Agriculture and Capitalism

chlamor
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Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:23 pm

Notes
[1] The article “The Capitalist System of Modern Agriculture” is the’ first part of a large work on capitalist agriculture in Germany which Lenin intended to write as a second instalment of his well-known work, New Data on the Laws of the Development of Capitalism in Agriculture. Part I. Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America.

The article “The Capitalist System of Modern Agriculture” is included for the first time in Lenin’s Collected Works. It was published in 1932 in the magazine Bolshevik No. 9 and Lenin Miscellany XIX after the discovery of part of the manuscript. The succeeding parts of the manuscript are still missing: the end of Chapter III—“Peasant Farms under Capitalism”, the beginning and end of Chapter IV—“Labour of Women and Children In Agriculture”, Chapters V and VI—“Squandering of Labour in Small-scale Production” and “The Capitalist Character of the Use of Machinery in Modern Agriculture”.

The end of the article with the signature “V. Ilyin”, as well as the end of Chapter I (“A General Picture of the Economic System of Modern Agriculture”) and the beginning of Chapter II (“The Real Nature of the Majority of Modern Agricultural ‘Farms’ [Proletarian “Farms”]”), which were missing when the article was published in 1932, have now been, found; hence Chapters I, II and VII are now published in full for the first time.

==================

FIRST ARTICLE
Social statistics in general and economic statistics in particular have made tremendous advances during the last two or three decades. A series of problems, moreover those most fundamental concerning the economic system of modern states and its development, which were previously decided on the basis of general considerations and approximate data, cannot nowadays be analysed at all seriously without taking into account the mass of data about the whole territory of a given country collected according to a single definite programme and summed up by expert statisticians. In particular, the problems of the economics of agriculture, which arouse particularly many disputes, require answering on the basis of exact, mass data, the more so since in the European states and in America it is a growing practice to make periodic censuses covering all the agricultural enterprises of the country.

In Germany, for example, such censuses were made in 1882, 1895 and the last in 1907. The importance of these censuses has often been mentioned in our press, and it is difficult to find a book or article on the economics of modern agriculture which does not refer to the statistical data on German agriculture. The last census has already occasioned a fair amount of noise in both the German and our own press. Writing in Kievskaya Mysl[2] last year, Mr. Valentinov, it will be recalled, loudly clamoured that this census allegedly refuted the Marxist doctrine and Kautsky’s views by proving the viability of small-scale production and its triumph over large-scale production. Recently, in an article entitled “Tendencies in Agrarian Evolution in Germany” published in Ekonomist Rossii[3] No. 36 of September 11, 1910, Professor Vobly, on the basis of the data of the 1907 census, tried to refute the applicability to agriculture of “the scheme elaborated by Marx in relation to the development of industry”[4] and to prove that “small enterprises not only do not perish in the struggle against large ones in the sphere of agriculture; on the contrary, each new census registers their success

We think, therefore, it would be opportune to analyse in detail the data of the 1907 census. True, the publication of the materials of this census is not yet complete; three volumes containing all the data of the census[1] have appeared, but a fourth volume devoted to an “exposition of the results of the census as a whole” has not yet appeared and it is not known whether it will appear soon. But there are no grounds for postponing a study of the results of the census until this concluding volume has appeared, for all the material is already available, as well as the summary of it, and it is being widely used in the press.

We shall merely note that to put the question in the form In which it is usually put, confining oneself almost exclusively to a comparison of the number of farms of various sizes (in area) and the amount of land they possessed in various years, is an absolutely incorrect approach to the subject. The real differences between the Marxists and the opponents of Marxism on the agrarian question are much more deeply rooted. If the aim is to give a complete explanation of the sources of the differences, then attention must be devoted primarily and most of all to the question of the basic features of the capitalist system of modern agriculture. It is just on this question that the data of the German census of June 12, 1907, are particularly valuable. This census is less detailed on some questions than the earlier censuses of 1882 and 1895 but, on the other hand, it gives for the first time an unprecedented wealth of data on wage-labour in agriculture. And the use of wage-labour is the chief distinguishing mark of every kind of capitalist agriculture.

We shall therefore endeavour first of all to give a general picture of the capitalist system of modern agriculture, relying chiefly on the data of the 1907 German census and supplementing them with the data of the best agricultural censuses of other countries, namely: the Danish, Swiss, American and the last Hungarian censuses. As regards the fact which most of all strikes the eye on a first acquaintance with the results of the census and which is being most talked about, namely, the reduction in Germany of the number of large farms (large in agricultural area) and the amount of land they possess, we shall turn to an examination of this only at the end of our work. For this is one of the complicated facts which are a function of a series of others, and it is impossible to understand its significance without first elucidating several much more important and basic questions.

I
A General Picture of the Economic System of Modern Agriculture
The German agricultural censuses, like all the European (as distinct from the Russian) censuses of the kind, are based on information collected separately about each agricultural enterprise. At the same time the amount of information collected usually increases with each census. For instance, in Germany in 1907, although very important information on the number of cattle used in field work was omitted (this information was collected in 1882 and 1895), for the first time information was collected on the amount of arable land under various cereals and on the number of family workers and wage-workers. The information about each farm obtained in this way is quite sufficient for a politico-economic characterisation of the farm. The whole question, the whole difficulty of the task, is how to sum up these data in such a way as to obtain an accurate politico-economic characterisation of the different groups or types of farms as a wholes When the summing up is unsatisfactory, when the grouping is incorrect or inadequate, the result can be—and this continually happens in the treatment of modern census data—that unusually detailed, excellent data on each separate enterprise disappear, become lost or are wholly missing when dealing with the millions of farms of the entire country. The capitalist system of agriculture is characterised by the relations which exist between employers and workers, between farms of various types, and if the distinguishing features of these types are taken incorrectly or selected incompletely, then even the best census cannot give a politico-economic picture of the actual situation.

It is clear, therefore, that the methods of summarising or grouping the data of modern censuses are of extreme importance. Later on we shall examine an exposition of all the rather diverse methods used in the best censuses enumerated above. For the present let us note that the German census, like the vast majority of the others, gives a full summary, grouping the farms exclusively according to a single feature, namely, the size of the agricultural area of each farm. On this basis the census divides all the farms into 18 groups, be ginning with farms of less than one-tenth of a hectare and ending with those over 1,000 hectares of agricultural area. That such detailed subdivision is a statistical luxury unjustified by politico-economic considerations is felt by the authors of the German statistics themselves, who provide a summary of all the data in six—or, by separating a subgroup—seven large groups according to the size of the agricultural area. These groups are as follows: farms having less than half a hectare, one-half to 2, 2 to 5, 5 to 20, 20 to 100, and over 100, the last including a subgroup of farms with over 200 hectares of agricultural area.

The question arises: what is the politico-economic significance of this grouping? Undoubtedly the land is the chief means of production in agriculture; the amount of land is the most accurate criterion of the dimensions of a farm and, consequently, of its type, i.e., for example, whether it is a small, medium or large farm, a capitalist farm or one not using wage-labour. A farm of less than two hectares is usually accounted a small (sometimes called a parcellised or dwarf) farm; from two to 20 hectares (sometimes from two to 100)—a peasant farm, over 100 hectares a large —that is to say, a capitalist farm.

And so, the information on wage-labour collected for the first time by the 1907 census gives us above all a first opportunity of verifying from mass data this “usual” supposition. For the first time we see the introduction in statistical procedure of at least a certain—although far from adequate, as we shall see later—element of rationality, i.e., an element taking into account data of the most direct, immediate politico-economic significance.

In point of fact, much is said about small production. But what is small production? The most usual answer is that small production is one that does not use wage-labour. It is not only Marxists who look at it in this way. Ed. David, for example, whose book Socialism and Agriculture may be called one of the latest summaries of bourgeois. theories on the agrarian question, writes on page 29 of the Russian translation: “In all those cases where we speak of small production, we have in mind the economic category which functions without permanent outside assistance and without an auxiliary occupation.”

The 1907 census fully establishes first of all that the number of these farms is very small, that in modern agriculture farmers who do not hire workers, and who do not hire themselves out to work for others, are an insignificant minority. Out of the total of 5,736,082 agricultural enterprises in Germany registered by the 1907 census, only 1,872,616, i.e., less than one-third, belong to farmers whose chief occupation is the independent conduct of agriculture and who have no auxiliary occupations. How many of them hire workers? On this there is no information; that is to say, it existed in the most detailed form on the original cards and was lost during the summarising! The compilers did not wish to calculate (after performing a mass of most detailed and futile calculations) how many farms in each group hire permanent or temporary wage-workers.

In order to determine approximately the number of farms that do without wage-labour, we shall single out those groups in which the number of farms is less than the number of wage-workers. These will he groups with less than ten hectares of land per farm. These groups include 1,283,631 farmers who regard agriculture as their chief concern and have no auxiliary occupation. These farmers have a total of 1,400,162 wage-workers (if it is assumed that only those farmers who regard agriculture as their chief concern and have no auxiliary occupations maintain wage-workers). Only in the groups of farms with two to five hectares is the number of independent farmers without an, auxiliary occupation greater than the number of wage-workers, namely: 495,439 farms and 411,311 wage-workers.

Of course, cultivators who have auxiliary occupations sometimes have wage-workers and, of course, there are some “small” farmers who hire not one but several wage-workers. But nevertheless there can be no doubt that farmers who do not hire workers and who do not hire themselves out to work are an insignificant minority.

From the data on the number of wage-workers three basic groups of farms in German agriculture are immediately distinguishable.

I. Proletarian farms. These include groups in which the minority of farmers regard the conduct of independent agriculture as their chief occupation, groups in which the majority are wage-workers, and so on. For example, there are 2,084,060 farms of less than half a hectare. Of these only 97,153 are independent cultivators, and 1,287,312 are wage-workers (in all branches of the national economy) by their chief occupation. The farms with one-half to two hectares of land numbered 1,294,449. Of these only 377,762 are independent cultivators, 535,480 are wage-workers, 277, 735 carry on small-scale industry, handicrafts or trade, 103,472 are employees or represent “various and unspecified” occupations, Clearly, both these groups of farms are in the main, proletarian.

II. Peasant farms. The bulk of the farms included here are those of independent cultivators; moreover, the number of family workers in them is greater than that of wage-workers. These will be groups with two to 20 hectares of land.

III. Capitalist farms. Here we include farms with more wage-workers than family workers.

The following are the total figures for these groups:

Groups of farms Total number of farms Of which Farms subdivided according to the number of workers
Independ-
ent culti-
vators wage-
workers Total num-
ber of The workers in them being
total family
workers wage-
workers
I. Less than 2 ha. . 3,378,509 474,915 1,822,792 2,669,232 4,353,052 3,851,905 501,147
II. 2–20 ha. . . . . 2,071,816 1,705,448 117,338 2,057,577 7,509,735 5,898,853 1,610,882
III. 20 ha. or more . . 285,757 277,060 737 285,331 3,306,762 870,850 2,435,912
Total . . . 5,736,082 2,457,423 1,940,867 5,012,140 15,169,549 10,621,608 4,547,941

This table gives a picture of the economic system of modern German agriculture. At the bottom of the pyramid is a vast mass of proletarian “farms”, almost three-fifths of the total number; at the top is an insignificant minority (one twentieth) of capitalist farms. Let us point out, anticipating a little, that this insignificant minority has more than half of all the land and arable area. They have one-fifth of the total number of workers engaged in agriculture and over half the total number of wage-workers.

Notes
[1] Statistik des Deutschen Reichs, Band 212, Teil 1 a, 1 b and 2 a. Berufs- und Betriebszählung vom 12. Juni 1907. Landwirtschaftliche Betriebsstatistik, Berlin 1909 und 1910. (Statistics of the German State, Vol. 212, Part 1 a, 1 b and 2 a. Census of occupations and enterprises of June 12, 1907. Statistics of agricultural production, Berlin, 1909 and 1910.—Ed.) —Lenin

[2] Kievskaya Mysl (Kiev Thought)—a daily bourgeois-democratic newspaper published in Kiev from 1908 to 1918, Mensheviks were among its most active contributors.

Lenin is referring to the article by the liquidator N. Valentinov, “Concerning the Recent German Census”, published in Kievskaya Mysl No. 308.

[3] Ekonomist Rossii (Russian Economist)—a weekly bourgeois journal devoted to economic and financial questions in Russia and abroad; it was published in St. Petersburg from 1909 to 1912.

[4] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1959, pp. 600–863.

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chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:24 pm

II
The Real Nature of the Majority of Modern Agricultural “Farms” (Proletarian “Farms”)
Of the “farmers” with less than two hectares of land, the majority are wage-workers by their chief occupation. For them agriculture is an auxiliary occupation. Of the 3,378,509 enterprises in this group, 2,920419 are auxiliary concerns (Nebenbetriebe). A quite small minority, 14 per cent in all, 475,000 out of 3,4 million, are independent cultivators, and this includes those who have in addition an auxiliary, non-agricultural occupation.

* ... It is to be noted that the number of wage-workers[1] in this group exceeds the number of independent cultivators.

This fact indicates that the statistics here lump together with the mass of proletarians those few capitalist cultivators who carry out large-scale farming on a small plot of land. We shall repeatedly encounter this type in the course of our exposition.

The question arises of the significance of these masses of proletarian “farmers” in the general system of agriculture. In the first place, they represent the link between the feudal and the capitalist systems of social economy, their close connection and their kinship historically, a direct survival of serfdom in capitalism. If, for example, we see in Germany and particularly in Prussia that the statistics of agricultural enterprises include plots of land (known as Deputatland) which the landlord gives the agricultural labourer as part of his wages, is this not a direct survival of serfdom? The difference between serfdom, as an economic system, and capitalism lies in the fact that the former allots land to the worker, whereas the latter separates the worker from the land; the former gives the worker the means of subsistence in kind (or forces him to produce them himself on his “allotment”), the latter gives the worker payment in money, with which he buys the means of subsistence. Of course, in Germany this survival of serfdom is quite insignificant compared with what we see in Russia with her notorious “labour-rent” system of landlord farming, nevertheless it is a survival of serfdom. The 1907 census in Germany counted 579,500 “agricultural enterprises” belonging to agricultural workers and day-labourers, and of these 540,751 belong to the group of “farmers” with less than two hectares of land.

