Agriculture Sector

Globalization

Globalization is a disputed concept, one used in both academic analysis and popular debates outside the academy. Despite these disputes, some consensus has emerged about the processes involved. The word global is a reference to scale and points to phenomena that are somehow “transplanetary,” to use Jan Aart Scholte's phrase. The spread of such transplanetary phenomena is not confined to the economic (as is often assumed in popular discourse), but includes political, cultural, military, legal, and nonhuman aspects as well. Most scholars acknowledge that the growth of transplanetary relationships has been uneven, with their density and speed of growth being more pronounced in wealthier countries than in poorer ones and differentially articulated spatially within all countries. There is nothing inevitable about globalizing processes; global historians have noted the growth and retraction of transplanetary phenomena over several centuries. If anything, doubts about claims to inevitability or unidirectionality in transplanetary integration have been renewed by the financial and economic crisis that intensified in 2008 and 2009.

Most scholars recognize that these transnational connections have accelerated in number, intensity, and extensity since the late 1970s. There are varying explanations for this apparent acceleration. At the heart of most explanations is dynamism in the transformation of capitalism propelled in substantial measure by the rapid growth of international financial markets and financial integration. The explosion of international finance and the financialization of capitalism have shaped the global order in ways not seen before. Capitalism is “global,” Manuel Castells writes, in that for the first time in history, it shapes social relationships across the whole planet.

The particularly global form of contemporary capitalism is linked in complex ways with innovations in information and communication technologies that have permitted some transplanetary connections to become “supraterritorial.” These connections are less strictly bound by physical location or nation-state boundaries than at any time since the collapse of an earlier highly integrated international economic order in 1914. Indeed, technology has likely made connections less restricted by the traditional territorial powers of states than ever before. These technologies have permitted more connections to become planet wide, and these global connections have intruded into the daily lives of more people than ever before (taking into account the caveats about inequalities in distribution noted earlier).

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