Here's an article by Paul Collier about the food crisis of 2008, with his prescriptions to increase world food supply. The title promises to talk about the roles of greed and illusion in the crisis, but he really only discusses some supposed illusions (though he's actually the delusional one, as we'll see below). As for greed, he doesn't touch on it, except when he's condoning it in the form of corporatization of farming, and land grabs by English lords and Brazilian strongmen alike.
Collier starts off with a disputable premise--that food prices must come down. I say it's disputable because, by Collier's own admission, the main people to suffer from high food prices are the urban poor. They are reliant on bought food, as they have ceased to produce food for themselves. But most of the poorest people in the world are rural dwellers. For many rural people, again by Collier's own admission, fluctuations of the world food market do not affect them much, as they are reliant on their own production and local markets that are not integrated with world markets. (An exception to this might be the sizeable numbers of landless rural dwellers, who in certain situations might be heavily reliant on bought food, as are poor urbanites.) In any case, if by all measures most of the world's poorest people are rural farmers, and rising food prices either don't affect them or in fact increase their wellbeing, I don't understand how Collier can confidently claim that reducing world food prices is an imperative. Third World urbanites are usually materially better-off than their rural counterparts, so why should we aim to lower food prices to maintain their wellbeing at the expense of rural livelihoods?
Collier actually gives us an answer to this question of why we would favor the wellbeing of already-advantaged urbanites over the rural poorest of the poor. By his own admission, the big concern with rising food prices is the possibility of urban riots. From the Roman empire onward, most central governments have been faced with a cyclical conundrum. Low food prices cause rural stagnation and migration to the cities, where new arrivals are presumably better-off than they were in the countryside. This trend creates cities bloated with the urban poor, who demand cheap food. Even if this urban poor is actually less needy than the rural poor, the urbanites exert more force on decision-makers, because they live near the centers of power and can threaten with riots in the face of high food prices. So to appease the urban poor, decision-makers do what they can to maintain low food prices, which in turn fuels even more rural desperation and migration to the city. Within a few generations you get an obscene centralization of population, as seen in ancient Rome, 19th-century London, Mexico City of the 1950s onward, or Mumbai today. Collier decries the decision-making that leads to such a state of affairs as Peron-style populism, but he is essentially proposing the same thing: keeping food prices low to appease urban slumdwellers.
In any case, I think I've made it clear that Collier's point of departure, the assertion that food prices must come down, is debateable. It is not the exclusive, self-evident option, but rather an election of certain priorities, in this case urban wellbeing over rural livelihoods. One could easily (and probably more justifiably) focus on alleviating the worst poverty in the world, which would imply a strategy that would in fact aim to maintain high food prices to improve rural income, in the meanwhile making land available to the rural landless and the urban poor so they might benefit from high food prices as producers, instead of suffering as consumers. In fact, the urban poor in the developing world are usually recent emigres from the countryside, which they left precisely because low food prices made farming unviable for them. The long-term effect of higher food prices might be a return of some of these urbanites to the countryside, which in many cases would not be a bad thing.
Beyond his disputable opening premise, Collier uses an almost entirely fallacious line of reasoning in his proposals for increasing world food production. He obviously knows little about real farming (as opposed to the fantasy vision presented in agribusiness companies' glossy brochures), because two of his three prescriptions have been unequivocally shown to have no positive effect on food supply.
First of Collier's fix-alls is the replacement of peasant agriculture by commercial agriculture. He claims that the middle and upper classes of the developed world have a romantic attachment to peasant agriculture, which ultimately harms food production. While I am also too-often prone to caricature and criticize the world's comfortable classes, I must take issue with this claim. I think as many urban bourgeoisie scorn rural life as romanticize it, and in any case I don't think that the personal attitudes of the First World's urban wealthy are a major driver of agrarian development policy, either on the world stage or within individual poor countries. In fact, I would say that a large part of the failure of many countries to pull their people out of poverty has been due precisely to an anti-rural, anti-agrarian vision on the part of policymakers, a refusal to accept the value and the centrality of peasant agriculture to the society. An omnipresent spectacle in African countries is that the government insists on a modern fantasy of a society based on cities, industry, and machine-laden agriculture, despite the reality that the majority of the population is rural, factories are scarce, and few farmers have the means or the desire to save labor (which is abundant) by sinking their scarce capital into unproven, expensive technologies. In many poor countries there are urban universities that turn out scores of accountants, lawyers, and agronomists, who then have trouble finding a job because there exist few large companies, a malnourished legal infrastructure, and no government agricultural extension agency! Poor countries are often poor precisely because leaders have followed Collier's scorn for peasants and his fetishizing of technology, thus implementing policies that are totally irrelevant for the society.
