http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/01/201312614571857504.html
Empty words won't fill hungry stomachs
There is good reason to be sceptical about the new initiatives coming out
of Davos targeting smallholder farmers.
Last Modified: 26 Jan 2013 15:07
The world's political and business elite gathered on January 23 in Davos,
Switzerland [AFP]
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With the launch of the "Enough Food for Everyone IF" campaign, global
food security is once again high on the public agenda. The UK campaign hopes to
mobilise massive public support leading up to the scheduled meeting of the G8
in Enniskillen in June this year, trying to replicate the considerable success
of the Make Poverty History movement in 2005. One of the key pillars of the IF
Campaign is land, and drawing attention to the plight of poor farmers who are
being forced to relinquish their property in what has been described as a
neo-colonial "land grab".
We have, of course, seen processes of alienation and dispossession
accelerating over the last century. In The Age of Extremes, the final volume in
his much-fêted quartet of books, published in 1994, historian Eric Hobsbawm
declared that the "death of the peasantry" constituted "the most dramatic and
far-reaching social change of the second half of this [twentieth] century",
sealing "us off forever from the world of the past". "The peasantry," Hobsbawm
continued, "which had formed the majority of the human race throughout recorded
history, had been made redundant by the agricultural revolution."
While many on the left felt that this was a premature obituary, several
commentators on the right saw the demise of the peasantry as an essential
precursor to progress and prosperity. In the pages of the American magazine
Foreign Affairs, Paul Collier, an Oxford don and former Director of the
Research Development Department at the World Bank, mocked "the middle- and
upper class love affair with peasant agriculture" and the view that "peasants,
like pandas, are to be preserved". Given the present food crisis, Collier
announced, support for small-scale farming marks a "retreat into romanticism".
In Collier's view, "the world needs more commercial farms, not less".
Looking ahead to the 2013 Davos meeting
Collier's remarks are only the latest instalment in a long history of
disparaging small farmers. Victorian elites castigated in equal measure Indian
ryot farmers, Irish cottier tenants and African sharecroppers as primitive,
idle, mendacious and improvident. To imperial eyes they were symbols of
obsolescence, no more capable of agricultural improvement than the dodo was
capable of flight. And as with the dodo their future would be short-lived;
extinction was the inevitable and natural dénouement. Famines usually did the
trick.
Much the same narrative that characterised the colonial period carried
over into the Green Revolution, as "de-peasantisation" became the sine qua non
for agricultural development. The push for higher yields and greater
agricultural productivity required a strong agricultural support structure,
including expensive pesticides, herbicides, fertilisers and regular irrigation,
much of which was beyond the capacity of small-scale growers. It didn't help
that influential voices within the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations - the key
agents introducing high-tech plant breeding and industrial farming to the
global South - dismissed rural peasants as human obstacles to agricultural
modernisation.
Reasons for caution
At first blush a new report by the World Economic Forum's "New Vision for
Agriculture" [PDF], launched last week to coincide with its annual meeting in
Davos, promises a break in this spiral of misanthropic thought. Recognising
that the planet is home to some 500 million smallholders - who support two
billion people, account for 97 percent of global agricultural holdings, and
produce food for almost 70 percent of the world's population - the report
stresses the importance of "collaborative action" with smallholders to deliver
food security, economic opportunity and environmental sustainability.
No longer fossils from by-gone era, smallholders are identified as
"change agents" and future "catalysts" in the business of agricultural
transformation. The report insists that "smallholder-inclusive" projects can be
devised in partnership with private sector investors, governments and civil
society organisations. With the right incentives those projects can then be
scaled-up to the regional and national level, promoting poverty reduction and
comprehensive rural development. "Step Up to Scale Up" is the clunky new
buzzword, but is this really a departure from old practice - a genuinely "a new
vision for agriculture"?
We believe there are good reasons for caution.
Firstly, partnership, as envisioned in this report, is clearly a
David-meets-Goliath type alliance. Though local businesses and indigenous
farmers frame the picture, it is global agribusiness that dominates the view.
Can smallholders really have a voice when faced with the collective bargaining
power of Bunge, Cargill, Coca-Cola Company, Diageo, DuPont, General Mills,
Monsanto Company, Unilever, and Wal-Mart - just a few of the 28 partner
companies that drive the initiative? Genuinely inclusive "bottom-up"
decision-making needs to be distinguished from the platitudinous rhetoric of
development partnerships and participation, which all too often masks the vast
asymmetries of power between participants.
Annual meeting convenes amid global uncertainty
What makes us even more cautious about the feel-good language of
partnership is the issue of trust, or more precisely the absence of it. Several
of the transnational corporations behind the Davos initiative have a sullied
record when it comes to engagement with local farming communities. In Palakkad
district in Kerala, India, for example, Coca-Cola were found guilty - and
obliged to pay compensation - for the "over-extraction" of ground water
supplies causing artificial shortages to local farmers and residents. To
prevent growers from "illegally" using their seeds, Monsanto Company continues
to carry out random farm inspections and regularly threatens growers with
lawsuits over the terms of use of its patented crops. Meanwhile Wal-Mart,
another company associated with the World Economic Forum's "New Vision for
Agriculture", is well known for its price-squeezing strategies. What the
company describes as "supply chain optimisation" means that small growers and
food producers must bear the brunt of its efforts to maintain low prices at the
till. If past record is any indication of future conduct we ought to approach
the promises emanating from Davos with great scepticism.