In the second place, the bulk of the “farmers” owning such insignificant plots of land that it is impossible to make a living from them, and which represent merely an “auxiliary occupation”, form part of the reserve army of unemployed in the capitalist system as a whole. It is, to use Marx’s term, the hidden form of this army.[3] It would be wrong to imagine that this reserve army of unemployed consists only of workers who are out of work. It includes also “peasants” or “petty farmers” who are unable to exist on what they get from their minute farm, who have to try to obtain their means of subsistence mainly by hiring out their labour. Their kitchen garden or potato plot serves this army of the poor as a means of supplementing their wages or of enabling them to exist when they are not employed. Capitalism requires these “dwarf”, “parcellised” pseudo-farms so that without expense it can always have a mass of cheap labour at its disposal. According to the 1907 census, out of two million “farms” of less than half a hectare 624,000 have only horticultural land and 361,000 have only a potato field. The total cultivated area of these two million “farms” is 247,000 hectares, of which more than half, namely, 166,000 hectares, is under potato. The total cultivated area of the million and a quarter “farms” with one-half to two hectares is 976,000 hectares, of which more than a third, namely, 334,000 hectares, is under potato. Deterioration of the people’s diet (replacement of bread by potatoes) and cheaper labour-power for the employers—such is the significance of the “farming” of three million agricultural “farms” out of the five million in Germany.

To conclude the description of these proletarian farms, let us add that almost one-third of them (one million out of 3.4 million) do not possess livestock of any kind, two-thirds (2.5 out of 3.4 million) do not have any cattle, more than nine-tenths (3.3 out of 3.4 million) have no horses. The share of these proletarian farms in the total agricultural production is minimal: three-fifths of them have less than one-tenth of all the cattle (2.7 million out of 29.4 million head, reckoning all livestock in terms of cattle), and one-twentieth of all the cultivated area (1.2 out of 24.4 million hectares).

One can imagine what confusion and falsity is introduced into the subject by statistics which lump together in this group of farms of less than two hectares of land millions of proletarians without horses or cattle and with only a kitchen garden or potato field and thousands of big farmers, capitalists, who conduct big cattle-raising or horticultural and suchlike enterprises on 1-2 dessiatines. That such farmers are contained in this group is evident if only from the fact that out of the 3.4 million (with less than two hectares of land) 15,428 are farmers each of whom have six or more Workers (taking family and wage-workers together), all of these 15,428 together having 123,941 workers, i.e., an average of eight workers per farm. Taking into account the special features of agriculture as regards machinery, such a number of workers is undoubtedly an indication of large-scale capitalist production. That large-scale cattle-raising farms are included among the mass of proletarian “farms” of less than two hectares, I have already had to point out on the basis of the data of the earlier census of 1895 (see my book: The Agrarian Question, St. Petersburg, 1908, p. 239[2] ). It was quite possible to single out these large-scale farms by means of the data both on the number of cattle and on the number of workers, but the German statisticians prefer to fill hundreds of pages with data on five subdivisions of the group of owners having less than half a hectare divided into still smaller groups according to the amount of land!

Socio-economic statistics—one of the most powerful means of acquiring social knowledge—are converted in this way into a monstrosity, into statistics for the sake of statistics, into a game.

That the majority or the great bulk of agricultural enterprises belong to the category of dwarf, parcellised, proletarian farms is a phenomenon that is common to many if not most European capitalist countries, but not all capitalist countries. In America, for example, according to data of the 1900 census, the average size of the farms is 146.6 acres (60 hectares), i.e., 7 1/2 times as large as in Germany. The very small farms, if one includes here those of less than 20 acres (8 hectares) form a little over one-tenth (11.8 per cent) of the total number. Even the farms of less than 50 acres (20 hectares) form only one-third of the total number. In order to compare these data with the German statistics one must take into account that farms of less than three acres (=1.2 hectares) are included in the American census only if their gross income amounts to 500 dollars, i.e., the vast majority of farms of less than three acres are not registered at all. Hence we must exclude also the very small farms from the German data. Let us eliminate even all the farms of less than two hectares: of the remaining 2,357,572 farms there will be 1,006,277 of two to five hectares, i.e., over 40 per cent of the farms will be very small farms. In America the situation is quite different.

It is evident that when the traditions of serfdom are absent (or all traces of it are more thoroughly abolished), and when the yoke imposed by land rent on agricultural production is absent (or weakened), capitalism in agriculture can exist and even develop with special rapidity without creating a category of a million agricultural labourers and day-labourers with allotments.

Notes
[1] Here the edge of the manuscript is torn off.—Ed.

[2] See present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 103–222.—-Ed. —Lenin

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow, 1959, pp. 640–48.

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chlamor
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:25 pm

III
Peasant Farms Under Capitalism
We have put under the heading peasant farms those groups in which, on the one hand, the majority of cultivators are independent farmers and, on the other hand, the number of family workers is greater than the number of wage-workers. It was found that the absolute number of wage-workers in such farms is very great—1.6 million, more than a third of the total number of wage-workers. Obviously there are not a few capitalist enterprises among the general mass (2.1 million) of “peasant” farms. We shall see below the approximate number and significance of these enterprises, for the present we shall deal in more detail with the relation ship between family and wage-labour. Let us see how big the average number of workers per farm is:

Groups of farms Average Number of Workers per Farm
Total Family
workers Wage-
workers
Proletarian farms . . { Less than 0.5 ha 1.3 1.2 0.1
{ 0.5-2 ha 1.9 1.7 0.2
Peasant farms . . { 2-5 ” 2.9 2.5 0.4
{ 5-10 ” 3.8 3.1 0.7
{ 10-20 ” 5.1 3.4 1.7
Capitalist farms . . { 20-100 ” 7.9 3.2 4.7
{ 100 ha or more 52.5 1.6 50.9
Altogether 3.0 2.1 0.9
We see from this table that, compared with industry, agricultural enterprises are generally of a small size as regards the number of workers. Only owners possessing more than 100 hectares have over 50 wage-workers: the number of such owners is 23,566, i.e., less than one-half per cent of the total number of farms. The total number of wage-workers on these farms is 1,463,974, i.e., a little less than the total number on the two million peasant farms.

Among the peasant farms, the group that is seen at once to stand out from the rest is that with 10-20 hectares: this group has an average of 1.7 wage-workers per farm. If we single out only the permanent workers we shall find that they number 412,702 for the 412,741 farms of this group (411,940 of the farms distributed according to the number of workers). This means that not a single enterprise is able to do without permanent use of wage-labour. That is why we single out this group as that of “Grossbauer”, big peasant farmers or peasant bourgeoisie. Usually it is owners of 20 or more hectares that are reckoned to belong to this category, but the 1907 census has shown that the use of wage-labour in agriculture is more widely distributed than is usually thought, and that the boundary at which the constant use of wage-labour begins must be shifted considerably lower.

Further, in examining the relationship between family and wage-labour, we find that in proletarian and peasant farming the average number of family workers shows a continual increase parallel to the increase in the number of wage-workers, whereas in capitalist farms the number of family workers begins to fall as the number of wage-workers grows larger. This phenomenon is quite natural and confirms our conclusion that farms of over 20 hectares are capitalist farms, in which not only is the number of wage-workers greater than that of family workers, but also the average number of family workers per farm is less than in the case of peasant farms.

Long ago, even at the very beginning of the controversy between the Marxists and the Narodniks, it was established from Zemstvo statistical data that in peasant farming family co-operation is the basis for the creation of capitalist co-operation, i.e., substantial peasant farms notable for their particularly large number of family workers become converted into capitalist farms employing wage-labour to an ever-increasing extent. Now we see that the German statistics for the whole of German agriculture confirm this conclusion.

Let us take the German peasant farms. As a whole they differ from the proletarian farms by being enterprises based on family co-operation (2.5–3.4 family workers per farm) and not enterprises of individuals. The proletarian farms have to be called the farms of individuals because they do not even average two workers per farm. Among the peasant farms, however, there is competition over the number of wage-workers taken on: the greater the size of the peasant farm, the higher is the number of its family workers and the more rapidly does the number of its wage-workers increase. The big peasant farms surpass the small peasant farms (of 2–5 hectares) by less than one-and-a-half times as regards the number of family workers but they exceed them by more than four times as regards the number of wage-workers.

We see here a precise statistical confirmation of the cardinal distinction between the class of small farmers in general, and of small peasants in particular, and the class of wage-workers, a distinction that is always being pointed out by Marxists and which the bourgeois economists and revisionists are quite unable to grasp. All the circumstances of commodity farming lead to the result that the small peas ants are unable to exist without striving to consolidate and extend their enterprises, and this struggle implies a struggle to increase the use of outside labour-power and to make its use cheaper. That is why in every capitalist country the mass of small peasants as a whole, of whom only an in significant minority “rise to prominence”, i.e., become real capitalists, are permeated by capitalist psychology and follow the agrarians in politics. The bourgeois economists (and the revisionists, too, in their wake) support this psychology; the Marxists explain to the small peasants that their only salvation lies in joining hands with the wage-workers.

The data of the 1907 census are also extremely instructive in regard to the proportion between the number of permanent and temporary workers. Altogether the latter are exactly one-third of the total number: 5,053,726 out of 15,169,549. Of the wage-workers 45 per cent are temporary, of the family workers 29 per cent are temporary. But these proportions undergo substantial change in the different types of farm. The following are the data for the groups we have distinguished.

Groups of farms Temporary Workers as a Percentage of the Total
Number of Workers
Family
workers Wage-
workers Total
I { Less than 0.5 ha 55 79 58
{ 0.5-2 ” 39 78 45
II { 2.5 ” 22 68 29
{ 5-10 ” 11 54 24
{ 10-20 ” 14 42 23
III { 20-100 ” 14 32 25
{ 100 ha or more 11 33 32
Average . . . . 29 45 33

We see from this table that among the proletarian farms with less than half a hectare (there are altogether 21 million such farms!) temporary workers form more than half of both the family workers and wage-workers. These are chiefly auxiliary farms which occupy only part of the time of their owners. Among the proletarian farms of 0.5–2 hectares, too, the percentage of temporary workers is very high. As the size of the farm increases the percentage falls—with only one exception. This exception is that among wage-workers of the biggest capitalist farms the percentage of temporary workers increases slightly, and since the number of family workers in this group is quite negligible, the percentage of temporary workers among the workers as a whole increases consider ably, from 25 to 32 per cent.

The difference between peasant and capitalist farms as regards the total number of temporary workers is not very great. The difference between the numbers of family and wage-workers is very considerable in all types of farm, and if we take into account that among temporary family workers there is, as we shall see, an especially high percentage of women and children this difference becomes still greater. Hence wage-workers are the most mobile element....

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chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:25 pm

IV
Labour of Women and Children in Agriculture
... they carry on agriculture. Generally speaking, women’s labour predominates also in the peasant farm, and it is only in the big peasant and capitalist enterprises that men constitute the majority.

There are in general fewer women among wage-workers than among family workers. Obviously, the capitalist cultivators in all the groups are among those farmers who obtain the best labour forces. If the predominance of women over men can be taken as a measure of the straitened circumstances of the farmer and of the unsatisfactory state of a farm that has no possibility of using the best labour forces (and this supposition inevitably follows from all the data on women....

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chlamor
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Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:26 pm

VII
The Low Productivity of Labour in Small-Scale Production and Excessive Work
The significance of the data on the use of machinery in agriculture is usually underestimated in economic literature. Firstly, the capitalist character of the use of machinery is quite often ignored (always, in the case of bourgeois economists); the economists make no investigation of this problem, they do not know how to raise it or do not even want to do so. Secondly, the use of machinery is considered in isolation and not as a criterion of the different types of farm, different methods of cultivation and different economic conditions of farming.

If, for example, as a general rule we find an incomparably greater use of machinery in large-scale compared with small-scale production, and a huge concentration of machines in the capitalist farms, which sometimes even have almost e monopoly of up-to-date implements, this is an indication of the difference in care for the land among farms of different types. Among the machines registered by the German census are such machines as steam ploughs, seed-drills and potato-planting machines. The fact that they are mainly used in capitalist agriculture means that in this case care for the land is better, the technique of cultivation higher and the productivity of labour greater. Bensing,[2] the author of a well-known monograph on agricultural machinery, basing himself on the data of specialists concerning the effect of using various machines, has calculated that, even without changing the system of cultivation, the use of machines by itself raises the net return from farming many times over. These calculations have not been refuted by anyone and basically they cannot be refuted.

The small-scale producer who has no opportunity of using up-to-date implements is forced to lag behind in care for the land, and it is only individuals or a few dozen out of hundreds and thousands who can try to “overtake” the big farmer by applying more labour to the land while retaining the old tools, and by greater “assiduousness” and a longer working day. The, statistics of the use of machinery indicate therefore the existence of excessive labour in small-scale production, a fact which is always stressed by Marxists. No statistics can take direct account of this fact, but if the statistical data are regarded in the light of their economic significance, it becomes clear which types of farming are bound to develop, cannot fail to develop, in modern society when machines are used, and when their use is impossible.

The Hungarian statistics provide an illustration of what has been said. Like the German census of 1907 (and of 1882 and 1895), like the Danish statistics on the use of machines in 1907, and like the French enquiry in 1909, the Hungarian census of 1895, which for the first time collected precise data for the whole country, shows the superiority of capitalist agriculture and the increased percentage of farms with machines as the size of the farms increases. From this angle there is nothing new here but only a confirmation of the German data. The special feature of the Hungarian statistics, however, is that information was collected not only on the few up-to-date implements and machines, but on the entire, or almost the entire, farm inventory, on the number of the simplest and most essential implements, ploughs, harrows, carts, etc.

Thanks to these exceptionally detailed data it becomes possible to establish accurately the, as it were, symptomatic significance, characteristic of the whole system of farming, of the information on the use of some agricultural machines and technological “rarities” (such as steam ploughs). Let us take the Hungarian statistical data[1] on the use of ploughs other than steam ploughs (of which in 1895 there were altogether 179 in the whole of Hungary, including 120 in 3,977 largest farms).

The following are data of the total number of ploughs and of the number of the simplest, most primitive and least strongly built of all the implements of this kind (the simplest comprise single-share ploughs with a wooden pole; the others are: the same but with an iron pole, then two- and three-share ploughs, cultivators, ridging ploughs, and ploughs for deep ploughing).

Groups of
farms Number
of farms
(total) Number of
ploughs
(total) Including
the
simplest
Dwarf (less than 5 yokes) 1,459,893 227,241 196,852
{ 5-10 yokes 569,534 335,885 290,958
{ 10-20 ” 467,038 398,365 329,416
{ 20-50 ” 235,784 283,285 215,380
{ 50-100 ” 38,862 72,970 49,312
Total small 1,311,218 1,090,505 885,066
Medium (100-1,000 yokes) 20,787 125,157 55,347
Large (over 1,000 yokes) 3,977 149,750 51,565
Total . . . . 2,795,885 1,592,653 1,188,830

Without mentioning the dwarf farms, we see that in the small peasant farms (5-10 yokes, i.e., 2.8–5.7 hectares) 233,000 out of 569,000 do not own any ploughs at all, and of the middle peasant farms 69,000 out of 467,000 are without ploughs. Only the higher groups, i.e., the big peasant and capitalist farms, all have ploughs, and it is only in the farms of over 100 yokes (there are only 25,000 such farms==O.9 per cent of the total number!) that the more elaborate implements predominate. In the peasant farms the simplest implements, those least strongly built and worst in performance, predominate (and the smaller the farm the more marked is this predominance).

