Two views: "future of family farming"

Unfortunately, the two questions posed by the editors constrained and truncated the discussion:

• Can family farming produce enough food for the growing world population? and
• Can family farming compete with large-scale industrial agriculture?

These questions are entirely hypothetical in nature, and are rather tangential to the actual situation in the world. Nobody will deny the presence of huge numbers of rural household living in poverty (one, two or even more billions of people). For them the small family farm is their only means for survival. Likewise, no-one will deny that industrial farming contributes crucially to feeding an increasingly urbanised population in both the developing and developed worlds. So basically the editors framed a "non-debate" juxtaposing two entirely different and therefore non-comparable agricultural systems.

Typical of such debate is that it provides an outlet for gratuitous and generalised statements that have little to do with the realities encountered in the field, and that do not lead to any realistic solutions for the complex and fundamental problems that are faced by agriculture in general, and by smallholders in particular. While this type of debate does not really clarify issues for the general public, it also diverts the thinking of scientists, policymakers and development agents from fundamental issues that call for immediate and concrete actions, incremental and practical.

Whenever dealing with complex systems, the choices are not either-or, but how much of each, in what combinations, and how can the two function in complementary ways that compensate for each other’s limitations. Why should anyone expect family farming to feed the whole world’s population? This is one-size-fits-all thinking that is as fatuous as the idea that industrialized agriculture can and will ‘feed the world.’ These options are caricatures.

Commercial agriculture can only succeed where consumers have sufficient purchasing power to pay for someone else’s production of their food. To assume that big farmers might ever altruistically provide food to the poor at non-market prices is a silly idea. Will governments be able and willing in the future to subsidize food for the poor? Highly unlikely, given the decline in fiscal capacities of governments around the world. So who will pay for the food of the poor? Neither LDCs nor DC governments, because if they do, it will be a vast drain on resources that will slow investment in meeting other needs, thereby curbing economic growth.

The idea that smallholders ‘cannot compete’ with large commercial operations is also untenable, unless richer societies continue to subsidize their large, modern farming. In view of the huge financial deficits that most developed country governments are facing, this is increasingly unlikely, when also taking into account the large negative externalities of ongoing environmental degradation of both soil and water quality. Large-scale farming is not paying its full costs and its advantages over small farmers --as presumed by Rabbinge and others -- are far from natural. They are policy-induced, ideologically-protected, and political-economic power-based! Does anyone expect that smallholders, unassisted, can compete with policy-favoured large corporate operations?

The contribution by Prof. Rabbinge reflects what Prof. Easterly would call the views of a typical planner. He looks into the far-away future – three generations or more — and arrives at the conclusion that family farming has no future. Thereby he bypasses the simple fact that the distant future is uncertain and therefore largely unpredictable, even with all kinds of sophisticated modeling approaches.

While Rabbinge’s arguments sound rational, they are irrelevant to solving the large, complex and immediate problems of this world, whether those of small farmers or meeting global food needs. As Easterly elaborates, these views of planners, which prevail in large organisations like the World Bank, IMF, and major governments, have caused a lot of harm (think of African experience and the Bank’s Structural Adjustment and Free Market assistance programs). Yet, the planners are never held to account; indeed they may already have died, to remind us of John Maynard Keynes’ famous observation. The long run remains always in the future, while people must live in the here and now. Some crystal ball gazing can illumine our present choices, but it necessarily remains utopian.

As is typical for these types of debate, both Prof. Rabbinge and Prof. Dal Soglio use some sweeping generalisations to underscore their viewpoints. For Rabbinge, small-scale farming is generally associated with “poverty”, therefore leading to soil mining and thus it is harmful to the environment and non-sustainable. What makes him believe that ‘modern agriculture’ is not engaging in soil mining and is not harming the environment?

Conversely, Dal Soglio emphasizes the large-scale destruction of eco-systems through monocropping and blanket use of external inputs (seeds, fertilisers and pesticides) by industrial farming as reported frequently for Brazil, Indonesia and other countries. Actually the latter sounds more alarming because of the major stakeholders and stakeholder coalitions involved. The industrial, large-scale farming system advocated and considered inevitable by Rabbinge meets the needs of the commercial sector more than the needs of the world’s poor. The seed and agricultural chemical producers, international commodity traders and food processing industries operate in a close and global coalition with governments and with major research institutions, like those of the CGIAR as well as universities like Wageningen. Increasingly, public-private coalitions are funding and driving the various research agendas in directions where company profits take precedence over consumer and environmental interests.

Against that background, the arguments supporting large-scale industrialized agriculture as the template for the future should be considered with a degree of skepticism. There is a growing feeling of unease on all sides. The rhetoric on the global issues of poverty alleviation, global food security, and environmental sustainability used so frequently by major institutions are attempts to satisfy a poorly-informed general public that these challenges can be met effectively through what is called ‘modern agriculture.’ While it has served the world reasonably well for the past half century ‘more of the same’ is no longer justifiable. Some pluralisation, rather than homogenization, of the agricultural sector is urgently needed. Therefore the role of ILEIA in voicing the many viable, environment-friendly, agro-ecological alternatives for farming should be warmly applauded.

Willem A. Stoop, the Netherlands