Food security and small farms
By Shahid Javed Burki
Monday, 02 Nov, 2009
EXPERTS are advising the developing world to focus on ground realities to achieve food security as its population continues to increase. They are not counting on another technological revolution to occur in the near future.
The next technological breakthrough will probably come from genetic engineering but that is not likely to happen any time soon. Even when it occurs its acceptance will not be easy since there are growing health and environmental concerns associated with this kind of tinkering with plants’ genetic material. In the meantime, the global demand for food will continue to increase.
The productivity increases that took place in many Asian countries including Pakistan beginning in the late ‘sixties and going on into the ‘seventies could happen again. But they will not be produced by developments such as the availability of high yielding seed varieties that resulted in doubling grain outputs in India and Pakistan between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s. That episode in the history of agriculture in the developing world is generally referred to as the “green revolution”.
It is now recognised, however, that the green revolution became the victim of its own remarkable and unprecedented success. Adjusted for inflation, food prices plunged by some 60 per cent by the late 1980s. This produced complacency among policy makers in the developing world as well as those in the aid giving agencies that had played a critical role in helping the green revolution to take place.
They turned their attention to the poor people’s other needs such as health care and education. These were called the “basic needs” in addition to food. Food was now cheap and hunger was no longer a big concern.
With the policymakers’ attention turned away from agriculture, farming was starved of investment resources. In 1979, 18 per cent of official development assistance (ODA) went to agriculture; by 2004, a quarter century later, that amount declined to a paltry 3.5 per cent.
During the green revolution years crop yields in the areas that benefited from new technologies saw yields grow routinely by 4 - 6 per cent a year. By the end of the 1980s, the annual increase had fallen to two per cent or less.
Reallocation of land to non-food crops and the continued expansion of urban land have put great pressure on land availability. The rate of increase in the world output of food began to decline significantly. This put pressure on the amount of food reserves available across the globe; they are at the lowest levels since the early 1970s.
By early 2008, there was panic buying by the countries that had the financial resources to spend on food imports which further depleted the stocks. To make matters worse, many large food producing countries, including India, imposed restrictions on grain exports. These constraints drove up prices in the international food markets.
The sharp increase in the price of agricultural commodities and the use of agricultural land for producing crops for the production of bio-fuels along with a continuous increase in population have, once again, raised the spectre of world hunger and starvation. Complacency is gone among both aid providers and as receivers. The last summit meeting of the world’s developed economies – the G8 – held in Italy in July 2009 declared, “there is an urgent need for decisive action to free humankind from hunger” and went on to pledge $20 billion for agriculture.
The Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organisation that had been campaigning for the renewal of donor interest in agriculture was pleased with the result of the Italy summit. “Since 2007, we have seen greater attention from world leaders on food security, in developing and developed countries alike,” said a senior official of the FAO after the G8 issued their communiqué..
But where should this money be invested? This is where the “small is beautiful” approach in agriculture has begun to take some traction. The lead is being given by India and in India by one of the more underdeveloped parts of that country.
When the Indian National Congress defeated the BJP in the elections of 2004, Dr Manmohan Singh, the new prime minister and an economist of some repute, decided to focus his government’s attention on agriculture and on the development of small farmers. Between 2003-04, the last year of the BJP administration, and 2008-09, the last year of Dr Singh’s first term, New Delhi’s budget for agriculture quadrupled.
According to one account, “government schemes built rural roads to help farmers get their produce to market, forgave some of their debt and raised minimum purchase prices on cotton, rice and other crops. In 2005, policymakers launched the Bharat Nirman Programme, aimed at providing electricity, housing and irrigation systems to farmers, and a year later, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which promised at least 100 days of work each year for poor farming households often on public works to develop infrastructure in the countryside.
In the latest federal budget, announced in July, funds allocated for the rural jobs scheme jumped 144 per cent from the previous year to more than $8 billion – making it the largest social-welfare programme in the budget – while funding for Bharat Nirman was boosted by 45 per cent.”
What does the evolving global food situation and India’s attempts to deal with it suggest for Pakistan? Given Pakistan’s stretched fiscal situation it is not going to be possible to throw a great deal of public money into agriculture for some time to come. The country will have to be very selective. It should concentrate on improving the productivity of small farmers by using simple technologies that will help small-holder agriculture to produce more from the little bit of land the peasant-proprietors own.
In India, for instance, providing the poor farming communities with small amounts of funding to construct small ponds that can hold rain water has helped to increase the productivity – and hence incomes – of the small farmers.
By introducing the farmers to the internet, it has made it possible for the small holders who have surpluses to market to get the best prices for their produce. The introduction of the internet has provided poor communities to invest in education. They can see right away the benefits to be derived from education.
What is clear is that the Pakistani policymakers will need to concentrate on the development of the agriculture sector to revive the slumping economy. But what is needed is not a large increase in the infusion of public funds since these are not available. What is required is a paradigm shift in the development of agriculture and within agriculture on the development of the small farmer. This way the country may be able to achieve self-sufficiency in food but also alleviate rural poverty.