ABSTRACT
Since the onset of the colonial era, food and agricultural systems across the world have undergone continual reorganization as they have been incorporated into capitalist market relationships. Central to this reorganizing process has been the global division of labour, based originally in an exchange of metropolitan manufactures for colonial primary products. The specialization in extractive raw material and agricultural commodity production imposed on the colonies integrated rural social systems within the broader market and political relations of the world economy. Peasants and labourers in the colonies subsidized metropolitan expansion through their labour and products. Producing regions and their communities of support thus became participants in a global dynamic. The state of Third World agricultures today cannot be understood outside of this worldhistorical context.
