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Collier on the Food Crisis
Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion was my pick for best economics book last year (not written by a dear friend), it was smart, hard-hitting and unconventional. Collier hasn't lost his touch as a great comment, more like an op-ed, on the food crisis over at Martin Wolf's Economic Forum illustrates.
The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market.... There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies...
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.
Read the whole thing. Many more oxen are gored.
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on May 3, 2008 at 07:05 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
OpEd I would say: it bears a remarkable similarity to the piece he wrote for the Time (London version) on April 15th.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article3746593.ece
He's consitent, that's for sure....
Posted by: Tim Worstall at May 3, 2008 8:37:53 AM
Keeping the farmers of small American farmers going and that land out of the hands of large agro-corporations through subsidies is definitely worth more than the lives of the world's poor.
Posted by: Ken at May 3, 2008 10:55:22 AM
As a counter point you might want to look at http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=39
It cites some interesting facts and reaches some different conclusions such as:
...Hedge funds and other sources of hot money are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, putting food stocks further out of poor people’s reach.[8] According to some estimates, investment funds now control 50–60% of the wheat traded on the world’s biggest commodity markets.[9] One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007
...In Asia, the World Bank constantly assured the Philippines, even as recently as last year, that self-sufficiency in rice was unnecessary and that the world market would take care of its needs.[12] Now the government is in a desperate plight: its domestic supply of subsidised rice is nearly exhausted and it cannot import all it needs because traders’ asking prices are too high.
...The truth about who profits and who loses from our global food system has never been more obvious.
...the small clique of corporations that control the world’s fertiliser market can charge what they want – and that’s exactly what they are doing. Profits at Cargill’s Mosaic Corporation, which controls much of the world’s potash and phosphate supply, more than doubled last year.[13] The world’s largest potash producer, Canada’s Potash Corp, made more than US$1 billion in profit, up more than 70% from 2006.
...On 14 April 2008, Cargill announced that its profits from commodity trading for the first quarter of 2008 were 86% higher than the same period in 2007.
...Bunge, another big food trader, saw its profits of the last fiscal quarter of 2007 increase by US$245 million, or 77%, compared with the same period of the previous year. The 2007 profits registered by ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, rose by 65% to a record US$2.2 billion. Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Foods, a major player in Asia, is forecasting revenue growth of 237% this year.
...an ideologically driven elite has forced countries to wrench open markets and let the free market run, so that a few megacorporations, investors and speculators can take huge payoffs. Many countries have lost that most basic power: the ability to feed themselves.
But what do they know anyway.
Posted by: lxm at May 3, 2008 10:56:43 AM
Bah! So what if the Europeans and Americans want to starve themselves so they run their cars on ethanol? The primary problem is how to get African farmers super-productive. As the article pointed out Africa has heaps of farmable land so there's no real reason why Africans should need to import food. As long as Africa relies on outside aid then of course it's going to feel the worst of shocks that happen in the providing nations. It's akin to me being a beggar and getting the excess food from a farming individual grows but would otherwise waste it. If one day this farmer decides he's going to experiment with the excess food and see if he can turn it into car fuel why should he be obligated not to experiment and instead give me the fuel? Or if I find one day that someone else is hungry and willing to pay him a good price for his excess food how is he obligated not to sell the food and instead give it to me? It seems as though Libertarians are shoving Liberals off the 'we care about the poor' soapbox utilitarian argument here.
Posted by: Gil at May 3, 2008 11:16:12 AM
Well at least Mr. Collier admits (although indirectly) that large-scale commercial agriculture, relying on "increased fertilizer inputs" among other things, is not sustainable...
Posted by: A Tykhyy at May 3, 2008 11:28:29 AM
Anybody read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's DIlemma?" Small organic farms have been repeatedly shown to be more efficient than factory farms. Also, Monsanto's PR notwithstanding, resistance to pesticides and herbicides is growing. Ah! Someone is sure to say, "But RoundUp Ready seeds will help!" Alas, crops based on this yield less then organic counterparts, and pests are developing resistance to RoundUp as well.
The only problem with organic is organization. When Chipotle wants to cut a deal for a million chicken breasts a day, they don't want to deal with 100,000 farms providing ten chickens a day. I don't know how to solve this, but it seems a much more tractable problem than thinking we're going to succeed in the long run with giant monoculture farms.
Posted by: Doug Blair at May 3, 2008 11:30:09 AM
One can already see what is going to happen, and we are seemingly helpless to stop it.
