The Small Farm Future Blog

Population, poverty and the return of Dr Pangloss

Posted on November 19, 2013 | 6 Comments

Thanks to a tipoff from Paul, my friend and much-missed some time contributor to this blog, I watched this interesting programme about global population trends by Professor Hans Rosling. Lovely graphics, great public speaker – bottom line(s): birth rates are falling in most parts of the world thanks to the heroic efforts of health and birth control specialists, but income inequalities remain stark…the poorest people use virtually none of the world’s resources (including carbon) so it’s really not a problem if they use more, small-scale farmers are heavily represented amongst the poorest of the poor, and simple things like access to a bicycle can make the world of difference to them.

Makes a lot of sense to me – with two possible exceptions. One I’ll come back to in a moment, the other is the point about birth rates responding to health care inputs. For in the excellent book I’ve just finished reading by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Poor Economics, Penguin 2011), the conclusion from various empirical studies seems to be that contraceptive availability makes little difference to birth rates. Where they’re high, it’s usually as a parental old-age insurance strategy (and kids from large families aren’t necessarily disadvantaged, because their parents put less by for themselves) – perhaps that’s why they’re still so high in much of sub-Saharan Africa, where the economic alternatives are generally fewer, although that’s something I’ll have to check. Banerjee and Duflo’s book is a fine example of all that’s best in academic scholarship: theoretically informed, empirically grounded, clearly written, and with a lot of surprises for almost everybody’s entrenched viewpoints on poverty. My next article for Statistics Views concerns poverty and global hunger, so maybe I’ll post some more on their analysis of these issues in that context in the future.

Meanwhile, back in the blogosphere I’ve had a short and frank exchange of views with my old adversary Graham Strouts on his Skepteco blog. I can hardly complain, having been needling at him on this site for several months. In fact, I’m not complaining at all, since his sweary, insult-laden response to the rather mild intellectual objections I posed towards his arguments says pretty much all I need to know about the motivations and calibre of his analysis. Yelling at each other through a brick wall may be the bread and butter of the blogosphere but it’s not good for the soul, so I don’t plan on any more discussions with him. At least an excellent comment on my Marx and Malthus post today by the superbly named Garden Bennett has restored my faith that blogosphere discussions can be worthwhile. But I think the real merit of rancorous panglossians like Strouts is that they push the logic of mainstream thought to such extremes that they can make explicit ideas that tend to remain more hidden and less examined within the analyses of more moderate and sophisticated thinkers.

Which brings me back to Roslin, and the other exception I mentioned earlier. Roslin took the poverty of the Mozambican farmers featured in his programme as a given, without addressing its social component: but what social history of land tenure decreed that they should have to walk four hours a day to reach their fields, and what social history of commodity markets decreed that they should be penalised by dishonest purchasers and generally declining global prices for primary produce? Or to put it another way, might there be another path of indigenous agricultural development through reforming the social conditions of Mozambican peasant agriculture? Roslin conceives the long-term possibilities for poor farmers escaping rank poverty largely within the singular framework of European capitalist development in agriculture, and in doing so he locks himself into the same airless historicist box as Strouts. But once you start asking how social justice and ecological sustainability are best served in a particular situation, without placing the question within some grand unilineal historical narrative, many more possibilities open up, including possibilities for social development as alternatives to technological development, and even perhaps the positive consequences of ‘de-development’ in what are sometimes delightfully called the ‘overdeveloped countries’.

A while back I promised Clem Weidenbenner that I’d stop sniping at eco-panglossianism, and I will – at least for the moment. In fact, I want to start taking this blog in a slightly different direction, but in a forthcoming post I’m going to take one more turn around the block on these issues of eco-panglossianism and history as a preamble to doing so. Hopefully, that will at least help me clarify the rather opaque comments to which Tom properly objected in my earlier analysis. I also owe Clem some comments on inequality and settlement scale, and have posts in the offing on permaculture and compost. Should keep me busy until Christmas.