Commercial agriculture, as I've explained in prior posts, produces less food and income per acre of land than does small-scale peasant agriculture. This is because as you mechanize agriculture, each farmer farms more land and thus can't afford to put as much work and care into each acre. And the focus on monocropping inherent to export-led commercial agriculture means that instead of the land's producing an abundant array of many products, it only produces a high yield of one product. The net result, in terms of real production of food, as well as the wealth created by each acre, is less production per acre under commercial farming systems. So while Collier's bogeyman of romantic bourgeois attachment to the "simple life" may have some basis in reality, the preference for peasant agriculture over industrialized commercial agriculture is firmly founded on real agronomic and economic results. Even the status quo thinkers at the World Bank have my back on this one.
Examples can be seen in the large sugar estates of northeastern Brazil. In land planted only to cane, profit per acre is very low, and only by possessing hundreds or thousands of acres can a company be profitable. In the meanwhile, within the vast expanses of almost-worthless cane, there occur tiny family plots that workers have planted to a mixture of cassava, corn, beans, fruit trees. The value produced by one of these small peasant plots (often not even held in property by their landless inhabitants) is much greater than that produced by an equivalent area of the cane surrounding them. Unfortunately, the model of agriculture that Brazil has chosen to expand to its broad tracts of virgin land in the interior, corresponds more closely to the sugarcane plantation than to the peasant plot.
Collier's anti-peasant tirades are merely self-fulfilling cliches. When government decision-makers enact policy to make peasant farming inviable, for example by requiring or favoring a certain minimum size of farm to be able to access credit, subsidies, or market chains, of course the excluded peasant farms will become less viable. This has less to do with anything inherent to peasant farming, and more to do with the dogma of policymakers. In fact, most of Collier's assertions about the economics of scale in farming are merely ideologies and cliches, with little foundation in fact. In most contexts, a peasant farm will always outperform a commercial farm if they are given access to the same resources. This is because a commercial, capitalist farm uses wage-labor and looks mainly at its return on capital. If profits fall below a certain level, the investor in a commercial farm will put his capital elsewhere, and the farm will fold. Peasants, on the other hand, have little capital and look mainly at their return on labor. If suitable wage labor is not available elsewhere (which it usually isn't), the opportunity cost of peasant labor is effectively null, and peasants will keep working, keep their farm going, even after a point where a commercial farm would have folded. Conversely, if the sons or daughters of a peasant farmer returns to the land, their labor can always be used to intensify production and create value. A commercial farm with a rigid business model can't and won't absorb any more workers than they need for their core operation. A marvelous treatment of the economics of peasant farming is given by Chayanov, a Russian agrarian economist that died in a Stalinist gulag.
Peasant farms are wholly compatible with technology and innovation, despite Collier's typecasting. In fact, most small family farms in the world do employ many modern technologies, as well as ever-changing personal innovations to improve efficiency. Most peasants in the world don't have tractors, but they can and do employ some mix of fertilizers, pesticides, improved seeds, rototillers, draft animals, and any other technology that suits their situation. Even US farmers, which Collier presumably thinks of as modern and commercial, operate largely on a peasant logic. The labor on most US farms is family labor, capital is scarce, and farmers have an emotional as well as an economic attachment to their land. In the US case, great expanses of land and the loss of surrounding farms makes large operations and heavy machinery necessary for farmers, and decent access to credit makes it possible to obtain these machines and expand operations. But despite large capital investments and the production of grains for commercial sale, a US family farm is not some capitalist operation, where the farmer might just as well fire his son or wife to raise profits, or invest his capital in a Payless Shoe Store franchise instead of in machinery and equipment for his land.
Finally on the point of the supposed efficiency of commercial agriculture, Collier's use of the English enclosure of the commons as a positive example of economic growth is ridiculous. Basically enclosure was the appropriation by aristocratic lords of what had been public lands. Peasants were no longer able to graze their herds and flocks from commonly-held pastures, or farm commonly-held land, or obtain wood and nuts from commonly-accessible forests. The land barons saw that it would be most profitable to exclude peasants from this land and to devote it exclusively to the grazing of sheep, whose wool they could sell to the burgeoning new textile industry. Thomas More discussed it in his Utopia:
"'But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England.' 'What is that?' said the Cardinal: 'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.'"
This was by no means a demonstration of the inherent inefficiency of peasant agriculture, but rather of the fact that by appropriating other people's land, the aristocracy could produce an important cash flow for themselves. I don't know where Collier gets his numbers regarding the productivity gains created by this robbery, but I'm sure that any ostensible gain would only be in fungible cash income, which in any case flowed principally to the moneyed few. Surely the production from a diversified peasant agrarian system integrating crops and livestock, public and private land, would have been greater than the wool of a few sheep, though if much of this peasant production were consumed or traded locally, without a cash transaction, its value would have been severely understated. On top of this, the net social effect of enclosure in England was to create a huge pauper class in the cities. So enclosure was good for the land barons who kicked peasants off land, and for the factory owners that could pay a pittance the newly-minted paupers, but most people suffered greatly. For most of the early modern age, London was a net consumer of human lives. The average lifespan of a peasant newly-arrived in London was but a few years before poverty, pollution, disease, and horrid factory conditions killed him or her. It was only because conditions in the countryside were so desperate that London could maintain its population, as peasants continuously flowed in only to die within a few years. So Collier's assertion that enclosure increased production is disputable, his claim that it led to English economic development is laughable, and his prescription of something similar for the rest of the world is criminal. His admiration for Brazil, where new land barons steal land from the government, from the commons, and from smaller farmers, is likewise criminal.