Governments the world over will attempt to cap prices- and the crisis will worsen.
Posted by: Yancey Ward at May 3, 2008 11:58:10 AM
Doug: yeah, the internet solves such organization problems somehow, I'm sure there's a reasonably efficient way to go about this as well. Witness Estonians cleaning up 8000 tons of rubbish all over the country in a day.
Posted by: A Tykhyy at May 3, 2008 12:17:14 PM
Doug, by which measures are organic farms more efficient? Not in output per acre. And while it may be true in a few cases that organic farming produces higher crop output, it's not universal.
Plus you are discounting the scientific advances of factory farms. It was the big boys who created the knowledge base for current organic farming. Just because you're organic doesn't mean you mimic the technology of the '20s.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is a great book. But the topic at hand is feeding the world. The real problem is that while we can debate the merits of small-scale farming here in the U.S., large agrobusiness is the only real hope for Africans. This isn't about convincing a national chain to source chicken breasts from 1,000 small farms. It's not about "guilt-free" meals. It's about providing the raw quantities of food needed for Africa to survive.
Posted by: Odin's Beard at May 3, 2008 12:25:32 PM
the small clique of corporations that control the world’s fertiliser market can charge what they want – and that’s exactly what they are doing. Profits at Cargill’s Mosaic Corporation, which controls much of the world’s potash and phosphate supply, more than doubled last year.[13] The world’s largest potash producer, Canada’s Potash Corp, made more than US$1 billion in profit, up more than 70% from 2006.
Well it would be surprising if profits didn't rise in a boom year, no? High food prices mean farmers want to buy more fertiliser, so they pay more. Next year you take the profit and invest it in more fertiliser factories. This isn't evidence of a conspiracy.
Posted by: improbable at May 3, 2008 1:02:14 PM
An irony I haven't seen commented on is that farm subsidies in rich countries used to be blamed for artificially lowering world food prices, making it impossible for poor countries to compete. Shouldn't those who held this view be happy to see high prices?
Posted by: improbable at May 3, 2008 1:08:55 PM
I am sorry I dont understand economics to same extent most people who write/comment on this blog. I wanted an opinion whether co-operative system can be used in Africa to increase production. I am not sure if any present large African organization can do large scale farming and there is high amount of mistrust for Western MNCs and to some extent rightly so. But if a co-operative organization is formed by all the farmers of a region and share of each farmer can depend on the extent of his land. Can this help?
As for organic farming, I am not sure whether it can be implemented on large scale right now.
If possible pls do provide some kind perspective on co-operative organization.
Posted by: buriedatsea at May 3, 2008 1:32:00 PM
"Small organic farms have been repeatedly shown to be more efficient than factory farms."
So, is it your opinion that market forces will lead to smaller organic farms, in place of the large corporate farms that have previously been favored?
Posted by: kebko at May 3, 2008 4:06:56 PM
re: small farms -- they are more efficient WHEN you consider that they are sustainable, i.e., they do not mine the environment for water, oil, fertilizer. Read more
re: Africa -- they suffer from bad government more than technology problems, e.g., Zimbabwe now.
re: co-ops -- they can certainly help in terms of aggregating capital and market power.
re: cliques of corporations -- they ARE having a material impact on prices, but mostly they are capturing more rents than farmers, etc. Read more
re: hedge funds -- they seem to be having an impact by squeezing inventories down into the volatile range. Read more
Posted by: David Zetland at May 3, 2008 6:24:58 PM
small farms -- they are more efficient WHEN you consider that they are sustainable, i.e., they do not mine the environment for water, oil, fertilizer.
David, by analogy, autarkies are the most efficient economy. After all, only an autarky is entirely self-reliant.
I think I'll still define efficiency as output/input as opposed to the implied output / (external input).
By the way, your link is quite dissapointing as it doesn't even buttress your claim that organic yields higher a output / (external input) ratio. If you want to make a counterintuitive claim, and you want to be taken seriously, then when you put in a link to support your claim, link to a study, a paper, something that actually makes an empirical argument. Not to a summary of four snippets of rants about the evils of capitalism. Seriously, that could have been a Rick Roll and it would've been equally as supportive of your argument.
Posted by: Jody at May 3, 2008 6:51:34 PM
A lot of the development literature has taken a different turn lately. Rather than mandating land-redistribution as a means for alleviating poverty, wealth is becoming increasingly delinked with land in the eyes of many NGO. The consequence is, of course, agricultural intensification and livelihood diversification. Things are changing.
