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Africa: Small Farms
Africa: Small Farms
Date distributed (ymd): 000911
Document reposted by APIC
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: Continent-Wide
Issue Areas: +economy/development+
Summary Contents:
This posting contains a slightly condensed version of an interview
by Multinational Monitor with Peter Rosset, executive director of
Food First, entitled "The Case for Small Farms."
Rosset's interview is a particularly clear statement, applicable to
Africa as well as globally, on the greater productivity of small
farms and on the biases against small farms in both national
policies and the international trade system.
The full text of the interview is available on both the Food First
web site at:
http://www.foodfirst.org/media/interviews/2000/mm8-00.html
and on the Multinational Monitor web site at:
http://www.essential.org/monitor/mm2000/00july-aug/interview.html
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Case for Small Farms
An Interview with Peter Rosset
MULTINATIONAL MONITOR
JULY/AUGUST 2000 VOLUME 21 NUMBER 7 & 8
Peter M. Rosset, Ph.D. is executive director of the Oakland,
California-based Institute for Food and Development Policy --
better known as Food First <http://www.foodfirst.org> -- a
nonprofit "people's" think tank and education-for-action center
whose work highlights root causes and value-based solutions to
hunger and poverty around the world, with a commitment to
establishing food as a fundamental human right. He is author of a
number of briefing papers, including "The Multiple Functions and
Benefits of Small Farm Agriculture in the Context of Global Trade
Negotiations," and is co-author of the book "World Hunger: Twelve
Myths."
For more information please contact: Food First/Institute for Food
and Development Policy 398 60th Street Oakland, CA 94618 USA
http://www.foodfirst.org
Multinational Monitor: Large farms are commonly viewed as more
productive than small farms. What's the evidence that suggests that
in fact small farms are more productive?
Peter Rosset: Here at the Institute for Food and Development
Policy, we've reviewed the data from every country for which it's
available, comparing the productivity of smaller farms versus
larger farms. By productivity, I mean the total output of
agricultural products per unit area -- per acre or hectare.
For every country for which data is available, smaller farms are
anywhere from 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit area.
The myth of the greater productivity of larger farms stems in part
from the confusing use of the term "yield" to measure productivity.
Yield is how much of a single crop you can get per unit area -- for
example, bushels of soy beans per acre.
That's a measure that's only relevant to monocultures. A
monoculture is when a single crop is grown in a field, rather than
the kind of mixtures of crops and animals that small farmers have.
When you grow one crop all by itself, you may get a lot of that one
crop, but you're not using the ecological space -- the land and
water -- very efficiently.
In monocultures, you have rows of one crop with bare dirt between
them. In ecological terms, that bare dirt is empty niche space.
It's going to be invaded and taken advantage of by some species in
the ecosystem, and generally we call those species weeds. So if
that bare dirt is invaded, the farmer has to invest labor or spray
herbicides or pull a tractor through to deal with those weeds.
Large farmers generally have monocultures because they are easier
to fully mechanize.
Smaller farmers tend to have crop mixtures. Between the rows of one
crop there will be another crop, or several other crops, so that
ecological niche space -- that potential -- is producing something
of use to the farmer rather than requiring an investment of more
labor, money or herbicides. What that means is that the smaller
farm with the more complex farming system gets more total
production per unit area, because they're using more of the
available niche space.
It might look like the large farm is more productive because you're
getting more, say, soybeans per acre. But you're not getting the
other five, six, ten or twelve products that the smaller farmer is
getting. And when you add all of those together, they come to a
much greater total agricultural output per unit area than the
larger farms are getting.
MM: Is that the essential difference -- that the small farms use a
more complex cropping arrangement?
Rosset: There are a lot of reasons why smaller farms produce more
per unit area than larger farmers. One is because of the more
complex systems, as I explained.
Small farmers also benefit by integrating crops and livestock. By
rotating pasture and planted fields, animal manure is used as
fertilizer, and then the part of the crop that is not consumed by
humans -- let's say the stalks of a corn plant -- is food for the
animals. So there's recycling of nutrients and biomass within the
system. That also makes it more efficient and productive.
Small farmers tend to invest more labor in their land. That too
makes it more productive.
And the quality of the labor is much better. When it's a farm
family whose future depends upon maintaining the productivity of
that soil and that piece of land, they naturally take better care
of it.
When it's a huge corporate farm with relatively alienated wage
labor doing the work, the employees do not have the kind of tie to
the future of that piece of land that they would if they were
family farmers.
MM: It seems as if some of these benefits are not necessarily
inherent in size but just in the different styles of farming. Could
you have, for example, more complex kinds of farming on large
farms?
Rosset: You can, but what tends to be limiting is mechanization. As
farms get very large, labor costs and logistics become prohibitive,
so farmers switch to machinery, and machinery requires simpler
systems. With machines, you can't achieve the same level of
complexity and therefore the level of productivity that you can
with a smaller size.
