The Politics of Industrial Agriculture

Tracey Clunies-Ross, Nicholas Hildyard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134063932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit de l'environnement

In the lastforty years, agriculture in the industrialised countries has undergone a revolution. That has dramatically increased yields, but it has also led to extensive rural depopulation; widespread degradation of the environment; contamination of food with agrochemicals and bacteria; more routine maltreatment of farm animals; and the undermining of Third World economies and livelihoods through unfair trading systems. Confronted by mounting evidence of environmental harm and social impacts, mainstream agronomistis and policy-makers have debatedly recognized the need for change.

'Sustainable agricultutre' has become the buzz phrase. But that can mean different things to different people. We have to ask: sustainable agriculture for whom? Whose interests are benefiting? And whose are suffering? At issue is the question of power– of who controls the land and what it produces. Most of the changes currently under discussion will actually strengthen the status quo and the underlying causes of the damage. The result will be greater intensification of farming, environmental destruction and inequality. There are no simple off-the-shelf alternatives to industrial agriculture. There are, however, groups throughout the world, who have contributed to this report and who are working together on a new approach. An agriculture that, in Wendell Berry's words, 'depletes neither soil nor people'. Originally published in 1992

Chapter One

Industrial Agriculture: Heading for Disaster

Since the Second World War, agriculture in the northern industrialised countries has undergone a revolution. Increased mechanisation, the development and widespread use of artificial fertilisers, larger field and farm size, the development of pesticides and herbicides, continuous cropping, increasing farm specialisation, developments in livestock and plant breeding and, now, biotechnology have transformed the landscape and brought major structural changes within the farming community and within rural society.

These changes have brought substantial increases in output, measured most strikingly in terms of output per unit of land. Between 1950 and 1982, yields of wheat in the US rose by 170 per cent, corn by 198 per cent and rice by 296 per cent.¹ Increases of 100 per cent per acre have been recorded for most other major crops.² The changes are also reflected in terms of reduced labour input. In Britain, just two per cent of the workforce is now employed in agriculture, and the country has moved from being a net importer of cereals to being the sixth largest exporter in the world.³ Yields of most basic crops continue to rise by around two per cent a year.

But as the post-war revolution in agriculture has unfolded, so its ruinous impact has become increasingly apparent:

• Hundreds of thousands of farmers and farm workers have been thrown off the land, either because machines and chemicals have made them redundant, or because the high costs of farming have pushed them over the brink into bankruptcy;
• Mechanisation, the use of agrochemicals and the drive to maximise productivity have together caused massive environmental degradation—both at the farm level and beyond;
• Increased output has not brought a healthier, better-fed population; on the contrary, problems of food scarcity have been replaced by the threat of production-related contamination of food with agrochemicals and bacteria;
• Animals have become a mere cog in the food production process: bred for early maturity, crammed together in their thousands, and routinely fed growth promoters and medicaments, their welfare, their health, and the health of those who eat them have been ignored in the quest for cheap food;
• Third World countries have suffered economic ruin and exacerbated famine as their own economies have been sucked into a world trading system which uses their land to provide food for the people and animals of Northern countries, while their farmers have to compete with surpluses dumped on the world market at subsidised prices by the North;
• Meanwhile, the very basis of agriculture is being undermined by the expansion of the wider industrial economy. The energy balance sheet in agriculture is paid little attention, and global warming threatens to render many areas either less productive or completely unproductive.

Taken separately, these adverse impacts of industrial agriculture might be held to be mere side effects of an otherwise successful system; taken together, they paint a picture of a system that is destructive, socially unjust and unsustainable. It is also a system in deep, and growing, crisis.

Rural Issues and the Land

A first set of concerns relates to the impact of industrial agriculture on the livelihoods of smaller farmers, on the wider economy of rural areas, and on the way people now view their relationship with the land.

