In his insightful and generous review, John Yasuda emerges as a skeptic of the possibility for agricultural policy to make a positive, sustainable contribution to authoritarian regime stability. He notes that even the complex web of stakeholders and institutions I describe as confronting dictators underestimates the danger of mass rural dissent or unrest in opposition to low food prices. Furthermore, my analysis is relatively static and does not emphasize the dynamic processes of rural–urban migration, landholding concentration, and the rise of politically powerful agribusinesses, which play themselves out in the course of development. In the end, he is left with a vision of the agricultural sector as the Achilles heel of developing autocracies, presenting impossible dilemmas that recurrently threaten regime stability.
My analysis provides much to support this view. I show that, with sufficient mobilization capacity, both the rural and urban sectors can endanger undemocratic regimes when policy jeopardizes their economic interests. However, the (mis-)management of the development process, and agriculture’s role within that process, is not only a vexing aspect of everyday authoritarian governance but is at the core of what James C. Scott calls the “huge development fiascoes” and “great human tragedies of the twentieth century” (Seeing Like a State, 1995, p. 3).
Recalling such disasters as Soviet collectivization also trains our attention on repression, which plays only a peripheral role in my study of prices for agricultural commodities and food. Yasuda rightly points out that I discount the threat of mass dissent and opposition in the countryside to authoritarian regime stability. I assume that the key actors in the rural sector are the landed elite because they can collectively threaten the regime, whereas unorganized peasants cannot. However, we cannot forget that one reason why landed elites are pivotal actors under autocracy is because they coalesce with the state to forcefully subdue rural unrest. Similarly, when extracting rents from the countryside, autocrats can discount peasant opposition if they control the means of coercion, as Stalin did in Ukraine in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the Chinese regime does today.
The dynamics of development, with rural–urban migration, concentration of landholdings, and the emergence of agribusiness, all further complicate the trade-off between rural and urban interests for dictators. However, rising output also mitigates the salience of food prices for the urban population and therefore the threat of popular opposition to pro-farmer policies. If dictators can successfully navigate the complex agricultural policy web in a middle-income economy, the dilemma of agricultural policy making fades, and higher food prices can funnel rents to newly emerging agribusiness elites, as in contemporary Russia. Unfortunately, this course is also likely to involve violence: I find that the most repressive authoritarian regimes do not face significantly greater urban opposition when they increase food taxes.
Collective action problems in the rural and urban sectors play a central role in my theory of the political economy of agriculture and authoritarian regime durability. However, as Yasuda perceptively suggests, further research is needed to explore how agricultural and food policy are linked to broader strategies of regime survival, including the use of force and coercion to defuse the mobilization capacity of threatening groups.
