[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Small Is Bountiful

[Bill Totten]

Peasant farmers offer the best chance of feeding the world. So why do we
treat them with contempt?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (June 10 2008)


I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At
last week's global food summit he was the only leader to speak of "the
importance ... of land in agricultural production and food security".
{1} Countries should follow Zimbabwe's lead, he said, in democratising
ownership.

Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his
opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the
new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming
in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land
reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of
land reform today.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world's governments won't
hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a
function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was
first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen {2}, and has since
been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse
relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they
produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in
Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are
twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares {3}. Sen's
observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia,
Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It
appears to hold almost everywhere.

The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to
associate efficiency with scale. In farming, it seems particularly odd,
because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to
have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the
latest techniques.

There's a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists.
Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical
artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so
farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way
around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship
holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in
countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best
land {4}.

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per
hectare than big farmers {5}. Their workforce largely consists of
members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower
than on large farms (they don't have to spend money recruiting or
supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more
labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend
more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again
immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops
in the same field.

In the early days of the Green Revolution, this relationship seemed to
go into reverse: the bigger farms, with access to credit, were able to
invest in new varieties and boost their yields. But as the new varieties
have spread to smaller farmers, the inverse relationship has reasserted
itself {6}. If governments are serious about feeding the world, they
should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the
poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting
small farms.

There are plenty of other reasons for defending small farmers in poor
countries. The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan arose
from their land reform programmes. Peasant farmers used the cash they
made to build small businesses. The same thing seems to have happened in
China, though it was delayed for forty years by collectivisation and the
Great Leap Backwards: the economic benefits of the redistribution that
began in 1949 were not felt until the early 1980s {7}. Growth based on
small farms tends to be more equitable than growth built around
capital-intensive industries {8}. Though their land is used intensively,
the total ecological impact of smallholdings is lower. When small farms
are bought up by big ones, the displaced workers move into new land to
try to scratch out a living. I once followed evicted peasants from the
Brazilian state of Maranhao 2000 miles across the Amazon to the land of
the Yanomami Indians, then watched them rip it apart.

But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to
the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a
peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive.
Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have
sought to seize their land, and have a powerful vested interest in
demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country
whose small farmers are twenty times more productive than its large
ones, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a
result of small landholdings, "farm output ... remains low". {9} The
OECD states that "stopping land fragmentation" in Turkey "and
consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising
agricultural productivity". {10} Neither body provides any supporting
evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well.

Like Mugabe, the donor countries and the big international bodies loudly
demand that small farmers be supported, while quietly shafting them.
Last week's food summit agreed "to help farmers, particularly
small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local,
regional, and international markets". {11} But when, earlier this year,
the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge proposed a means
of doing just this, the US, Australia and Canada refused to endorse it
as it offended big business {12}, while the United Kingdom remains the
only country that won't reveal whether or not it supports the study {13}.

Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual
property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants
which either won't breed true or which don't reproduce at all {14}, it
ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it
captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its
transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that
supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see
what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing
countries sweep away street markets and hawkers' stalls and replace them
with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose
their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this
process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural
subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with
the small producers of the poor world.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. For many years, well-meaning
liberals have supported the fair trade movement because of the benefits
it delivers directly to the people it buys from. But the structure of
the global food market is changing so rapidly that fair trade is now
becoming one of the few means by which small farmers in poor nations
might survive. A shift from small to large farms will cause a major
decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight. Fair
trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing
income, but also to feed the world.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1.
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/statements/zwe_mugabe.pdf

2. Amartya Sen, 1962. An Aspect of Indian Agriculture. Economic Weekly,
Vol 14.

3. Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006. Small Is Beautiful: Evidence Of Inverse
Size Yield Relationship In Rural Turkey. Policy Innovations.
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382

4. Giovanni Cornia, 1985. Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural
Production function: an analysis for fifteen Developing Countries. World
Development. Vol 13, pages 513-34.

5. For example, Peter Hazell, January 2005. Is there a future for small
farms? Agricultural Economics, Vol 32, pages 93-101.
doi:10.1111/j.0169-5150.2004.00016.x

6. Rasmus Heltberg, October 1998. Rural market imperfections and the
farm size— productivity relationship: Evidence from Pakistan. World
Development. Vol 26, pages 1807-1826. doi:10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00084-9

7. See Shenggen Fan and Connie Chan-Kang , 2005. Is Small Beautiful?:
Farm Size, Productivity and Poverty in Asian Agriculture. Agricultural
Economics, Vol 32, pages 135-146.

8. Peter Hazell, ibid.

9. http://www.new-agri.co.uk/00-3/countryp.html

10. OECD Economic Surveys: Turkey - Volume 2006 Issue 15, page 186.
This is available online as a Google book.

I was led to refs 9 and 10 via Fatma Gül Ünal, ibid.

11.
http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/HLCdocs/declaration-E.pdf

12. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and
Technology for Development (IAASTD), 2008. Global Summary for Decision
Makers. www.agassessment.org

13. IAASTD, viewed 9th June 2008. Frequently Asked Questions.
www.agassessment.org

14. For example, Terminator seeds.

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/10/small-is-bountiful/


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/