Small Farmers Hold Key to Feeding the World

[© Image copyright Michael Courville and Jennifer Tong]

The food system is in trouble with food sovereignty being threatened and nearly one billion in the world starving everyday. Many possible measures have been put on the table in order to fix the situation and I called out to the Fair Trade movement to looks within ourselves to be part of that dialogue. How should the movement  address the situation and collaborate with others? While asking how, we should also explore why the Fair Trade movement is so important in this dialogue and what the Fair Trade movement can bring.

The movement has been a long time champion of small-scale farmers by voicing out against farmer injustices and setting up an alternative trade system that benefits them rather than work against them. Unfortunately, agribusiness continues to work to favor profit over sustainability and human rights and keep on driving small farmers off their land and have incidently been instrumental in creating the current global food crisis. Now it is time to voice out against these injustices not only because it is right but because it is necessary as small farmers hold the key to feeding the world.

In his Guardian article, Small is Bountiful, George Monbiot points out the important role that small farmers can play in feeding the world and that can only be done if big business (and governments) allow them to by giving them back ownership of the land.

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. ..... 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.

Small farms are more productive than larger ones, with a study showing that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares.

The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers. 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.

Which also points out the ecological benefits of small-scale farming. If we continue to give power to big business, they are going to continue to drive small farmers off their land, leaving them hungry and powerless.

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.

So, how to help these small farmers. Giving ownership back to small farmers and right now, the Fair Trade system is offering hope. With this hope, we can move forward and continue to strengthen the movement and continue to fight for the rights of small farmers.

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.