1. Why? To whose benefit is it to have a relative "few" producers
instead of a multitude? Does society somehow benefit from a few
large farms? How? I found to my surprise when informally exploring
the scale-sensitivity of profit and efficiency indices that both seem
to be rather flat above the level of a hobby farm - particularly if
viewed without the selective filtering of government policy. Emmm.
Perhaps these small to medium sized farmers - you know, the ones
being forced off the land by implementation of government cheap food
policies - are not necessarily less efficient or capable as
producers. Perhaps their only failing is that they are not big.
What a tragedy, to have dispossessed so many people from their land,
to achieve such an objective. And to what end? Who are the
beneficiaries of this policy?
2. What is the scale-dependence of environmental impact from
agriculture? We can all think of specific case examples to support
either extreme, but in the aggregate, who is most likely to exert the
greatest adverse impact on the environment, and ultimately, society?
In other words, in this era of increasing environmental awareness,
what are the environmental ramifications of explicitly favoring one
farm size over another?
3. How has food security been impacted by this governmentally driven
push to "bigness"? I was quite intrigued when preparing a recently
delivered paper on the Need for Long Term Experimentation to learn
that yield variability (CV) has actually increased rather than
decreased in response to the high yield paradigm being actively
promoted under government incentives. Say what? I expected the
opposite. Turns out that high yield is attainable but only at the
expense of high inputs, and because of the steeper response of our
management-responsive cultivars/hybrids, any variation in input level
(as owing to market, policy, or weather incentives)
creates/exacerbates yield variability (see excellent text,
Variability in Grain Yields edited by Anderson and Hazell for "human-
induced" variation in yield). This is coupled with the trend toward
homogeneity in both cropping practices and crop genetics over wide
regions, resulting in a strengthening of intra-regional yield
correlations (same source).
In total, this means wider amplitude yield fluctuations from year
to year, as everyone responds to the same market signals, using the
same methods, and yield varies accordingly - everyone does well in a
"good" year and poorly in a bad year. In effect, high yield
agricultural practices and the push to bigness have destabilized
yield for many but not all crops, in many but not all countries (same
source), and at the same time, have removed the buffering effect of
many smaller operations, each employing a wider diversity of
genotypes and farm- specific management practices.
The upshot of this is that when combined with the high level of
specialization in modern agriculture (which reduces the potential for
on-farm buffering against the vagaries of whatever), the "risk" of
agriculture really cannot be absorbed on the farm anymore, and has
now been transferred to society, in the form of subsidy and insurance
programs. So, the (presumably unintended) side effects of this
"bigger is better" paradigm have been a) specialization, b) yield
destabilization (a particular threat to economic solvency, given the
high input costs and borrowed money that routinely accompany annual
crop high-yield agriculture), c) increased risk, d) transferral of
risk to society, and ultimately, e) disempowerment of the farmers
who responded to these government incentives, and who now find
themselves increasingly dependent, for their very survival, upon the
97% who don't farm and have little appreciation for what it means to
farm.
In light of this analysis, one may ask - for what? Has
the benefit (whatever it is) derived from these policy directives
toward bigness been at least equal to the cost of these multi-faceted
side-effects?
4. And finally, to conclude this over-long discussion, if government
policy has created this situation, why cannot government policy make
amends and rectify the situation? The so-called cheap food policy
may have made sense at some time, and the notion that small farms are
inefficient may well have been true at some time but it is a policy
that has long outlived it's usefulness. It seems that continuing
to pursue such a policy today - when so much economic, environmental,
and societal harm is accruing as a direct result of the policy - is
counterproductive. What the government has given, the government can
take away - AND VICE VERSA! Ann
ACLARK@crop.uoguelph.ca
Dr. E. Ann Clark
Associate Professor
Crop Science
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
Phone: 519-824-4120 Ext. 2508
FAX: 519 763-8933