The Small Farm Future Blog

One billion hungry…or how much is enough?

Posted on April 27, 2013 | 2 Comments

I recently finished Gordon Conway’s book One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed The World? and offer below a few thoughts, since the book raises many issues close to the theme of this blog.

Conway is an agricultural ecologist who’s been heavily involved in agricultural development work throughout his long career and has held all sorts of senior positions at places like the Rockefeller Foundation – so he’s well qualified to write on the subject, but also has a few blindspots. Unlike me in both respects, then.

Conway’s basic story is that more people go hungry today than ever (although slightly less proportionately than before), that most of them are people living in the rural areas of poor countries, and that previous attempts to tackle hunger such as the green revolution have only partially worked and in some respects have made things worse. He recognises that if we’re going to tackle hunger then policies are needed to support small farmers, whose sheer numbers mean they’re going to play the dominant role in development for decades to come – a refreshing change from the rubbishing of small farmers and the blind enthusiasm for urbanisation expressed by the likes of Stewart Brand and other self-styled ‘eco pragmatists’.

But I’m not sure what Conway really thinks of small-scale farmers. He sometimes seems to display a sneaking admiration for their skills and resilience, but even in a chapter on ‘farmers as innovators’ which is explicitly critical of ‘top down’ development projects that ignore grassroots perspectives, only a few sentences in he can’t help discussing how experts can help farmers be better grassroots innovators. Maybe not an unworthy sentiment, but revealing of a certain mindset. What I think Conway ultimately wants is for small-scale subsistence farmers to become something else.

He has a point. Producing a bare subsistence with little cash income makes you vulnerable – you need cash for health care, for education, to tide you over crop failures and so on. Therefore much of the book discusses, with some subtlety, issues like improvements to rural infrastructure, access to markets, rural-urban linkages, cash crop options for small-scale farmers, and above all yield improvements which is a key motif throughout the book. Higher yields, more cash income and better connections to urban centres create a ‘virtuous circle’ that can lift the rural poor out of poverty and secure their livelihoods. So Conway gives short shrift to ‘simplistic’ arguments that the world already produces enough food and merely needs to distribute it better.

Well, he’s clearly right that a perfect, equitable distribution of global resources is an impossibility – we will always have to produce more than is strictly ‘needed’ on a resource per capita basis. But how much more? How much is enough? On the one hand, small-scale farmers tend to take risk averse decisions because they’re ultimately gambling with their lives in ways unimaginable to most of us in the wealthier countries of the world. As Edward Carr has pointed out in an excellent blog post, too much market exposure isn’t necessarily a good thing for small-scale farmers – and though Conway knows this and looks at ways of insuring small-scale farmers from market risks, persuasive ways of doing this in a context where people are poor and powerless seem to me to be thin on the ground. In fact, a lot of the economics in the book are decidedly rickety. Conway spins a rather predictable neoclassical line, in which the private sector is always good (albeit suitably supported by the public), protectionism is always bad, global trading really does proceed on the basis of comparative advantage, and there seem to be no gluts or commodity price instabilities, no centres and peripheries in global trading. To be fair, he does allow reality to intrude into this picture quite often, but his analysis nevertheless bears the hallmarks of someone who’s spent so much time in high level meetings at the IMF that he’s started confusing the model of reality for the reality of the model. So yes, some market engagement may not be a bad thing for impoverished small farmers, but faced with global economic prescriptions of this kind it’s no wonder that they stick so grimly to their yams and millet.

How about an alternative assumption – that small-scale, subsistence-oriented farming is actually worth preserving, not as an interim measure until small farmers find better paid things to do like rickshaw pulling, but potentially as a long-term and globally widespread attempt to address many of our current problems? I don’t think abject poverty should be part of that vision, so again we must think in terms of surpluses, cash incomes and so on. But again, we must ask how much is enough – possibly less than what’s needed to kickstart an urbanising industrialism, which currently seems to be humanity’s unilinear Plan A, B and C for producing wellbeing?

This is where I find Conway’s analysis quite deeply flawed, for nowhere does he properly consider tenure patterns or the politics of landownership (he is also dismissive of the concept of food sovereignty without, I think, really understanding it). Consider this: in reprising the fictionalised story of Calcutta slum dweller Hasari Pal from Dominique Lapierre’s City of Joy Conway discusses how Hasari’s family had originally owned over 3 hectares of good rice land but lost all but half a hectare when a rich landowner bribed a judge in a court action. Eventually Hasari and his family give up farming and move to Calcutta, living on the pavement, and Hasari manages to get a job as a rickshaw puller. Conway writes “It is a hard life, and Hasari eventually dies from the strain of the work, but he has saved enough for a dowry for his daughter, and his family survives. The opportunity is there, for some at least, to slowly progress from the pavement to the slum and to the beginnings of a decent livelihood”.

Well, no doubt. But the opportunity might have been there for Hasari to continue farming if his family hadn’t lost nearly all their land through corrupt local powerbrokers, and if government policies had supported such small farmers. When people dismiss rural life as being one of hopeless poverty, they rarely distinguish between landless or nearly landless rural dwellers and those with more land – and it’s generally the landless who suffer the most. They rarely analyse how landownership is distributed in rural locales. And they rarely consider how tenurial arrangements and rents affect rural poverty. Suppose that instead of trying to double grain yields, governments devoted themselves to halving the rents paid by poor rural dwellers, how would that affect global hunger? Doubtless in all sorts of highly complex ways, but I think it’s a major flaw of Conway’s book that he doesn’t bother to ask the question.

Conway argues that the way forward lies not in either small or large farms, but in both, not in either hi tech or low tech, but in both. I’m sure there’s some truth in that, but it doesn’t persuade me to abandon my ‘small farm future’ focus, because so much of the money and the policy attention globally is focused on large farms, or at best on supporting small farmers in the hope that they’ll become large farmers or urban workers. One interesting statistic: the Kenyan fresh vegetable market was reorganised in the 1990s in order to meet the quality demands of European supermarkets, leading in one district to a decline in the number of growers supplying a key green bean exporter from 1,200 in 1991 to less than 400 in 2004.

Conway’s book is orders of magnitude more subtle than most of the ‘eco-pragmatist’ literature on the situation facing small farmers and the pros and cons of high tech innovations in agriculture, but I think his lukewarm endorsement of small-scale farming is ultimately problematic. How much is enough? We still don’t know, largely because we’re still not asking.