The Small Farm Future Blog

The agribusiness fail

Posted on October 5, 2014 | 6 Comments

An interesting discussion occurred on my blog during my summer recess, which I thought I might address briefly in this post. It concerned inter alia the difficulties of earning a living through ‘alternative farming’, the pronouncements of Vandana Shiva, and the promise of sustainably synthesised fertiliser. I’m going to leave the last of these issues to a future post, and say a few words about the other two.

So, Brian Macmillan drew attention to this interesting article which argued that farmers using alternative approaches such as permaculture are struggling to stay afloat economically – a deficiency that author Frank Aragona provocatively called ‘The Permaculture Fail’. Unlike Tom, I found much of the discussion beneath the article quite interesting and well reasoned, though I do agree with Tom at least in part that the peak oil-collapse of capitalism-billions will die nexus can easily be overdone.

I’ve made plain on this blog before that I’m amicably sceptical about a number of permaculture’s sacred cows and, as Brian pointed out, Aragona’s article covered pretty similar ground to my own blog post on some of permaculture’s limitations. But, as I also made clear in that post, I’m not planning to throw out the baby with the bathwater: ultimately, I reject Aragona’s concept of the ‘permaculture fail’ for reasons that are well covered in some of the comments beneath his post. The most telling one, I think, is the simple point made by ‘onoway’: so called ‘normal’ farmers aren’t making any money either. Here in the UK, the Commission for Rural Communities found in 2010 (shortly before the government abolished it) that a quarter of farm households lived below the poverty line, and you can be pretty sure that most of them weren’t permaculturists.

Aragona writes “we have focused all of our energy on biological production techniques, many and most of which are sound, effective, and replicable, yet we have done so on top of a broken socio-economic model”. Well, speak for yourself: personally I only focus my energy on biological production techniques by day. By night I write this blog, in which I tirelessly fix broken socio-economic models. But sheesh, then somebody comes along and breaks the damn things again and nothing seems to change. The fact is that however anyone farms they do it on top of a broken socio-economic model. The alternative farming movement – for example, my colleagues in the Land Workers Alliance and Via Campesina – does a pretty good job of articulating exactly how the model is broken. A better job at any rate than ‘normal’ mainstream farming organisations such as the NFU, who are servants of that model (witness George Monbiot’s mischievous but telling comparison of the NFU’s address – 16 Smith Square, London SW1 – with DEFRA’s address – 17 Smith Square, London SW1). We alternative farmers are hardly alone in wishing to derail the present neoliberal juggernaut without quite knowing how.

Still, I think it’s true that permaculturists are often over-susceptible to illusory get rich quick schemes. The article mentions somebody who supposedly earns $90,000/acre from his farming. Well, I’m sure with skill, luck, hard work and a relentless focus upon non-essential products that might be possible, but with the help of that infallible oracle, Wikipedia, let me now demonstrate mathematically the impossibility of all farmers following suit:

(1) Total area of agricultural land globally: 12.07 billion acres

(2) Total economic output of this land area @ $90,0000/acre: $1086 trillion

(3) Actual total global economic output: $59 trillion

(4) Theoretical total agricultural output as a percentage of total global economic output: 1841%

QED

New ideas emerge in farming for sure, but if you’re aiming to produce basic foodstuffs I’d argue there are few shortcuts: you need to input either a lot of fossil fuel and fancy chemicals or a lot of your own/animal labour to get a financial return, and either way the return won’t be very much. You could argue that we shouldn’t be aiming for a financial return in the first place, as some of those commenting on Aragona’s article suggest. Fair point, though I think permaculturists can also be a bit over-susceptible to some confusions about money. But I’ll spin that particular yarn another time.

Aragona’s wider point is surely right, however – we need to develop some different socio-economic models. Of the various resources bequeathed us by history to do so, I find agrarian populism (leavened with a judicious quantity of Marxism, a touch of neo-Stoicism, an exotic hint of Taoism, a pinch of civic republicanism, and the tiniest half-pinch of liberalism) to be the most promising. And since Vandana Shiva is probably the highest profile advocate for agrarian populism around these days, I suppose I should leap to her defence in the light of the outrage caused by her GM/rape analogy. Or perhaps I should chide her and plead for less inflammatory rhetoric on both sides of the debate. But when you have the likes of Patrick Moore tweeting to GM Watch “You are murdering bastards and deserve to rot in hell for your anti-human sins” I just can’t help thinking “Go get ‘em, Vandana!”

Perhaps that last paragraph wasn’t the most spirited defence of a political stance ever mounted. Truth be told, I don’t think there’s a useful parallel between GM crops and rape (though when you look at what Shiva actually said, it wasn’t in fact quite such a direct analogy). There are certainly some troubling issues around seed sovereignty and violence, however. And though I find myself in disagreement with quite a lot of the particulars of what Shiva says, I like her  capacity – and the capacity of agrarian populism in general – to outrage the comfortable worldviews of Marxists and liberals alike. The mainstream media will wax with outrage and scorn for Shiva until it finds some other outside-the-box opinion-former to demonise. Meanwhile, the quiet and necessary work of articulating a left agrarian populism continues. For what it’s worth, I think Shiva does tend to romanticise peasant farming a little, though to be honest why the hell shouldn’t she? We’ve had two hundred years of shameless romanticising of the urban, and if Stewart Brand can get away with writing “Let no one romanticize what the slum conditions are…but the squatter cities are vibrant” then I demand my right to my jolly nature-loving peasants.

Truth be told, the cupboard of agrarian populist gurus is looking pretty bare these days – Shiva, James Scott, Philip McMichael, Paul Richards, maybe Colin Tudge? I might file an application myself. But whatever my specific disagreements with their respective oeuvres, I think they’re right in their basic contention that the best solutions to our social, economic and environmental problems are to be found from the ground up, and if small scale farmers and small scale communities are allowed to get on with the business of feeding their bodies and spirits, perhaps with a little bit of help from central governments rather than with their active hindrance, then those problems start to look less insurmountable. It’s what you might call the agribusiness fail.