Farmers Leaving the Land

Increasingly chemicals and machinery—both dependent on the use of fossil fuel energy—are used as a substitute for human energy, with the result that large numbers of those formerly employed in agriculture have been driven off the land. Between 1946 and 1989, the total number of people working on farms in Britain (full- and part-time) declined from 976,000 to 285,000.⁴ In 1990 alone, 6,000 British farmers sold up, and 4,000 full-time workers lost their jobs.⁵

In the United States, 38 per cent of the workforce was employed in agriculture at the turn of the century, now it is down to three per cent.⁶ In the six years between 1980 and 1986, 235,000 farms went out of business, and 650,000 people were lost from the farm workforce. The US Office of Technology Assessment estimates that by the year 2000, the 50,000 largest farms in the US will account for 75 per cent of agricultural production.⁷

Moreover, the capital costs involved in becoming a farmer, mean that opportunities for new entrants are restricted. Increasingly, those entering farming have either inherited their farms, or have built up capital in other ways and switched to farming later in life.

With rising capital costs, spiralling debt has become a hallmark of farming in modern industrial societies. Declining prices in recent years have added to the squeeze on farmers. In the five years between 1984 and 1990, for example, Welsh hill farmers saw their income collapse by 37 per cent in real terms, putting many out of business.⁸ It is a pattern that is being repeated in country after country, leading to the increasing concentration of landownership as farms are bought up by larger farmers. The farming community is thus becoming ever more divided between, on the one hand, prosperous “agri-business” farmers who know how to work the system, and, on the other hand, small farmers trying to keep pace with the demands made upon them.⁹

Many areas now support far fewer humans than was common centuries ago.¹⁰ According to Britain’s Countryside Commission, the number of upland farmers has contracted due to an increase in the size of farms, which have grown by an average of some 56 per cent in non-afforested areas.¹¹ The rate at which farms were being amalgamated into larger units more than doubled during the 1960s compared with the previous decade and it continued to increase in the 1970s. In Snowdonia in Wales, 79 per cent of full-time and 70 per cent of part-time workers’ jobs disappeared between 1965 and 1972, while on Exmoor and Dartmoor, 66 per cent of full-time jobs were lost between 1952 and 1972.¹² In 1950, less than five per cent of the population lived in the uplands of Britain compared to 20 per cent 200 years before.¹³

Land as a Commodity

In societies where industrialised agriculture is the norm, land has become little more than one of the factors of production. In Britain, land ownership has traditionally been, and remains, highly inequitable. The top one per cent of the population own 52 per cent of the land, and the top 11 per cent own 92 per cent.¹⁴ In both Britain and the US land has become a commodity which can be freely bought and sold by individuals or corporations, creating a situation in which vast tracts of land are owned by people who are not farmers. In Britain, for example, the Duke of Northumberland owns some 105,000 acres while in Scotland the Duke of Buccleigh owns 277,000 acres, mainly in the southern uplands.¹⁵ In the 1970s and early 1980s, when agriculture was a lucrative investment, large areas of land were also bought by foreign owners, such as the Dutch,¹⁶ and by institutions such as pension funds. The same problem of concentration and control from outside can also be seen in non-agricultural land use. Mining and quarrying in upland areas, for example, is now controlled by big transnational corporations like Rio Tinto Zinc and Consolidated Goldfields.¹⁷ Fish farming on the west coast of Scotland is also often in the hands of wealthy outsiders.

This concept of land as a commodity contrasts strongly with attitudes to land in other cultures. In many parts of Africa, for instance, the concept of owning land was unheard of in the pre-colonial era. Even in Denmark and Norway nobody may buy agricultural land without first obtaining a permit from the Government indicating that he or she has the necessary technical qualifications to farm the land. Moreover, no individual in Denmark may own a farm larger than 180 acres without special permission.¹⁸

Where there are no controls over land ownership, land becomes an investment or a commodity which must be worked hard to generate short-term profit, often at the expense of the long-term interests of both farmers and the land. When prices are high, there is an incentive to produce as much as possible at the lowest possible price, in order to maximise profits. As prices fall, there is no option but to utilize the land in the most intensive way possible, in order for the business to survive. When prices fall below the level at which they cover the cost of production, land eventually has to be abandoned. Generally, in this system, it is the small farmer who gains least and suffers first.

