ABSTRACT
World agricultural production more than tripled after 1960 due to an expansion of the agricultural labor force, the continued extension of frontiers of land, water and natural resources, and the diffusion of new, productivity-enhancing technologies. The industrialization of farm production in the second half of the twentieth century shaped the present uneven global agricultural economy. The neoliberal agricultural and food regime was rooted in an industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex that dominated the temperate world and spread to significant portions of the tropics. The worlds of peasantries transformed dramatically after the 1970s. Neoliberal reforms reshaped agricultural production, trade systems and consumption patterns and ultimately rural and land-based livelihoods all over the world. The standard story is that reconfiguration of the global countryside was reinforced by two interrelated processes: de-agrarianization and de-peasantization. De-agrarianization refers to the shrinking share of small-scale and family farming in total agricultural activities, and the reduced role of rural societies and the ecology of the countryside.