Market volatility for smallholders
Wal-Mart's approach to extracting maximum value and profit from its
supply chain illustrates our second reason for suggesting that the signals from
Davos may not necessarily be good news for farmers and growers around the
world. The "New Vision for Agriculture" clearly prioritises market-based
approaches to food security and poverty reduction. Significantly the report
asks: "With the models employed, are smallholders able fully to participate in
the market, or are most still mainly at the subsistence level?" The contrast
between subsistence agriculture ("bad") and market participation and commodity
production ("good") is not, however, a straightforward one. We need to
recognise that markets can yield good and bad outcomes for the world's poor.
Adopting a morally neutral position on the operation and outcomes of markets
impoverishes public debate, as Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has so
powerfully argued in his book What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets.
The evidence suggests that uncertainty and volatility in agricultural
markets have their greatest impacts on the lives and livelihoods of the poorest
and most vulnerable groups. An important report [PDF] authored by the World
Food Programme, and published in 2009, noted that while food markets help
"promote efficiency in resource allocation, especially through the signals they
send to food producers, who favour high prices... [they] tend to fail most
often and most severely for those who need them the most - the hungry poor".
Smallholder farmers are notoriously "risk averse" when it comes to food
markets, not because they are inherently conservative, as is often alleged, but
because increased market integration means greater vulnerability to price
fluctuations. Risk aversion, as distinguished anthropologist James Scott has
observed, is a perfectly rational response to food markets that all too often
tilt against the poor.
Counting the Cost
The economic malaise and its perils
We should not romanticise subsistence agriculture - unquestionably it is
challenging and often a brutal way of life - but it can be a safer bet when
food markets are volatile, as they have been since 2007. There is an important
difference between the concept of food security, which can create and
perpetuate a culture of dependency (on state agencies, well-meaning
international donors and charities), and food sovereignty, which expresses a
much deeper need amongst the most vulnerable groups to exercise democratic
control over their food production and consumption choices when faced with
uncertainty. By creating more integrated global production and consumption
systems, while market-based reforms may facilitate the smooth flow of
commodities to the highest bidder, they are unlikely to reinforce the abilities
of local groups to assert control over their food choices when confronted with
the sorts of price volatility that has characterised agricultural markets over
the last few years.
The global land grab
Thirdly, the "scale-up" idea, on which the "New Vision for Agriculture"
hinges, is also profoundly problematic. The desire to transition small growers
into high-value commodity producers assumes that off-farm employment
opportunities are available for those who must exit agriculture as farmlands
are rationalised, and mechanisation and the economies of scale squeeze out the
need for "inefficient" allocation of family labour to small-scale peasant
farming. This is the thinking that was articulated in the World Bank's 2008
World Development Report, Agriculture for Development, which argued that
smallholders who could not compete in the global agricultural marketplace
should abandon farming to "more productive users" and take up wage labour. This
sort of thinking has legitimised a global "land grab" that is staggering in
scale; one report, by an alliance of civil society and international
organisations, the International Land Coalition estimated that, between 2000
and 2011, an area of land over eight times the size of the United Kingdom (a
total of some 203 million hectares) had been purchased or let to states,
commercial farmers, private investors, and parastatal agencies from mostly
poor, developing countries. Ironically, the same report also found that the
highest demand for land investment came from biofuel production, producing the
ultimate double whammy - dispossessing small scale local farmers and
substituting food crops for agro-based fuels to meet the consumption demands of
gas guzzling foreigners.
The assumption is that this "rationalisation" of landholding will result
in a rural-to-urban transition similar to that experienced in parts of Europe
in earlier centuries. In the past rural surplus labour was regularly absorbed
by out-migration or industrial employment in nearby towns and cities; indeed,
this was perceived to be the engine of modernisation and economic growth,
ensuring the availability of a large reserve of cheap labour to serve the
expanding needs of capital. Driven from the land in the nineteenth century, for
example, Irish peasants found work in the naval stockyards of Boston, the
cotton mills in industrial Lancashire, and the coalmines encasing Glasgow city.
By contrast, even in some of the fastest growing economies in Asia, such as
India, employment generation since the adoption of liberal reforms has simply
not kept pace with the rate of economic growth, a phenomenon being
characterised as "jobless growth". Moreover, for the new generation of
dispossessed farmers, out-migration to more affluent countries is politically
disallowed, so the crowded favelas, squatter camps, and slums of the global
South must make room for one more family after another, pushed out from their
rural production systems, but also virtually unemployable in the modern urban
economy without the skills and knowledge that are needed to succeed in these
fast-growing and globally connected cities. "Scale up" is thus the first stage
in a trajectory that author Mike Davis describes as the "urbanisation of world
poverty".
There is, finally, the unshakeable sense that we have been here before.
At the end of the 2012 Olympics, the British athlete Mo Farah was brought to
Downing Street to raise awareness ahead of David Cameron's "hunger summit".
"While people around the planet have been enjoying and competing in these Games
there's another world where children don't have enough to eat, and never get
the start in life they deserve," declared the Prime Minister. Readers of the
best-selling young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games, could not have missed the
allusion. For the Prime Minister, this was a very clever PR stunt.
Public handwringing and future assurances are now part and parcel of the
annual cycle of political life, with little tangible proof that this makes any
difference on the ground, where it matters most. Against this background, it is
far too easy to be cynical about the recent commitments emanating from Davos,
and the fleeting media attention cycle that surrounds public campaigns on food,
hunger and global justice issues. For the sake of world's smallholder farmers,
let's hope we are wrong.
David Nally is senior lecturer in human geography and Bhaskar Vira is
senior lecturer in environment and development at the Department of Geography,
University of Cambridge, and both are fellows of Fitzwilliam College. A shorter
version of this article was published on The Guardian Poverty Matters blog. The
issues raised in this article will be debated at Kings Place, London, on Monday
at the second of three events organised by the University of Cambridge's
strategic research initiative in Global Food Security.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
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