Agrarian Crises
Autor: Sebastião Matias de Carvalho Neto | Publicado: 2012-10-12T12:48:00-03:00

Agrarian Crises, =

economic crises of
overproduction in the agriculture of
capitalist countries. They are manifested
primarily in a relative overproduction of
agricultural goods and the accumulation of
enormous unsold stocks of them. At the
same time, there is an increase in the size
of farmers' debts (under modern conditions,
mostly to mortgage banks); many small
and medium producers are ruined.
Competition becomes more acute. Only larger
farms using up-to-date machinery and
technology can survive. Agrarian crises are
accompanied by accelerated concentration
and centralisation of production in capitalist
agriculture. The most general cause of
agricultural crises is exacerbation of the
basic contradiction of capitalism---that
between the social character of production
and the private form of appropriation.
Besides, each crisis has its own, specific
causes, connected with the changes in
agricultural production on the scale of the
world capitalist economy. One feature of
agrarian crises is that they are not strictly
periodic and are usually very prolonged.
The first agrarian crisis began in the early
1870s and lasted until the late 1890s; the
second lasted from 1920 and up to the
Second World War. After the war, in
1948, a new agrarian crisis began which
continued until the early 1970s. The main
reason of agrarian crises tending to be
so prolonged is the monopoly of private
ownership of the land and the existence
and growth of ground rent, which makes
agricultural produce more expensive and
therefore more difficult to sell. High ground
rent prevents enormous capital from being
used productively in agriculture. This
obstructs the rapid large-scale renewal of
fixed capital, the attainment of higher
labour productivity, a reduction of production
costs and, in the long run, of prime costs
of the goods, which would have facilitated
their sales. Another reason that agricultural
crises invariably last a long time is the
existence of a large number of small-scale
farmers who cannot reduce production to
get out of a crisis. For these reasons,
curtailment of production caused by a price drop
happens more slowly in agriculture than
in industry, if at all. Overproduction of
agricultural goods is relative: millions of
people in the capitalist world are starving.
With the advance of state-monopoly
capitalism, the capitalist state introduces
anti-crisis measures, curtailing agricultural
production and keeping agricultural prices
at a certain level whenever a tendency
appears for them to decline. State--
monopoly regulation of agriculture promotes
concentration of large-scale capitalist
production through the ruin of farmers and
poor peasants which converts them into
wage-labourers. Since World War II,
agriculture in the capitalist countries has
been growing increasingly intensive owing
to the widespread use of machinery and
chemicals, which has caused further
concentration of production and the mass ruin
and disappearance of small and
mediumsized farms. Even this, however, has failed
to prevent agrarian crises, since only an
end to capitalist production relations, as
has been shown by the experience of the
socialist countries, is capable of doing so.