Beth Eats Local

An article from George Monbiot on small farmers…

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 10th June 2008

I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance … of land in agricultural production and food security”.(1) Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.

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.

But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen(2), and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.

In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares(3). Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Phillippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.

The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to associate efficiency with scale. In farming, it seems particularly odd, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.

There’s a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land(4).

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers(5). Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don’t have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops in the same field.

In the early days of the Green Revolution, this relationship seemed to go into reverse: the bigger farms, with access to credit, were able to invest in new varieties and boost their yields. But as the new varieties have spread to smaller farmers, the inverse relationship has reasserted itself(6). If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms.

There are plenty of other reasons for defending small farmers in poor countries. The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan arose from their land reform programmes. Peasant farmers used the cash they made to build small businesses. The same thing seems to have happened in China, though it was delayed for 40 years by collectivisation and the Great Leap Backwards: the economic benefits of the redistribution that began in 1949 were not felt until the early 80s(7). Growth based on small farms tends to be more equitable than growth built around capital-intensive industries(8). Though their land is used intensively, the total ecological impact of smallholdings is lower. When small farms are bought up by big ones, the displaced workers move into new land to try to scratch out a living. I once followed evicted peasants from the Brazilian state of Maranhao 2000 miles across the Amazon to the land of the Yanomami Indians, then watched them rip it apart.

But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have sought to seize their land, and have a powerful vested interest in demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country whose small farmers are 20 times more productive than its large ones, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a result of small landholdings, “farm output … remains low.”(9) The OECD states that “stopping land fragmentation” in Turkey “and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity.”(10) Neither body provides any supporting evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well.

Like Mugabe, the donor countries and the big international bodies loudly demand that small farmers be supported, while quietly shafting them. Last week’s food summit agreed “to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local, regional, and international markets.”(11) But when, earlier this year, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge proposed a means of doing just this, the US, Australia and Canada refused to endorse it as it offended big business(12), while the United Kingdom remains the only country that won’t reveal whether or not it supports the study(13).

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(14), 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.

This leads to an interesting conclusion. For many years, well-meaning liberals have supported the fair trade movement because of the benefits it delivers directly to the people it buys from. But the structure of the global food market is changing so rapidly that fair trade is now becoming one of the few means by which small farmers in poor nations might survive. A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight. Fair trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing income, but also to feed the world.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/statements/zwe_mugabe.pdf

2. Amartya Sen, 1962. An Aspect of Indian Agriculture. Economic Weekly, Vol. 14.

3. Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006. Small Is Beautiful: Evidence Of Inverse Size Yield
Relationship In Rural Turkey. Policy Innovations. http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01382

4. Giovanni Cornia, 1985. Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production function: an
analysis for fifteen Developing Countries. World Development. Vol. 13, pp. 513-34.

5. Eg Peter Hazell, January 2005. Is there a future for small farms? Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp93-101. doi:10.1111/j.0169-5150.2004.00016.x

6. Rasmus Heltberg, October 1998. Rural market imperfections and the farm size— productivity relationship: Evidence from Pakistan. World Development. Vol 26, pp 1807-1826. doi:10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00084-9

7. See Shenggen Fan and Connie Chan-Kang , 2005. Is Small Beautiful?: Farm Size, Productivity and Poverty in Asian Agriculture. Agricultural Economics, Vol. 32, pp135-146.

8. Peter Hazell, ibid.

9. http://www.new-agri.co.uk/00-3/countryp.html

10. OECD Economic Surveys: Turkey - Volume 2006 Issue 15, p186.
This is available online as a Google book.

I was led to refs 9 and 10 via Fatma Gül Ünal, ibid.

11. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/foodclimate/HLCdocs/declaration-E.pdf

12. International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 2008. Global Summary for Decision Makers. www.agassessment.org

13. IAASTD, viewed 9th June 2008. Frequently Asked Questions. www.agassessment.org

14. Eg Terminator seeds.

Success. After two weeks, finally a 100 mile meal worth sharing. Witness my breakfast of champions (don’t grimace - in a blog about food, I was going to use that phrase at some point, it’s better that we get it out of the way now.) I made wholewheat pancakes, wrapped them around some strawberries from the allotment and drizzled honey over the top of it. The full recipe is below with producers that I use.