Collier's second fix to increase food production is to roll back a supposed war on science that he has detected. He claims that Europeans are afraid of scientific agriculture, and for this reason they have regulated GM crops more heavily than the US. First off, European agriculture is arguably more "scientific" than that of the US. Some of the world's foremost agriculture research is done in Europe. Europeans farm land more intensively, which usually means more use of technology and chemicals, and higher productivity per acre. An example according to FAOSTAT, the Food and Agriculture Organization's useful database on all things agricultural, is that in 2008 average US wheat yields were about 3 metric tons/hectare (45 bushels/acre), as compared to Germany's 8 tons/ha (125 bushels/acre).
Flowing from Collier's claim of European bias against technology is that this has led Africa to shun
GM crops for fear of being shut out of European markets. This might have some truth to it, but it rests on an assumption that African nations and farmers are unable to think and decide for themselves if they want to adopt a given technology. It places responsibility for Africa's rejection of GM crops solely in the hands of Europeans.
My final point with respect to Collier's lauding of GM crops as a great new technological frontier for agriculture is that GM crops have yet to raise food production anywhere in the world. By far the most widely-planted GM crops (practically the only ones, really) are corn, cotton, and soybeans resistant either to certain insects or to an herbicide that kills everything else. These traits, while potentially useful for reducing use of agrichemicals (though this doesn't always happen in the real world), do not increase production. Increasing yields is still left to traditional breeding, as no single, easily-isolated and inserted gene is likely to have an appreciable effect on yield. So Collier's insistence on GM technology to augment world food production is yet another fantasy. It seems he has trouble coming to terms with the real, empirical present, existing instead in commonplaces and cliches, or in those appealing "next 15 years" that are always sure to see an inconceivably better world.
I agree with Collier's final assertion that a US obsession with biofuel made from corn grain is economically and ecologically silly, and that it bore a significant responsibility in the food price spike of 2008. The amount of energy required to produce a gallon of corn ethanol for cars is almost equivalent to the energy released by that gallon when it is burned in your car. The same is more or less true of costs vs. earnings on a gallon of US-made biofuel. This means corn ethanol is not a good replacement for oil, but rather just a change in its form. There can be made a case for US subsidies to corn ethanol, if they are used as a temporary incentive, geared toward a gradual transition to more efficient ways of creating fuel from farm production. That said, there exists of course a sort of moral dilemma when we start putting food into our gas tanks, but this dilemma has more to do with the commoditization of food than with anything else. Since food is not considered a right for all but rather one more product to be bought and sold, even without biofuels we are already privy to the obscene spectacle of providing more food for the world's livestock than for its people.
A few final asides, because Collier sneaks in a few dubious claims amidst his three major points.
First off, just so you know, the amount of arable land available to African farmers is still very extensive, which means there is a lot of potential to increase production by expanding cultivation. While it's of course important to respect and protect Africa's natural areas, the continent is if anything underpopulated, not overpopulated.
Secondly, notice in the penultimate paragraph of the article Collier's assertion that the US tax system burdens people's work. I agree that workers are given a disproportionate tax burden as compared to the wealthy, and also that we should disincentivize energy profligacy through our tax codes. But the natural solution for a tax code that burdens work more than capital and investment is to tax earnings from investment more, not to tax energy consumption.
This little slip perhaps betrays a general pro-business, pro-capital bias on Collier's part, which in turn must lead us to question the objectiveness of his touting of big, commercial agriculture. It seems he is all too willing to recommend wide-reaching global changes, to overturn functional, longstanding farming practices, to overlook sovereign people's concern with manipulating nature's genetic order. Indeed, he is willing to rework the world, but he can't even fathom mild changes in the relationship between rich and poor. It's a convenient blind spot. In his very ambitious, overarching recommendations to increase world food production (ostensibly to help the poor), not once does he mention any form of downward redistribution of resources (though implicitly he sanctions the appropriation of land and resources by large commercial operations, an upward redistribution).
In the end, we can clearly see that it is Collier who is the irrational romantic, the ideologue committed to advancing a certain order of things, whether or not it is beneficial to the majority of people. He paints himself as a pragmatic bearer of truth, dismissing reasonable objections to his points as irresponsible romanticism, but it is he who lives in a fantasy world. Or maybe he truly is as pragmatic and rational as he claims, and the fantasies he spins are a cynical attempt to steer his readers towards an acceptance of an agenda Collier knows would not serve the common good.
In case I haven't convinced you, here's a good response letter to Collier's article, published in Pambazuka news.
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