When agricultural returns are poor, as at the present time, land as a commodity becomes worth less and less. In Britain, with the close link between agricultural returns and land prices, collapsing farm incomes have led to the near halving of land prices in under a decade, leaving over-borrowed farmers facing bankruptcy. In Australia, where there is even less protection from the vagaries of the world market, farmers are unable to sell up and leave farming as no one will buy their farms. To build sustainable farming practices when teetering on the knife-edge between profitability and bankruptcy is next to impossible.

Women in Farming

Division of tasks between men and women on farms has been a feature of rural life through the centuries, and throughout the world. With the development of industrial farming, there has been a tendency for the division of tasks to degenerate into a conceptual division between conscious, productive tasks (men’s work) and “natural”, unproductive and unskilled tasks (women’s work). Detailed studies of women’s duties on farms in the US show that women regularly undertake household and childcare responsibility, 74 per cent also grow vegetables and rear animals for family consumption, 61 per cent undertake bookkeeping and other secretarial duties for the business, while 47 per cent run farm errands, and 37 per cent take care of farm animals.¹⁹

As farms have become increasingly linked to the wider market economy, the conditions of women’s participation in farming has changed. Often their tasks in the formal production sphere have been made more casual, and they have lost self-determination over production and activities. There is also a tendency for fewer farm activities to be solely their responsibility.²⁰ Nevertheless, the productivity of farms, particularly family farms, is directly related to the free availability of a houseworker and “another pair of hands” for farm labour.

The general recasting of women’s roles in agriculture as mere “supporters” of the “producers” has led to the further misconception that women have disappeared from agriculture. In common parlance, farmers are now men, and women are connected with them in some way, for instance as “farmers’ wives”. By talking of “a farmer and his family”, the contribution made by women and children to farming has been made invisible by story-tellers, researchers, economists and planners. Yet, despite this myth, the 1981 British population census revealed that 25,430 women were farmers, farm-managers or horticulturalists (11 per cent of the total). There were also 26,600 women farm workers (17 per cent) and 8,140 women horticultural workers (44 per cent of the total). Furthermore, a detailed study of the role of women in British farms showed that 70 per cent of them were involved in some way in manual work on the farm, 32 per cent on a regular basis.²¹

Despite the persistence of women’s contribution to farming, the need for them to “disappear”’ remains compelling. In industrial agricultural systems, sons rather than daughters or wives usually inherit the farm, with women, rather than men, marrying into farming families. It is also interesting to note that, in the UK until 1976, the occupier of an agricultural holding completing the labour section of the annual census form was instructed to “exclude the wives of farmers, partners and directors, even though the wives themselves may be partners or directors.”²²

Compartmentalized Thinking about Land

The recasting of women’s relationships with the land, and with men, is part of a wider change in the relationship between people and the land in industrial society. In the industrialised countries of the North, where the majority of the population was urbanized generations ago, the perception of agriculture and the natural environment has changed, with different aspects of the relationship between humans and the land becoming compartmentalized. As a result, public policy is often driven by conflicting demands. On the one hand, consumer organisations call for “efficient” agriculture that produces low cost, sanitised food, while, on the other, consumers—seduced by advertisements for food which portray farms as unchanging idyllic places, where animals roam freely and the pace of life is slow—appear unaware of the implications of “efficiency” for animal welfare and the environment.

On the one hand, land is nothing more than a factor of production, and is the responsibility of farmers, who may use whatever techniques they think appropriate to produce food “efficiently” (see Box below). On the other hand, land as an amenity, land for its scenic beauty, land as part of the “rural idyll”, land as a reserve for rare plants and animals, and land as part of the natural environment continues to be the subject of great public concern.

Having lost their connection with the land and with farmers, urban-based populations often seem unable to see the problem as a whole. Shocked by the reality of intensive animal production or environmental destruction, large ...