Leaving out of account the dwarf farms, which constitute the majority (52 per cent) of all the farms but which occupy an insignificant fraction of the total area (7 per cent), we reach the following conclusion:

Over one million small- and middle-peasant farms (5-20 yokes) are inadequately provided with even the simplest implements for tilling the soil,

A quarter of a million big peasant farms (20-100 yokes) are tolerably equipped with implements of the simplest kind. And only 25,000 capitalist farms (but possessing, it is true, 55 per cent of the entire area of land) are fully equipped with up-to-date implements.

The Hungarian statistics, on the other hand, calculate how many yokes of arable land there are to one agricultural implement and obtain figures such as the following (we quote only the data for ploughs, harrows and carts, while pointing out that the picture of their distribution among the farms is completely analogous to that we saw in regard to ploughs).

In farms Yokes of arable land
to one
plough to one
harrow to one
cart
dwarf . . . . . . . . 7 8 7
small . . . . . . . . 12 13 15
medium . . . . . . 27 45 40
large . . . . . . . . 28 81 53

This means that the proletarian and peasant farms, which are quite unsatisfactorily equipped with all agricultural implements, have an excessively large number of them in relation to the whole amount of the arable land of their farms. A beggarly equipment of implements and an unbearable costliness of maintaining them—such is the lot of small-scale production under capitalism. In exactly the same way the statistics relating to housing in every large town show us that the poorest classes of the population, the workers, small traders, petty employees, etc., live worst of all, have the most crowded and worst dwellings and pay most dearly of all for each cubic foot. Calculated per unit of space the dwellings of factory barracks or hovels for the poor are more costly than the fashionable dwellings anywhere on the Nevsky.

The conclusion to be drawn from this as regards both Germany and all the capitalist countries is as follows. If the data on the utilisation of a few up-to-date implements and agricultural machines show us that their employment increases as the size of the farm increases, this means that small-scale production in agriculture is poorly equipped with all necessary implements. This means that in small-scale production squandering of labour on maintaining an immense quantity of poor and out-of-date implements suitable only for farming on a minute scale is combined with acute want, causing the peasant to overstrain himself in order somehow to keep going on his plot of land with these obsolete barbaric implements.

That is what the data, so simple and so well-known to all, on the use of agricultural machinery tell us if we reflect on their socio-economic significance.

Capitalism raises the level of agricultural technique and advances it, but it cannot do so except by ruining, depressing and crushing the mass of small producers.

In order to give a graphic illustration of the social significance and tempo of this process, we shall conclude by comparing the data of the three German censuses of 1882, 1895 and 1907. For the purpose of this comparison we must take the data on the number of instances of the use of the five agricultural machines which were registered during the whole of this period (these machines are: steam ploughs, seed-drills, mowing machines and harvesters, steam and other threshing-machines). We obtain the following picture:

Groups of farms Number of Instances of the use of the chief
agricultural machines per hundred farms
1882 1895 1907
I Less than 2 ha. . . . . . 0.5 1.6 3.8
II { 2-5 ” . . . . . 3.9 11.9 31.2
{ 5-10 ” . . . . . 13.5 32.9 71.1
{ 10-20 ” . . . . . 31.2 60.8 122.1
III. { 2O-100 ” . . . . . 59.2 92.0 179.1
{ 100 ha or more. . . . 187.1 208.9 271.9
Average ..... 16.6 33.9 8.7

The progress seems considerable: during a quarter of a century the number of instances of the use of the chief machines has grown in general nearly fourfold. But, on making a careful examination, it has to be said that it has required a whole quarter of a century to make the use of at least one of the five chief machines a regular phenomenon in a small minority of the farms that cannot do without the constant employment of wage-labour. For such use can only be called regular when the number of instances of it exceeds the number of farms, and we find that this occurs only in relation to the capitalist and big peasant farms. Together they comprise 12 per cent of the total number of farms.

The bulk of the small and middle peasants, after a quarter of a century of capitalist progress, have remained, in a position in which only a third of the former and two-thirds of the latter can use any of these five machines during the year.

(End of first article)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ ... 16pp74-442

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:28 pm

Lessons from the Green Revolution
Do We Need New Technology to End Hunger?


by Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lapp�*

[from Tikkun Magazine, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 52-56, March/April 2000]


Faced with an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world,
cheerleaders for our social order have an easy solution: we will grow
more food through the magic of chemicals and genetic engineering.
For those who remember the original "Green Revolution" promise to end
hunger through miracle seeds, this call for "Green Revolution II" should
ring hollow. Yet Monsanto, Novartis, AgrEvo, DuPont, and other chemical
companies who are reinventing themselves as biotechnology companies,
together with the World Bank and other international agencies, would have
the world's anti-hunger energies aimed down the path of more
agrochemicals and genetically modified crops. This second Green
Revolution, they tell us, will save the world from hunger and starvation
if we just allow these various companies, spurred by the free market, to
do their magic.

The Green Revolution myth goes like this: the miracle seeds of the Green
Revolution increase grain yields and therefore are a key to ending world
hunger. Higher yields mean more income for poor farmers, helping them to
climb out of poverty, and more food means less hunger. Dealing with the
root causes of poverty that contribute to hunger takes a very long time
and people are starving now. So we must do what we can-increase
production. The Green Revolution buys the time Third World countries
desperately need to deal with the underlying social causes of poverty and
to cut birth rates. In any case, outsiders-like the scientists and policy
advisers behind the Green Revolution-can't tell a poor country to reform
its economic and political system, but they can contribute invaluable
expertise in food production. While the first Green Revolution may have
missed poorer areas with more marginal lands, we can learn valuable
lessons from that experience to help launch a second Green Revolution to
defeat hunger once and for all.

Improving seeds through experimentation is what people have been up to
since the beginning of agriculture, but the term "Green Revolution" was
coined in the 1960s to highlight a particularly striking breakthrough. In
test plots in northwest Mexico, improved varieties of wheat dramatically
increased yields. Much of the reason why these "modern varieties"
produced more than traditional varieties was that they were more
responsive to controlled irrigation and to petrochemical fertilizers,
allowing for much more efficient conversion of industrial inputs into
food. With a big boost from the International Agricultural Research
Centers created by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the "miracle"
seeds quickly spread to Asia, and soon new strains of rice and corn were
developed as well.

By the 1970s, the term "revolution" was well deserved, for the new
seeds-accompanied by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and, for the most
part, irrigation-had replaced the traditional farming practices of
millions of Third World farmers. By the 1990s, almost 75 percent of Asian
rice areas were sown with these new varieties. The same was true for
almost half of the wheat planted in Africa and more than half of that in
Latin America and Asia, and about 70 percent of the world's corn as well.
Overall, it was estimated that 40 percent of all farmers in the Third
World were using Green Revolution seeds, with the greatest use found in
Asia, followed by Latin America.

Clearly, the production advances of the Green Revolution are no myth.
Thanks to the new seeds, tens of millions of extra tons of grain a year
are being harvested. But has the Green Revolution actually proven itself
a successful strategy for ending hunger? Not really.

Narrowly focusing on increasing production-as the Green Revolution
does-cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly
concentrated distribution of economic power, especially access to land
and purchasing power. Even the World Bank concluded in a major 1986 study
of world hunger that a rapid increase in food production does not
necessarily result in food security-that is, less hunger. Current hunger
can only be alleviated by "redistributing purchasing power and resources
toward those who are undernourished," the study said. In a nutshell-if
the poor don't have the money to buy food, increased production is not
going to help them.

Introducing any new agricultural technology into a social system stacked
in favor of the rich and against the poor-without addressing the social
questions of access to the technology's benefits-will over time lead to
an even greater concentration of the rewards from agriculture, as is
happening in the United States.

Because the Green Revolution approach does nothing to address the
insecurity that lies at the root of high birth rates-and can even
heighten that insecurity-it cannot buy time until population growth
slows. Finally, a narrow focus on production ultimately defeats itself as
it destroys the very resource base on which agriculture depends. We've
come to see that without a strategy for change that addresses the
powerlessness of the poor, the tragic result will be more food and yet
more hunger.

More Food and Yet More Hunger?

Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there
are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the
1990s. Where are these 786 million hungry people? Since the early 1980s,
media representations of famines in Africa have awakened Westerners to
hunger there, but Africa represents less than one-quarter of the hunger
in the world today. We are made blind to the day-in-day-out hunger
suffered by hundreds of millions more. For example, by the mid-1980s,
newspaper headlines were applauding the Asian success stories-India and
Indonesia, we were told, had become "self-sufficient in food" or even
"food exporters." But it is in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution
seeds have contributed to the greatest production success, that roughly
two-thirds of the undernourished in the entire world live.

According to Business Week magazine, "even though Indian granaries are
overflowing now," thanks to the success of the Green Revolution in
raising wheat and rice yields, "5,000 children die each day of
malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are
poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced,
"the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some
is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to
public markets." The article concludes that the Green Revolution may have
reduced India's grain imports substantially, but did not have a similar
impact on hunger.

Such analysis raises serious questions about the number of hungry people
in the world in 1970 versus 1990, spanning the two decades of major Green
Revolution advances. At first glance, it looks as though great progress
was made, with food production up and hunger down. The total food
available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over those two
decades, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942
million to 786 million, a 16 percent drop. This was apparent progress,
for which those behind the Green Revolution were understandably happy to
take the credit.

But these figures merit a closer look. If you eliminate China from the
analysis, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually
increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million. In South
America, for example, while per capita food supplies rose almost 8
percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent. In
south Asia, there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there
were also 9 percent more hungry people. Nor was it increased population
that made for more hungry people. The total food available per person
actually increased. What made possible greater hunger was the failure to
address unequal access to food and food-producing resources.

The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped
from 406 million to 189 million, almost begs the question: which has been
more effective at reducing hunger-the Green Revolution or the Chinese
Revolution, where broad-based changes in access to land paved the way for
rising living standards?

Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food
production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and
cultural rules that people make. These rules determine who benefits as a
supplier of the increased production-whose land and crops prosper and for
whose profit-and who benefits as a consumer of the increased
production-who gets the food and at what price.

The poor pay more and get less. Poor farmers can't afford to buy
fertilizer and other inputs in volume; big growers can get discounts for
large purchases. Poor farmers can't hold out for the best price for their
crops, as can larger farmers whose circumstances are far less desperate.
In much of the world, water is the limiting factor in farming success,
and irrigation is often out of the reach of the poor. Canal irrigation
favors those near the top of the flow. Tubewells, often promoted by
development agencies, favor the bigger operators, who can better afford
the initial investment and have lower costs per unit. Credit is also
critical. It is common for small farmers to depend on local moneylenders
and pay interest rates several times as high as wealthier farmers.
Government-subsidized credit overwhelmingly benefits the big farmers.
Most of all, the poor lack clout. They can't command the subsidies and
other government favors accruing to the rich.

With the Green Revolution, farming becomes petro-dependent. Some of the
more recently developed seeds may produce higher yields even without
manufactured inputs, but the best results require the right amounts of
chemical fertilizer, pesticides, and water. So as the new seeds spread,
petrochemicals become part of farming. In India, adoption of the new
seeds has been accompanied by a sixfold rise in fertilizer use per acre.
Yet the quantity of agricultural production per ton of fertilizer used in
India dropped by two-thirds during the Green Revolution years. In fact,
over the past thirty years the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian
rice has been from three to forty times faster than the growth of rice
yields.

Because farming methods that depend heavily on chemical fertilizers do
not maintain the soil's natural fertility and because pesticides generate
resistant pests, farmers need ever more fertilizers and pesticides just
to achieve the same results. At the same time, those who profit from the
increased use of fertilizers and pesticides fear labor organizing and use
their new wealth to buy tractors and other machines, even though they are
not required by the new seeds. This incremental shift leads to the
industrialization of farming.

Once on the path of industrial agriculture, farming costs more. It can be
more profitable, of course, but only
if the prices farmers get for their crops stay ahead of the costs of
petrochemicals and machinery. Green Revolution proponents claim increases
in net incomes from farms of all sizes once farmers adopt the more
responsive seeds. But recent studies also show another trend: outlays for
fertilizers and pesticides may be going up faster than yields, suggesting
that Green Revolution farmers are now facing what U.S. farmers have
experienced for decades-a cost-price squeeze.

In Central Luzon, Philippines, rice yield increased 13 percent during the
1980s, but came at the cost of a 21 percent increase in fertilizer use.
In the Central Plains, yields went up only 6.5 percent, while fertilizer
use rose 24 percent and pesticides jumped by 53 percent. In West Java, a
23 percent yield increase was virtually canceled by 65 and 69 percent
increases in fertilizers and pesticides respectively.

To anyone following farm news here at home, these reports have a
painfully familiar ring-and why wouldn't they? After all, the United
States-not Mexico-is the true birthplace of the Green Revolution.
Improved seeds combined with chemical fertilizers and pesticides have
pushed corn yields up nearly three-fold since 1950, with smaller but
still significant gains for wheat, rice, and soybeans. Since World War
II, as larger harvests have pushed down the prices farmers get for their
crops while the costs of farming have shot up, farmers' profit margins
have been drastically narrowed. By the early 1990s, production costs had
risen from about half to over 80 percent of gross farm income. So who
survives today? Two very different groups: those few farmers who chose
not to buy into industrialized agriculture and those able to keep
expanding their acreage to make up for their lower per acre profit. Among
this second select group are the top 1.2 percent of farms by income,
those with $500,000 or more in yearly sales, dubbed "superfarms" by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1969, the superfarms earned 16 percent
of net farm income; by the late 1980s, they garnered nearly 40 percent.

Superfarms triumph not because they are more efficient food producers or
because the Green Revolution technology itself favored them, but because
of advantages that accrue to wealth and size. They have the capital to
invest and the volume necessary to stay afloat even if profits per unit
shrink. They have the political clout to shape tax policies in their
favor. Over time, why should we expect the result of the cost-price
squeeze to be any different in the Third World? In the United States,
we've seen the number of farms drop by two-thirds and average farm size
more than double since World War II. The gutting of rural communities,
the creation of inner-city slums, and the exacerbation of unemployment
all followed in the wake of this vast migration from the land. Think what
the equivalent rural exodus means in the Third World, where the number of
jobless people is already double or triple our own.

