Producing Cheap Food and Labour: Migrations and Agriculture in the Capitalistic World-Ecology

Abstract

Through the perspective of world-ecology, one of the most recent approaches in international relations, we aim to analyse global capitalism as an ecological project based on the appropriation of human and extra-human nature oriented to support capital accumulation process. Agriculture and its labour force occupy a central role in maintaining the world-system in which global chains, international migrations and centre-periphery relationships interact. This paper shows how global processes occur at this intersection. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the analysis of the current world-system through this innovative approach, developed mainly by Jason W. Moore, and then show how the world-system’s structure and its crisis have articulated a highlyinternationalized production model whose most significant effect has been the generation of large migrations of cheap labour across the planet. It is also proposed to descend to the local context to highlight examples because the organization of work at this territorial scale is representative of global agricultural production.

Keywords

• world-ecology
• migrations
• capitalism
• agriculture
• seasonal workers