So some of the factors do depend on size and others depend on
styles of management and relationships between human beings and the
land.
MM: Do the general points you're making apply equally to farms in
the United States and other rich countries as well as farms in the
developing world?
Rosset: Amazing as it may sound, we find the same general pattern.
Some of the causes may be different, and what we consider a small
farm versus a large farm may be different, but smaller farms in the
U.S. produce more than 10 times more value of output per unit area
than large farms. Part of that is because smaller farmers in the
U.S. tend to produce higher value crops, but part of it also has to
do with the same factors that explain greater productivity of
smaller farms in the Third World.
MM: If all this is so, then how come the conventional wisdom is
just the opposite?
Rosset: For one thing, there are vested interests behind the
conventional wisdom. Obviously we have a huge corporate-owned
agribusiness system in this country that has a vested interest in
making the American public believe that what they're doing is
productive and efficient and good for us. So there's a little bit
of intentional myth creation going on.
There's also the fact that smaller farms don't appear to be
economically viable. Despite what I've said about productivity,
they're being driven out of business in incredible numbers. At the
end of World War II, we had more than six million farms in the
United States; today we have less than two million, and it's mostly
the smaller farms that have been driven out of business.
We have to look at why that is. My belief is that it's because we
have a system here that rewards inefficiency, low productivity and
destruction of soil -- 90 percent of the topsoil in the United
States is being lost faster than it can be replaced.
This system is heavily based on direct payment subsidies tied to
the amount of land that a farmer has. American taxpayers paid a
record $22 billion in direct farm payments last year. Sixty-one
percent of those payments went to the largest 10 percent of
American farmers.
Although those subsidies have been presented to us as helping keep
family farmers on the land, they do just the opposite.
Because large farms in the U.S. get such a large subsidy, they can
stay in business even if they're selling what they produce below
the cost of production. The subsidies are tied to area and allow
prices to drop below the cost of production. That prevents small
farmers from competing because: one, crop prices have dropped so
low and two, they don't have enough land to get enough subsidies to
live on.
The system drives inefficiency and destruction of resources,
because the large farms are the ones that strip rural America of
trees, destroy the soil, dump so many pesticides, and compact the
soil with machines.
It's basically a transfer of money from the pockets of U.S.
taxpayers to large corporate farmers, so that they can stay in
business despite low prices, and to the ones who benefit the most
-- the Cargills and ADMs of the world who have all this grain that
they're buying at giveaway prices and using to capture markets
around the world and drive small farmers out of business in Mexico,
India, Africa, Asia and South America.
MM: Is export dumping the primary cause of farmers in the Third
World being driven off the land?
Rosset: There are many ways that policies are biased against small
farmers in the Third World. In any particular Third World country,
you'll find that the local landed oligarchy tends to have captured
the political system and distorted rural policies in their favor,
whether it's agricultural credit, prices, marketing, input supply
or trade policy.
But all those biases together pale in comparison with the impact of
this kind of export dumping and the taking over of local markets by
multinational grain companies. Because of the perverse way that
farm subsidies work in both the United States and European Economic
Community, the U.S. and Europe are dumping agricultural commodities
on Third World economies at prices often below the cost of
production. Local farmers can't compete.
MM: To what extent in developing countries does the Green
Revolution change the equation? Don't Green Revolution efficiencies
require big farms?
Rosset: What's happened with the Green Revolution is sort of a
microcosm of what's happened in the United States in this century,
where agricultural production has gone up tremendously, but at the
cost of driving people out of the countryside and into the cities,
where the economy cannot absorb the excess labor. The Green
Revolution promoted seeds that required chemicals, irrigation and
other expensive investments that could only be adopted by larger,
wealthier farmers, but not by smaller, poorer farmers. This allowed
the larger, wealthier farmers to expand at the expense of the
smaller farmers.
During the boom years of the Green Revolution, from 1970 to 1990,
world food production did go up dramatically. Unfortunately, hunger
increased in most parts of the Third World as well. The Green
Revolution creates what we call the paradox of plenty, or hunger
amidst abundance. Production goes up, but that production is in the
hands of larger farmers, who expand at the expense of smaller
farmers. These smaller farmers eventually lose their land, move to
the cities, don't find jobs, and can't afford to buy the additional
food that's produced. So the Green Revolution gives you more food
and more hunger.
If we ever really want to get at hunger in the future, we have to
find a different kind of agricultural model that can have
additional production come from the hands of the poor themselves.
The small farm model is really the only model that will allow us to
have more food and less hunger, instead of repeating the mistakes
of the Green Revolution era when we had more food and more hunger.
MM: What happens when you add the World Trade Organization and
proposals for agricultural liberalization into the story?
