George Ballis's california dream: the struggle over land, water, food, and power in the Golden State (1960-1995)

• Grant number: 21/11294-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: January 01, 2023
• End date: June 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of America
• Principal Investigator: Clifford Andrew Welch
• Grantee: Clifford Andrew Welch
• Host Investigator: Madeleine Fairbairn
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz), United States

Abstract

California has been an agro-industrial leader for a century and a half. From the 1960s to 1980s, however, the sector faced disruptive challenges from labor, land, consumer, and environmental opposition groups, emerging from crisis to restructure agrarian capitalism, establishing agribusiness practices that influenced the sector globally. The objective of this project is to examine its disputes with a key opposition group in order to construct a history of the recent transformation of California agriculture at the birth of the neoliberal era and its implications for agriculture's globalization process. That group was called National Land for People (NLP) and it was led by George and Maia Ballis until 1984. Its campaign to force the implementation of the federal Reclamation Act of 1902 is a textbook case of the mobilization of social technology to achieve radical reforms in the context of the capitalist system. For eight decades, the 1902 agrarian reform law had promised to protect small-scale family farming wherever federal government dollars were used to enrich the land with water in the vast arid regions of the seventeen western states. But these promises were gutted by a 1982 revision of the law, causing the NLP to morph into the Sun Mountain Research and Education Center, which led it to adopt new but less effective technologies of social influence. By the 1990s, corporations and financiers rather than farmers consolidated control over much of California's land and this model increasingly characterized food production in other parts of the world, such as Brazil. Through the story of conflict between a socio-territorial movement and large farm supporters, the project intends to contribute to the history of agrarian capitalism's recent transformations toward a global corporate food regime. (AU)