Not Ecologically Sustainable

There is also growing evidence that Green Revolution-style farming is not
ecologically sustainable, even for large farmers. In the 1990s, Green
Revolution researchers themselves sounded the alarm about a disturbing
trend that had only just come to light. After achieving dramatic
increases in the early stages of the technological transformation, yields
began falling in a number of Green Revolution areas. In Central Luzon,
Philippines, rice yields grew steadily during the 1970s, peaked in the
early 1980s, and have been dropping gradually ever since. Long-term
experiments conducted by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)
in both Central Luzon and Laguna Province confirm these results. Similar
patterns have now been observed for rice-wheat systems in India and
Nepal. The causes of this phenomenon have to do with forms of long-term
soil degradation that are still poorly understood by scientists. An
Indian farmer told Business Week his story:

Dyal Singh knows that the soil on his 3.3-hectare [8 acre] farm in Punjab is becoming less fertile. So far, it hasn't hurt his harvest of wheat and corn. "There will be a great problem after 5 or 10 years," says the 63-year-old Sikh farmer. Years of using high-yield seeds that require heavy irrigation and chemical fertilizers have taken their toll on much of India's farmland.Š So far, 6 percent of agricultural land has been rendered useless.

Where yields are not actually declining, the rate of growth is slowing
rapidly or leveling off, as has now been documented in China, North
Korea, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Sri
Lanka.

The Green Revolution: Some Lessons

Having seen food production advance while hunger widens, we are now
prepared to ask: under what conditions are greater harvests doomed to
failure in eliminating hunger?

First, where farmland is bought and sold like any other commodity and
society allows the unlimited accumulation of farmland by a few,
superfarms replace family farms and all of society suffers.

Second, where the main producers of food-small farmers and farm
workers-lack bargaining power relative to suppliers of farm inputs and
food marketers, producers get a shrinking share of the rewards from
farming.

Third, where dominant technology destroys the very basis for future
production, by degrading the soil and generating pest and weed problems,
it becomes increasingly difficult and costly to sustain yields.

Under these three conditions, mountains of additional food could not
eliminate hunger, as hunger in America should never let us forget. The
alternative is to create a viable and productive small farm agriculture
using the principles of agroecology. That is the only model with the
potential to end rural poverty, feed everyone, and protect the
environment and the productivity of the land for future generations.

Successful Examples

That sounds good, but has it ever worked? From the United States to
India, alternative agriculture is proving itself viable. In the United
States, a landmark study by the prestigious National Research Council
found that "alternative farmers often produce high per acre yields with
significant reductions in costs per unit of crop harvested," despite the
fact that "many federal policies discourage adoption of alternative
practices." The Council concluded that "Federal commodity programs must
be restructured to help farmers realize the full benefits of the
productivity gains possible through alternative practices."

In South India, a 1993 study was carried out to compare "ecological
farms" with matched "conventional" or
chemical-intensive farms. The study's author found that the ecological
farms were just as productive and profitable as the chemical ones. He
concluded that if extrapolated nationally, ecological farming would have
"no negative impact on food security," and would reduce soil erosion and
the depletion of soil fertility while greatly lessening dependence on
external inputs.

But Cuba is where alternative agriculture has been put to its greatest
test. Changes underway in that island nation since the collapse of trade
with the former socialist bloc provide evidence that the alternative
approach can work on a large scale. Before 1989, Cuba was a model Green
Revolution-style farm economy, based on enormous production units, using
vast quantities of imported chemicals and machinery to produce export
crops, while over half of the island's food was imported. Although the
government's commitment to equity, as well as favorable terms of trade
offered by Eastern Europe, meant that Cubans were not undernourished, the
underlying vulnerability of this style of farming was exposed when the
collapse of the socialist bloc joined the already existing and soon to be
tightened U.S. trade embargo.

Cuba was plunged into the worst food crisis in its history, with
consumption of calories and protein dropping by perhaps as much as 30
percent. Nevertheless, by 1997, Cubans were eating almost as well as they
did before 1989, yet comparatively little food and agrochemicals were
being imported. What happened?

Faced with the impossibility of importing either food
or agrochemical inputs, Cuba turned inward to create a more self-reliant
agriculture based on higher crop prices to farmers, agroecological
technology, smaller production units, and urban agriculture. The
combination of a trade embargo, food shortages, and the opening of
farmers' markets meant that farmers began to receive much better prices
for their products. Given this incentive to produce, they did so, even in
the absence of Green Revolution-style inputs. They were given a huge
boost by the reorientation of government education, research, and
extension toward alternative methods, as well as the rediscovery of
traditional farming techniques.

As small farmers and cooperatives responded by increasing production
while large-scale state farms stagnated and faced plunging yields, the
government initiated the newest phase of revolutionary land reform,
parceling out the state farms to their former employees as smaller-scale
production units. Finally, the government mobilized support for a growing
urban agriculture movement-small-scale organic farming on vacant
lots-which, together with the other changes, transformed Cuban cities and
urban diets in just a few years.

The Cuban experience tells us that we can feed a nation's people with a
small-farm model based on agroecological technology, and in so doing we
can become more self-reliant in food production. A key lesson is that
when farmers receive fairer prices, they produce, with or without Green
Revolution seed and chemical inputs. If these expensive and noxious
inputs are unnecessary, then we can dispense with them.

The Bottom Line

In the final analysis, if the history of the Green Revolution has taught
us one thing, it is that increased food production can-and often does-go
hand in hand with greater hunger. If the very basis of staying
competitive in farming is buying expensive inputs, then wealthier farmers
will inexorably win out over the poor, who are unlikely to find adequate
employment to compensate for the loss of farming livelihoods. Hunger is
not caused by a shortage of food, and cannot be eliminated by producing
more.

This is why we must be skeptical when Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, and
other chemical-cum-biotechnology companies tell us that genetic
engineering will boost crop yields and feed the hungry. The technologies
they push have dubious benefits and well-documented risks, and the second
Green Revolution they promise is no more likely to end hunger than the
first.

Far too many people do not have access to the food that is already
available because of deep and growing inequality. If agriculture can play
any role in alleviating hunger, it will only be to the extent that the
bias toward wealthier and larger farmers is reversed through pro-poor
alternatives like land reform and sustainable agriculture, which reduce
inequality and make small farmers the center of an economically vibrant
rural economy.

https://nature.berkeley.edu/srr/Allianc ... olutio.htm

chlamor
Posts: 520
Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 12:46 am

Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:28 pm

Agroecology and the Green Revolution
30
06
2011
The promise of the Green Revolution was that it would end hunger through the magic of chemicals and genetic engineering. The reasoning goes like this: the miracle seeds of the Green Revolution increase grain yields; higher yields mean more income for poor farmers, helping them to climb out of poverty, and more food means less hunger. Dealing with the root causes of poverty that contribute to hunger takes a very long time – but people are starving now. So we must do what we can now – and that’s usually to increase production. The Green Revolution buys the time Third World countries desperately need to deal with the underlying social causes of poverty and to cut birth rates.

Today, though, growth in food production is flattening, human population continues to increase, demand outstrips production; food prices soar. As Dale Allen Pfeiffer maintains in Eating Fossil Fuels, modern intensive agriculture – as developed through the Green Revolution – is unsustainable and has not been the panacea some hoped it would be. Technologically-enhanced agriculture has augmented soil erosion, polluted and overdrawn groundwater and surface water, and even (largely due to increased pesticide use) caused serious public health and environmental problems. Soil erosion, overtaxed cropland and water resource overdraft in turn lead to even greater use of fossil fuels and hydrocarbon products. More hydrocarbon-based fertilizers must be applied, along with more pesticides; irrigation water requires more energy to pump; and fossil fuels are used to process polluted water. And the data on yields, and fertilizer and pesticide use (not to mention human health problems) supports these allegations. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists called “Failure to Yield” sums it up nicely. (click here).



Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, says the Achilles heel of current green revolution methods is a dependence on fossil fuels. “The only way you can have one farmer feed 140 Americans is with monocultures. And monocultures need lots of fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and lots of fossil-fuel-based pesticides,” Pollan says. “That only works in an era of cheap fossil fuels, and that era is coming to an end. Moving anyone to a dependence on fossil fuels seems the height of irresponsibility.”

So is a reprise of the green revolution—with the traditional package of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds—really the answer to the world’s food crisis? As Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, describes it: the good news is that feeding the world in 2050 is completely possible; the bad news is that there isn’t a lot of money to be made by doing so.[1]

It has become clear that agriculture has to shrink its environmental footprint – to do more with less. The world’s growing demand for agricultural production must be met not by bringing more land into production, with more gallons of water, or with more intensive use of inputs that impact the environment, but by being better stewards of existing resources through the use of technological innovation combined with policy reforms to ensure proper incentives are in place.[2]

A massive study (published in 2009) called the “International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development” concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology in the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor. The six-year study, initiated by the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and involving some 400 agricultural experts from around the globe, called for a paradigm shift in agriculture toward more sustainable and ecologically friendly practices that would benefit the world’s 900 million small farmers, not just agribusiness. As the report states: “business as usual is no longer an option”.[3]

Dr. Peter Rosset, former Director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy and an internationally renowned expert on food security, has this to say about the Green Revolution:

In the final analysis, if the history of the Green Revolution has taught
us one thing, it is that increased food production can-and often does-go
hand in hand with greater hunger. If the very basis of staying
competitive in farming is buying expensive inputs, then wealthier farmers
will inexorably win out over the poor, who are unlikely to find adequate
employment to compensate for the loss of farming livelihoods. Hunger is
not caused by a shortage of food, and cannot be eliminated by producing
more.

This is why we must be skeptical when Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, and
other chemical-cum-biotechnology companies tell us that genetic
engineering will boost crop yields and feed the hungry. The technologies
they push have dubious benefits and well-documented risks, and the second
Green Revolution they promise is no more likely to end hunger than the
first.

Far too many people do not have access to the food that is already
available because of deep and growing inequality. If agriculture can play
any role in alleviating hunger, it will only be to the extent that the
bias toward wealthier and larger farmers is reversed through pro-poor
alternatives like land reform and sustainable agriculture, which reduce
inequality and make small farmers the center of an economically vibrant
rural economy.

We began this series a few weeks ago with statements from several people who said that organic agriculture cannot feed the world. Yet increasing numbers of scientists, policy panels and experts are suggesting that agricultural practices pretty close to organic — perhaps best called “sustainable” — can feed more poor people sooner, begin to repair the damage caused by industrial production and, in the long term, become the norm. This new way of looking at agriculture is called agroecology, which is simply the application of ecological principles to the production of food, fuel and pharmaceuticals. The term is not associated with any one type of farming (i.e., organic, conventional or intensive) or management practices, but rather recognizes that there is no one formula for success. Agroecology is concerned with optimizing yields while minimizing negative environmental and socio-economic impacts of modern technologies.

In March, 2011, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food , Olivier de Schutter, presented a new report, “Agro-ecology and the right to food”, which was based on an extensive review of recent scientific literature. The report demonstrates that agroecology, if sufficiently supported, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. “To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available,” says De Schutter. “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live — especially in unfavorable environments. …To date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects,” De Schutter says. “Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3-10 years.”

The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

De Sheutter goes on to say: “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, the report says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. Agro-ecology, according to De Sheutter, immediately helps “small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological destruction.”

The majority of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), but an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

As an example of how this process works, the UN report suggests that “rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise”. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful “push-pull” strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

The push-pull method involves pushing pests away from corn by interplanting corn with an insect repelling crop called Desmodium (which can be fed to livestock), while pulling the pests toward small nearby plots of Napier grass, “a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests.” In addition to controlling pests, this system produces livestock fodder, thus doubling corn yields and milk production at the same time. And it improves the soil to boot![4]

Further, by decentralizing production, floods in Southeast Asia, for example, might not mean huge shortfalls in the world’s rice crop; smaller scale farming makes the system less susceptible to climate shocks. If you read the story by Justin Gillis in the New York Times on May 5, which discusses the effects climate change is having on crop yields, this can only be a good thing.

Significantly, the UN report mentions that past efforts to combat hunger focused mostly on cereals such as wheat and rice which, while important, do not provide a wide enough range of nutrients to prevent malnutrition. Thus, the biodiversity in agroecological farming systems provide much needed nutrients. “For example,” the report says, “it has been estimated that indigenous fruits contribute on average about 42 percent of the natural food-basket that rural households rely on in southern Africa. This is not only an important source of vitamins and other micronutrients, but it also may be critical for sustenance during lean seasons.” Indeed, in agroecological farming systems around the world, plants a conventional American farm might consider weeds are eaten as food or used in traditional herbal medicine.

States and donors have a key role to play here. Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don’t open markets for chemical products or improved seeds. The flood-tolerant rice mentioned above was created from an old strain grown in a small area of India, but decades of work were required to improve it. But even after it was shown that this new variety was able to survive floods for twice as long as older varieties, there was no money for distribution of the seeds to the farmers. Indeed, the distribution was made possible only through a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

American efforts to fight global hunger, to date, have focused more on crop breeding, particularly genetic engineering, and nitrogen fertilizer than agroecology. Whereas the new UN report notes that, “perhaps because [agroecological] practices cannot be rewarded by patents, the private sector has been largely absent from this line of research.” The U.S. aggressively promotes public-private partnerships with corporations[5] such as seed and chemical companies Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and BASF; agribusiness companies Cargill, Bunge; and Archer Daniels Midland; processed food companies PepsiCo, Nestle, General Mills, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kraft Foods; and the retail giant Wal-Mart.[6]

We need to look closely at all options since there is so much at stake. To meet the challenges listed above, perhaps we need what Jon Foley calls a “resilient hybrid strategy”. Foley, director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Minnesota, puts it this way:

I think we need a new kind of agriculture – kind of a third agriculture, between the big agribusiness, commercial approach to agriculture, and the lessons from organic and local systems…. Can we take the best of both of these and invent a more sustainable, and scalable agriculture?[7]

The New York Times article pointed out the success of a new variety of rice seeds that survived recent floods in India after being submerged for 10 days. “It’s the best example in agriculture,” said Julia Bailey-Serres, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside. “The submergence-tolerant rice essentially sits and waits out the flood.” (8)

But this path raises many concerns – for example, genetically modified seeds are anathema to much of Europe and many environmentalists. And so far, genetic breakthroughs such as engineering plants that can fix their own nitrogen or are resistant to drought “has proven a lot harder than they thought,” says Michael Pollan, who says the major problem with GMO seeds is that they’re intellectual property. He is calling for an open source code (i.e., divorcing genetic modifications from intellectual property). De Sheutter sees promise in marker-assisted selection and participatory plant breeding, which “uses the strength of modern science, while at the same time putting farmers in the driver’s seat.”

So what can be done?

