RURAL VIABILITY

Traditionally, the diversified family farm was the foundation of agriculture, rural culture and consequently all other culture and industry. What is happening to the family farm, and with it, rural culture and rural communities?



In 1911, 43% of Australians lived in rural areas. By 1976 only 14% of the population lived in rural areas.  At the start of the 21st century, only 2.1% of the population was involved in agriculture.

In the USA, in the early 20th century, 50% of the population was engaged in agricultural production, the figure dropped to 18% by the 1940s and reached a level of 12% by the 1960s. Today it is 3%.

In Great Britain 80% of the population was involved in agriculture in the year 1000. In the year 1700, 56% of the population was involved. This reduced to 40% by 1820, 16% by 1890 and 2% by 1990.

The economic basis for agricultural production is a very simple one. It is that the producer has adequate means of production to provide for one’s requirements and produce one or more commodities, in sufficient quantity, that are in demand and will provide viable economic return for the producer.

Traditionally, the farmer’s basic concept and operation was one of self-reliance, or self sustenance. The farmer had a diversified farm management and rotation which provided for his own needs, with the surplus going to market. Every village, every region and consequently, every country was self reliant in regard to domestic food production.

The line of thought among modern economists has been that a nations self sufficiency in food production is of no consequence. The understanding of farming as the basis of a self reliant culture seems to have been eradicated in the modern industrial countries. The traditional understanding of farming as a self reliant culture has been replaced in the modern industrial era by the factory concept of maximizing profits. The profit motive has replaced any consideration of self reliance, domestically or nationally. The consequences of this are the wholesale destruction of rural culture and rural communities. The results of agricultural industrialism all over the world can be observed in ever greater numbers of urban dispossessed, the rootless, and the unemployed.

Reliance on artificial fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and mechanization, has caused farmers to become primarily concerned with maximizing profits simply to meet the continuously spiraling costs. Once having become dependent on these artificial inputs the farmer has found that he is no longer the master of his destiny, but a slave of the banks and chemical companies...and then one of the dispossessed.

The situation with the modern industrial farming is that the annual gross income has been rising slowly, if at all, while the cost of producing that gross has risen very fast. As a consequence many farmers have walked off the land, while others, who refused to walk, have been locked out of their own farms by the banks to which they were in debit, and many farmers have simply killed themselves.

FIGURES

Australia’s food industry remains our leading manufacturing sector and a major export earner. During 2001- 2002, the food industry’s sales were worth nearly $35 billion at the farm level and around $75 billion at the retail level. Food exports amounted to $26.6 billion, while imports were $5.3 billion, leaving with a surplus of $21.3 billion, further consolidating Australia’s position as a major net exporter of food. Food and beverages remained Australia’s largest manufacturing industry in 2000-01, accounting for 22% of total sales turnover.

Intriguingly, Australian farm businesses owed a total of $26.2b at 30 June 2000, an 8% increase on 1998-99. The aggregate debt has risen steadily from $11.5b in 1986-87 when the current series of agricultural finance surveys began (ABS). Overall, the median debt per farm business was $87,000 at 30June, 2000.

GLOBALIZATION

Globalization, free trade, the abstraction of the “level playing field”: the death knell of the family farm, domestic food production, self reliance. The world has become a constantly expanding market. Land is a resource to be exploited, farms are factories and agriculture an industry. Economic fantasies have overwhelmed all culture and all other values and have become the dominant paradigm that give meaning and value to life in the industrialised societies.

The economic fantasy is of a constantly expanding market, domestically and internationally:

·       Domestically, through the stimulation of over-consumption and the calculated outdating , outmoding, and degradation of goods and by the self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitive economy.

·       Internationally, with the imposition of our economic imperialism now termed Globalization. Globalization maintains the vision of a global market offering indiscriminate market access and unrestricted consumption. 

The reality of Globalization is rule by elites, mercantilism and selfishness. As the ranks of the urban dispossessed increase worldwide, economic policy concentrates resources into the hands of fewer and fewer companies.

Today, from the midst of the economic driven movement towards globalization, we observe the swelling ranks of urban dispossessed, millions of people in third world countries, especially Africa, dying of starvation, and even in the wealthiest of nations, such as Britain, one farmer kills himself every six days.

The WTO meeting at Cancun (2003) collapsed: concern over domestic job losses and impoverishment could not be squared with ever more open markets and the increasing cheap imports, and subsidized dumping by the USA, they bring in their wake.  The South Korean farmers' leader Lee Kyunghae committed suicide in protest at the millions of small farmers ruined by international trade. The vast majority of small farmers are struggling to make a living, with hundreds leaving the land every week.

Most developing countries face serious rural problems. Following a case brought against it at the WTO by the USA, India has been forced to reduce import barriers on key food commodities, with devastating results. Prices of coconuts have collapsed by 80%, pepper prices have fallen 45% and domestic production of edible oil has been effectively wiped out.

PERSPECTIVE

The line of thought among modern economists has been that small scale, self sufficient farming is wrong- that it is a primitive kind of agriculture – one that should be eliminated as quickly as possible. It has been believed that the area of each field must be expanded to handle the changeover to large scale agriculture. The goal is to have only a few people in farming. The agricultural authorities advised that fewer people, farming monocultures, using mineral fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and large modern machinery could get greater yields from the same acreage. This is considered agricultural progress.

In 1997, the World Bank carried out productivity studies on various sized farms, as did the international Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). It was found that the highest productivity is on farms of up to 3 acres. After that there is a decline. The theory of modern industrial agriculture- that productive efficiency would increase with an increase in mechanization and scale of production- is not borne out by recent research. On the contrary, productivity is not increased by increasing the scale of production.

A chemical-industrial farm requires 300 units of energy - fertiliser, fuels and so on - to produce 100 units of food. A traditional organic polyculture farm requires 5 units of energy to produce the same 100 units of food. Traditional farming used energy from the sun to produce food - resulting in a net increase. Chemical-industrial farming uses fossil fuels, non renewable resources, 60 times as much energy, to produce the same amount of calories - resulting in a net loss.

Obviously the traditional peasant farming of small farms is not going to support the average middle class Australian lifestyle, but the point is that the current trend toward centralized ownership and industrialized production cannot be supported. The evidence of the last 40 yrs is that the result will be the loss of food quality and rural communities, and the degradation of land and environment.

TASMANIA

Today, more and more freehold land is disappearing into corporate hands. In Tasmania , prime agricultural land is disappearing into the portfolios of the forest companies. Our resource base is disappearing down the corporate plughole. What can we do? Our societies are no longer as democratic as they are corporatist. Public interest no longer has as much influence on government as corporate interest. Consequently, legislation ostensibly designed to protect agricultural land (PAL) is used to eradicate family farms and rural communites, transferring the land to corporate ownership.

Recent models of agricultural progress have been constructed entirely on the basis of economic factors, to the complete exclusion of any consideration for the social, ethical and spiritual requirements of rural communities.

As agricultural land disappears into the portfolios of forest companies we lose our potential to produce food domestically. Consequently we lose control of food quality and become dependent on foreign countries for our most basic sustenance, our health and, ultimately, our survival.

References

Berry , Wendell  (1977). The Agricultural Crises :A  Crises of Culture. New York : Proceedings , no.33, The Myrrin Institute.

Steiner, Rudolf. (1974) Agriculture . London : Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association.

Suzuki, David & Dressel, Holly. (1999)  Naked Ape To Superspecies.
Toronto :   Stoddart Pub. Co.