Posted by: Uku at May 3, 2008 6:53:50 PM
Between Martin Wolf's article and Paul Collier's response, there is a lot to chew on (so to speak).
First off, to those who think there is speculative hoarding by hedge funds or other bogeymen, I strongly suggest checking out the graphs in Martin Wolf's article. Stored food supplies are falling, not rising like one would expect pretty much by definition if hoarding was going on. (I am too lazy to log out of FT to find out if you need to be registered with FT to read the article or not, but registration is free, albeit mildly time consuming per the norm in such situations).
Second, decreased poverty (anyone's definition of poverty) in China and elsewhere is enabling (and producing, not necessarily the same thing) poor people to eat improved diets. People who used to eat one meal a day can now eat two. Those who used to eat two meals a day can and do eat three per day. Those who used to eat more or less strictly vegetarian diets for money reasons can now afford to eat meat, and more and more often. This is definitely a good development for those with the improved diets.
Also, increasingly in the "rich" countries the "poor" (hardly poor by the definitions of truly poor countries) members of society are increasingly fat due to food being nominally cheap either via wages or handouts of one sort or another. Middle class citizens are also increasing their caloric intake to levels beyond what is healthy for them (i.e. they too are getting fat).
Since more and more countries are finally adopting freer markets and becoming richer (or less poor, depending on framing), these increased caloric intakes will continue for decades, maybe even generations, depending on how fast poorer countries develop economically.
As a result the demand side part of the equation is simply going to grow and grow and grow for a lot longer than many people seem to realize. This means that food supply simply has to increase or some disturbing results will ensue. Perhaps there will be mass starvation in some countries that remain poor. Perhaps governmental or freelance agents will engender some form of genocide as a local "solution".
To put it simply, any policy that stands in the way of long term productivity increases is simply obscenely immoral and ought to be spotlighted as such and those arguing for such policies need to be taught how they are wrong, and if they persist in their ways they ought to be shamed and shunned at the very least.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at May 3, 2008 7:56:23 PM
Regarding "organic" food (a redundancy if I ever heard one), Norman Borlaug (of Nobel peace prize winning, father of the Green Revolution, feeder of billions "fame" [he is sadly unkown by most]) says that we can feed only about 4 billion people using "organic" methods, and then only at the cost of massively destroying forest land.
The world has about 6.5 billion people on it. Which 2.5 billion (and counting) will have to be murdered so that Whole Foods customers can feel superior?
Sooner or later "organic" food will properly come to be seen as an immoral indulgence.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at May 3, 2008 8:17:36 PM
Odin, organic farming, according to at least one study, yields three times the food on a per acre basis: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1091304
And, given peak oil (and, by extension, peak natural gas) and the declining availability of potassium and phosphorus from mines, we're going to be farming organic eventually, anyway. I know that economists tend to wave these issues away -- the almighty market will provide -- but I'm not sure the pricing signals will leave enough time for any sort of alternatives to be developed without all of us suffering from significant pain.
http://www.noble.org/Ag/Soils/NitrogenPrices/Index.htm
http://www.energybulletin.net/6994.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertilizer#Health_and_sustainability_issues
Posted by: Doug Blair at May 3, 2008 9:09:29 PM
"David, by analogy, autarkies are the most efficient economy. After all, only an autarky is entirely self-reliant."
False. Do you know the definition of efficiency? The most basic definition and intuitive definition of efficiency is increasing output with the same or less input. By definition autarkies can never be more efficient than economies that open themselves up to trade, taking advantage of comparative advantage, which all by itself makes an economy more efficient.
By your definition of efficiency, the most efficient economy would be an individual living an isolated life somewhere. The division of labor exists because it's more efficient.
Posted by: Ken at May 3, 2008 10:16:22 PM
Doug: if that is true, then why is organic food much more expensive than the regular stuff. Are all organic farmers evil gougers, or are these studies missing something?
In any event making natural gas is merely a problem of having enough energy. I find it hard to believe that will be a problem for more than a few decades.
Posted by: James K at May 3, 2008 11:55:50 PM
James K: I can think of a couple answers to this. First, organic isn't always more expensive. Second, organic is sometimes a better product; the producers maintain standards higher than their non-organic competition. Third, at the moment, supply is outstripping demand. Fourth, the processing of organic foods may often be done on a smaller scale (cereals, for example), which could result in higher costs.