[1] http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/sl ... the_world/

[2] 2010 GAP Report, Global Harvest Initiative, http://www.globalharvestinitiative.org

[3] Synthesis Report: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development”, 2009

[4] http://www.worldchangecafe.com/2011/03/ ... riculture/

[5] http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/pr110128.html

[6] Richardson, Jill, “Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture”, March 13, 2011

[7] Revkin, Andrew, “A Hybrid Path to Feeding 9 Billion on a Still-Green Planet”, New York Times, March 3, 2011,

(8) Gillis, Justin, “A Warming Planet Struggles to Feed Itself”, New York Times, May 5, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/scien ... =1&_r=1&hp


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Tags: agriculture, Agro-ecology and the Right to Food, Agroecology, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, biodiversity, crop yields, Dale Allen Pfeiffer, Dr. Peter Rosset, DuPont, Eating Fossil Fuels, Failure to Yield, Food and Agriculture Organization, Food First, Green Revolution, Institute for Food and Development Policy, intensive agriculture, Internatioinal Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Josh Viertel, Michael Pollan, New York Times, resilient hybrid strategy, Science and Technology for Development, Slow Food USA, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Union of Concerned Scientists, United States, World Bank
Categories : Green Revolution
Green Revolution part 2
22
06
2011

“It is well that thou givest bread to the hungry, better were it that none hungered and that thou haddest none to give.”
– St. Augustine

Last week we posted Josh Viertel’s article about the false premise that Deutsche Bank and Monsanto used in finding ways to feed the world’s burgeoning population and end hunger. They focused on increasing crop yields: Monsanto wants to use genetically modified crops and Deutsche Bank wants to invest in industrial agriculture in the Third World and shift the emphasis to commodity agriculture.

But Mr. Viertel says:

Hunger is not a global production problem. It is a global justice problem. We need to increase global equity, not global yields. There may be profit to be made in exporting our high-tech, input-reliant, greenhouse-gas-emitting agricultural systems to the developing world. But let us not pretend it will solve global hunger or address climate change. After all, high-tech, input-reliant, commodity agricultural is a major cause of global hunger and climate change.

That’s a lot to swallow. Let’s look at how today’s high tech agriculture can be considered a major cause of hunger, and then we’ll look at why hunger can be considered a global justice problem.

With regard to the oft repeated accusations that commodity agriculture has resulted in an increase in global hunger, I think Sharon Astyk’s article in the online Energy Bulletin, (click here to read it) is so important that I’ve reproduced most of it below:

While the Green Revolution increased grain yields, it also cut back on other food sources. For example, among rice eating people, the pesticides required for the cultivation of the miracle rices produced in the 1960s killed fish and frogs that provided much of the protein in the diets of rice eating people, resulting in, as Margaret Visser points out in Much Depends on Dinner, “…the sadly ironic result that ‘more rice’ could mean ‘worse nutrition.’ The same can be said of the loss of vegetables often grown in and at the edges of rice paddies. The famous “golden rice” that was supposed to alleviate blindness due to Vitamin A deficiency, a common problem among poor people who have little but rice to eat, ignored the fact that one of the reasons for the decline in Vitamin A consumption was that nutritious vegetables and weeds traditionally grown or harvested with rice were no longer available.

The same is true of food grown in the US, in our very own breadbasket. As our corn and wheat and soybeans were produced by larger and larger farms, with more and more industrial equipment, we began to stop producing other, smaller crops that were less amenable to industrialization, but that made up a significant portion of people’s diets. For example, virtually every farm family in the US had a garden in the first half of the 20th century, and most of those gardens produced most or all of the family’s vegetables. Since we’re talking about a time when 1/3-1/5 of the US population lived on farms, that is an enormous quantity of produce. The significance of gardens is easy to underestimate, but it would be an error to do so. During World War II, 40% of the nation’s produce was grown in house gardens. The figures were higher in Britain during the same period. In the late 1990s, a study done by the Louisiana Extension service suggested that the average house vegetable garden produced $350 worth of produce. Food produced in gardens was a significant part of our dietary picture not so very long ago, and much of it was lost to industrial agriculture, either directly, in the consolidation of family farms, or indirectly, through agricultural subsidies that made purchased food often nearly as cheap as growing your own, and even social policies that encouraged suburbs to become places of lawns, not vegetable gardens.

House gardens in rural areas, urban centers, and suburbs are another casualty of the Green Revolution – the artificial cheapness of food, created by industrial, subsidized agriculture in the second half of the 20th century drove the house garden out of existence. We went from producing 40% of our produce to less than 3% in home garden over four decades. And it would be a mistake to see “produce” as watery vegetables like lettuce, and thus believe that few of our calories came from our gardens – among the vegetables lost were dense calorie crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes, which can substitute for grains in the diet.

Going back to what the Green Revolution, and its ugly step-child globalization did to the American farm family – the exhortation by Earl Butz (Secretary of Agriculture under Presidents Nixon and Ford) to “get big or get out” in the 1970s, and the systematic farm policies that favored large commodity growers and regional specialization cut back enormously on the quantity of food we produced. Small farmers in the 1940s might have raised corn or wheat as their central crop, but they also grew gardens, had an orchard, raised some pigs for sale and milked a house cow. The loss of all that food value, spread over millions of farm families, was a significant one. A farmer might have tapped his sugar maple trees and sold the syrup, and would probably have sold some eggs. He might also have sold a pig to a neighbor or had a calf butchered and shared the meat. The industrial commodity farmer rarely does these things, and in many cases, the area that permitted them – the woodlot, the barn, the chicken coop have been removed to allow unhindered access to more acres. In a bad crop year, a farmer might have planted a late crop of sunflowers for oil seed, lettuce or something else, which is also not calculated into our total consumption. In many cases a family member might also operate a small truck garden and sell produce locally – even children did this routinely.

All these are foods that were removed from the food stream, and this systematic deprivation over millions of households represents an enormous loss of total calories produced.

The economic pressure of farms to specialize also took its toll. Joan Dye Gussow, in This Organic Life documents that in the 1920s, Montana was self-sufficient for 75% of its produce, including fruit. Now Montana is one of the harshest climates in the US and has very little water, comparatively speaking, and yet this was possible in part because the economic pressure of big business had not yet persuaded small farmers that they couldn’t grow fruit effectively in Montana, but should leave it to Washington and Florida. None of us know how many calories were lost this way, but it is almost certainly an enormous quantity. And this systematic removal in the name of efficiency and specialization happened all over the world to one degree or another.

All this is particularly important because of the urgent distinction between yield and output. Dr. Peter Rosset, former Director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy and an internationally renowned expert on food security, has documented that industrial agriculture is, in fact, more efficient in terms of yield. ( That is, when five acres of soybeans and five thousand acres of soybeans are compared, you get more soybeans per acre by growing 5000 acres.) But when you compare output – that is the total amount of food, fertility and fiber you get from small scale polyculture farms (that just means farms where you grow a bunch of different things, not a single commodity), the five acre farm comes out not just ahead, but vastly ahead in per acre output. It isn’t just that five acres are more productive in terms of total output, they are often hundreds of times more productive (Rosset, www.mindfully.org/Farm/Small-Farm-Benefits-Rosset.htm). Rosset’s figures are not in dispute, as Rosset points out here:

Surveying the data, we indeed find that small farms almost always produce far more agricultural output per unit area than larger farms. This is now widely recognized by agricultural economists across the political spectrum, as the “inverse relationship between farm size and output”. Even leading development economists at the World Bank have come around to this view, to the point that they now accept that redistribution of land to small farmers would lead to greater overall productivity. (Note: to read why Dr. Rosset sees small-farm agriculture as providing a productive, efficient and ecological vision for the future, click here.)

And the difference in total output rises further when you talk about garden models. A half acre garden is often tens or hundreds of times more productive than the same acreage in industrial agriculture. The displacement of house and farm gardens by industrial agriculture represents a dramatic loss in important food crops due to the Green Revolution. On a given acre of land, the Green Revolution might have increased rice or wheat yields by several times, but since the garden, henhouse and berry bushes that could have been on that acre would have been many times more productive in total than what was granted to us by fertilizers and hybridization, what we are experiencing is a net total loss, not a gain in many cases.

In the US, during most the last 50 years, we have had enormous grain surpluses, mostly of corn, and as Michael Pollan documents in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, industrial food production has been challenged to keep finding new ways to use our spare corn up. Processed foods are all sweetened with our extra corn, made of processed corn, or of meat from corn fed to livestock. And we have seen a rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease – all associated with high meat, low vegetables, processed food diets. We kept raising our yields, at the cost of our outputs, and our diets came to reflect that – we ate fewer kinds of vegetables and fruits, and fewer of them. To a large degree, what happened was that we gave up foods that we did need to be healthy and have good, varied, tasty diets, and replaced them with a couple of grain crops that we did not particularly need more of, and we harmed ourselves doing so.

I cannot find a single reliable number about how much food was lost to us, worldwide by the Green Revolution. It may never be possible for us to find out what we lost to industrial agriculture, and I will make no claims that I know precisely. If someone can locate such a number, I’d be fascinated. But there is no question that it was enough food to feed millions, maybe even billions of people. And we must, in our analysis of what the Green Revolution cost us, also recognize that we lost an uncertain, but enormous quantity of future food, mortgaging the future to overfeed the present.

As I said, I don’t know whether in the net the Green Revolution gave us more food or not. But it is absolutely clear that it did not give us the enormous increases in food that were claimed for it. And it may well be that all of us experienced a loss of nutritious food, or food value. It is manifestly the case that not only may we not need industrial agriculture to feed us, we may well be better off without it.

In looking at the second issue, global hunger as a social justice problem, we need to remember that in order for farmers to be successful during the Green Revolution, they required the optimal use of irrigation, intensive use of fertilizers, rich soil and proper pest control with chemical pesticides. These prerequisites, coupled with the increased use of machinery, meant that many peasant farmers were simply too poor to afford the expensive irrigation equipment, the fertilizers and the inordinate amounts of pesticides required. As a result, these peasant farmers and agricultural laborers were less able to afford the food which was being produced in ever-greater quantities.

These high-yielding varieties allowed the wealthy upper-class owners of farms to prosper, as they were the only group actually able to achieve the advertised high-yields. This eventually led to increased polarization and a widening of the social and economic gap between the lower and upper class of developing nations.

“Introducing any new agricultural technology into a social system stacked in favor of the rich and against the poor-without addressing the social questions of access to the technology’s benefits-will over time lead to an even greater concentration of the rewards from agriculture, as is happening in the United States.”[1]

Why can’t poor farmers compete:

Many poor farmers were tenant farmers, with little money to buy the seeds and fertilizers required. They couldn’t even begin to buy fertilizer and other inputs in volume; big growers can get discounts for large purchases.
Poor farmers can’t hold out for the best price for their crops, as can larger farmers whose circumstances are far less desperate.
In much of the world, water is the limiting factor in farming success, and irrigation is often out of the reach of the poor. The new high yielding varieties of seeds required reliable sources of water, which in most of the world meant irrigation. Canal irrigation favors those near the top of the flow. Tubewells, often promoted by development agencies, favor the bigger operators, who can better afford the initial investment and have lower costs per unit. As well as being expensive, in some cases where inappropriate schemes were used salinization became a problem.
In areas where there was an increase in mechanization there was an increase in unemployment as tractors displaced workers. This lead to migration to the cities, causing urban problems. Those farmers who tried to take on the new technologies became heavily in debt, leading to increased stress and in some instances suicide.
Credit is also critical. It is common for small farmers to depend on local moneylenders
and pay interest rates several times as high as wealthier farmers. Government-subsidized credit overwhelmingly benefits the big farmers.
Most of all, the poor lack clout. They can’t command the subsidies and
other government favors accruing to the rich.
When conducting agricultural research, scientists must consider the diverse, complex and risk-prone conditions under which small-scale farmers strive to produce. This inability by scientists to understand the ecology of farms in developing countries was clearly one of the key reasons behind the failure of the Green Revolution[2].

Furthermore, scientists and politicians must empower the small-scale farmers with the ability to influence and direct modern agricultural research, as they are the only people to know how to use and to manipulate their local environment most efficiently. All the textbooks and the laboratory research in the world cannot substitute first-hand knowledge and experience.

The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and most importantly, the hungry got hungrier: The World Bank concluded in a 1986 study of world hunger that a rapid increase in food production does not necessarily result in food security – i.e., less hunger. Current hunger can only be alleviated by “redistributing purchasing power and resources toward those who are undernourished,” the study said. In a nutshell, they stated that if the poor don’t have the money to buy food, having more food available won’t help.

We’ve come to see that without a strategy for change that addresses the powerlessness of the poor, the tragic result will be more food and yet more hunger.

More next week…

https://oecotextiles.wordpress.com/tag/dr-peter-rosset/

chlamor
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:29 pm

Drought and debt, from Punjab to California: Unearthing the Green Revolution
KANWALROOP KAUR SINGH | KALW PUBLIC RADIO | SEP 18, 2017
Unearthing the Green Revolution, Part I: California’s fertile Central Valley is home to a sizable community of farmers from Punjab in India, a region also famous for its rich cropland. Why they came to the United States is a story as layered and complex as the politics and science of the crops they cultivate.

A Punjabi farm in California

To find an almond, you have to crack open the layers that conceal it. You have to get through the green, leathery exterior shell to the rough, brown, interior shell deep in the center. There, you’ll discover the small sweet white nut – something to chew on, like a kernel of truth waiting to be found.

Sandeep Singh is cracking open almonds on his 70-acre farm in Tracy, California. He picks one off a tree to show me the inside.

“While the nut is on the tree it’s called a shell,” he says.

California produces four fifths of the world’s almonds. Almonds are a $5 billion industry for the state. And Singh is now a small part of it.

“We can hardly make enough money to survive by farming.”


He marvels at how tall his trees will eventually be. He says they’ll grow up to three times their current height, and they’re already 12 feet tall. Taller trees mean a lot more almonds, which is good for business.

“It used to pay for itself in two years,” he says. “It was serious money.”

But it isn’t easy money. Almond farming is costly, and it’s hard work.

“I’m looking to buy all the tools for harvesting, because it costs a lot,” he says. “Before the harvesting you do three or four weed sprays on the ground and four or five sprays on the trees.”


Sandeep Singh’s almond trees in Tracy, California.
CREDIT : GURDEEP SINGH DHALIWAL
Singh came to the United States from the state of Punjab in northern India when he was 19 years old. He sought economic opportunities and chose not to go to college, but to work instead.

“I really wanted to help out my family back in Punjab” he says. “My dad, my grandparents, my brother, my sister.”

He took a job as a construction worker, then as a taxi driver in New York, and then as a truck driver in California.

But three years ago, he decided to return to his agricultural roots.

Singh may be a young farmer in California, but he comes from a family that’s been farming for generations. His father was a farmer, his grandfather was a farmer, his great grandfather was a farmer, on and on, as far back as he can go. Actually, his family is still farming today, on their ancestral land in the state of Punjab, in northern India.

