Book Review Forum

Abstract

Given the attempts within human geography over the last 30 years to disassemble academic boundaries, agricultural geographers now appear to be a rare breed. My reading of Stefan Ouma’s book, more research monograph, came from this endangered agricultural geography perspective! I was transported by this volume back to the mid-1980s when a radical new way of thinking about agriculture emerged in geography; that of the modified political economy perspective (‘modified’ to take account of agency; a nuance that has not always been fully appreciated – see Marsden et al., 1996). Co-authored by Richard Munton, whom Ouma describes at one point (34) as ‘probably the leading scholar on assetization of farmland in the United Kingdom at that time’, the ‘buzz word’ was the ‘restructuring’ of agriculture (Marsden et al., 1986). The central focus for the approach was the family labour-based farm and its prospects for survival; one with deeper roots to Kautsky’s ‘Agrarian Question’ itself. This arose in the context of a fierce industrialisation of agriculture, a phenomenon proceeding at pace and attracting increasing research attention from agricultural geographers; as testified by the collection of works in the first half of Healey and Ilbery’s (1985) book on The Industrialisation of the Countryside. Features discussed included vertical integration of production, a managerialist approach to farming on the ground, and, crucially, the subsumption (both direct and indirect) of factors of production (including land) by industrial capitals. Many are now raised again in Ouma’s book. To cut a long story short, the general conclusion from the application of a modified political economy approach to agriculture at this time was that there would be no ‘disappearing middle’. Farm families had survived, and would continue to survive, in business, in the UK at least, because it was in the interests of corporate capitals to avoid owning land and tying up money in something fixed with unattractive ‘long capital turnover time’ (Goss et al., 1979: 19). Having solved that hitherto stubborn problem, agricultural geographers subsequently became distracted away from agrarian industrialisation into the realms of: farm diversification (eventually leading to whole new theorisations, including my pet hate of ‘post-productivism’! – see Evans et al., 2002); agri-environmental policy; and the broader ‘geography of food’ (Atkins, 1988). But, how does this saunter down memory lane relate to Ouma’s book? For me, and after more than three decades, it essentially picks up where we left off with the industrialisation of agriculture. In other words, it represents the type of investigative work agricultural geographers should, and possibly would, have done next if focus had been maintained on this theme. Ouma himself declares that he was inspired by Worthington’s (1979) work for the Countryside Commission (a UK Government Book review forum