THE CHALLENGE OF PEASANT AGRICULTURE
François Houtart1
1 (Belgium) A sociologist and professor emeritus of the Catholic University of Louvain, he is the vice-president of the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA).
To raise the question of peasant agriculture in a seminar2 organized in China is a real challenge, because of its long tradition in this country. However it has also today a new perspective, because of the rapid urbanization and industrialization process, even if the context is quite different here and in other Asia countries as in the rest of the world.
2 Seminar on Peasant Agriculture in Asia, organized by the Department of Rural Economics of Renmin University (Popular University) of China and the Tricontinental Centre of Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), between the 15th and the 17th of November 2010.
There are three main reasons for the importance of the topic. First is the necessity of feeding humankind. In the middle of the century, we will have between 9 and 10 billion human beings to feed in an increasing urban proportion, which means that food production will have to be multiplied by two or three. The second reason is to save the planet. This is not only a quantitative question. It means the necessity of developing a type of production respectful of the regenerating capacity of the earth. Every year this capacity is reduced and agriculture, as it is performed today, is part of the problem. Finally the promotion of welfare for about 3 billion people living on agriculture is also at stake. All this is a task for everyone in the planet.
1. The destruction of peasant agriculture
During the last forty years we have been witnesses to an acceleration of the destruction of peasant agriculture in which many factors have intervened. The use of land for agrarian activities has diminished because of a rapid urbanization and industrialization process. Therefore, the rural population has declined relatively. In the year 1970 we had 2.4 billion people in rural areas against 1.3 in urban areas. In 2009, it was respectfully 3.2 billion against 3.5.
At the same time the adoption of a monoculture type of farming has provoked a huge concentration of land, a real counter-land reform, which has been accelerated during the last few years with the new phenomenon of land grabbing, estimated in the southern continents to be between 30 and 40 million ha; and in Africa alone 20 million ha.
This has been linked with the production of cash crops for export. One striking example has been Sri Lanka, where in 1996 a report of the World Bank was proposing to abandon rice production in favor of exports production. The reason is that it was cheaper to buy rice from Thailand and Vietnam than to produce it in Sri Lanka. For more than 3,000 years Sri Lanka has been producing rice as their main staple, but market laws must prevail, without any other consideration.
Therefore the World Bank asked the government to put an end to all regulating measures and institutions for the rice market, to put a tax on irrigation water, increasing the cost of rice production, privatize the common lands in order to make the peasants able to sell their land to local or international companies. In the face of the resistance of the present government, the World Bank used pressures, namely with international loans. The following government, more inclined to neo-liberalism, produced a paper called “Regaining Sri Lanka,” where it accepted the idea, thinking that such a solution would produce cheap manpower for industrial development with foreign capital. But Sri Lanka has been doing this for more than forty years while the working class has struggled for better salaries, social security and pensions. So manpower has become too costly and foreign capital is even leaving the country to go to Vietnam or China, where manpower is cheaper. So the solution was to reduce labor costs by cutting real salaries, dismantling social security and reducing the amount of pensions.
To export cash crops meant also to import cheap agricultural products, especially in many countries of the South which were surpluses of American or European productivist and subsidized agriculture. This in several cases destroyed the local agricultural production, like chicken in Cameroon and beef in Ivory Coast.
Monoculture production developed also a massive use of chemical products and the introduction of genetically modified organisms. All this has been linked with a productivist model of agriculture, legitimated by the growing needs, ignoring all long-term effects and in fact oriented by a profit-making economy.
2. Ecological and social effects
From the ecological point of view, effects are well known. We can mention deforestation (130,000 square km destroyed every year: the equivalent of Greece territory), but also the destruction of biodiversity. It means an irrational use of water provoking droughts in many regions. It provokes contamination of soils (In Nicaragua certain chemicals products used for sugar cane production take almost a hundred years before dissolving), but also of underground water, of rivers and even of seas. The delta of the Red River in Vietnam has started to be polluted in such a degree that fishing is diminishing. In the Gulf of Mexico, before the Mississippi estuary, there is a phenomenon of “death sea” over an area of 20,000 square kilometers (no more animal or vegetal life), because of the amount of chemical products being swept along by the river, in regions where maize for agrofuel has been massively developed. In many cases the end results in fifty or a hundred years will be desertification.
