You state, “In largely rural economies, farms are small, production methods are relatively primitive and inefficient, and waste due to losses in storage and transit is high…In the developed world, in contrast, industrialized agriculture, however much some may criticize it, produces a considerably larger harvest per unit of energy expended…”
Upon what research are you basing this set of claims? They seem far too over-generalized. I would point out research reaching a contrary conclusion, including:
Kumar, A. and Ramakrishnan, P.S. (1990) ‘Energy flow through an Apatani village ecosystem of Arunachal Pradesh in northeast India’, Human Ecology 18(3).
This study found that “the energy efficiency of the Apatani [a tribe in Arunachal Pradesh, NE India] agroecosystem is around 60 to 80 joules per joule of input. Green Revolution agriculture fares dismally in comparison: it gives less than a joule for every joule of input. The valley’s energy input-output ratio is also considerably higher than that of other traditional mountain systems in the region. There, the value is in the range of 9-50 joules…” (quoted from this summary: http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/9930).
The paper also notes: “Many studies done in different parts of the world have shown traditional systems, based on technology developed over many generations, to be energy efficient.”
The Apatani system is super-efficient, so perhaps not perfectly representative, but other research also shows highly energy-efficient traditional/small-scale farming systems vis-à-vis industrialized agriculture, e.g.:
Rosset, P. (1999) ‘The multiple functions and benefits of small farm agriculture in the context of global trade negotiations’, Institute for Food and Development Policy, Food First Policy Brief No. 4 http://www.foodfirst.org/en/node/246
(the author writes: “How many times have we heard that large farms are more productive than small farms? Or that they are more efficient? And that we need to consolidate land holdings to take advantage of that greater productivity and efficiency? The actual data shows exactly the reverse for productivity: that smaller farms produce far more per unit area than larger farms. Part of the problem lies in the confusing language used to compare the performance of different farm sizes. As long as we use crop yield as the measure of productivity, we will be giving an unfair advantage to larger farms.” While especially the case in the developing world, this even obtains in a country like the US: considering total factor productivity, “even in the United States, there is no reason to believe that large farms are more efficient, and very large farms may in fact be quite inefficient.”)
Your points are interesting, but I would argue that they are irrelevant. You fail to quote the rest of that paragraph:
I see no way to directly compare the small farm techniques your cites use with the totality of the westernized industrial system. Perhaps Cecil should have made that more explicit but I think his summary is fair for the entire system as a whole.
In addition, crop yield is indeed a significant measure for an industrialized western society for the straightforward reason that barring a total catastrophe there is no circumstance that will allow us to feed our population based on traditional small farm agriculture.
Whether small farms can or should be sustained in other countries is a more complicated issue. And the waste built into our system surely could be reduced. But small farm agriculture will not feed seven billion people and counting, no matter how efficient it is. The economies of scale prohibit it.
Manual labor has a much higher energy efficiency than machines–but the cost of manual labor per unit output is extremely high compared to that of machines.
One concern is judging the small farming techniques vs large farming techniques and then considering the post-harvest distribution processes. Are those distribution processes equivalent? In other words, are the losses you quote for the industrial system actually losses from accummulation and distribution to corporate food systems, as opposed to more local distribution networks like farmers markets? So that if we tried to supply our industrialized distribution (i.e. supermarket chains, national restaurant supply, processed and preserved food production, etc) with the small farm farming techniques, they would be subject to the same losses? Are we really talking apples to apples (pardon the pun)?
I was curious about the statement regarding crop yield as a poor measure of output, because I wasn’t sure what the other options were. So I read through the third linked cite. What it discusses is crop yield is the output of a farm on a per crop basis. Industrialized farming typically is monoculture: that is, they plant a field of corn and it is just a field of corn. That makes it more efficient for using giant combine harvesters, and provides a large output of corn per acre. But the family farm technique alternative would mix crop - they would plant corn, but also something else, like strawberries*, in the same fields growing at the same time. The second crop would fill the space not utilzed by the corn, and help reduce weed growth through not allowing unused space. So the small farm technique is going to produce some smaller amount of corn per acre than the industrial technique, but it will also be producing some amount of alternate crop (e.g. the strawberries I mentioned) at the same time. That value is typically neglected in the standard evaluation techniques that only looks at one crop at a time.
Farm A puts out 1000 lbs of corn per acre. Farm B puts out 900 lbs of corn per acre,* and* 130 lbs of strawberries per acre - in the same space. Farm B has 1030 lbs of crop output per acre, but the standard measurement technique of crop yield would only compare that as 900lbs of corn against a corn grower and possibly 130 lbs of strawberries against a strawberry grower, assuming it bothers to look at the secondary drop at all.
