Will there be any mention of the 3 billion peasant farmers that constitute nearly half of the world’s population at Cop28? According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, “about two-thirds of the developing world’s 3 billion rural people live in about 475 million small farm households, working on land plots smaller than 2 hectares.” Are they all supposed to be condemned to a life of modern day peasantry before capital eventually comes and eliminates their livelihood?

The question raised here is precisely whether this trend will continue to operate with respect to the three billion human beings still producing and living in the framework of peasant societies, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Indeed, what would happen henceforth, should ‘agriculture and food production’ be treated as any other form of production submitted to the rules of competition in an open–deregulated market, as decided in principle at the Doha conference (November 2001)? Would such principles foster the acceleration of production?

Indeed, one can imagine some 20 million new additional modern farmers producing whatever the three billion present peasants can offer on the market beyond their own (poor) subsistence. The conditions for the success of such an alternative would necessitate the transfer of important pieces of good land to the new agricultural producers (and these lands have to be taken out of the hands of present peasant societies), access to capital markets (to buy equipment) and access to the consumer markets. Such agriculturalists would indeed ‘compete’ successfully with the billions of present peasants. But what would happen to these peasants?

Under the circumstances, admitting the general principle of competition for agricultural products and foodstuff, as imposed by the WTO, means accepting that billions of ‘non-competitive’ producers be eliminated within the short historic time of a few decades. What would become of these billions of human beings, the majority of whom are already the poorest among the poor, but who feed themselves with great difficulty? Worse still, what would be the plight of one-third of this population (since three-quarters of the underfed population of the world are rural dwellers)? In 50 years’ time, no relatively competitive industrial development, even in the fanciful hypothesis of a continued growth of 7 per cent annually for three-quarters of humanity, could absorb even one third of this reserve…

What was always overlooked was that capitalism, while it solved the agrarian question in its centres, did so by creating a gigantic agrarian question in the peripheries, which it cannot solve but through the genocide of half of humankind.

• The Agrarian Question Beyond Neoliberalism: Essays on the Peasantry, Sovereignty and Socialism