Capital's Food Regime: Class Struggle, the State and Corporate Agriculture in India

by Jostein Jakobsen

Overview

Capital’s Food Regime traces India’s integration into the global food regime and reveals the consequences for the country’s different classes of labour.

The book is an in-depth study of agrarian transformations in contemporary India through the lens of food regime analysis. While the food regime approach has emphasized global-scale studies, this book breaks new ground in downscaling the approach to account for specific historical-geographical cases. Jakobsen thus develops an innovative Marxist approach to food regime analysis that challenges prevailing scholarly accounts in Agrarian Studies and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888905692
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	11/21/2025
Series:	Studies in Critical Social Sciences
Pages:	249
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Jostein Jakobsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. He works in agrarian studies and recently co-authored Authoritarian Populism and Bovine Political Economy in Modi’s India (Routledge, 2024).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Tables, Figures and Maps

1 Introduction
 1 Downscaling Food Regime Analysis

 2 Beyond Reifications

 3 The Structure of the Book


2 The Travels and Travails of the Global Food Regime
 1 The Emergence of Food Regime Analysis

 2 Established Food Regime Periodisation

 3 Debating the Third Food Regime

 4 Beyond the Third Food Regime?

 5 Steps towards the ‘Concrete’

 6 Conclusion


3 Agrarian Change in Postcolonial India
 1 The ‘Resurrection’ of Agrarian Scholarship

 2 Beyond ‘cul-de-sac’: Agrarian Questions and Transitions

 3 India’s Integral State

 4 Neoliberalising the Indian State

 5 Conclusion


4 Crisis, Counter-Movements, Class Analysis
 1 Food Regime Crisis

 2 Enter Polanyi

 3 India’s Agrarian Crisis

 4 Towards a Peasant Counter-Movement?
 4.1 The 2020–21 Farm Law Agitations in Context


 5 Conclusion


5 Neoliberalisation, the State and the Case of Right-to-Food
 1 Challenging ‘Progressive’ State Action in the Global Food Regime

 2 The State and Neoliberalism in Food Regime Analysis

 3 The Contradictions of the Neoliberalising State in India

 4 The Right-to-Food in India
 4.1 Short-Term Neoliberalisation

 4.2 Longer-Term Neoliberalisation


 5 The ‘Long’ Green Revolution, Crises and Commodity Frontiers

 6 Conclusion


6 The Hybrid Maize Frontier
 1 Hybrid Maize in the Global Food Regime

 2 Commodity Frontiers

 3 Methods and Field Site

 4 The Hybrid Maize Frontier Seen ‘from Above’
 4.1 The Maize Frontier in Karnataka


 5 The Hybrid Maize Frontier Seen ‘from Below’
 5.1 Local Markets and Dealers in Hybrid Maize

 5.2 The Making of the Boom

 5.3 The Rainfed Dystopia and Classes of Labour

 5.4 Maize Materiality

 5.5 The Multiple Use-Values of Maize


 6 Conclusion


7 Concluding Reflections
 1 The Contributions of this Book


References

Index