4oz wholewheat flour - Wessex Mill

1 egg - Through We Love Local

Pinch of salt - Maldon Salt

½ pint milk - Middle Farm Unpasturised Whole Milk

Glug of oil - Sussex Gold Cold Pressed Rape Seed Oil

Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. In another bowl beat together the egg, milk and flour. Add the flour a bit at a time, then put it in the fridge for at least half an hour. After half an hour, heat some oil in a pan. The pan should be quite hot, but not as high as it can go. Add some batter and rotate the pan to spread it out. The first pancake will be quite oily, but the ones after will be fine. Flip the pancake over after a minute or so. While it’s still hot, chop some fresh strawberries into it, roll it up and drizzle honey on the top. Eat and enjoy.

To make this even better, how about chopping up the strawberries into a Tupperware pot, drizzle honey over the top and then put inside a rucksack and carry several hundred miles to Wales, including up a steep hill. When you’ve done all of that, the strawberries will have infused the honey with their sweet, sweet juice and will be almost unbearably delicious.

These pancakes have been a life-saver. Without my usual muesli, I have been at a loss what to have for breakfast. I’ve tried the day before’s left-overs. I’ve tried scrambled eggs, but try as I might I can’t eat eggs or left-overs day in, day out. Pancakes, it seems, are a whole different matter. On Sunday night I made up a whole load of batter and then used it for the next three days while I was at work and needed to eat quickly in the mornings. Pancake batter gets better if you leave it - something to do with the gluten in the flour needing time in the water to work properly (ah, lovely gluten).

It seems that this project is all about rhythms and routine, and in a life with very little routine, that’s quite a hard lesson to learn. In the past two weeks I have been learning to plan ahead, settle in and ultimately, calm down. I’ve learned that my veg box lasts for less time now that I am leaning more heavily on it, and that I need to be going up to the allotment 3-4 times a week to harvest. I am thanking myself for starting the project at the beginning of June (intentional), after the dearth of the hungry gap has passed and the strawberries and redcurrents and beans and peas and early carrots and potatoes are all ready to eat. We are harvesting a lot of strawberries at the moment, a couple of pounds a week – at least. I wondered out loud to my allotment mate why they were so expensive when they were so prolific at the moment and he suggested that it was labour costs – which then moved into a conversation about migrant labour. I’m learning that food affects everything.

One of the things that I have been learning to deal with in the first two weeks is panic. In the first week of the project, I panicked and spent a lot of money on food. In part, this is because I was stocking up on things like flour and oil, but I also spent money on vegetables that I didn’t really need to. I learnt the hard way how much more expensive vegetables in shops are than getting them through my veg box. To compare, a bunch of asparagus in a shop costs £1.99. Asparagus is in season at the moment and I got two to three times as much asparagus in my veg box and this costs me £8 a week for half the box (I share with my housemate). The asparagus in my veg box was much thinner, much less uniform than the stuff in the shops, but there was so much of it that it didn’t matter.

My veg box (or my half of it) lasts me nearly to the end of the week. Nearly. For the rest of the time, I have to rely on what I can get from the allotment. This panicked me at first. What if there’s nothing to harvest? What if the insects have got it? What if, what if, what if. It suddenly struck me that this was a fear that was millennia old but that curiously, in a life led close to supermarkets full of food, I had never felt before. I stopped panicking after I went on a foraging mission with my friend Kat. We got samphire, sea beet, mallow and sea kale (this is quite rare in Britain, but abundant in Brighton and we only took a bit). This is only a tiny fraction of the wild food available at the moment. I made comfrey fritters the other day (using left-over pancake batter). I’m not going to starve this week.

…asked my housemates yesterday as they tucked into a curry and swigged tea. “Umm, Ok” I answered. The truth is, they’ve been pretty tough. This, I find, is a mental challenge, not just a culinary one.