So, why did he come to California to farm when he could have just farmed where he grew up? To answer that, we’ll go to Punjab, to the small village where he was born.

Roots of struggle

I’m standing in the village of Bhairomuna, near the city of Ludhiana, in Punjab, India. Singh’s ancestors came and settled in this village about 300 years ago. They’ve been farming ever since.

Today, on their 17 acres of land, they grow rice and wheat, like most farmers in Punjab.

But Balvir Singh, Sandeep’s father, says they’ve been struggling to make ends meet.

“In the next 20 years, we may not any have any water left.”


“We can hardly make enough money to survive by farming,” he says. “After the harvest is over, when we’re balancing our accounts, we find that we barely have enough left to eat. We aren’t able to save money for anything else.”

He says that’s partly because of how expensive farming has become in the last half-century. It wasn’t always that way.

“Back when we had a well on our farm,” he says, “I used to operate it myself. It didn’t cost much. We had two oxen that pulled water from the well. We would feed them grain, lentils, chickpeas, sugar. Whatever we had at home, we never had to buy anything for them.”

Fifty years ago, that’s how irrigation used to happen in Punjab. With water wheels attached to wells, pulled round and round by oxen.

Today, most farmers in Punjab use tubewells — long pipes that bore down into aquifers deep underground and pump the water up, supplying it through pipes to the farmland.

Water, rice and “revolution”

Sandeep’s brother, Virinder Singh, shows me the tubewell on their farm.

He opens the door to a dark room filled with switches used to operate the tubewell. When his family installed it back in 1965, the water was 15 feet below the ground. Now, he says, they have to drill down 200 feet to get their water. And the water levels are continuing to recede.

Balvir Singh says, “In the next 20 years, we may not any have any water left.”

But how can water disappear in Punjab? The soil-rich state is full of rivers. It’s actually named for the five rivers that flow through it, and is historically known as one of the most fertile regions on earth. Sixty percent of Punjabis work in agriculture. And their small state provides much of the food for one of the largest nations on the planet.


Water-intensive rice fields in Punjab.
CREDIT : GURDEEP SINGH DHALIWAL


Virinder Singh and I take a walk on their family’s farmland. All around me, rice plants sit in fields flooded with water for miles and miles.

He tells me they will sit like this for almost five months, using water 24 hours a day. But Balvir Singh remembers a time when they didn’t grow rice at all.

He says, “We used to grow cotton, corn, wheat and sugarcane. There was no rice back then.”

Things started to change in 1965. That year, they had their first tubewell installed, and it was the year the first high yielding varieties of rice were introduced to Punjab.

The seeds of the Green Revolution were planted.

“A helpful way to think of the Green Revolution,” says Eric Holt Gimenez, the executive director of Food First, a nonprofit advocacy agency in Oakland, “is as a capitalist marketing campaign that sort of got out of hand.”

Chemical infusion

To understand the Green Revolution, we must go back to the years immediately after World War II.

The U.S. had stockpiles of chemicals, tanks and other equipment left over from the war. The chemicals were turned into pesticides and fertilizers. The tanks were turned into tractors. The government and banks gave out loans to farmers to buy this equipment and increase production.

“The cost of production has increased so much but the price of our crops hasn’t.”


“That was very important,” says Gimenez, “because that extra food production not only fed the United States, it fed Europe.”

In 1944, the Rockefeller foundation funded the scientist Norman Borlaug to go to Mexico, where he developed high-yielding varieties of wheat, called “miracle wheat.” Around the same time, the corporations that produced agricultural equipment were trying to expand.

Gimenez says this is how the Green Revolution began.

“The Green Revolution was a campaign to export not just the products but the form of agricultural production to the Third World,” he says.

Punjab was flooded with high-yielding seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, advanced farming equipment, and scientists trained by U.S. universities. As food production grew Borlaug was hailed as the scientist who would end world hunger. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.

During his acceptance speech, he said, “The Green Revolution has not yet been won. It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again.”

Boom, bust — and debt

Whole nations bought into Norman Borlaug’s ideas. Balvir Singh remembers when India invested in the miracle wheat the scientist had helped invent, and which the Indian government bought by the ton in 1966.

“The first seed we ever got from a foreign country came from Mexico,” he says. “It was for wheat.”

I ask him if it actually helped produce more wheat. He says it did for a while, but today, it doesn’t really make a difference.

“We have to spend so much money,” he says. “We get more wheat, but it costs so much to grow. So, even if there’s more wheat, what’s the point?”

His son Virinder agrees.

“The cost of production has increased so much but the price of our crops hasn’t,” he says.

Miracles can have consequences. More food means more dependence on water, chemical fertilizers and pesticides that lose their effectiveness over time.

“The first pesticides stopped working after a while, then we had to buy more expensive ones,” he says. “Then those stopped working. Every five or six years, we have to buy new ones.”

Eric Holt Gimenez calls this the pesticide treadmill. It’s when farmers are, “taking out credit in order to buy more and more pesticides more and more fertilizer and getting diminishing returns. So there’s a cost price squeeze between higher and higher costs for the factors of production and then lower and lower prices for the goods that the farmers sell. That’s a characteristic of people who are who are swept up in the Green Revolution in the capitalist food system.”

As a result, Balvir Singh says, most farmers in his village became indebted.

Today that debt continues to grow.

“On average, each farmer in my village is about 2 million rupees in debt,” he says. “For some it may be 5 million, for some 1.5 million. But 2 million is about the average.”

That’s more than $30,000. And this in a state where the average annual income is about $1,000 per person.

Balvir Singh says the land has become dependent on pesticides, even as debt and high production costs reduce the value of crops grown there. He felt the effects of this acutely in his potato crop.

“When we grew potatoes, it cost us 180 rupees per bag,” he says. “But they were selling at 150.”

“The first pesticides stopped working after a while, then we had to buy more expensive ones. Then those stopped working.”


The Ludhiana district, where the Singh family lives, received lots of attention during the Green Revolution. Fifty years ago, it was thought to be one of the areas with the most potential for success. But now, people want to leave.

“Everyone would leave if they could”

“Out of the 50 farming families in this village, 15 have left for other countries,” he says. His son Virinder adds, “And everyone would leave if they could.”

I ask Balvir Singh if he wants the rest of his family to leave and join his son, Sandeep, in Modesto.

“I would want us to,” he says. “But who would stay and take care of our ancestral land?”

Almost 10,000 miles away, Sandeep Singh tends to his farm in California’s Central Valley. He sends money home to his family regularly. He even helped them build the house they live in now. He says his peers who left Punjab are doing well.

“If you go down south to Fresno or Bakersfield, you see every other farm is owned by Punjabis,” he says.

Farmers like Sandeep Singh have left the country where the Green Revolution was carried out. They’ve come here, instead, to the country that created it.

And more are coming, because, Singh says, those left in Punjab aren’t doing so well.

This may be one result of the Green Revolution that its founders never expected.

https://foodfirst.org/news/drought-and- ... evolution/

chlamor
Posts: 520
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:30 pm

Origins of the Food Crisis in India and Developing Countries
by Utsa Patnaik
(Jul 01, 2009)
Topics: Ecology
Places: Asia

Utsa Patnaik is professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi. She is on the editorial advisory board of Social Scientist (Delhi) and Journal of Agrarian Change (London) and a life member of the All-India Democratic Women’s Association. Her most recent book is The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2008).
India has had a growing problem with food output and availability for the mass of the population since the inception of neoliberal economic reforms in 1991. A deep agricultural depression and rising unemployment rates resulting from “reform” policies have made the problem especially acute over the past decade. There has been a sharp decline in per capita grain output as well as grain consumption in the economy as a whole. Income has been shifting away from the majority towards the wealthy minority and a substantial segment of the population is being forced to eat less food and wear older clothing than before. This is exacerbated by the current global depression, which is further constraining mass consumption because of rising unemployment.

In a complex and changing scenario it is useful to distinguish the long-term and immediate factors giving rise to the food problem, which are not unique to India but affect other developing countries including China. Policies that divert food grains to feeding livestock take food away from the already poor through a dual route: increasingly unequal distribution of income (and food) both within developing countries and between advanced and developing countries. The latter route is strongly associated with a second contradiction: between food consumption and exports. Under free trade policies that pressure developing countries to remove barriers to trade and shift their land use increasingly to exports, there is a contradiction between food for domestic consumption versus exports for the benefit of others. Finally, agriculture’s growing reliance on energy presents a third contradiction. We will see how these circumstances, taken together, thoroughly refute many popular assumptions about the causes of rising global food prices.

The Human Food–Animal Feed Competition
The medieval European competition between food and feed arose from the fact that with very low productivity it was not possible to produce enough food grains for humans as well as feed to carry livestock through the barren winter. There was widespread seasonal livestock slaughter and high consumption of salt-preserved meat.1 The “agricultural revolution” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in industrializing Europe did not fully overcome the problem of low productivity. There was an increasing dependence on wheat imports from colonies with temperate climates, and dietary and clothing diversification. Consumption of sugar, beverages, rice, and cotton by West Europeans depended heavily on unpaid import surpluses from colonially subjugated tropical areas.2 Colonized regions saw a decline in food grains for their own populations as land and resources were diverted to these exports.

The modern food-feed competition is somewhat different in nature but has entailed a similar international division of labor, whereby the lands of tropical developing countries are made increasingly to produce animal feed and animal products for the rich segment of the world population. Starchy food grains, which double as feed grains, are transformed into costly animal products, resulting in less energy and protein than was contained in the original feed. A kilogram of beef provides 1,140 calories of energy and 226 grams of protein, but the feed grain required for producing that kilogram of beef, if directly consumed as food grain (instead of being transformed into beef), provides as much as 24,150 calories and 700 grams of protein (see table 1).3

Demand for costly animal products is heavily concentrated among the well-to-do who thereby draw away grain for use as feed for animals, reducing direct consumption as food by the poor both at a global level and within a given developing country. Empirically observed conversion rates of grain to animal products are available for each level of technology, namely each unit of milk, eggs, meat, and so on can be decomposed into so many units of grain. The exact conversion rates vary depending on the degree of “industrialization” of livestock production. Taking the conversion rates for advanced countries, a liter of milk embodies 0.2 kg of grain, a kilogram of eggs or poultry meat is equivalent to 2 kg of grain, and so on. The larger the animal, the higher is the conversion rate with a kilogram of beef requiring at least 7 kg of feed grain.

There is a clear association between the income of the individual or family and the total consumption of grain. Grain is consumed in two forms—first, direct grain consumption as bread, biscuits, cakes, etc., in advanced economies (boiled rice, roti, tortillas, pita bread, and so on in developing societies) and second, indirect grain consumption as animal products embodying definite quantities of feed-grain (milk, butter, eggs, poultry, and red meat). The total consumption of grains by humans is the sum of direct consumption and indirect consumption.

Table 1. Energy and protein in animal products and feed needed for their production
Table 1: Energy and protein in animal products and feed needed for their production
Sources: J. S. Sarma and V. S. Gandhi, Production and Consumption of Foodgrains in India: Implications of Accelerated Economic Growth and Poverty Alleviation,Research Report 81 (Washington D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1990). Feed requirements for modern livestock production systems are described in Bhalla, Hazell, and Kerr (see endnote 7). National Sample Survey Reports on Nutritional Intake in India (see endnote 10) provide a detailed chart of calories and protein per unit of different food items.

At increasing per capita income levels, an increasing amount of grain is consumed as animal products, so the total per capita grain consumption rises fairly sharply with rising income. The share of direct cereal demand in the household food budget does decline,4 but there is an absolute increase of total cereal demand and no decline in its overall share in the food budget.

Chart 1 summarizes the empirical observation of direct and indirect grain consumption as per capita income increases.5 Direct grain consumption per capita is low in a poor economy, rises with rising income, then levels off and may decline once very high income levels are reached.

The indirect demand for grain as feed to produce animal products is near zero in a poor economy, where consumption of animal products depends on hunting and natural grazing. As the society develops and industrializes, natural grazing tends to diminish and is replaced increasingly by stall feeding. As per capita income rises, the indirect feed demand for grain to raise animals goes up steeply and eventually outstrips the direct demand. The total demand for grain is the sum of the two curves and rises sharply as the economy achieves a high-income status. The United States had the world’s highest consumption of grain—nearly one ton per person per year by the mid-1990s, of which four-fifths was indirect demand. U.S. total grain demand is falling very slowly with a tendency towards healthier diets, but it is still the world’s highest at 900 kg, while the least developed countries only consume about 130 kg per person per year.

Chart 1. Direct and indirect demand for grain with rising income
Chart 1: Direct and indirect demand for grain with rising income
Adam Smith remarked in his Wealth of Nations that there was a natural upper bound to the demand for food, since how much a person could eat was limited by the size of his stomach. He could not have foreseen the sharply increasing animal-products intensity of diets as populations grew better off. The per capita direct plus indirect grain demand of the United States, at 900 kg per year, is seven times the comparable per capita grain demand of the poorest nations, although North American stomachs are obviously not seven times larger. The required direct grain consumption for minimum daily energy intake for working and health is often not available to the poorest nations and any slight output or import shortfall can tip large segments of the population into famine. This not always because these nations produce too little grain to feed their populations, but because the end use of the grain they do produce is determined by the superior purchasing power of their own elites and of richer Northern populations.

Eating the meat of large animals is a particularly wasteful way of satisfying energy and protein needs. A single half-pound beef burger eaten daily by a consumer in Brazil or the United States uses up enough grain to meet the entire total daily energy and protein needs of three people in India with a combined grain and milk diet. Advanced countries, with their beef-eating habits, have long been monopolizing the world’s grain supply, drawing away not only grain but also concentrates like oilcakes from developing countries for their meat industry. With 16 percent of world population, the advanced countries account for nearly 40 percent of the world’s cereal consumption.

Within a given developing country, the middle- and high-income classes are able to corner the bulk of domestically consumed grain with a rising share for indirect use, while the low-income classes are deprived of even sufficient direct consumption to meet minimum needs. Consumption of animal products among the poor is not the result of modern forms of production, but depends on their fast-dwindling access to forest and water resources, for example trapping birds and fishing in the case of tribal people in India. A 10 percent rise in income leads to a 14 to 16 percent rise in demand for animal products in developing countries. With a current 8 percent GDP growth and 6 percent per capita income growth in India, consumption of animal products has been growing at 9 percent annually and so has the derived demand for feed grain, leaving a declining share for direct consumption. The rise in upper- and middle-class incomes thus has important implications in a developing country for the availability of food grains for the poor majority.

