George Monbiot notes that smaller farms actually produced more food per acre than large ones.
He notes that he agrees with Robert Mugabe is right, that land reform is crucial in agricultural production and food security, and then further notes:
Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.
Which is, of course, completely true.
In his extensively footnoted essay, which also appeared in the The Grauniad*, he notes that in nearly every case where it has been examined, smaller farms outperform larger ones.
Of course, the developed world is working against this reality:
Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own, large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.
Obviously, as he concludes, the moves of people to buy into “fair trade” agricultural practices do more than lift small farmers out of abject poverty. They actually produce more food for everyone in the end.
It is remarkable just how destructive, and just plain evil the agricultural practices of the Western World are.
*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”
