ABSTRACT
This chapter places my findings within long processes. The small peasant approach deepened rural capitalism in non-industrialized countries, inequality and the persistence of hunger. It failed to expand many multinationals’ business and contributed to a new accumulation model with little clear-cut proletarianization and industrialization, different from what was planned. Thus, world capitalism is less homogeneous and centralized than many assume. The 1970s were at the end of a long crisis of poverty and hunger, ca. 1940–1980. This means that the 1980s were not everywhere a period of impoverishment and ‘lean’ statehood. Rural poverty alleviation remained a major goal of development policies in and after the 1980s. I identify five global waves of famines from the 1870s to the 2010s (caused by local production problems, the world grain market’s functioning, international power hierarchies, sometimes in war, and national and regional socioeconomic crises), often occurring at the end of an A-phase of Kondratiev cycles. Responses were liberal, especially by forcing hungry people into paid work and market relations, thereby reproducing part of the causes of the hunger crises in the first place, as the small peasant approach also did.