Okay, I totally made those numbers up and they likely bear no resemblance to what actual numbers look like, but they illustrate the point of contention.
I think about what we grew for a few years in our backyard when I was growing up. We had a couple of plots. We grew tomatoes, squash, ocra, corn, and maybe a couple other things I don’t remember all stacked and interspersed together. That’s not something industrial agriculture can manage.
Assume that what you say is true. Then consider there are, in round numbers, a billion acres of farmland in the U.S. alone. That provides food for the 315 million Americans plus hundreds of millions of tons of crops for export. How many people would be required to produce that much food on small family farms?
Take a real-world example. Many people insist that raw milk tastes better and is healthier than processed milk. Assume that’s true. You can only get raw milk from small farmers who service a few tens of customers from small herds that require intensive care. No attempt to provide raw milk for the masses has ever succeeded. As soon as you scale up production to mass numbers the amount of specialized care required overwhelms the providers. If you want supermarkets full of milk and milk products and products that use milk and milk products you must use industrialized methods. There is no alternative.
You can have a westernized, industrial civilization in which only 2-3% provide food for the rest or you can have a nation of farmers gambling on providing themselves enough food to survive on an extremely limited diet. There is zero chance that the west will give up supermarkets, although some limited small scale farming will continue. Other countries will have to make this choice as they industrialize and move people off of individual farms. The real question I’m asking is what kind of world do people want? That determines what style and scale of farming is needed to support it. You can improve farming methods, you can adapt ecosystems to local values, you can refrain from imposing non-native plants and techniques. But it all comes down to whether the people involved are willing to farm and do nothing else. If they want more, then here’s only one answer.
Exapno Mapcase: My point was to question the assumption, repeated unquestioningly by Cecil, that small-scale traditional agriculture is energy inefficient vis-a-vis industrialized agriculture, and to show that the reverse is probably in fact the case, illustrated with some studies. Unfortunately it looks like you have similarly adopted the assumption without much question in your comments dismissing the ability of small-scale diversified agriculture to feed the world. Please have a look at the last two papers I linked to, showing that even in an industiralized country context like the US, small-scale, diversified farms are more productive and are more profitable per unit of output. So there’s nothing physically about such farming that couldn’t feed everyone well - rather, agricultural policies that systematically favor large-scale, monocultural production of a few commodity crops are the real barriers to change. We could instead push for policies that promote decentralized, regional food systems based on mostly small-to-middle sized farms. There are many alternatives to the status quo food system.
I did look at your links and found nothing in them about overcoming the economies of scale provided by industrial farming or for managing to grow sufficient food with only 2% of the population. That’s as realistic as thinking we can solve global warming if everybody gave up their cars.
You last link ends with “Conclusions: Free Trade Threatens Small Farm Agriculture.” Maybe it does. But free trade will increase in the future. There is nothing that can diminish it. Every country in the world is industrializing and urbanizing. He also says that four million farmers in the U.S. have left the land since WWII. This will continue here and in every other country - because people don’t want to farm and opportunities elsewhere are far more attractive.
How do you propose that these trends, which have existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution, be totally reversed while continuing to feed a world of seven-plus billion people moving off of farms as fast as they possibly can? Can you give any realistic proposals that will allow faster urbanization and increased small farming simultaneously? Can you provide a single scenario in which globalization is not an increasing factor in the lives of every human on earth? Are you prepared to tell the billions in emerging nations that they need to forget about improving their wealth and instead need to spend more time tilling their crops night and day in a desperate race for survival?
Do industrial farm methods have drawbacks? Certainly. Yet we were supposed to have global famine decades ago and instead we have more people eating more and living better than at any time in history, because of globalization and industrialization. You can’t tell people to give that up without a damn impressive counterproposal. I’ve never seen one, and don’t believe one can exist. If I’m wrong, please correct me. But your links don’t come within a million miles of that reality.
**“I did look at your links and found nothing in them about overcoming the economies of scale provided by industrial farming or for managing to grow sufficient food with only 2% of the population. That’s as realistic as thinking we can solve global warming if everybody gave up their cars.