",,,merely a problem of having enough energy." Well, sure, and death is merely a problem of ceasing living! There are no alternatives waiting in the wings with either the quantity or flexibility of fossil fuels. I believe that the impacts of peak oil will be rather serious; perhaps not Kunstlerian, but bad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/
Posted by: Doug Blair at May 4, 2008 1:02:35 AM
Collier singlehandedly recycles every unsubstantiated talking point of the USDA-Agribusiness Complex.
If there's a problem with people "romanticizing" things, it's with Chandlerian/Galbraithian technocrats who romanticize large-scale production (especially in agriculture).
Large-scale agribusiness is indeed more efficient in terms of output per man-hour; but small-scale, intensive production is actually MORE efficient in terms of output per acre. Those presently unemployed in the Third World, sitting in shanty towns or begging in the gutters, would be better off back on the land they were evicted from by quasi-feudal landed oligarchs in collusion with cash-crop agribusiness interests.
Most of the problem of starvation results, not from underproduction, but from maldistribution of purchasing power. That's because land formerly used to support the rightful owners, who were living and working on it, is now used instead by the landed oligarchs and agribusiness interests to raise cash crops for the export market. And those formerly living on it, who were able to support themselves, now have no source of purchasing power to buy it.
To repeat, it's not a problem of underproduction, any more than was the Irish potato famine (which occurred at a time when English landlords were exporting wheat from Ireland). Most Third World starvation results from the reenactment of the Enclosures on a global scale.
It's also asinine to romanticize Green Revolution techniques, when for the most part they are only viable in the presence of massively subsidized irrigation and other inputs, and are useful only for the privileged classes engaged in large-scale, subsidized production on stolen land. For the vast majority of ordinary producers, traditional drought- and pest-resistant varieties are far more productive for farming that actually internalizes its own costs instead of operating on the taxpayer tit.
Posted by: Kevin Carson at May 4, 2008 3:14:26 AM
happyjuggler:
What Doug said.
Has Borlaug even heard of John Jeavons or biointensive farming? or is he just talking out of his ass whereof he knows nothing, based on his own institutional background?
I once talked to an agribusiness professor who regurgitate the whole "the world would starve without chemical fertilizers" party line. And when I confronted him with the productivity per acre of intensive, raised-bed techniques that returned all organic material to the soil through composting, guess what his reaction was: "Oh, well, if people made that intensive use of the land, it could probably be done."
James K.:
Doug's third answer is probably the most imporant one. Current high organic prices are mostly scarcity rents.
In addition, we have a distribution system geared to large-scale agricultural production and large supermarkets. When a single supermarket can absorb an entire truckload of organic produce from a nearby farm, instead of the load being distributed among a number of stores all over a county, the distribution cost will fall.
Posted by: Kevin Carson at May 4, 2008 3:28:25 AM
KC, you have overstated your case in two areas. They wouldn't matter for your conclusions, only some people are bound to stop reading as soon as they spot an error.
A lot of the people who would be better off as peasant-proprietors were not "rightful owners", sometimes because they always were tenants and sometimes because they had a different cultural connection with land, one not recognised by modern systems (which is why they had no standing as claimants when it was first appropriated in our sense of the term). There's a complete spectrum all the way from legal machinery not counting them, all the way to people who never had a claim (why should ex-slaves end up better off than crowded out natives in British Guiana?). Injustice was done, just not always that particular injustice.
Ireland did have a food shortage during the potato famine; the fact that exports continued doesn't disprove it, it only shows that things were even worse than nature hitting a distorted economy had made them. Your description does apply in most poor areas today, but since it doesn't account for your example after all, some people will assume that the main reason for that suffering applies to this suffering after all.
You might want to look at "Sanity", by G.K.Chesterton, which I just found linked from Distributism. It goes into these areas, and also fills in the gaps Belloc left in "The Servile State" about the role of big business structures.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at May 4, 2008 5:07:28 AM
Ken re autarkies: "False. Do you know the definition of efficiency?"
I guess I need to be less subtle with my needling in the future.
Posted by: Jody at May 4, 2008 10:38:15 AM
Kevin Carson said,
Large-scale agribusiness is indeed more efficient in terms of output per man-hour; but small-scale, intensive production is actually MORE efficient in terms of output per acre.That implies that abundant supply of very cheap surplus labor is needed to supply the man hours needed to make the methods you mention work.And when I confronted him with the productivity per acre of intensive, raised-bed techniques that returned all organic material to the soil through composting, guess what his reaction was: "Oh, well, if people made that intensive use of the land, it could probably be done."
