The Small Farm Future Blog

Small farm future?

Posted on October 24, 2012 | 2 Comments

It’s a curious fact that despite everything they’ve endured throughout modern history, small-scale farmers still constitute nearly half the world’s population, and grow around 70% of its food, and yet most currents of mainstream policy analysis seem implacably opposed to their survival. Marxists think they ought to be urban proletarians, liberals and neo-greens think they ought to be urban entrepreneurs, while development agronomists think they ought to make way for a large-scale commercial agriculture which is supposedly better adapted to the environmental realities of the present world. The latter, at any rate, is the message from a recent blog on the CGIAR website, whose authors believe that small-scale farming suffers among other things from poor water and transport access, diseconomies of small scale, and lack of resilience in the face of threats such as climate change – their solution being the familiar one of promoting larger-scale commercial farming and lowering barriers to global food trade.

I’d like to pose the following five questions of this analysis – and if anyone can answer them for me with some convincing data I’d be interested.

1. Is poor water and transport access associated with farm scale as such, or is it that larger, better financed commercial farms tend to be situated on better sites? How would smallholder productivity compare if smallholders were able to farm these same sites?

2. Do economies of scale on larger farms result to any degree from monopoly power? And if so, shouldn’t this power be curbed according to orthodox economic theory?

3. Do economies of scale on larger farms result from larger inputs of fossil fuel and other polluting/non-renewable inputs per unit output? If so, is it a good idea to be advocating as a solution to climate change agricultural systems that involve a relatively greater use of inputs that are causing the problem?

4. What empirical evidence exists to suggest that the range of crops and cultural methods used on smallholder farms makes them less resilient to climate change than those used on larger commercial farms?

5. What empirical evidence exists to suggest that reducing barriers to international trade in food is causally associated with a decrease in global hunger long-term?

I’ll struggle to find arguments about the environmental benefits of large scale commercial farming terribly persuasive until these kinds of questions are answered convincingly. In the mean time, how about this alternative four point plan for a more sustainable global food supply:

1. Abolish all agricultural subsidies in the US, the EU and other wealthy countries/blocs.

2. Impose heavy environmental extraction taxes on all fossil fuels.

3. Break up middleman monopolies on food retail.

4. Abolish all immigration controls, allowing people to flow around the world in search of the best returns on their inputs just as capital currently does (think of the extra productivity that several million land-hungry Indian and Chinese peasants could wring from those vast acreages of poorly utilised American prairie).

Once governments of the world have sat up, taken notice and implemented my eminently sensible policy reforms, I’ll be interested to see how small-scale farming then stacks up in comparison to its industrial counterpart. But in the unlikely event that my proposals go unheeded, I suspect that small-scale farmers will still be around growing much or most of the world’s food in the decades to come. Their demise has long been predicted – and endlessly enacted through government policies – but fortunately never quite realised.