attention to the forms of resistance and self-organisation typical of these spaces.

Despite the increasing importance of migrants, and their exploitation, for global agriculture, the citizenship divide is not the only axis worth considering. Drawing on her analysis of sexual harassment in the Costa Rican banana industry, Layla Zaglul Ruiz shows how gender influences the exploitation and vulnerability of labourers. She describes how forms of male domination are translated onto the shop floor of the banana farm, and how gendered forms of exploitation interlace with hierarchy in the workplace.

Dynamics of exploitation are furthermore not limited to employer/employee relations. They also extend to small farmers who control their own land but lose control of production. Valerio Colosio explores the debt trap in which farmers of the Guéra region of Chad find themselves when obliged to sell their products in disadvantageous conditions. This makes them vulnerable to traders who loan them cereals during the hungry season with high interest rates, and then claim back a much larger part of the harvest later on. However, this scenario is still considered by farmers as preferable to “working for someone else”, a condition perceived as unworthy for the household head and perilous to the following harvest. As Colosio points out, the unequal relation between farmers and traders is part of a longer history that, after the colonial abolition of slavery, transformed precolonial, slave raiding elites into a powerful class of traders able to exert a substantial degree of control over agricultural production.

The last contribution from Marco Gardini explores the post-slavery context of the Malagasy highlands that sees landless slave descendants continuing to work for former masters – a situation frequently seen by both sides as ‘win-win’. Sharecropping agreements, however, also reinforce power structures, economic inequalities, and the re-production of statutory distinctions. When that system breaks down, and former masters start to slip from their dominant position, what was once a ‘win-win’ situation has a tendency to quickly turn against the sharecroppers. The ‘win-win game’ rhetoric hides the fact that sharecropping agreements contribute to reinforce the social prestige of landowners at the expense of the tenants, often expanding the stigma of slave origin even to people who are not slave descendants.

Taken together, these contributions provide fresh ethnographic material for an analysis from below of contemporary human bondage in the agricultural sector, and of the different, often hidden tactics that subordinated people use to renegotiate their marginalised positions, reinforce their rights, or simply struggle to survive. These stories demonstrate how similar dynamics affect very different, albeit increasingly interconnected, places, and remind us that an exploitative relation is never a private or circumstantiated problem, but always a collective history. This is as crucial today as it was in 1939, when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath:

“One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here ‘I lost my land’ is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate – 'We lost our land.’ The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first ‘we’ there grows a still more dangerous thing: ‘I have a little food’ plus ‘I have none.’ If from this problem the sum is ‘We have a little food’; the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. ‘Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mother’s blanket - take it for the baby’. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning from ‘I’ to ‘we.’

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I’, and cuts you off forever from the ‘we’."