Which probably works in situations like substenance farming. I'm not sure how well that would scale up to areas where labor is limited and it produces more doing something beside hoeing weeds in the raised beds of an organic plot.
Might be possible but probably not as simple a situation as you paint it to be.
Posted by: TJIT at May 4, 2008 2:20:19 PM
I've heard the argument that organic can have higher yields per acre, but is very labor intensive and therefore has much lower per dollar efficiency than industrial farming. I haven't seen any studies - but comparing my parents garden to fields in the country It sounds possible - has anyone here got some links to share on this?
Posted by: Greg at May 4, 2008 9:51:41 PM
I think that this: http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/wheat/YBtable04.asp
might be one of the tables folks are looking for. I think the important columns are the ones labeled "world production" and "world ending stocks." They show that, for at least wheat, the world is consuming more wheat than is being produced, and that global production is pretty flat around 20 billion bushels/year, +/-15%. It looks like about 20% of the crop is left-over by the following harvest time, but that surplus has been shrinking for 7 of the last 8 years.
Posted by: Tangurena at May 5, 2008 12:17:05 AM
TJIT, you've got your eye on the wrong ball. What you're bringing out is the right question for how much surplus owner-operated farms would produce for the cash economy or for how much would be available for poor people in the rest of the cash economy to buy. However, for people who are doing the owner-operating, the question is "what is the amount of work my family has to do to to break even?". If enough resources could be put in the hands of poor people so that they could become owner-operators, those (the previously poor) would then find they were ahead of the game quite early. That is, they would find they stopped being in want at a level at which they had surplus resources, at which point they would have a surplus for extras. Short of Malthusian constraints (which we have not yet hit), the formerly poor would end up ahead of the game. The idea of "very cheap surplus labor" is meaningless, until you start talking about the wider cash economy. What counts is that - short of Malthusian constraints - Mao Tse Tung's sound bite "for every new mouth to feed there are two more hands to work" makes sense. Simply, short of Malthusian constraints, you have all the labour you need for the non-cash needs you need to meet, and the rest is extra. (Once Malthus hits, you get problems - but that's not where we are now.)
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at May 5, 2008 5:03:01 AM
Greg, industrial farming is predicated on cheap fossil fuels. Note that it's not just cheap energy -- fossil fuels provide the raw materials for many herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers. As the price of fossil fuels rises, the viability of industrial farming will decline.
Posted by: Doug Blair at May 6, 2008 9:46:56 AM
PML,
Thanks for the comment. Although I was looking at things through the lens of individual homesteading, I think my observation would apply just as well to abrogation of other forms of traditional property rights like collective ownership by a village commune (e.g. the medieval open field system).
TJIT,
The countries in which starvation is worst tend to be those countries with a large pool of surplus labor. And an awful lot of those in the surplus labor pool are dispossessed peasants who'd love to have their land back, or who have access to inadequate amounts of land because of latifundistas holding it out of use.
Posted by: Kevin Carson at May 6, 2008 1:39:55 PM
PML, Kevin Carson,
When applied to developing nations I agree with what your saying and that is what my original comment said.
The question is how well such systems would work in areas with decent property rights and no surplus labor (say the US).
In that situation I don't think the intensive system Kevin described in his first post would be so workable.
Posted by: TJIT at May 6, 2008 9:45:51 PM
TJIT - "decent property rights", "no surplus labor", and "(say the US)". Which? The USA has surplus labour (concealed behind cooked unemployment figures) and has not got decent property rights (since it allows a large corporate and state thumb onto the scales, e.g. evicting owner-occupiers for redevelopment). A lot of the "discouraged" labour is in rural or semi-rural areas and could be mopped up, or at least have its plight ameliorated, if people of that sort could access small plots of land and grow food towards their own private use. Not all of it could be, because some people are in the wrong places or have the wrong scales, but it would definitely help. And, as the Georgists pointed out, helping those few you could in that way would improve what was on offer for the rest.