Sustained Fall in Cereal Consumption Despite Rising Incomes
The sharp food grain price rise in 2007–08 was widely attributed by Northern observers to the fast growing grain demand on the part of the well-to-do in China and India, where per capita income has been growing at between 6 to 9 percent annually for many years and the upper income groups show rising consumption of animal products. However, this is an incorrect argument for explaining global inflation in food prices. Commentators as disparate as George W. Bush and Paul Krugman were perhaps right to expect that total grain consumption per capita should have risen sharply in both countries. But they were wrong to think that this was actually happening, based on the unstated assumption that income distribution remained unchanged.

On the contrary, owing to cuts in state development spending in rural areas, unemployment was rising and income disparity was increasing, with real incomes (money incomes adjusted for price change) for much of the population declining, forcing people to cut back on food. Higher costs of utilities like transportation, power, and health services forced further cuts in food spending. The data show that average grain consumption per capita declined sharply in both countries over the last decade, even though the upper income groups were increasing their demand rapidly. The statistics point to a severe compression of incomes and purchasing power for the majority of the population in India that more than canceled out the rise in demand on the part of the minority getting richer. Although we can establish this conclusively only for India, it is likely to underlie the decline in per capita grain consumption in China as well.

The actual consumption for food grains fell below projected consumption because the latter assumed unchanged income distribution whereas in reality inequality was fast rising. In an interesting 1999 study for the International Food Policy Research Institute, Bhalla, Hazell, and Kerr projected a 375 million ton total cereal consumption (267 million tons direct plus 108 million tons as feed) by the year 2020 in India on the assumption of a 6.0 percent annual growth in per capita income, as well as an alternate scenario assuming 3.7 percent growth.6 The cereal consumption growth rates inherent in the two projections give us total demand estimates by 2004–05 of 198.5 and 218.5 million tons, respectively.7

The actual availability or demand for 2004–05 however was only 157 million tons. The deficit is 41.5 million tons in the first projection assuming 3.7 percent per capita income growth, and a massive 62.5 million tons in the more realistic projection based upon a 6 percent per capita income growth. These projections are far above observed consumption, even though the parameters used are reasonable. The authors had to make the assumption that the income distribution would remain unchanged,since there was no way they could have predicted the order of change in income inequality.

In reality, however, we have seen increasing income inequality of the most adverse type—an absolute decline in real incomes for a large population segment, lowering the aggregate demand curve which is reflected in the steep decline in food grains availability shown in Chart 2. This decline was steeper than the per capita output decline up to 2002 after which output fell faster than did demand. The availability of food grains in a given year is a measure of the actual market demand and hence actual grain consumption by the population. To obtain availability, net imports (if any) and net drawing down of public grain stocks (if any) are added to net output. Net imports and drawing down of stocks will clearly mean availability or demand is higher than output, while net exports and adding to stocks means availability or demand is less than output.8 Abnormally high public food stocks, 40 million tons in excess of buffer norms, had built up by 2002. The role of neoliberal macroeconomic policies from 1991 onwards in raising unemployment rates, inducing severe contraction of mass consumption and rising levels of hunger, continue to be ignored by our economists and the government alike.

In actuality, the average Indian family of five in 2005 was consuming a staggering 110 kg less grain per year compared to 1991, reflecting divergent trends: a sharp rise in intake for the wealthy minority, outweighed by a large decline for the majority. Not only has calorie intake per capita fallen, there is also a steep decline in protein intake for four-fifths of the rural population over the period 1993–94 to 2004–05 according to the National Sample Survey Reports on Nutritional Intake (NSS).9

Chart 2. Per capita food grains output and availability in India (three-year average centered on specified years)
Chart 2: Per capita food grains output and availablity in India (three-year average)
Note: Output is Net Output = 87.5 percent of Gross Output, 12.5 percent assumed to be seed, feed, and wastage. Availability = Net Output + Net Imports – Net Addition to Public Stocks. This is the official definition. Both variables divided by total population for per capita values. Chart updated to 2004–05 from Utsa Patnaik, “Neoliberalism and Rural Poverty in India,” Economic and Political Weekly, July 28–August 3, 2007.

The World Bank and the governments of India and China have been claiming reductions in poverty on the basis of an incorrect method, in which the definition of the poverty line has been altered. Both governments had defined the poverty line using a nutrition norm, i.e., an observed level of total household spending, whose food spending portion allows the consumer to access a specified minimum nutrition level. In 1973–74 in India, the correct nutrition-based rural poverty line for that year was forty-nine rupees per month (about six dollars at the exchange rate then), while in China 1984 was the initial year of analysis, and 200 yuan per year or 16.67 yuan per month was the rural poverty line. For later years, however, the nutritional norm was no longer directly used, even though the data were available; instead the initial poverty lines were updated simply using a consumer price index in both countries.

This procedure does not capture the actual spending rise required to meet the nutritional standard as the economic environment changes over time. It leads to cumulative underestimation of the poverty line. Three decades further on, it has produced absurdly low current official poverty lines, for rural India 356 rupees per month for 2005. This is below 12 rupees per day (about 26 U.S. cents), which would not have bought even one kilogram of open market rice. This poverty line, it must be remembered, is the total spending meant to cover not merely the daily food need but also all other daily non-food expenses of fuel, transportation, apparel, health, education, and so on. Similarly in China the official rural “poverty line” for 2007 is 1,067 yuan per year or 2.92 yuan per day, while the cost per kilogram of the cheapest rice variety is 4 yuan. For comparison, if one posited a poverty line of around one dollar a day for the deep South of the United States, it might convey some idea of the absurdity of these official poverty lines.

These so-called poverty lines are now more properly seen as destitution lines in both countries, at which only a very low energy intake, far below the nutritional norm, can be accessed. When the consumption standard, against which poverty is being measured, is allowed to decline, it is hardly surprising that the estimated poverty percentage falls, but it is as spurious as claiming improved academic performance in a school that continuously lowers the passing mark. The correct poverty lines are more than double the official ones and applying them shows that the percentages of poor have not decreased, but have risen particularly sharply during the period of market oriented reforms and emphasis on exports.10

Food for Export versus Food for Local Populations
A number of recent analyses have tried to explain the reasons for the exceptionally rapid food price inflation during 2007–08. The international price of rice doubled in a matter of five months, producing food riots in as many as thirty-seven developing countries. Remarkably all these analyses have completely missed what I consider to be the main reason—the fact that in country after country in the developing world, there has been a diversion of land under the neoliberal paradigm of free trade, from food grain production to export crops. Growth rates for food grains have slowed sharply in every developing country, including India and China, and in many countries, there has been an absolute decline in grain output. My own discussion of these trends started in 1992 with a warning that India might expect the same outcome of declining output growth and a severe threat to its food security as it liberalized trade.11

The objective of promoting free trade under IMF/World Bank-guided economic reforms, strengthened by the WTO discipline, has been to bring about an intensification of the international division of labor in agriculture, where tropical lands are increasingly required to produce the relatively exotic requirements of advanced country populations, keeping the supermarket shelves in the North well-stocked with everything from winter strawberries to edible oils and flowers. The resulting food grain deficits of developing countries, as they divert more land to export crops and specialized crops for internal consumption by the wealthy, are supposed to be met by accessing the global market for grains, which is dominated by the United States, Canada, and the European Union with Argentina and Australia as smaller players.

The developing countries were told that food security, based on self-sufficiency in food grains production, was passé in a modern globalized world, even for large countries with poor populations. Rather, they would benefit from specializing in the non-grain crops in which they had a “comparative advantage” by increasing their exports and purchasing their grains and dairy products from Northern countries that had surpluses of these products.

Developing countries were urged to dismantle their domestic systems of procurement of grains and distribution at controlled prices. These systems were mostly put in place after decolonization, precisely in an attempt to break free from earlier colonial systems of specialization and trade that had severely undermined nutrition standards. Historical memories are short, it would seem. Many developing countries, from the Philippines to Botswana, succumbed to sustained pressure and unwisely dismantled their grain procurement and distribution systems beginning in the mid-1990s.

The model of export specialization that was thrust on developing countries, or unwisely adopted by governments, was always at the cost of declining food security for the mass of the people. The promises of increased export earnings and increased ability to access food from global markets proved misleading and false—even before the current inflation. With dozens of developing countries following the same policies of exporting much the same products, the per unit value of their exports declined and the terms of trade shifted against them. A doubling of the volume of exports over a decade means no increase in exchange earnings at all if it is accompanied by a halving of the unit export price. Most developing countries altered their cropping patterns but ended up with little or no rise in export earnings. Second, even if foreign exchange is not a constraint, governments do not privilege the interests of the poor, and officials in India continue to deny that hunger has increased. India has a mountain of foreign exchange and has removed restrictions on the free purchase of hard currencies by those rich enough to go on holidays to Europe or the United States.

There is a tradition in India of operating food-for-work schemes in drought years—the state provides employment in public works and most of the wages are paid in grain from public stocks. However, there was no large expansion of food-for-work during 2002 and 2003, the worst drought years seen in two decades, despite a sharp rise in unemployment and fall in purchasing power that led to 64 million tons of unsold grain stocks. Instead, grain from public stocks was exported in record amounts, reaching a total of 22 million tons. Agrarian distress was the main cause of the government being voted out of power in 2004, but the new government did not import grain to provide relief. Finally, in 2006, after sustained agitation by progressive forces and the left parties, a National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was passed, which guarantees 100 days of employment per worker to every rural family seeking work.

It is very clear by now that the decline in food grains output per capita in the developing world has been far greater than the increase in developed countries, thus leading to a global decline in per capita output and availability. The 1980–85 per capita world cereal output of 335 kg per year, declined to 310 kg by 2000–05. Among developing countries, China and India, which together accounted for over 30 percent of world cereal output in the early 1990s, contributed significantly to this global decline.12 Let us consider the eleven developing countries—China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Iran, Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka—which together contributed 40 percent of world cereal output. Over the thirteen year period between 1989–91 and 2003–04 we find a mere 15.6 percent rise in cereal output from this group, a rate of growth of only 1.1 percent per year, well below the nearly 2 percent population growth rate of these countries. At the same time, the output of their export crops have been rising fast, up to ten times faster than food grains, owing to the diversion of land and resources to export crops.

The developed countries, which accounted together for about 40 percent of world cereal output, showed only an 18.6 percent rise in cereal output over the same period, or an annual growth rate of 1.3 percent, ahead of their own population growth, but insufficient to meet their own rising domestic needs and to provide an adequate surplus for meeting the increasing deficit of the developing world.13

Why should there be a drastic slowing down of growth in food grains output as developing countries follow economic reforms and liberalize their trade? The reason is simple at one level, and profound at another. Land is not a product of human labor and has to be conceptualized as akin to fossil fuels, since the supply of both is fixed. Nor is land homogeneous in its productive capacity, since warm tropical lands produce not only a far larger variety but also a qualitatively different output mix compared to the cold lands of advanced countries. The historical motive of acquiring control over tropical biodiversity was a major driver of colonial subjugation of other nations by the Western Europeans. By setting up slavery—and later indentured labor-based plantation systems—a steady stream of tropical goods and raw materials was obtained, both to diversify European diets and clothing, and provide the raw material for new industries.

Moreover most of this swelling flow of valuable goods was not actually paid for since the very same taxes extracted by colonial rulers from local peasants and artisans were used to buy these export goods from them, thus converting a cash tax into a goods tax, while the foreign exchange earnings from selling these export goods to the world were not permitted to flow back to the colony.14

All the regions subject to such enforced exports suffered declines in grain availability for the local population and falling nutrition, sometimes culminating in famine, as limited land and resources were diverted to export crops. For a brief period after decolonization these countries protected themselves from unfair international trade and privileged domestic food security. From the late 1970s, however, there has been a renewed onslaught by the advanced countries desiring access to the productive capacity of developing country lands. Owing to modern air-freighting, the range of products demanded has expanded greatly. While only a few non-perishable products were traded earlier (sugar, tea, coffee, timber, and cotton), now a very large range of perishable goods, from fresh vegetables and fruit to flowers, are demanded for stocking Northern supermarket shelves in the depth of winter. The transnational agribusiness corporations have extended their tentacles into dozens of developing countries using contract systems or by purchasing on the market, which transmits global price volatility into peasant agriculture. Mass peasant suicides owing to debt were unknown in India before 1991. As global primary food prices fell and protection was virtually removed under WTO discipline, debt-driven farmer suicides have officially claimed over 160,000 peasant lives over the last decade.15

The colonized Indian peasant starved while exporting wheat to England, and the modern Indian peasant is eating less while growing gherkins and roses for rich consumers abroad. The rapidity of the decline is explained by the fact that deflationary reform policies have cut back public investment in agriculture at the very same time that they pushed for more exports, so yield growth is falling and there is not the slightest possibility of maintaining both exports and domestic grain production from a total planted area that remains constant.

Fuel versus Food
The long-term imbalance produced by decelerating food output growth and falling per capita output in the world economy during the 1980s and through the 1990s became invisible to people because no unusual inflation was seen. On the contrary, price deflation occurred in many developing countries, precisely owing to the IMF-guided income deflating mechanisms that depressed mass incomes, and hence effective demand and consumption, in virtually all developing countries. The peasantry and labor, both rural and urban, in developing countries worldwide ate less and less and absorbed the punishment, while urban intellectuals en masse seemed to be conceptually blind and largely ignored the problem in their writings.

Owing to this suppression of inflation via the reduction in mass demand in developing countries, most observers did not understand the gravity of the situation. A shock or trigger was required to make the long-term imbalance and decline in nutrition explicit, and this shock has now come, largely owing to the United States misadventure in Iraq, the global oil price rise, and consequent large-scale diversion of grain to biofuel production in advanced countries.

The main sources of energy for centuries before the widespread use of fossil fuels were feed crops for animals used for soil tillage, traction, and transport. From the mid-nineteenth century to the present in the industrializing world, agricultural crops received some respite from energy demands as coal, oil, and gas driven motors took the place of oxen and horse power. With the gradual slipping away of political control by advanced countries over world fossil fuel resources, agriculture is once again under pressure, now to produce biofuels (also called agrofuels) as a fossil fuel supplement and substitute.

Chart 3. Use of corn for ethanol in the United States
Chart 3: Use of corn for ethanol in the United States
Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

In the United States, which aims to maintain its energy-intensive automobile–based lifestyle in the face of the global oil price upsurge, there has been an almost four-fold rise in corn going into ethanol production in a mere five years, from 27 to over 100 million tons (projected) between 2002–03 and 2008–09, aided by heavy subsidies. The European Union too has been diverting grain to ethanol production while Brazil has long engaged in using a substantial part of its sugarcane output for this purpose. In 2008 a smaller projected U.S. output of maize did not deter the diversion of almost a third of output to fuel production, implying a downturn in the net supply for other uses (chart 3).

