IF GLOBAL food production is to keep pace with rising demand, society will have to agree on how to get money into agriculture and dispense with romantic notions about small peasant farms.
The barrage of angst from governments, aid agencies and media pontificators about rising food costs last summer was unsettling for farmers who were just starting to enjoy the first modest prosperity in years.
The global financial meltdown and a bigger world crop has lowered grain prices, lessening the immediate worry, but fundamental trends remain that could push prices higher and revive fears about food scarcity.
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The ability to respond to this situation is impeded by a set of widely held conflicting expectations and desires.
First, many people reject allowing food prices to rise to encourage greater production because it causes an undue burden on the world’s poor.
They also reject subsidizing food production because it disrupts markets, tilts the playing field in favour of rich countries and is costly for taxpayers.
Third, many believe that food is best produced by small family farms.
Politicians from the New Democrats and Green Party in Canada to centre-left movements in Europe and even Barack Obama in the United States show support for small family farms and a suspicion of agribusiness concentration and large farms.
A similar sentiment is evident in consumer movements such as the 100-mile diet, community shared agriculture and other systems that bring food producers and consumers closer.
There is nothing wrong with small farms, indeed they present many opportunities outside of commodity production. And there is reason to be concerned when market power is concentrated too much in one segment of a value chain.
But there is also danger in romanticizing small farms.
The special report in this issue outlines the inefficiencies that have arisen in Ukraine as a result of post-communist land reform that widely distributed ownership of small parcels of land that cannot be effectively farmed.
The situation is worse in impoverished countries in Africa and Asia where peasant farmers scratch a living from tiny plots that produce inadequate income to feed the family, let alone invest in technology and know-how to increase production.
The result is stagnant or declining food production while population grows.
Thankfully, major third world development agencies such as the World Bank are rectifying decades of neglecting agriculture by investing in such things as seed development and extension.
But the impact of new aid will be muted if it goes to farming units that are too small and poor to take advantage.
Amalgamating land into sustainable holdings will take a deft hand.
Simply forcing peasant farmers off the land and into city slums to allow large agribusiness to take over would create its own set of problems.
A fair system enabling land sales, development of co-operatives and programs that encourage creation of rural, non-farm jobs will be key to unleashing the food producing potential of developing countries.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
