Introduction

In recent decades, the penetration of the financial economy into the dynamics of everyday life has involved a significant ‘value extraction’ process, extraction that is more evident in those sectors dealing with the creation and distribution of goods and services consumed by the whole population that are basic for individuals and families. These processes concern not only private enterprises, whose focus is to chase financial accumulation strategies, to the detriment of wages (Salento and Tafuro, 2018), but also public authorities providing health services, childcare and care for the elderly, education, food supply and distribution, water, gas, electricity, phone networks and sewers. All these elements are the main essentials of material life (Braudel, 1981) and deal with an area recently defined as the foundational economy (Bentham et al, 2013; Barbera et al, 2016; Froud et al, 2018, 2019).

The privatization of essential sectors such as these facilitated what is called the ‘financialization of welfare’ (Caselli and Dagnes, 2018). In some specific settings such as old age or health, this has caused new forms of inequalities among families or individuals (Dagnes, 2018).

The consequences of this economic model also concern agriculture and the food distribution networks connected to them. In this environment – especially in peripheral areas – the contradictions implicit in the neoliberal dynamic are revealed: rural farming becomes gradually marginalized and industrialized agricultural jobs increasingly unstable, edging ever closer towards exploitation. This is what van der Ploeg called a ‘squeeze on agriculture’, and he described its consequences as follows: