FAO’s plan to feed the world

What the report singularly fails to address, however, is the role that the agricultural policies it seeks to promote have played – and continue to play – in creating the “institutional setting” for rural poverty. The impact of agricultural intensification on farmers is illustrative of the problem:

At the farm level, intensification removes control of agricultural inputs from individual farmers and places it in the hands of outside interests. Instead of planting seed saved from the previous crop, fertilising the land with manure and compost from their own farm waste, or controlling pests and weeds through good husbandry, farmers must buy their inputs on the open market.

Price hikes are common – in Senegal, for example, the cost of fertiliser rose some 60 percent in the five years from 1975-l980; [75] in Korea, it rose 100 percent in 1979 alone [76]. The peasant has little choice but to pay up – or go under.

In Korea, often cited as an agricultural success story, the introduction of ‘miracle rice’ in tile early 19705 “left producers with escalating expenses and uncertain profit margins”. [77] In just two years, from 1974 to 1976, pesticide use trebled, whilst fertiliser use doubled within a decade. Farm debt meanwhile rose 63 times between 1975 and 1985 – almost ten times the rate at which income and assets increased. [78]

Mechanisation further exacerbates the problem, not least by increasing rural unemployment and underemployment. As Clarence Dias of the International Centre for Law in Development notes,

“A World Bank study estimates that for each tractor purchased in Pakistan, between 7.5 and 11.8 full-time jobs are lost. After the purchase of a tractor the average farm size increased by 240 percent within three years, mostly through the eviction of tenants. Employment per cultivated acre dropped by 40 percent.”[79]

A World Bank report on Java warns that the introduction of large power tilling machines could eliminate more than a million jobs. The report quotes a Javanese worker: “the only people who like tractors are the ones who own them”. [80]

The net impact is thus to marginalise farmers, divorcing them from their means of production and placing them at the mercy of market forces over which they have no control.

At the community level, the impact is equally divisive. As individual farmers carry out more and more of the tasks in the production cycle by themselves, without having to seek help from their wider family or their community, traditional systems of mutual support begin to atrophy. [81]

Meanwhile, indebtedness, unemployment and widening differences in wealth further entrench existing inequalities and create new ones. As the poorest farmers go to the wall, their land holdings are bought up by richer farmers, leading to the concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands; money, rather than the fulfilment of communal obligations, becomes the currency of power and the poor begin to find themselves excluded from resources – water, land, forests – which were once open to all.

At the national level, agricultural intensification has massively increased dependence on foreign imports. Within four years of the Green Revolution being launched in India, 20 percent of the country’s export earnings were being spent on fertiliser imports alone. [82] Oil imports have also risen, whilst the penetration of foreign multinationals into the agricultural sector has made many Third World countries little more than client states for agribusiness interests. [83]

Mounting debts have brought IMF restructuring programmes, triggering off a further cycle of impoverishment as welfare programmes are cut and agricultural production is still further intensified to increase export income.

Forced Intensification

In effect, by attempting to “transform agriculture into a dynamic productive sector” [84] by corralling peasants into the market and pushing for the “widespread diffusion of new technologies” to replace “backward agricultural technologies”, [85] FAO is promoting the systematic marginalisation of rural people. In doing so, it is actively reinforcing the very “institutional setting” that deprives the poor of food, creating new power structures that are antithetical to the interests of farmers.

It is no coincidence that the intensification of agriculture has met with resistance in many countries. In South Korea, for example, the ‘miracle’ strains of rice met with widespread opposition.

“When official campaigns failed, local agricultural officials resorted to force to meet quotas. Rooting out rice fields planted to traditional rice was a common practice.” [86]

In Senegal, Mohamed Gakou describes how, for a large rice project, the new farming methods

“are applied under the supervision of supervisors. This supervision sometimes takes the form of draconian constraints. The least lack of respect for the new techniques being disseminated and the time-table for crops, leads to the peasant’s expulsion from the project zone and the repossession of the plot.” [87]

In the context of such clear conflicts of interests between the needs of local people and the requirements of a “dynamic agricultural sector”, any programme of land redistribution is likely to be piecemeal and short-lived. FAO itself admits that the “history of land reform is. . . largely one of failures”. [88] Nor are the three ‘success’ stories cited in Toward 2000 – the Republic of Korea, Indonesian Transmigration and West Bengal – without critics:

In Korea, the farmers have land – but intensification is crippling them with debt.
In Indonesia, the Transmigration Programme has deprived indigenous groups of land and destroyed vast areas of forest: many settlers have returned home to Java unable to earn a living from farming the outer islands of the archipelago.
In West Bengal,

“land reform and tenancy control laws were executed by a local bureaucracy largely indifferent, occasionally corrupt and biased in favour of the rural oligarchy . . . Quite frequently, protective tenancy legislation may have worsened the conditions of tenants.” [89]

The beneficiaries of agricultural intensification, meanwhile, have been local elites and the agribusiness interests of the North. For them, the programme outlined in Toward 2000 represents a bonanza. It is no coincidence that FAO’s Farm Mechanisation Working Group includes Caterpillar Tractors, John Deere, Fiat, Massey Ferguson, Mitsui, British Petroleum and Shell.

Food and Community First

In seeking to cast world hunger as an essentially technical problem – a lack of fertilisers, pesticides and modern know-how – Toward 2000 sidesteps the root cause of the crisis in Third World agriculture. For the crisis stems not from “backward agricultural technologies” nor from the “under-productiveness” of traditional farming practices, but rather from the growing separation between producers and the means of production and between producers and their produce.

Successive studies have highlighted the productivity and sustainability of traditional peasant farming in the Third World and indeed of organic methods in the North. [90] Yet, such studies are studiously ignored in Toward 2000. Similarly, the report downplays the inventiveness, dynamism and independence of local people. Instead, they are portrayed as in need of “educating”, of “training” and, above all, of being “managed”. But managed by whom? And in whose interests?

If the poor are to be fed with justice, the way forward lies down a very different route. The need is for an agriculture that:

Maximises food availability rather than food production;
Employs methods of farming that are not disruptive of the climate or of the environment;
Keeps control of production within the hands of the farmer and the community;
And maximises co-operation between farmers, thus strengthening the community and providing support to farmers in times of hardship.

Such an agriculture exists and is widely practised throughout the Third World. The most urgent priority is thus to cease those policies that are undermining the viability of traditional peasant systems and to create the wide economic and social change necessary to permit small farms to flourish.

If that means a vastly reduced role for agencies such as FAO, then so be it. For there is little that a bloated arid centralised bureaucracy in Rome can teach the peasants of Africa, India or South America in terms of agriculture: but, sadly, much that it can do to make their way of life unsupportable.

In that respect, Leo Tolstoy’s comment on the predicament of the peasant is as relevant today as when it was written over a century ago:

“I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.”

It is a prescription that FAO, and the rest of the development industry, should heed.

By Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard.

