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This paper explores some features of the development paths taken by Brazil and China (two member countries of the BRICS grouping) in the current context of the crisis of neoliberal globalization and transformation of the political and economic world order. The authors use Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ thesis to argue that newly emerging rural development (RD) dynamics in China and Brazil are part of a protective ‘countermovement’, driven by actors and institutions responding to the contradictions of the concentration and internationalization of agrifood systems. However, thedirectionand scope of these countermovements are still open; their transformative potential should be viewed in Gramsci’s terms as a struggle for hegemony the outcome of which depends on the concrete ‘balance of social forces’. First, the paper characterizes the impacts of China’s rise on Brazil’s development, which subsequently found its economy under threat of reprimarization and deindustrialization. The paper then sketches some stylized facts of production and consumption within the Brazil–China soy–meat complex, a key element of the current global food regime, with a focus on corporate control of the soy–meat value chain, and its negative consequences. Finally, the paper identifies the key roles that actors and institutions linked to peasants and family farmers are playing in the RD dynamics of each country. Although China and Brazil represent two very different realities, the comparison shows that critical rural and agrifood issues are indeed moving onto the centre stage of the contemporary ‘double movement’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many Americans believe free trade destroyed the U.S. industrial base, and blame foreign workers for taking their jobs. During World War II, Keynes had similar misgivings about the effect of postwar free trade on Britain’s economy. Yet for Keynes, economic forces are never inevitable, and capital rather than labor was the cause of trouble. His 1941 proposal for an International Clearing Union suggested capital controls, forced creditor adjustment, and an international fiat reserve as remedies for deindustrialization. This framework channeled financing toward production rather than speculation, leading to a rising standard of living for workers. A counterfactual with balance of payments data for the United States and China since 1982 suggests his ICU would have prevented U.S. deindustrialization, while yet permitting export-led growth in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]