You last link ends with “Conclusions: Free Trade Threatens Small Farm Agriculture.” Maybe it does. But free trade will increase in the future. There is nothing that can diminish it.” **
Well, we are now moving into considerably broader, and more complicated, territory from the question I was specifically addressing, viz., input-to-output energy efficiency of large-scale industrialized versus small-scale traditional farming. Since you’ve broadened the debate, here we go…
I contend that your comments belie an unjustifiable inevitablism/fatalism, failing to respond to my point about current reigning situations and outcomes being contingent, political products, i.e. not inevitable or immutable. You say “free trade will increase in the future. There is nothing that can diminish it” as though free trade were a force of nature rather than a political project of powerful actors (viz., states and transnational corporations). Free trade is but one of many modalities of organizing international political economy. It is not foreordained (see, e.g., Graham Dunkley, Free Trade: Myth, Reality & Alternatives, http://www.zedbooks.co.uk/ebooks/&bid=9781848136755).
**
“Every country in the world is industrializing and urbanizing. He also says that four million farmers in the U.S. have left the land since WWII. This will continue here and in every other country - because people don’t want to farm and opportunities elsewhere are far more attractive.**”
Correct that urbanization and industrialization are exploding world-wide, but it is a dramatic oversimplification – a fundamental attribution error – to reduce this enormously complex phenomenon involving interplays of political-economic and psychological factors to a supposedly universal farming-averse disposition residing in people as a matter of course. Certainly it is the case that many people don’t want to farm and consider different opportunities more attractive, but this hardly suffices to explain mass urbanization. In many contexts, urbanization is explicit government policy, e.g.:
Furthermore, the claim, “people don’t want to farm”, that you state as a universal certitude falls apart when confronted by numerous counter-examples demonstrating that people, especially young people, do want to farm, and that in some instances the small farm population is growing, e.g.:
("According to the National Young Farmer’s Coalition report, between now and the year 2030, it is estimated that half a million or one-quarter of American farmers will retire. However, the National Young Farmers Coalition membership began in 2011 and has seen a 90 percent increase in membership over the past six months. Currently, they have 600 members in 13 chapters across 12 states with another dozen chapters currently in development.)
Does this mean no one wants to leave farming, or even that the predominant trend isn’t in the direction of leaving farming? No, of course not. Rather, I want to problematize, and politicize the phenomenon, and show that it is not universal, and in any case can hardly be explained by a naïve dispositionist account. I will readily reconsider this should you care to furnish evidence demonstrating a universal anti-farming disposition resting indelibly in human nature.
So what is driving urbanization, de-ruralization? To a large degree, policies: Trade policies, farm policies, urbanization policies (as mentioned). Also, processes of transnational capital accumulation. A few references to consider:
Davis, M. (2006) Planet of Slums, London & New York: Verso.
Kothari, A. and Shrivastava, A. (2012) Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India, New Delhi: Penguin.
Wise, T. (2003) “Fields of Free Trade: Mexico’s Small Farmers in a Global Economy”, Dollars & Sense, November/December
**“How do you propose that these trends, which have existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution, be totally reversed while continuing to feed a world of seven-plus billion people moving off of farms as fast as they possibly can? Can you give any realistic proposals that will allow faster urbanization and increased small farming simultaneously?” **
I reject the premise that we must accept “faster urbanization” and corporate globalization as a fait accompli. Again, reversing policies driving manic urbanization and corporate consolidation and concentration of farmland and the food system towards policies that support, promote and protect small, diversified farming systems, that support and encourage young people entering farming, and that support localized/regionalized food economies would be a very good place to start. This is a tall order indeed given the political power of agribusiness, but one that is nevertheless not impossible. But even with urbanization, much food can and is being produced within cities, e.g.:
“Before the current food crisis, an estimated 800 million peasants were involved in urban farming. Of these, 200 million produce food primarily for urban markets and manage to provide full-time employment for about 150 million family members. On average, the world’s cities produce about one-third of their own food consumption.98 In times of high food prices, the amount of urban and peri-urban gardening and livestock-keeping increases significantly…” (ETC Group (2009) ‘Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises’ Who Will Feed Us? Questions about the food and climate crisis - 2009 | ETC Group ).
“Can you provide a single scenario in which globalization is not an increasing factor in the lives of every human on earth?”
Globalization certainly is an increasing factor in the lives of everyone, of course, precisely because of the processes of deregulation of trade and finance and the ever-widening political-economic control being exerted by multinational corporations. These are not inevitable or natural outcomes, however.
