Brad Delong directs us to this Financial Times opinion piece by Collier:
Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture
The best solution to a problem is often not closely related to its cause (a proposition that that might be recognized in the climate change debate). China’s long march to prosperity is something to celebrate. The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something that is entirely feasible.
The most realistic way to raise global supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market. To give one remarkable example, the time between harvesting one crop and planting the next, in effect the downtime for land, has been reduced an astounding thirty minutes.
There are still many areas of the world that have good land which could be used far more productively if it was properly managed by large companies. For example, almost 90% of Mozambique’s land, an enormous area, is idle.
Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies.
In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago…
Our longstanding agricultural romanticism has been compounded by our new-found environmental romanticism. In the United States fears of climate change have been manipulated by shrewd interests to produce grotesquely inefficient subsidies for bio-fuel…
While I don’t always agree with Collier on development and conflict issues, in this case I think his criticism mostly on. We do pay too little attention to agribusiness.
But the political economy of this agricultural transformation is not easy to imagine. The successful move to large-scale agri-production has historically been accompanied by either the (voluntary) flood of citizens from rural to urban jobs, or the (involuntary) enclosure of the commons. I don’t think we want to emulate the latter, and we don’t have a particularly good means of guaranteeing industrialization.
The best plan might lie in some hybrid between peasant and agri-business production. In northern Uganda, the U.S. cotton giant Dunevant is lending farmers seeds and fertilizer and knowledge, and guarantee a market for any cotton they produce. This is a USAID-sponsored project, one that balances the need for increased output with the political and human realities on the ground.
In concert with public agricultural extension services, local research capacity, and increased access to agricultural markets, I see a hopeful short term future for the rural farmer (as well as dramatically higher output).
Read Collier’s full article here.
So the best way to make more food is to have less people farm? That seems kinda ass backward.
People are smart. They are highly adaptable to local conditions. They are relatively cheap to power (no fossil fuel required). Why not use more of them?
We need another Green Revolution. But instead of one that figures out the best farming methods that can be applied everywhere, it needs to work everywhere to determine the best farming method for each individual piece of land.
The key to successfully producing an abundance of food will be technology. However, it won’t be 19th century technology of fossil fuels and machinery. Nor will it be 20th century technology of chemicals and automation.
Instead we should use new advances in information and communication technology to work together across the world to develop thousands of new farming methods.
Give people knowledge and a plot of land, and they will take care of the rest.
The biggest challenge to setting up agribusiness is not land tenure systems, peasant forms of agriculture, or farmers holding onto tradition. It is infrastructural investment. There needs to be major public investment in transportation, irrigation, research, and extension services. Sub-Saharan Africa only has less than half of the density of roads that India had at independence and an even smaller fraction of the irrigation infrastructure. Further every country basically needs to build a half billion dollar agricultural research center with a 100 million dollar annual budget for extension services in order to fit the technology to the specific environment. CGAIR is great but Africa is incredibly fragmented in terms of environment and you cannot plant the same crop varieties in different environments.
Making credit available is the next essential item and right now even American farmers aren’t making any money because they all have to borrow in order to plant and the credit crunch is eating all of their prospective profits. Even with credit available though the cost of human or animal labor is still going to be more cost effective than mechanization or scaling up to largeholder farms in most cases.