KC, the point I was getting at was that there are quite sizeable groups of poor people in the world who are (a) rural and (b) didn't ever have land rights or their analogues. Not only would giving them new rights run the risk of their losing them from unfamiliarity, but also it would deprive yet other people who had land rights, and might even end up sub-optimal. A case in point: the poorest people in Madagascar are the landless migrant harvesters who follow the harvest around (it isn't simultaneous everywhere because of climate variations with altitude and latitude etc. in such a large island). They are mostly the descendants of slaves freed when the French annexed the island. They don't have the traditions for self sufficiency, the land they would need would have to come from others who don't owe it to them and would lose out in their turn, while those you might argue owed it don't have enough to give (even the slave owners lost their wealth to the French, who are now long gone), and - real killer - the total rural product depends on the harvesters following the harvest, which means that anchoring everybody to their own geoographical area with land ownership wouldn't be workable in the short term, a short term they would have to get through.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at May 7, 2008 3:05:44 AM
PM Lawrence,
In the US surplus labor does not necessarily = labor available to work the field all day.
If we had surplus ag labor we would not have to bring in labor from foreign countries to pick the crops.
No doubt US property rights took a kick in the balls when big government and the liberal justices on the supreme court teamed up to produce the Kelo ruling.
That does not change the fact that as imperfect as they may be an individual's right to own property in the US is better protected then many other countries.
Posted by: TJIT at May 7, 2008 9:13:13 PM
TJIT, look at the various comments I wrote again.
You do have surplus labour available, even though it is not in a form suitable "to work the field all day" and even though not all the surplus labour is suited or located to benefit from the kind of agriculture that would help (which isn't the kind you're describing). If families or individuals had access to small patches of land, they could - well within their limits, and without working in the fields all day or even every day - reduce their dependence on bought food and so increase their discretionary income from other sources; and every little helps (some would end up not even needing a top up income). That would in turn improve the bargaining power of those who were unable to do that, from location or skills problems. And, of course, this wouldn't help bring in the massive harvests you are talking about, since it would be bypassing the whole business of agriculture on that scale; we're talking a pattern of mixed activities at the household level. Households only need to help themselves; anything above that is discretionary, so we aren't talking large scale, just lots of small scales that never get aggregated and cycled through the wider economy.
All your objections, apart from the last, are inadvertently building in the very things that are in place now, i.e. large scale cash economy operations, and so building in the very thing you want to demonstrate. The last objection is at the same time irrelevant (so what if other places are even worse, if things aren't set up right in the USA?) and - historically - false. That is, only current owners get that sort of protection for their property, but the whole reason they have that property now is that the small scale farmers did not receive effective protection in the past, and so got squeezed out. (It's a long and complicated story, different in each country despite often similar outcomes; the US pattern involved arranging farmers to get set up under-capitalised, with an overhang of dependence on financial institutions.)
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at May 8, 2008 8:28:09 AM
P.M. Lawrence,
You are meandering all over the place.
I'm pretty convinced the vast majority of US citizens have zero interest in moving away from the TV and taking up gardening.
Furthermore, even if they are, I see exactly zero evidence that they would increase the total supply of ag commodities available on the world market.
Which was what the original post, and my comment, were about.
Posted by: TJIT at May 8, 2008 10:23:48 PM
TJIT, who is meandering all over the place? You are confusing several very different things, as follows:-
- "I'm pretty convinced the vast majority of US citizens have zero interest in moving away from the TV and taking up gardening". I'm pretty sure of that too. In fact, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would rather sit in front of the TV than earn a living in any way, come to that. But I was pointing out some options that used to be available for people to earn their own living (or part of it) without participating in the wider cash economy - subsistence options. I'm pretty sure that people who aren't making a living now would rather have those options back (if they understood them) than not have them at all, but I'm equally sure they would even rather sit in front of the TV and get supported even more easily, if only that were available. But I'm talking about what would help the marginalised, not for those with better options.
- "Furthermore, even if they are, I see exactly zero evidence that they would increase the total supply of ag commodities available on the world market". I'm pretty sure of that myself, apart from the greater availability from their not buying on the open market. That's the point, that they would be getting (at least some of) resources they need without going through the market. It's no criticism to say that the market wouldn't increase; in fact, it might even shrink and still be an improvement for the people who would be bypassing it.
- My comment to you was to point out that you were not looking at what mattered for people's well being. I know you were asking how the market etc. would gain in these ways; I was pointing out that there were ways of changing the problem, of getting (some of) what people needed without that dependency - a dependency that doesn't matter if they have something to offer the market, but does if they lack it. For those people, the older system of optional, household level subsistence resources gave them a fallback which is not now available.
Posted by: P.M.Lawrence at May 9, 2008 2:51:51 AM