The model of free trade and export specialization that has been thrust on developing countries now stands explicitly discredited. The question is where the developing countries are to go now, with the large-scale diversion of food grains to fuel production in the North and the resulting disappearance of global food stocks and food price inflation. For India there is only one alternative, to launch a campaign to grow more food with the same urgency that it had after the Second World War, because per capita food output has plunged back to the level of fifty years ago and it can only import now at an exorbitant price. While India, in the last fifteen years of neoliberal reforms and trade liberalization, has gone quite a long way along the same slippery path of falling agricultural investment and export focus that other smaller countries have followed for three decades, it is still in a position to reverse a worsening situation provided the goal of growing more food is addressed on an urgent basis and mass purchasing power is restored.

Fortunately India’s public procurement and distribution system has not been completely dismantled as in many other developing countries. This has the potential for protecting poor consumers, provided that it is revived on a larger scale. This requires appropriately higher procurement prices for crops including the commercial crops, and the active setting up of cooperative groups to reclaim waste land and to cultivate jointly for food production, as is being done in Kerala, a traditionally food-deficient state, with positive results. Farmers seem to be responding to the substantial rise in the central procurement price for wheat and rice, belatedly announced in late 2007, and there was some, though so far inadequate, revival of food grains output during 2007–08.

Notes
↩ B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 650-1800 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963).
↩ For import surpluses see R. Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1985); for the unpaid nature of these see U. Patnaik, “Export-oriented agriculture and food security in developing countries and India,” Economic and Political Weekly 31, nos. 35–37, (1996), reprinted in The Long Transition—Essays on Political Economy ( Delhi: Tulika, 1999) and U. Patnaik, “Theorizing Food Security and Poverty in the Era of Neoliberal Reforms,” Social Scientist, September–October 2005, http://www.mfcindia.org.
↩ The different grains have slightly different calorie and protein values per unit but on average one kilogram of cereal gives 3450 kilocalories and 100 grams of protein.
↩ Ernst Engel argued on the basis of household budget studies that the food share of total spending declines as the per capita income rises, and this has been extended in subsequent studies to show that within the food group the share of spending on cereals declines with rising income.
↩ P. A. Youtopoulos, “Middle-Income Classes and Food Crises: The ‘New’ Food-Feed Competition,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33, no. 3, (1985).
↩ G. S. Bhalla, P. Hazell and J. Kerr, Prospects for India’s Cereal Supply and Demand to 2020 (Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1999).
↩ The growth rates work out to 3.431 percent 2.529 percent respectively.
↩ The only missing element is change in stocks with private traders on which data are not available.
↩ National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), India, Report No. 405, Nutritional Intake in India, 1993–94, and No. 513 for 2004–05, http://www.mospi.nic.in.
↩ My critique of the official procedure that is the basis of the World Bank’s poverty estimates, and my nutrition based poverty estimates for India, are available in a number of papers including U. Patnaik, “The Free Lunch—Transfers from the Tropical Colonies and their Role in Capital Formation in Britain during the Industrial Revolution,” in K. S. Jomo, ed., Globalization under Hegemony (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), and U. Patnaik, “Neoliberalism and Rural Poverty in India,” Economic and Political Weekly (July 28–August 3, 2007. While the official estimate of rural persons in poverty in 2004–05 is 28.4 percent, it is not mentioned that this population is below 1800 calories energy intake, far below the 1973–74 nutrition norm of 2200 calories per day which had produced 56.4 percent in poverty. Directly applying this nutrition norm of 2,200 calories to current data gives us 69.5 percent of rural persons in poverty, sharply up from 56.4 percent in 1973–74 and 58.5 percent in 1993–94. In short there was hardly much change between 1973–74 and 1993–94 but the subsequent decade of economic reforms has substantially increased poverty. See also National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), India, Report Nos. 402 and 508, Level and Pattern of Consumer Expenditure, 1993–94, and 2004–05, respectively, http://www.mospi.nic.in.
↩ U. Patnaik, “Export-oriented agriculture and food security in developing countries and India,” Economic and Political Weekly 31 nos. 35–37, 1996, reprinted in The Long Transition—Essays on Political Economy (Delhi: Tulika, 1999); U. Patnaik, “On the Inverse Relation between Primary Exports and Domestic Food Absorption under Liberalized Trade Regimes” in J. Ghosh and C. P. Chandrasekhar, eds., Work and Wellbeing in the Age of Finance (Delhi: Tulika, 2003); U. Patnaik, “Global Capitalism, Deflation and Agrarian Crisis in Developing Countries,” Social Policy and Development Programme Paper Number 13, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) October 2003 (shorter version under the same title in The Journal of Agrarian Change (January–February 2003). Some other papers have been included in U. Patnaik, The Republic of Hunger and Other Essays (Delhi: Three Essays Collective 2008).
↩ United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization database, at http://www.faostat.org.
↩ Data from http://faostat.org.
↩ For a detailed account of the mechanism, see U. Patnaik, “The Free Lunch.”
↩ Police records show that from 1997 to 2006, farmer suicides totaled 166,304, concentrated heavily in export crop producing states. See K. Nagaraj, Farmer Suicides in India (2008) at http://www.macroscan.org.

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chlamor
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Re: Agriculture and Capitalism

Post by chlamor » Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:31 pm

Book Review: Why the “Green Revolution” Was Not So Green After All
Tom Philpott

In 1968, India’s farmers cranked out a record-setting wheat crop at a time when many observers feared the nation would plunge into famine. That triumphant harvest represented the culmination of decades of work by a group of foundation-funded US technocrats. Their effort, which became known as the “green revolution,” still casts an imposing shadow more than four decades later.

Its technological architect, the Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, was all but beatified upon his death in 2009. In its obituary, Reason Magazine proclaimed him “the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history,” while The New York Times wrote that he “did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself.”

Meanwhile, the powerhouse funding institution most associated with the Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation, has joined forces with today’s richest funder, the Gates Foundation, to recreate Borlaug’s magic in Africa. Their “Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa” push got a de facto endorsement from President Obama when he tapped Gates’ chief ag-development man, Rajiv Shah, for a top research job at USDA. Today, Shah serves as director of United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Thus the “green revolution” idea still percolates in high-level development policy circles. But if our top foundations and development policymakers are pushing to recreate the green revolution for an entire continent, than it’s worth figuring out precisely what led up to that famous bumper crop nearly half a century ago—and what it means for the future. In his 2010 book The Hungry World, the University of Indiana historian Nick Cullather does just that.

Cullather’s book amounts to a thorough, gracefully written debunking of what might be called the green revolution master narrative, which goes something like this: In the 1940s, US foundations and policymakers became concerned about population growth and hunger in Mexico, so they sent Borlaug and other ag wizards south of the border to help farmers ramp up food production; Borlaug and crew succeeded dramatically; and then took their innovations to south and central Asia, where they averted a massive famine in the late ’60s and set the table for food security thereafter.

But the canonical Green Revolution account crumbles under Cullather’s gaze. His brilliant, concise early chapter on the Green Revolution’s birth in Mexico anchors his broader argument. In 1941, when the Rockefeller Foundation sent its first set of ag technologists south of the border, Mexico was hardly a seething hotbed of population overshoot and food scarcity, Cullather shows. Quite the opposite, it was a net food exporter, sending vegetables, fruit, cattle, and coffee to the United States. The USDA had deemed it “largely self-sufficient” in food and fiber, he reports; and population, while growing, was less dense than than that of its would-be savior, the United States.

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Moreover, the US’s own recent foray into high-production agriculture had delivered ambiguous results. Pushed by government and university researchers, US farmers had in recent years ramped up production dramatically. The result was a collapse in prices and a “paradox of plenty”—millions of farmers driven to ruin or near ruin by low prices, alongside millions of consumers unable to afford enough to eat. At the height of the Great Depression, Cullather reports, government agents were buying cows in Kansas for $16 and shooting them on the spot—a desperate attempt to keep prices from plunging further. This was the system that the Rockefeller Foundation wanted to export to Mexico?

Well, not at first. Cullather shows that the Rockefeller strategists’ motivations were muddled from the start—and variable. Spooked by war and fascism in Europe and Communism in Russia, the foundation’s leaders concluded in 1939 that “US postwar security would require, at minimum, holding an area comprising the entire British Empire plus the Far East and South America.” Rising peasant populations and stagnant agriculture in those areas gave rise to Malthusian visions of social chaos—and the idea that rural reform might be able to resolve the problem.

Mexico, which had only a decade before emerged from its own political revolution, made an attractive laboratory for testing that idea. Its population largely made up of peasant farmers, Mexico represented for the Rockefeller team “a type of backwardness that could be found throughout the colonial areas of the world,” Cullather writes. There were practical considerations, too. Mexico was selling supplies to the Axis Powers in war-torn Europe; and had recently confiscated oil fields once controlled by Standard Oil, source of funds for the Rockefeller Foundation. A bit of cash for agricultural improvement seemed like a wise investment for future good will.

The foundation set up the Mexico Agricultural Program in 1941. Its technologists were looking beyond that nation’s borders from the start. Cullather quotes Borlaug himself on his experience on the ground in Mexico: “We were consciously, and very early…discarding those things that fit only one environment.” The concept of grand, one-size-fits all “solutions” for agriculture had been hatched.

Crucially, though, the initial fixation was not on boosting yields for the sake of boosting yields. Instead, the foundation at first sought to stabilize rural areas by “raising incomes and living standards for farmers.” The vision was a kind of “mini-New Deal” for the Mexican countryside, one that “other ‘backward countries’ could emulate,” Cullather reports.

It was FDR’s vice president, the Iowa agriculturalist and former USDA secretary Henry Wallace, who convinced the foundation to focus on crop yields. Wallace had toured the Mexican campo in 1940 and came away impressed by the ingenuity and diligence of the small-scale farmers he observed, Cullather writes. But he found their productivity to be shockingly low; and concluded that they needed “improved seeds” and other agri-technologies then taking root in Wallace’s native Iowa. Urged on by Wallace, the Rockefeller team pivoted, and the new mission became to dramatically ramp up the productivity of Mexico’s farmers. This new path led Borlaug and his team to what would become known as the “Green Revolution package”—hybridized “dwarf” grain varieties, bred to produce bumper crops when given lavish doses of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation.

And here is where Cullather’s critique is damning. Borlaug’s innovations in Mexico, impressive as they were technologically, were “an answer in search of a riddle,” he argues. That is, they focused on problems that didn’t exist and ignored ones that did, in the process exacerbating them. Not only was Mexico growing sufficient food for its population when the Rockefeller team alighted, it was also devoting much of its richest agricultural land, still largely owned by wealthy landowners despite recent land reform, to non-food industrial crops bound for export. And it was then taking some of that foreign exchange and using it to buy corn, beans, and wheat from the US, which drove crops prices steeply downward for Mexico’s small-scale farmers. In response, they “switched to the more profitable export crops and shifted grain production onto marginal lands: the steep hillsides Wallace had seen.”

As farmers switched from corn to export crops, Mexican food production declined, causing a vicious cycle: The government had to “import even larger grain quantities the following year.” Thus, Mexico’s food problems, insofar as they existed, did not stem from lack of US technology or scientific know-how. They resulted from unequal land distribution and domestic economic policy, Cullather demonstrates.

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And the Rockefeller effort to ramp up production, as it took took hold in the countryside, only accelerated those trends. Crop prices fell as yields rose, pushing peasant farmers off the land. By the 1950s, Cullather reports, US policy analysts were fretting about what they called the “wetback problem”—1.5 million migrants crossing the border each year in search of gainful work. Savoring the irony, he quotes Rockefeller Foundation paper from the time blaming a “growing oversupply of cheap, unprotected labor” in rural Mexico for the phenomenon.

Cullather catalogues Mexico Agricultural Program’s downsides: “narrowing of [domestic agriculture’s] genetic base, supplanting indigenous, sustainable practices; displacing small and communal farming with commercial agribusiness; and pushing millions of peasants into urban slums or across the border.” None of them stopped Rockefeller from presenting its Mexico program as a successful model for future ones in Asia. As for Borlaug, future Nobel laureate and putative savior of India’s famine-stalked masses, he learned in Mexico to “see modernization as a transition from lower to higher levels of soil nutrients,” i.e., energy-intensive, soil-degrading synthetic fertilizers.

By the end of the Mexico chapter, Cullather has already shattered the green revolution myth and exposed it as something like a lunge, and a not very well thought-out one, to replace other societies’ farming systems with our own highly problematic one. The Mexico effort’s one unambiguous success was in creating an attractive development model: Take hybridized seeds, douse them with imported fertilizers, add water and pesticides, get more food. But development models, Cullather shows, “are a form of selective forgetting.” They strip away context and motive, “leaving an image of outside experts isolating problems and then introducing a sharply focused solutions.”

In the rest of The Hungry World, Cullather traces the tortured path of the Mexico model into South Asia at the height of the Cold War, with the US misadventure in Vietnam providing heavy incentive to keep post-colonial India, vast and ever flirting with socialism, out of the Sino-Soviet sphere. Much of the Mexican pattern was repeated as the Green Revolution took root in South Asia. Fears of famine were shamelessly puffed up; the fact that gaping swaths of rich farmland are devoted to crops for export, not domestic food, was overlooked; huge imports of US grain, which push down crop prices to the despair of domestic farmers, were ignored; and then, finally, a triumphant harvest vindicated the model.

The green revolution’s legacy lives on, not only in the Borlaug legend but also on the ground in the places it touched. In his conclusion, Cullather notes the ecological and social devastation wrought by over reliance on irrigation and agrichemicals. Yet even on its own terms—its promise to create abundance—the effort can be seen as a failure. It jacked up yields, but its narrow technical focus offered no vision for how to distribute the bounty equitably. Today, as Cullather devastatingly notes, “the green revolution epicenters—Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Mexico, the Philippines, and Indonesia—are all among the most undernourished nations, each with higher rates of adult and childhood malnutrition and deficiency diseases … than most Sub-Saharan countries.”

That sobering fact, and indeed Cullather’s account as a whole, should give the Gates Foundation and the Obama Administration pause as they set out to transform Sub-Saharan Africa agriculture under the “new green revolution” banner. Like their forebears, the leaders of what Cullather calls GR2.0 seem to be ignoring key facts on the ground. In his conclusion, Cullather writes:

As in India in 1950, Africa today is a major food exporter. No French market would be complete without cut flowers, coffee, lobster, citrus fruits, and salad greens from across the Mediterranean. The total value of food aid coming in is less than the value of one of the smaller market segments—vegetables—going out. … Africans are hungry not because there is no food, but because there is no entitlement to food.

Within that context, “GR2.0 proposals give only vague explanations for how expanding farm productivity will translate into increased health, welfare, or growth,” he writes. Sound familiar? To be sure, many of the original green revolution epicenters did experience rapid economic growth, of course; but in ways that left large portions of their populations chronically hungry.

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