Detail from the cover of Issue 3, 2021

Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.

Issue 3 : In this issue of Commodity Frontiers, contributors take up issues relating to animals, livestock, and livestock production through a commodity frontiers lens. Fueled by increasing (local, national, imperial, and global) livestock production “developments” and demands for livestock products—most notably (but not only) meat—and reinforced by technoscientific innovations, new livestock frontiers have emerged and spread across the globe. With livestock frontiers we mean both processes and sites in which animals are bred, reared, cured, traded, and commodified in novel ways, by re-allocating land, labour, capital, knowledge, and other resources, to enhance productivity and maximize gains. By doing so, livestock frontiers have changed human-animal and interhuman social relations, economic systems, and ecological landscapes in various and often unintended ways. Furthermore, livestock frontiers have become deeply entangled with frontiers in agriculture, securing the production of fodder crops such as soy and corn. These changes include, but are not limited to, the industrialization of livestock production that we discussed above.

This edition features several interviews, including Maarten Vanden Eynde's interview with Christien Meindertsma, the Dutch designer who has researched and wrote a book called Pig 05049 which relates the many consumer products made from a pig called 05049. They discuss Meindertsma’s motivations for making the book and reflect on some of the challenges of promoting and brining about social change regarding meat (and other) consumption.

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Fragment from the introduction by Mindi Schneider and Samuël Coghe

" The word "livestock" itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts—live and stock—also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things breathe, eat, defecate, move, sleep, grow, reproduce, connect with others, get sick, die. To be stock, on the other hand, is economic; stocks are things held and exchanged. In capitalist relations specifically, livestock (and livestock parts) are owned, quantified, rationalized, commodified, specialized, simplified, contracted, accumulated, speculated upon, traded, sold.

Ongoing attempts to make living things into stocks, or commodities, are rife with contradictions and impossibilities. Fundamentally, biological bodies are barriers to accumulation. The unruliness of living stocks—including their biological needs, the
time they take to grow and mature, their propensities toward genetic diversity, and their vulnerabilities in environments where diversity is strictly denied—make them particularly difficult to standardize and simplify for the market. Just as Karl Polanyi (1944) unveiled the fiction of land, labor, and money as commodities, animals must join this list. (...)

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