**“Are you prepared to tell the billions in emerging nations that they need to forget about improving their wealth and instead need to spend more time tilling their crops night and day in a desperate race for survival?” **
This is an unfortunate caricature of traditional agriculture (I have spent considerable time living and working with farming villagers in a number of countries, and never have I witnessed ‘day and night’ tillage let alone a ‘desperate race for survival’ – have you? Yes, it can be a lot of hard work, but it’s also not the unmitigated drudgery that so many urban folks like to assume. By all means, if you could provide research showing desperate day and night tillage in ‘emerging nations’, I will happily reconsider my limited experiences as anomalies). You problematically bundle together assumptions about causality and definitions of wealth and improvement. We can agree on the empirical fact of urbanization, but your unqualified positive characterization of it is subjective. Yes, over half the global population now lives in cities, but around one-third of them – about 1 billion people as recently as 2005 (certainly increased by now) – live in slums, a number expected to double by 2030. Certainly there exist enormous levels of rural material poverty in the world, but it simply cannot be assumed, a priori, that moving out of agriculture and the countryside and into the cities equates with “improving wealth” if by wealth we mean well-being, capacity for a healthy/productive life, etc.
**“Do industrial farm methods have drawbacks? Certainly. Yet we were supposed to have global famine decades ago and instead we have more people eating more and living better than at any time in history, because of globalization and industrialization.” **
Again, your assertion that everyone is “living better than at any time in history” is just that, an assertion, though you state it as an objective fact. I could just as easily point to some of the many grave contemporary problems to contest this Panglossian view: climate change, systemic chemical pollution (including ubiquitous population-wide burdens of toxic chemicals like endocrine disruptors and carcinogens); rising incidences of chronic diseases (both communicable and non-communicable diet-related, e.g. obesity and diabetes); rising precarity of employment; skyrocketing levels of inequality within and between states; proliferating resource conflicts in countries on every continent; rising incidences of depression, lonliness, suicide and other psychological maladies, among many others. You may disagree about the severity (hopefully not about the existence) of these sorts of problems compared to ones past, but their existence alone means your bold assertion is contestable.
As for “more people eating more” - the actual situation is far more complicated. You are assuming that agricultural production is the same as equitable distribution and access. Many are eating too little, and many others too much, and of questionable nutritiousness in either case. Consider this:
“The food crisis has increased the ranks of the “hungry” (i.e., those taking in insufficient calories for daily living) from 840 million around 2003 to just over 1 billion today – a jump of 160 million in less than six years. Another billion people may have enough calories but are malnourished – in chronic ill-health due to micronutrient shortfalls.4 Of the world’s 6.6 billion in 2009 then, close to one-third are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. But, there are another 1.3 billion people – overweight or obese – who are also “malnourished.”5 Although this last 1.3 billion elicits less sympathy, many of them are the victims of predatory commercial practices that condemn them to cheap, calorie-rich, nutrition-poor processed foods. By any measure, almost half the world’s
population is badly served by today’s food production systems.” (ETC Group (2009) ‘Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises’ Who Will Feed Us? Questions about the food and climate crisis - 2009 | ETC Group ). Have a look at Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved for a similar, trenchant analysis of this situation: reviewed at Flab grab | Books | The Guardian).
“You can’t tell people to give that up without a damn impressive counterproposal. I’ve never seen one, and don’t believe one can exist. If I’m wrong, please correct me. But your links don’t come within a million miles of that reality.”
The fact is that small-scale, peasant food system is already feeding the world’s majority. Consider a report I should have linked to in my previous posts and have cited a couple of times above: ETC Group (2009) ‘Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises’ Who Will Feed Us? Questions about the food and climate crisis - 2009 | ETC Group
The report shows that globally, industrialized agriculture uses 70 percent of agricultural resources to produce 30 percent of world’s food while small landholders produce the remaining 70 percent using only 30 percent of the resources. The authors write:
“There are 1.5 billion on 380 million farms; 800 million more growing urban gardens; 410 million gathering the hidden harvest of our forests and savannas; 190 million pastoralists and well over 100 million peasant fishers. At least 370 million of these are also indigenous peoples. Together these peasants make up almost half the world’s peoples and they grow at least 70% of the world’s food. Better than anyone else, they feed the hungry. If we are to eat in 2050 we will need all of them and all of their diversity.”
I’d put the challenge back to you: please justify the grave inefficiency and wastefulness of industrialized agriculture if our mutual concern is healthy people and environments. Hopefully this comes at least within a million miles of a convincing ‘counter proposal’.
You write as though, whatever its faults and defects, this world and the trajectory it’s on are the only possible paths. I’ve been at pains to argue that this is an untenable zero-sum calculation, circumscription of possibilities. I hold to my argument in the last post that there are many much more sustainable, equitable food system alternatives that can improve people’s well-being.
