California: The Parallel Worlds of Rival Agri-food Paradigms

The aim of this chapter is to explore the nature of the contemporary agri-food worlds—the conventional and the alternative—in California. More specifically, we ask: what are the variations within each world? What sources of contestation are leading to (1) convergence and potential appropriation by the dominant agri-industrial complex; or (2) separation and real ecological modernization; or (3) a sort of coexistence and spatial multifunctionality and regulation of the two systems? In this chapter we make some preliminary assessment of the agri-industrial pathway that distinctively marks out California as one of the most highly productivist agrarian regions in the world. This region has applied successive waves of capitalist and endogenous development, with or against a series of ‘obstacles’. As the literature has traditionally emphasized, the history of agri-food in California is the history of a tension within a regional brand of agrarian capitalism continually wrestling with its own contradictions between economic accumulation and social legitimacy. The chapter first examines the historical and contemporary dynamics of the agri-industrial paradigm as it has played itself out in this bountiful but peculiar agrarian space. Specifically, it describes how the agri-food system in California has (quite successfully) attempted to overcome ‘the obstacles’ of what we term ‘first’, ‘second’, and ‘third’ natures. More so than any other region, California has developed since 1849 an agri-industrial dynamic that continues to exploit its natural and social conditions in ways that sustain an exceptional and endogenous form of ‘agri-cultural economy’. After exploiting the natural resource ‘initial endowments’ through a very effective ‘extractive’ mode (i.e. ‘first nature’), the agri-industrial paradigm assembles a specific form of fictitious circulation of capital, goods, and services. This creates a ‘second nature’: a longstanding framework of flows of capital and labour, infrastructure and technologies, which provide a superstructure for the state to overcome the well-documented obstacles of labour and production time in the agri-food sphere. However dominant or celebrated this peculiar model becomes at the end of the twentieth century, we see another set of profound challenges ahead. These are ‘third nature’ obstacles which were in part created out of the very success of a century of Californian agri-industrialism.