The Art of the Possible

Normally, on reading a pro-Green Revolution post, I’d reach for my gun. But seeing as how it’s Comrade Jim Henley, I guess I’ll just put on my contrarian hat and and mouth off a bit.

Jim links to the comment thread of a Tabarrok post on the subject, which, as he says, is quite interesting. Jim, far from uncritically accepting the assertions of the Borlaug cheerleading uncritically, writes that although “Borlaug’s work saved many lives in its day,”

It seems debatable whether what the present moment calls for now is more of the same. During the era of cheap oil, there was real economic - if not ecological - sense in pumping plants up with massive inputs of fossil fuel. Now? I’m honestly unsure what a post-hydrocarbon agriculture that can feed billions of people will (can) look like.

But in fact, it turns out that the value of the Green Revolution in saving lives is also debatable.

In Tabarrok’s comment thread, there are several capable advocates of small-scale, labor-intensive agriculture. But the real drama comes from their interaction with the usual spokespersons for the USDA/Agribusiness complex, who use the hippie decentralists as foils. The agribusiness apologists know, for a fact, all sorts of things that just ain’t so.

For instance, there’s this one from mk:

If environmentalists really want to make the argument that the novel practices (fossil-fuel based fertilizer, GMO, chemical pesticides, etc.) are incompatible with treating the planet well, their argument becomes one of population control very quickly. (These methods are the only way we have to feed such a huge population).

I’ve heard this “the world would starve without chemical fertilizers” argument many times, including a couple of conversations with retired agri professors, and have yet to see anyone maintain the assertion in the face of evidence. It’s entirely an article of faith. When I specifically challenge such people on the comparative output per acre from intensive raised-bed cultivation, versus that from mechanized, American-style row-cropping, they usually start hemming and hawing and say something like, well, if farmers used the land as efficiently as the Japanese, the world wouldn’t necessarily starve….

Another commenter, Cassandra, repeats the sort of stuff you’d expect from those circles. For example, he contrasts corporate agriculture with the alternative of “[c]ontinuing to force subsistence farming on developing nations….” And of course, those elitist tree-huggers want to force people “to hand till a field with an adze because you don’t like the combustion engine.” A man just called from Nebraska and said they’re running out of straw.

But before I deal with those contentions in the main body of this post, I’ve got to dispose of this howler from Cassandra:

Anyone familiar with fertilizer understands that N is N and K is K. There is no difference between natural and chemically created fertilizer.

Sure, just like there’s no difference between the way your body absorbs a synthetic ascorbic acid pill, and the way it absorbs natural Vitamin C interacting synergistically with a wide variety of associated bioflavonoids and phytochemicals, both known and unknown.

Of course, there couldn’t be any difference in bioabsorptive capacity between nitrogen put into the soil through bacterial decomposition, and a handful of tiny white pellets. The bacterial ecology of the soil and root systems is totally irrelevant. And of course, substituting synthetic NPK fertilizers with chemical binders for organic soil amendments couldn’t affect soil osmosis or friability. And of course, stripping the soil of those silly old trace minerals can’t be all that big a deal, or Herr Doktor Professor von Liebig would have included them in his chemical fertilizers.

Getting to the main point: Despite Cassandra’s narrative of peasants choosing to abandon subsistence farming for chemical agribusiness and GMOs, and latte-sipping hippies trying to keep them down on the farm, the actual history of the twentieth century has been just the opposite: a reenactment of the Enclosures on a modern stage. Peasants have been forced to abandon subsistence farming, driven off the land by feudal landed oligarchs in collusion with agribusiness interests.

Far from it being an issue of whether peasants should be compelled to continue subsistence farming and till the field with an adze, it has been almost entirely an issue of whether they should be allowed to do so on their own land.

As I said in my comment to Jim’s post, the real significance of the Green Revolution is “the road not taken”–or to use terms more libertarians are familiar with, “the unseen.”

Today’s battle lines reflect a colonial history where landed oligarchs pushed peasant cultivators off of the best land and onto marginal land, so that they could use the most fertile, level land for plantation farming of cash crops. The agribusiness propaganda machine (”ADM feeds the world!” “Without chemicals the world would starve!”) likes to create the impression that starvation results from primitive farming techniques, and that the only solution is a technocratic fix like Green Revolution seeds or GMOs. But hunger actually results from the fact that land once used to grow staple foods for the people working it is now used to grow cash crops for urban elites or for the export markets, while the former peasant proprietors are without a livelihood.

Given this maldistribution of land resulting from government-enabled land theft, the state diverts inputs like subsidized irrigation systems (and most forms of technical support, infrastructure, and other development aid) disproportionately to large agribusiness plantations. Government subsidies and loan programs are set up so that only large holdings, with access to preferential benefits like state-subsidized irrigation, can qualify.

Government-subsidized agricultural research is also channelled in directions geared to increasing the profits of cash crop agriculture on the big plantations, rather than to increasing the productivity of small peasant holdings (hence the so-called “Green Revolution”).

Frances Moore Lappé, writing in the specific context of Mexico, argues:

Policy choices systematically discarded research alternatives oriented toward the nonirrigated, subsistence sector…. Instead, all effort went to the development of a capital-intensive technology applicable only to the relatively best-endowed areas or those that could be created by massive irrigation projects.

The dominant pattern in the Third World is huge irrigation projects, developed for favorably situated land owned by big landed elites, and massive state subsidies for the importation of mechanized equipment.