Still unsatisfied? Try these ‘counter-proposals’ then:
“The notion that the areas of the global South, including China and India, can easily incorporate
the billions of people now engaged in small-scale agriculture into the overcrowded urban
centers of the third world is the product of a development ideology according to which the
rich countries of Western Europe are said to have rapidly absorbed their own rural populations
within their emerging, industrialized cities. In reality there were huge waves of emigration
of Europeans to the colonies taking the pressure off the cities… Such an industrialization-
urbanization pattern, relying on mass emigration, is clearly not feasible in today’s global South,
which does not have the outlet of mass emigration on the scale now needed… Nor does it have
the favorable economic conditions—expansion into a whole “new” continent … under which
the United States emerged as a world industrial power. What is happening instead in many
countries is the huge growth of urban slums as people migrate from the countryside into cities
that contain insufficient employment opportunities.”
Foster, J. B. and Clark, B. (2012) ‘The Planetary Emergency’, Monthly Review (http://monthlyreview.o rg/2012/12/01/
the-planetary-emergency).
How would you propose to overcome these vexing dynamics to keep world-wide urbanization going indefinitely? Where would you draw the line? Any counterproposals you care to offer?
I find your post most commendable and appreciate the time and energy you spent in putting it together. It’s the kind of argument that we almost never see here: Well-reasoned and well-cited passion about a subject.
Yet it is insufficient to break through my wall of cynicism. What it most reminds me off are the endless stream of articles decrying sprawl and proclaiming that people are abandoning suburbia and coming back to center cities. And the people they are talking about are real. Yet for every 10,000 in the U.S. who return to cities, suburbia grows by another million. Sprawl gets worse, Americans become more car-dependent, the number of houses being built for renters is at its all-time peak. Nothing, not recessions, or housing busts, or gas crises puts more than a small bump in the process. Commentators have decried suburbia since well before the huge transition after WWII and pushed forward every positive reason for denser housing and continually get ignored for the plain and simple reason that that’s not how the majority wants to live.
Suburbanization is a subset of the more general trend toward urbanization. It’s nothing new; it’s literally as old as civilization. For the purposes of this thread, we cans start with the Industrial Revolution. Commentators were horrified and amazed that millions of Britons left those idyllic farms and moved to industrial jobs in the most horrific slums that they had ever imagined. Yet the net trend was not that people left to return to the farms, but that they drew more and more farmers to cities. Somewhat later, commentators were horrified and amazed that tens of millions of Eastern European peasants left those idyllic farms and moved to industrial jobs in the U.S., temporarily making the Lower East Side of New York the crowded slum on Earth.
And today people are horrified and amazed that across the world, hundreds of millions are leaving those idyllic farms for industrial jobs in cities whose air is spreadable on toast. They shouldn’t be. It looks identical because it is, the same historic trend playing itself out in different locations at the first moment when it becomes possible. (You can see it in miniature in specialized locations where westernization came early, like St. Petersburg, Shanghai, and Bombay (Mumbai).) “The first moment it becomes possible” is the key phrase. That indicates that it is a law of behavior, of a basic human desire, that crosses mere times and cultures. There are no large-sized counterexamples, merely the expression of minority behaviors.
I am using the entirety of human history over the last two centuries as my cite that this is indeed a universal. You are stating what could happen, if suddenly the vast majority of people in the world were to decide to reverse what has been that universal for two centuries. I say that’s wishful thinking. Neither of us can prove these opinions, but you have nothing on your side to weigh in against my reading of history. It could happen - but it won’t.
I applaud you for fighting the good fight. And I agree it should be fought. For one thing even a small percentage minority of all of humanity is a huge number of individual people. They deserve alternatives and choices. Nor am I saying that this world is any sort of utopia. Quite the contrary: it’s full of horrors. Only by comparison to the horrors of the past can we see an improvement. Improve some more! What you’re fighting for surely has benefits on the small scale. Your problem is that you’re up against people, and people don’t look at what’s good for the world - they look to better their immediate prospects or those of their children. And what looks “better” has been a constant across centuries and societies. It ain’t farming.
I’ll bet with equal certainty that I am older than you. When I was young I wanted to fight the good fight and I was baffled that others didn’t agree with what that “good” was. When we get older we have the time to study history and find out why those good fights never seem to get anywhere.
Please dismiss me and what I’m saying. Please. We need that. Small changes can have large effects. But we are all smaller than the sweep of history. Industrialization has a world empire far bigger than the British ever dreamed of. Globalization and urbanization will not be deterred for more than a fleeting moment by anything less than a meteor strike or world-wide plague. It is tomorrow because it has been tomorrow as long as a country named The United States of America has existed and it has now spread across the globe. Inevitable is a mild word for it. It is history itself.