The history of agriculture in developed countries over the past seventy years is first and foremost a political history because of the intense interplay between farming and the state. Indeed, it is difficult to think of any other ‘industry’ which has been so comprehensively regulated by the state, over such a long period of time, as agriculture. Even neo-liberal governments in OECD countries have accepted the political compact between farming and the state on account of the ‘exceptionalism’ of agriculture. The rationale for its exceptional status might vary from country to country, but it invariably has something to do with one major aspect that distinguishes agriculture from all other industries: the fact that we ingest its products. In other words, the centrality of agriculture to human health is far and away the most important reason why many countries have sought to ensure a measure of food security by protecting their national farm sectors through permutations of production subsidies, price supports, and import controls—the origins of which stretch back to the 1930s in the case of the US and as far back as the nineteenth-century Corn Laws in the case, for example, of the UK. Agricultural history can be read in a number of different ways. The most polarized readings are the productivist and the ecological interpretations. The productivist discourse, which emphasizes the phenomenal productivity gains that have been achieved since the Second World War, is essentially a story of unalloyed economic success due to a tripartite alliance of state, science, and farmers. The ecological discourse, by contrast, points not to the economic benefits of the post-war productivity miracle, but to the social and environmental costs of agricultural intensification. In the US, where intensive farming practices are most advanced, such problems as soil erosion and animal welfare were attributed to the regulatory regime operated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which actively encouraged unsustainable farming practices. Similar connections have been made in Europe, where the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was deemed to be the main culprit.