On the 30th May, the night before my first day of local eating, I found myself in a tent in Newton-Ferrers, near Plymouth in Devon. My friend Ollie and I had gone to walk the South West Coast Path. Walk we did, at a military pace on the first day as we only managed to start walking at four and needed to get to the campsite before nightfall. I was expecting the night before the challenge to involve relaxing with friends around a meal comprised entirely of chocolate, tea and sugar, all the things that I wouldn’t be able to have for the next year. There would be pats on the back and general warm glow of appreciation for my bravery and single-mindedness. Instead, we cooked pasta and pesto on a camping stove (according to Ollie the most complex meal ever cooked on that stove ) and dropped into bed early because we were so exhausted from walking. I woke up the next day and cooked my first local meal - local to Newton-Ferrers that is. I had asparagus and scrambled eggs from Riverford Farm, a shop that I had found on the internet before the holiday and rerouted the walk to include.

This picture of my first local meal makes it look pretty nice - a romantic and slightly decadent breakfast in a field. The truth is that while the asparagus was great, tender and gently seasoned with posh salt, the eggs were completely rubbery. The gas ran out half way through the cooking procedure and I had to nuke them in the campsite microwave. I hate microwaves, but it was either nuke the eggs or go hungry, so nuke them I duly did.

The past few days have made me utterly fearful of being hungry, even though there isn’t really much likelyhood of that happening. I’ve started having psychosomatic hunger pangs

at times when I cannot possibly be hungry. I thought that I had cut down a lot on ‘non-local’ produce before I started this, but didn’t add in all the snack items that I ate. I didn’t realise how much I snacked during the day until I could no longer do so. No more biscuits on tap at work, no slice of bread when I get in from where ever I’ve been (I’m hoping this situation is going to be different in a week when I have successfully made my own sourdough bread - there’s definitely a blogpost in that particular journey). No quick handful of crisps, no… need I go on? What I am missing isn’t food, it’s time.

Leaving for Plymouth, I felt like I had things completely under control. I had prepared a bunch of snacks in case I couldn’t find any local food in Devon, the first day of my challenge went fine, apart from the rubber eggs. It was arriving back from camping late on Sunday, dog-tired from walking, that I realised the flaw in my micro-managed food plan. While I had prepared food to take with me to Devon in case I couldn’t get any there (the rule is I eat within 100 miles of the place that I am, or take food sourced from within 100 miles of Brighton with me), I hadn’t prepared any for when I got back.

When I arrived home, my vegetable box had arrived and I decided to roast some tomatoes and asparagus (there’s a theme developing here - do you think it’s asparagus season?) and make something involving gluten to wrap around them. Pancakes would have been great but my milk had gone off while I was away, so I ended up making some ‘tortillas’ which rather than the soft, malleable circular bread I am used to, became mishapen and cracker-like. In actual fact, they weren’t bad - kind of like oatcakes - but I wish I had had more time to make something better. This theme of not having time continued throughout the next day. I woke, not knowing what I was going to have for breakfast and opted to make some more of the same cracker-cakes and spread them with butter and honey. At lunchtime, I came home from work as usual, but instead of going back there in the afternoon, I was going to the Houses of Parliament to talk to Lib Dem Environment spokesperson Steve Webb about how bloggers can encourage the government to set higher targets for reducing carbon emissions (more on this later). This left me about two hours to make some food for the evening. I cobbled together a quiche (not a very good one), some honey tarts and honey biscuits all of which were ok but suffered from a) the lack of time involved in their making and b) the fact that they were made with bread flour as I don’t yet have any normal flour. So, a series of hurried and disappointing meals characterised the first few days of the diet, but yesterday I stuck some potatoes in the oven to bake and had them for lunch and dinner today with shallow-fried pepper and asparagus (the theme continues). They were gorgeous, both hot and cold, so I learnt a lesson, two lessons really. Firstly that I always need to be a meal or two ahead if I want to fit this in around my already busy schedule, and secondly that I shouldn’t attempt things I’m not very good at (pastry) at speed and in a bad mood.

So, I’m feeling more positive now, but then I have breakfast and lunch in the fridge and lots of time to cook the next meal tomorrow evening. At the moment, this is what it comes down to, it seems. Half of my brain is living my life (organising conferences, twittering, organising trips to Paris), and the other half is performing complex culinary equations - ‘What am I going to have for lunch?’ Could I also have this for dinner tomorrow?’ ‘Do I have the right ingredient in the house to make this?’

My final taste of chocolate for a year - pear and chocolate tart at Riverford Farm Cafe…