Notes and References

1.	N. Alexandratos ed., World Agriculture: Toward 2000, An FAO Study. Belhaven Press by arrangement with FAO, London, 1988. This is a revised and updated version of Agriculture: Toward 2000 which was submitted to the 1979 FAO Conference.
2.	Ibid.; p.1.
3.	Ibid.; p.3.
4.	The report ascribes the “achievements” of the past 25 years to “the extension to all parts of the world of more productive farming systems” and, more generally, to the transformation of agriculture “into a dynamic productive sector, first in the developed market economies but increasingly in the developing countries also, where the use of biochemical technology in the 1960s was the watershed”; p.6, p.3.
5.	Ibid.; p.3.
6.	Lester Brown, “The Illusion of Progress”. In Lester R. Brown et alia, State of the World. Norton, 1990, p.4.
7.	J. Power, International Herald Tribune, 9th June, 1987. Quoted in Environment Digest, July 1987.
8.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1, p.28.
9.	Ibid.
10.	UNICEF. Quoted in Environment Digest, July 1987.
11.	Brown, op.cit. 6; p.8.
12.	S. Kothari, “Ecology vs Development: The Struggle for Survival”. In International Centre for Law in Development, The International Context of Rural Poverty in the Third World; p.216. Council on International and Public Affairs, New York, 1986.
13.	Quoted in Environment Digest July, 1987.
14.	Ibid. p.75, p.12.
15.	Ibid. p.120.
16.	Ibid. p.121.
17.	Ibid. p.12, p.127.
18.	Ibid.; pp.14-15.
19.	Lester Brown The Changing World Food Prospect. Worldwatch Paper 85, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, 1989.
20.	FAO, Protect and Produce: Soil Conservation for Development. FAO, Rome, 1983. Quoted in Brown, op.cit. 6; p.60.
21.	Charles Secrett, “The Environmental Impact of Transmigration”. The Ecologist Vol. 16 Nos. 2-3, 1986.
22.	FAO puts the figure at 20 percent. Lester Brown (op.cit. 6, p.60) estimates that “waterlogging and salinity are lowering the productivity of a fourth* of the world’s irrigated cropland”*. Unless irrigated land is well drained, the water table tends to rise, dissolving out natural salts in the soil and bringing them to the surface. In arid areas, the water then evaporates, leaving the ground encrusted with salt.
23.	S. Postel, Water for Agriculture: Facing the Limits. Worldwatch Paper 93, Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC, 1990.
24.	Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard, The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams, Vol 1. Wadebridge Ecological Centre, 1984.
25.	UNESCO, Courier No. 4, 1980.
26.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.257.
27.	Ibid. p.121.
28.	Ibid.
29.	Ibid. p.132.
30.	Ibid. p.13.
31.	Other aspects of the strategy proposed inToward 2000 will also exacerbate the problem. The clearing of tens of millions of hectares of tropical forests to provide more agricultural land will reduce soil moisture, drying up springs and streams and reducing the flow of rivers. In addition, deforestation will reduce evapo-transpiration, one of the main sources of atmospheric moisture. By substituting plantation crops for food crops, FAO is also increasing water-consumption in agriculture, since the former are very much more water-intensive than the latter – commercial sugar cane for instance, requires about 10 times more water than wheat. In addition, hybrid strains of wheat and rice are very much more water-intensive than traditional varieties.
32.	Goldsmith and Hildyard, op.cit. 24. Even where dams could be built to serve the water needs of one area, they would reduce water-availability downstream, both through the abstraction of water and through salt-water intrusion at the mouths of the rivers. In Bangladesh, salt-water has penetrated over 300 kilometres inland.
33.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.132.
34.	In 1988, South Korean farmers rioted in front of the National Assembly in protest at irrigation taxes which were seen as a major cause of increasing debt. See Bello and S. Rosenfeld, “Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis”; p86. Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, 1990.
35.	Sudan’s Gezira scheme, where water is allocated according to what Carl Widstrand has called the “average” principle, illustrates the point: “The ‘average’ farmer gets an ‘average’ amount of water for an ‘average’ crop over the year. Everybody gets water over the year, but not necessarily at the precise or necessary moments. This concept is closely related to the idea of ‘normal rainfall’ and other peculiarities in the ‘folklore of the normal’ that simplifies administrative thought.” [Goldsmith and Hildyard, op.cit. 24] The contrast with the management of traditional systems of irrigation where water is allocated after prolonged discussion within the local community, could not be more pronounced.
36.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.128.
37.	Ibid. p.121, p.128.
38.	In traditional bush-fallow systems, it is common to find small plots in which a wide variety of plants are intercropped, creating a multi-layered garden which protects the soil from erosion and from direct sunlight.
39.	Goldsmith and Hildyard, op.cit. 24.
