Investigating Agricultural Labour through Commodity Frontiers, Environment, and Im/mobility

Most human migrations have been undertaken by people dedicated to agriculture. Whereas the importance of agricultural workers seemed to be fading in favor of industrial wage workers all over the world at the dawn of the Glorious Thirty, the former have reappeared in greater numbers with the latest food regime. Like those of our ancestors, today’s societies need peasants as the primary makers of commodity frontiers which they anticipated and shaped by reworking the relations between commodities, mobility, labor, and the environment. This paper contributes to the understanding of the scales of global capitalism by addressing these relations from a historical perspective. In first place, it suggests that the problem of the deadly cost of the expansion and shifting of commodity frontiers can be resolved only with an approach that scrutinizes humans’ consumption habits and lifestyle. Secondly, it proposes to explore the making of commodity frontiers through the respective sites of immobilization – voluntarily established or contingently emerging from the mobilization of workers – as well as workers’ means of escaping such immobilization. In third place, it explores the nexus of health, food, and labor by considering agricultural production of commodity as toxic frontiers against which workers' unions have historically organized to protect their safety as occurred in 1970s Arizona. Finally, it sheds light on the ways in which the global scale of capitalism has definitely met the micro scale of particles because of the toxicity of twenty-first century commodity frontiers.