I strongly recommend Lappé’s book Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity (N.Y.: Ballantine, 1978) for an alternative account of the Green Revolution. According to Lappé, the Green Revolution’s “high-yielding variety” (HYV) seeds are normally productive only under the most favorable conditions: those prevailing on giant agribusiness plantations like the latifundia and haciendas of Latin America. They are specifically designed to be productive, perhaps not coincidentally, the precise conditions of large-scale corporate agribusiness.

These HYVs are not “high-yielding” in any generic sense, but rather high-response: that is, they are highly responsive to expensive irrigation and chemical fertilizer inputs. They also just happen to be most responsive on the kind of especially fertile, well-watered land that just happened to be stolen by landed elites under the colonial regimes or post-colonial landed oligarchies. For that reason, Lappé prefers to call them “High-Response Varieties” (HRV).

There is no such thing as neutral technology, and very few technological imperatives that remain constant independent of class and power considerations. The most “efficient” farming methods depend on who will be using them.

The Green Revolution’s high-response varieties crowded out other viable alternatives that were more appropriate to traditional small-scale agriculture. Green Revolution seeds are actually less hardy and durable, under the conditions that prevail outside the subsidized agribusiness sector: less drought-resistant, for example. So despite all the pseudo-populist rhetoric Borlaug’s cheerleaders use about empowering the little guy, small Third World farmers without privileged access to state-subsidized irrigation often find the HRVs a colossal failure. Hence the suicides among small farmers in India’s Vidarbha province, 170 out of 182 of whom where growers of Bt cotton. Although Bt cotton was advertised to produce 20 quintals per acre, “the average yield per acre was only two to three quintals per acre…”

Locally improved varieties, in contrast, were specifically adapted to be productive under conditions of low rainfall, and more resistant to insects and fungi without costly chemical inputs. And a rural development agenda geared toward the interests of peasant proprietors would have emphasized, not increasing the yield of seeds in response to expensive irrigation and chemical inputs, but improving the soil. Technical improvement of traditional techniques, and integration of intermediate technology into small-scale production (for example, wider use of crop rotation and green manuring with leguminous cover crops, and pest control through companion planting) would have drastically increased the per-acre yield of subsistence farms, at little cost. Treated human and animal waste, efficiently used, would have provided several times the amount of nitrogen in chemical fertilizers, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The Green Revolution was a concerted effort to develop seeds and techniques most suited to the needs of the land-grabbers.

Historically, the Green Revolution represented a choice to breed seed varieties that produce high yields under optimum conditions. It was a choice not to start by developing seeds better able to withstand drought or pests. It was a choice not to concentrate first on improving traditional methods of increasing yields, such as mixed cropping. It was a choice not to develop technology that was productive, labor-intensive, and independent of foreign input supply. It was a choice not to concentrate on reinforcing the balanced, traditional diets of grains plus legumes….

Elite research institutes will produce new seeds that work… for a privileged class of commercial farmers. Genetic research that involves ordinary farmers themselves will produce seeds that are useful to them. A new seed, then, is like any other technological development; it’s contribution to social progress depends entirely on who develops it and who controls it.

Following up on my reference above to the efficiency of raised-bed horticulture, John Jeavons–the guy who should really get credit for developing ways to “feed the world”–has managed to reduce to 4000 sq. ft., or one tenth of an acre, the amount of land needed to feed one person. Of course it’s a rather Spartan diet, about 80% legumes, grains and root crops, in order to get the most calories out of the least space; that means only some 20% of the diet can be fruits, or succulent or leafy vegetables. But the very least, I think it enables us to call bullshit on those who say “the world would stave” without mechanized chemical agribusiness.

And we’ve seen enough to call bullshit, likewise, on the morality play of goddamned tree-hugging hippies trying to keep peasants down on the farm. No doubt the former subsistence farmers now inhabiting the sheet metal slums of Mexico City, or squatting with begging bowls on the streets of Calcutta, are gratified to know their land is being used to grow cash crops for the urban and export markets (or as cattle feed for Big Macs) rather than to feed the people formerly living on it. Unfortunately, it’s not of much use to the former subsistence farmers who now can’t afford to buy it at any price because they’re, you know, former subsistence farmers.

Addendum. More of the same from Gennady Stolyarov II, who recycles (yet again) the ass-brained “best available alternative” meme at Mises.Org.

Virtually no one today who romanticizes the “good old days” of traditional agriculture recognizes how nasty, brutish, and short life under such conditions had been for millennia. Once the first industrial factories opened — with their long hours, dangerous equipment, and meager pay — people flocked to them in droves, because the factory conditions (including the sanitation provided and wages paid) were greatly preferable to those of toiling virtually all day on the traditional farm.

Our own frequent commenter P.M. Lawrence rips him a new one, dismissing his assertion as nonsense:

We actually have historical records to show this; they generally went into factories because they were deprived of rural opportunities, as in the English Enclosures, Irish evictions and (Scottish) Highland clearances. We know that when the opportunities remained they stayed away in droves, as in the natural experiment when Lord Lever started a fish processing factory at Leverburgh on the island (peninsula, actually) of Lewis….

Basically, people shouldn’t trot out this recycled prejudice as fact without doing their homework, let alone have the chutzpah to accuse others of romanticising.

Tags: agriculture

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, corporate state, food, globalization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.