Return to Small Farms Could Help Alleviate Social and Environmental Crises

The epic blow-up at Copenhagen was ultimately about something very simple. It was about economic growth — about who gets to grow, how fast, under what terms, using which energy supplies.

Within this purportedly zero-sum framework, if China grows quickly, burning cheap coal for fuel, with a slowly increasing amount of renewables added to the mix, the West will have to cut growth too sharply. Meanwhile most of the global South worries that the Copenhagen proposals could have permanently put a stop to their plans for growth.

But what if there’s an escape from this cul-de-sac? What if development — entailing, but not the same as, economic growth — could co-exist harmoniously with sharp emissions reductions? What would that imply for development planning?

The question is not rhetorical. It can.

Take a glance at the latest Food First! report, in which the authors assert that

“Sustainable, smallholder agriculture represents the best option for resolving the fourfold food, finance, fuel and climate crises.”

Before proceeding, it’s important to clear away a bit of the debris of received wisdom. Paul Collier, for example, in an influential Foreign Affairs article, suggested that the peasants who for the last 50 years have flowed in great waves to the cities were “right: Their mode of production is ill suited to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful.” Collier’s right, of course, but you have to add one thing: “modern agricultural production” isn’t suited to sustainability, or development, or preventing global warming.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem like “modern agricultural production” is even good for production.

In Latin America, for example, roughly 17 million campesinos, farming about 33 percent of the region’s cultivated land, grow 51 percent of the corn, three quarters of the beans, and 60 percent of the potatoes that are used for “domestic consumption,” according to Berkeley agronomist Miguel Altieri. In Brazil, farmers controlling just 30 percent of the country’s agricultural land produce 84 percent of the country’s cassava and 67 percent of all beans.

Indeed, Altieri shows that on a per-hectare basis, small farms are able to strongly out-produce large ones. It’s not the first time this claim has been made.

The quick counter is that agricultural labor is onerous and backbreaking, that no one wishes to do it, that freeing up farm labor by using mechanical devices and chemical inputs allows former farmers to move into the cities, raising productivity, contributing more effectively to national GDP, and so on.

That’s a reasonable claim, except for the fact that there’s now more available labor in the world than the world knows what to do with, so much so that much of the global South, its former peasantry, lives in dilapidated shanties on the peripheries of urban cores.

So it makes sense to try to think of creative, non-coercive ways of encouraging such people to move back to the countryside. At the very least, they’d be able to contribute meaningfully to the broader economy, as well as to their country’s economic development more generally — small family farms provided the impetus for South Korean and Japanese economic development, by creating a backbone of rural demand to provide markets for urban production. Furthermore, as Annie Shattuck and Eric Holt-Giménez note,