Future Agricultures DEBATE

Big farms or small farms:
how to respond to the food crisis?

Contributors:

1. Derek Byerlee and Alain de Janvry, Co-Directors of the World Development Report 2008, Agriculture for Development, www.worldbank.org/wdr2008.
2. Thomas Lines, Freelance Consultant and Author of Making Poverty: A History (Zed Books, 2008)
3. Stephen (Esteban) Bartlett, Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)
4. Peter Rosset, Global Alternatives
5. Roy Keijzer, Agromisa
6. Jerome Gefu,International Livestock Research Institute
7. Herment A. Mrema, Executive Director, Africa Rural Development Support Initiative (ARUDESI)
8. Louis Pautrizel, GRET.org
9. Ruchi Tripathi, Head of UK Policy and Campaigns,
   Concern Worldwide (UK)
10. Jeremy Keenan, School of Oriental and African Studies
11. C. Devendra, International Livestock Research Institute
12. Wolfgang Bayer, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
13. Colin Poulton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
14. Michael Loevinsohn, Applied Ecology Associates
15. Andrew Dorward, School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS)
16. Paul Wagstaff, Concern Worldwide
17. Josien Kapma, "St Ulrich Group" / "PTD-Forum"
18. Dr. Shahid Zia, Oxfam GB
19. Sam Moyo,African Institute for Agrarian Studies
20. Peter Hazell, member of Farm Africa’s Board of Trustees
    

Contributions

Derek Byerlee and Alain de Janvry, Co-Directors of the World Development Report 2008, Agriculture for Development, www.worldbank.org/wdr2008.

Paul Collier (November/December 2008 issue) sets out three priorities to overcome the world food crisis—moving to large-scale commercial farms to replace peasant or smallholder farming, promoting genetically modified organisms, and reducing distorting subsidies to biofuels in the US.  We think that Professor Collier got two of these right, but missed the boat with his anti-smallholder bias to modernizing agriculture, especially in Africa.... [read more]

 

Thomas Lines
Author of Making Poverty: A History (Zed Books, 2008)

It is rather unfortunate that the terms of debate should be framed by a man like Paul Collier.  From his dreaming spire in Oxford, he looks down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope.  Like many unimaginative economists, he starts with the market – and the world market to boot.  Yet he understands neither agriculture nor world markets.  And he does his case no good by patronising his opposition as ‘populist’, ‘ideological’, ‘romantic’ and even ‘romantic populism’.... [read more]

Stephen (Esteban) Bartlett, Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)

Why should we debate on Big Farms or small farms as if we have to chose?

A discussion about the future of Big Farms and small farms together will be more opportune. And this discussion has not to be focused only on Africa and other regions in the Tropics, but also looking at the development of our own farming systems in Europe and similar areas in the industrialized countries. The worldwide migration of people, products and capital from rural areas towards the cities is still ongoing. How to stop this phenomena and how to develop the rural areas worldwide, so young people prefer to stay and see that there is still a future for them in agriculture and local agro-industry.

Jerome Gefu, International Livestock Research Institute

Professor Paul Collier’s thesis incriminating poor countries for lack of progress in food production, especially in the wake of the worsening global food crisis (and economic meltdown?) as hinging on the preponderance of small farms raises more questions than proffering feasible and sustainable solutions.   One question is: for whom do large-scale commercial farmers in poorer countries produce? The argument for big farms as a means of boosting food production does not provide answer for the food shortage experienced in Africa and other poor regions. This is because most (if not all) of the large-scale commercial farmers in these regions produce essentially for Western markets where they are able to recoup their investments faster than they would have if they had targeted their production for domestic markets, where agricultural produce pricing is very erratic and responsive to a variety of environmental, socio-economic and political  uncertainties....[read more]

Herment A. Mrema, Executive Director, Africa Rural Development Support Initiative (ARUDESI)

To me it will be a waste of time to debate on an obvious issue.  Small scale farming in Africa is life, is culture, is political, is survival and is livelihood. Small scale farming in Africa has performed well and what we need to do more, is to make these small holder farms more productive and profitable.  To do that we need to support our farmers to embrace the concept of farming is business, which means assuming higher affordable risks and the higher the risk assumed the higher the returns.  In order to embark on commercial agriculture they need volumes and good quality.  These farmers can achieve both if they are organized into farmer groups, embrace uniform best agricultural practices (into large farms) and they add as much value to their produce before they sell and move from marketing commodities into marketing complex products....[read more]

Louis Pautrizel, GRET.org

During the year 2008, GRET worked with several NGOs (on the behalf of Coordination SUD) on a position paper on these issues.
This paper underlines the benefits of family farms for employment, poverty reduction, hunger reduction, environment protection and rural development. It often refers to the efficiency of small farms and family labour while large agribusiness tend to develop at the expense of the population.

