Thursday, August 22, 2013

Growing out of poverty or grow poverty?

The poorest farmers in the world are unlikely to farm themselves out of poverty. They simply lack resources to invest in agriculture, and paradoxically they often even lack the labor needed as they are busy earning money with other trades than farming. To try to ease their predicament by introduction of GMOs or chemical fertilizers is a counterproductive strategy. 

A recent doctoral thesis, From Betterment to Bt Maize: Agricultural Development and the Introduction of Genetically Modified Maize to South African Smallholders by Klara Jacobson, Uppsala reinforce this understanding through a study of the Massive Food Production Programme (MFPP), an agricultural development program aiming to reduce poverty by raising agricultural production in Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Introduction of Bt maize (a GM crop) was a main component in this program. The Bt maize variety introduced was not adapted to smallholders' farming environments. It was input-demanding and sensitive to environmental dynamics, and it was promoted for planting in monoculture.

The results also reveal that the program was not properly designed to support the improvement of smallholders' livelihoods through agriculture. The program disregarded the long-term marginalisation of smallholders, and the associated need for substantial advisory, infrastructure and credit support to increase agricultural productivity.

The program also, like so many similar programs, failed to recognize the heterogeneity of poverty, resulting in a bias towards the better-off smallholders. Many may believe that poor farmers would have ample access to labor, from themselves and their families, but the study show that the poorer were more labor constrained than those better off. For example they had to do manual hand-hoeing of their fields instead of using oxen and they had to offer their labor to others for money or food. The wealthier, in contrast could use the labor of the poorer to increase their productivity. 

I have written a number of posts on this, and associated topics earlier, e.g.
The road to food security: What works and what doesn’t?
The hunger, the people and the land
If you don't have cash you don't get to eat
Rich people are not starving – can markets help?
Millennium Villages: the Great Experiment

Ultimately, this analysis can be drawn much further. There are similar issues to consider if we want to understand why commercialization of small holder farming may not work out as well as many believe.
Most farmers will simply not survive in this process. If they did, there would be enormous over-production of agriculture commodities. After the introduction of cross-Atlantic steamships, European farms had difficulties to cope with competition from North America. The response was to introduce protectionist measures. Still the pressure of competition was a lot lower for them than it is for poor farmers in developing countries today. To believe that they could compete with their manual labor, their muscles, with tractors driven by fossil fuel is simply not at all realistic, and the result of this is seen everywhere.

In addition, because of the productivity gains in developed countries, agricultural prices dropped with some 60 percent in the period 1960 to 2000 (Dorward et al 2002). As the productivity, and energy use, of the poorest farmers remained much the same, it is obvious that they lose out. At current prices, it would require one life of labor for a manual farmer to acquire a pair of oxen and small animal drawn equipment, and ten generations of labor to buy a small tractor (Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). The productivity gap has widened over the last decades, both relatively and in absolute numbers (see table below). 

Agricultural labour productivity, dollar per man-year
1990-1992
2001-2003
Agriculture as share of GDP
Low income countries
315
363
20%
Middle income countries
530
708
9%
High income countries
14,997
24,438
2%
France
22,234
39,220
2%
United Kingdom
22,506
25,876
1%
USA
20,797
36,216
1%
Brazil
1,507
2,790
5%
India
332
381
4%
China
254
368
12%
Malawi
72
130
36%
Source: World Bank 2007

You can read more on this here: Agriculture: How cheap energy (and capitalism) increased the gaps between rich and poor

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