Rosset: I think the proposed agreements on agriculture in the WTO
are the gravest threat to rural communities, small farmers and
rural ecologies around the world, perhaps the gravest threat in
history.
I've already described a system that's pretty bad, but despite all
odds, small farmers and peasants have clung to the land in
incredible numbers all around the world. But the WTO agreement on
agriculture threatens to remove virtually any ability on the part
of individual countries to protect their agricultural sectors, to
stop the flooding of their local markets with cheap imports from
Northern countries or other large grain-exporting companies. It
would take away the ability of countries to have programs that
promote or support small farmers or family farmers.
Organizations representing small farmers, medium-sized farmers,
farmworkers and the landless from all over the world were in
Seattle last November protesting the WTO. We had the National
Family Farm Coalition from the United States, the National Farmers
Union from Canada, Mexican farmworker unions, the landless workers
union (MST) from Brazil, farmworker unions from Africa, farmers'
organizations from Africa, farmers' organizations from Thailand,
the United Farm Workers union from the United States -- an
incredible international coalition of rural organizations all
saying that the proposed WTO rules for agriculture would be a death
sentence for rural communities and rural areas around the world.
The upside of the WTO proposals is that they have helped a new
global food movement coalesce. It's got all of those rural actors
-- farmers, farmworkers and the landless -- as well as
environmentalists concerned about pesticides and genetically
altered crops and consumers concerned about food safety, working
together against the WTO.
To me this is very exciting, because counting all the people
negatively affected by the global food system as we know it, we are
really the majority of the people in the world.
MM: What would the WTO agricultural proposals do and how does that
differ or go beyond the already-existing restrictions on Third
World governments?
Rosset: Many Third World countries have already been hurt by
structural adjustment agreements. In exchange for renegotiating the
debt, the IMF and World Bank forced them to open their borders to
imports, among many other things. That meant opening their borders
to the dumping of Northern food surpluses and cheap food and
undercutting their local farmers.
What the WTO rules would do is raise those agreements to the level
of treaty law, making it a violation of international law for a
country to impose any kind of protection on its agricultural
sector. I believe that every country, in order to have national
security, has to have the most important dietary elements for its
population produced within its borders. But under the WTO rules you
would not be able to maintain policies to guarantee that. It would
also require that Third World countries reduce any remaining
tariffs much more dramatically than northern countries would have
to reduce theirs.
Basically what happens with free trade or the integration of
economies is that you go from a relatively small-sized national
economy to a larger economy. If you have a small economy that's too
small to support a Cargill or an ADM, and you have protection so
that it's hard for those companies to get in, then you have a
situation where smaller producers and smaller companies can
flourish. When you open up into a larger economy, you create the
conditions where the giant conglomerates now have large enough
market conditions to support themselves, and then they can undercut
everyone else and drive everyone else out of business. So as we go
from smaller economies to larger economies, we create the
conditions where the largest multinationals can use their power in
the marketplace to drive everyone else out of business, with
devastating social consequences.
MM: What is multifunctionality?
Rosset: Multifunctionality is a way of characterizing agriculture
that would set it apart from other kinds of economic activity, like
industry. The notion is that farming isn't just producing corn the
way that, for instance, a shoe factory produces shoes, because
agriculture also involves the management of natural resources.
Agriculture has impacts on culture and ways of life, and farmers
are the custodians of those cultures.
The concept of multifunctionality was developed by the European
Union as a way of arguing that agriculture should receive special
treatment in the WTO and shouldn't be opened to free trade the way
that industry has been.
Unfortunately, that notion didn't have a lot of success in terms of
trying to stop the U.S.-driven juggernaut towards free trade in
agriculture.
The United States was able to point out quite rightly that Western
Europe was being hypocritical in saying that they wanted protection
for agriculture in order to preserve its multiple functions, given
the way European export subsidies are destroying farming in the
Third World. Of course the United States was also being
hypocritical, since U.S. export dumping is also destroying
agriculture throughout the Third World. As a result of the U.S.
maneuvering, this very interesting and I think potentially very
useful concept fell by the wayside.
MM: How would you like to see it incorporated into trade
agreements?
Rosset: It should be the basis for excluding agriculture from the
WTO altogether. I think that agriculture does serve these multiple
functions. It is very special and important, and it shouldn't be
subjected to arbitrary and exaggerated free trade policies.
If agriculture were excluded from the WTO, then countries would be
able to develop policies towards their rural sectors that were
tailored towards their own rural needs, their own realities and
their own cultures, something that's not permitted under the WTO.
Multifunctionality does give at least a theoretical argument for
why you should exclude agriculture.
...
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the
Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC provides
accessible information and analysis in order to promote U.S.
and international policies toward Africa that advance economic,
political and social justice and the full spectrum of human rights.
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