40.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.258.
41.	R. Repetto, Skimming the Water: Rent Seeking and the Performance of Public Irrigation Systems. World Resources Institute, Washington DC, 1986
42.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.136.
43.	Lester Brown, Soil Erosion: Quiet Crisis in the World Economy; p.24. Worldwatch Paper 60, Worldwatch institute, Washington DC, 1984. In West Africa a loss of 3.9 inches of top soil reduced corn yields by 53 percent and the yield of cowpeas by 38 percent. See also S. P. Dhus, “Need for Organo-Mineral Fertiliser in Tropical Agriculture”. In The Ecologist Vol. 5 No. 5, 1975.
44.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.136.
45.	Goldsmith and Hildyard, op.cit. 24.
46.	Other environmental problems will be exacerbated by the proposed increase in fertiliser use, with adverse impacts on food supplies. Nitrate fertilisers change the physiology of the crops grown, elongating cells, thinning cell walls, lowering osmotic pressure and reducing the plant’s sugar content. Fertilised plants are in fact sick plants and are thus more vulnerable to pests. The use of pesticides is therefore likely to increase, with attendant costs to the environment. Pesticide run-off has already caused fish kills in many Third World rivers whilst the increased use of fertilisers has led to the eutrophication of rivers and waterways, making them unsuitable for fish life. The result has been a reduction in the availability of fish, which plays an important part in the diet of people in many Third World areas.
47.	A 1981 draft of Toward 2000 proposed an 8 percent increase in the number of tractors.
48.	R. Senanayake, “The Ecological, Energetic and Agronomic System of Ancient and Modern Sri Lanka”. The Ecologist Vol. 13 No. 4, 1983.
49.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.12.
50.	What other people refer to as self-sufficiency is referred to by FAO as “food Autarky” – something which they do not recommend at all. The reason given is that it is “too costly” – an unexpected criticism from an organisation that is trying to persuade the Third World to invest £1,500 billion on the expansion of agricultural policies that have already impoverished it.
51.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.94.
52.	Ibid. p.15.
53.	Ibid.
54.	Ibid. p.152.
55.	Ibid.
56.	Ibid. p.41.
57.	Ibid. p.138.
58.	C. Dias, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Some Third World perspectives on the Green Revolution and the ‘Seed Revolution’ “. In International Centre of Law in Development, op.cit. 12; p.47.
59.	Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard, op.cit. 24.
60.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.218.
61.	Ibid.
62.	Ibid. p.152.
63.	In Arizona and other areas of the USA, where water is becoming increasingly scarce, industrialists are ‘water-ranching’ – buying up farms in order to have access to their water supplies, the farms then being taken out of production.
64.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.251.
65.	D. P. Häder, R. C. Worrest and H. D. Kumar, “Aquatic Ecosystems”. In Environmental Effects Panel Report, UNEP, Nairobi, 1989.
66.	J. J. MacKenzie and M. T. El-Ashry, Ill Winds: Air Pollution’s Toll on Trees and Crops; p.31. World Resources Institute, Washington DC, 1988.
67.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.145.
68.	R. T. Watson et alia, “Greenhouse Gases and Aerosols”. In Houghton et alia ed., Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
69.	Ibid.
70.	J. G. Gibbs et alia, Reducing Methane Emissions from Livestock: Opportunities and Issues. EPA, Washington DC, 1989
71.	R. J. Cicerone and J. D. Schetter, “Sources of Atmospheric Methane: measurements in Rice paddies and a Discussion”. Journal of Geophysical Research 86, 1981.
72.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.223.
73.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.225.
74.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.227.
75.	M. L. Gakou, The Crisis in African Agriculture; p55. Zed/United Nations University, London, 1987.
76.	Bello and Rosenfield, op.cit., 34; p.83.
77.	Ibid. p.83.
78.	Ibid. p.86.
79.	Dias, op.cit. 58.
80.	C. Whittemore, Land for People; Land Tenure and the Very Poor. Oxfam Public Affairs Unit, Oxford, 1981.
81.	Dias, op.cit. 58; p.51.
82.	Ibid. p.87.
83.	See for example, essays by C. Dias and C. Espiritu in International Centre for Law in Development, op.cit. 12.
84.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.3.
85.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1, p.227.
86.	Bello and Rosenfeld, op.cit. 34; p.83. The majority of South Korean farmers have now turned their backs on high-yielding varieties. “In 1979 land devoted to traditional rice accounted for less than one third of total paddy land; by 1985, it had gone up to nearly three quarters”.
87.	M. L. Gakou, op.cit. 75; pp.49-50.
88.	Alexandratos, op.cit. 1; p.228.
89.	M. R. El-Ghomemy, The Political Economy of Rural Poverty: the Case for Land Reform; p.273. Routledge, London, 1990.
90.	See, in particular, National Academy of Sciences, Alternative Agriculture. Washington DC, 1989.