The same working group is now concluding a new position paper analyzing policies that promote family farms. [read papers].

Ruchi Tripathi, Head of UK Policy and Campaigns,
Concern Worldwide (UK)

I’d like to make a contribution under this section of the debate and add another dimension to the debate.

Let me confess that I am on the side of Steve Wiggins in this debate – due to a number of well known reasons that I wont repeat, and am glad that last time round when this debate was being played out during consultations for DFID’s agriculture policy 2005, Michael Lipton won the argument - that support to smallholder farmers is vital for poverty and hunger eradication....[read more]  

Jeremy Keenan, School of Oriental and African Studies

A colleague at Reading forwarded to me the contribution on big-small farms from Roy Keijzer, saying that I might find the reference to Mali interesting. I cannot contribute much to the main debate, as it is not my field. However, with reference to the Mail Niger inland Delta scheme to which Roy Keijzer refers, I can make the following comment: While his remarks about its present state of development etc may well be valid, its colonial history are interesting, in that it was developed originally by the French to counter the British cotton-growing Gezira scheme. The Office du Niger scheme was probably one of the very worst forms of colonial development, at least as far as the local people were concerned. They were treated horrendously and suffered appallingly. The scheme was a large blot of shame on colonial development at that time. In fact, the Office du Niger project was one of the first classic social anthropological studies of the late Claude Meillassoux. Not surprisingly, the French did much to cover up his research and findings.

When dealing with such schemes/regions in their present day context, their previous exploitation (it was not development) should not be forgotten.

C. Devendra, International Livestock Research Institute

I have read with interest the ongoing exchange of emails concerning above, and cannot resist the opportunity to make a few comments.

Please permit me to present an Asian perspective.

1). Some of the comments made mainly from the " North " give the impression of poor understanding of what constitutes small farms. These probably stem from inadequate R and D efforts to appreciate the systems, infinite complexities needs and opportunities....[read more]

Wolfgang Bayer, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation

One thing that is missing in the contributions I saw thus far, are definitions of large farms or small farms. 25 years ago I was in Australia and found interesting statistics for Australian conditions of course. To gain an income from farming equal to average national income a beef farmer in the North needed 100 km² of land or 1000 head of beef cattle. A sugar cane farmer needed 50 ha and a farmer growing green pepper 1 ha . Things have surely changed in the mean time and Africa is not Australia, yet looking at income potential instead of at size might be a useful way of looking at farming....[read more]

Colin Poulton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Perhaps predictably, I find it hard to disagree with Steve’s arguments. There is a pro-smallholder and pro-science - even pro-GM! – position, drawing on a strong empirical record, that Paul completely misses in his attempt to slay the giants of romanticism. I will, therefore, confine myself to two main points:

The first augments Steve’s points about the comparative advantage of smallholder vs large-scale commercial agriculture. In low income economies, replacing labour with capital is often not efficient. This is true for many agricultural production tasks.... [read more]

 

Michael Loevinsohn, Applied Ecology Associates

I’d like to challenge one of Prof. Collier’s key points: small farmers are failing to keep up with the pace of change. “Innovation is hard to generate through peasant farming”, he writes. “Their mode of production is ill-suited to modern agricultural production in which scale is helpful”.... [read more]

 

Andrew Dorward, School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS)

The large/ small farm debate has been long running and is not helped by simple conclusions that one or the other is best. The debate needs to consider small and large farms' relative efficiency and effectiveness in terms of the resources they use and the benefits they deliver in different and evolving contexts..... [read more]

 

Paul Wagstaff, Concern Worldwide

I wonder how many of these authors have ever tried to run a commercial farm in Africa? It is very, very, difficult to be a decent employer (and an honest citizen) and run a profitable commercial farm in much of Africa – smallholder farmers can out-compete you in every direction. Steve hits the nail on the head: “Why is this? The main obstacle to farming on a large scale is the same one that hit Soviet state farms: the management of labour. Small farms have the advantage that family labour is generally self-supervising, prepared to work long and diligently in ways that hired hands are not. When large farms try to minimise the labour problem by mechanising, not only do their costs of production rise, but keeping machinery operating well in rural areas remote from supplies of spares and skilled mechanics is not easy...... [read more]