Social consequences are not less damaging. Food production is displaced toward less fertile lands and in various countries is diminishing. West Africa which was self-sufficient until the 1970s has to import today 25% of its food. Indebtedness and poverty of the peasants are accompanying the development of monocultures under the direction of big companies: small peasants are totally submitted to them for credit, inputs, commercialization, food and consumers goods.
Serious health problems are provoked among the workers and their families, because of the use of chemical products and also because of water pollution. In some cases the premature death of agricultural laborers is common.
Millions of peasants are displaced by force from their land, under various schemes and in certain countries, like Colombia, with the violence of military operations or of paramilitary forces at the service of landlords and agribusiness. In Latin America four million have been displaced in Colombia, six million in Brazil, one million in Paraguay, and in Asia six million in Indonesia. This phenomenon is increasing the migration pressure to foreign countries and creating political problems. A special case is the one of the ethnic minorities, losing their land and the basis of their existence.
3. The case of agrofuel
Mankind is facing the necessity of changing its sources of energy in the next fifty years when fossil energy will be exhausted. Among the new sources, agro energy is supposed to provide a solution, with ethanol from alcohol, coming from maize, wheat, sugarcane and agrodiesel from vegetable oil: palm trees, soya, and jatropha. Because Europe and the USA do not have enough arable land to produce what they need, a phenomenon of land grabbing is taking place in the continents of the South. Local governments are often accomplices, because they see the opportunity of diminishing their fuel bill or to accumulate foreign exchanges. According to plans for 2020 (in Europe, 20% of renewable energy) more than 100 million ha will be transformed for agrofuel and at least 60 million peasants will be expelled from their lands.
Huge extensions of land are planned for such a purpose. Indonesia plans a new extension of 20 million ha for palm trees. Guinea Bissau has a project of 500 000 ha of jatropha (one seventh of the country’s territory) financed by the casinos of Macao. An agreement was signed last October in Brasilia, between Brazil and the European Union to develop 4,8 million ha of sugarcane in Mozambique, in order to supply Europe with ethanol. All this involves a tremendous destruction of biodiversity and of social environment.
If agrofuel is not a solution for the climate (because the total process of its production is destructive and produces CO2) and if is not a real solution for the energy crisis (perhaps 20% with the existing plans), why such a project? Because it is greatly profitable for capital in the short term and so it contributes to alleviate the crisis of accumulation and allow speculative capital to intervene.
4. Peasant resistances
All over the world, peasant movements are resisting. It is the case of the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) in Brazil, of the Indonesian Peasant Movement (SPI), of ROPPA in West Africa, etc. La Via Campesina, an international federation of more than a hundred peasant movements in the world, has been also on the move and has organized several seminars to alert peoples and authorities on the matter. Organizations for the defense of the environment, in favor of organic agriculture (namely in Korea and China) or urban and suburban agriculture (like in Cuba) are acting in the same direction. Finally academic centers of agronomy and social sciences manifest a growing awareness of such a problem and are proposing alternative solutions.
5. The reasons of such a development
The first origin of such a development has to be found in a philosophical approach, the one of a linear conception of progress without end, thanks to science and technology on an inexhaustible planet. Applied to agriculture, this means the “Green Revolution,” as we have seen in Asia, particularly in the Philippines and India, with a high productivity, but the concentration of land, soil and water contamination and growing social inequalities.
The second reason is the logic of the economic principles of capitalism. In this vision, capital is the driving force of the economy and development means accumulation of capital. From there the central character of the rate of profit leads to speculation. Financial capital has played a major role in the food crisis of 2007 and 2008. Capital concentration in the agricultural field means monopolies, such as Cargill, AMD, Monsanto, etc. Agriculture becomes a new frontier of capitalism, especially with the failing profitability of productive capital and the crisis of financial capital.
Such logic of the economic model ignores the “externalities,” i.e., the ecological and social damages. They are not paid by capital, but by the collectivities and by the individuals. Liberalization of the exchanges has increased the mercantilization of agricultural products as commodities and encouraged Free Trade Agreements, which in fact are treaties between the shark and the sardines.
6. Necessity of a transformation
Everyone sees that it is not possible to go on with agricultural policies based on the disappearance of peasants. The World Bank published in 2008 a report recognizing the importance of the peasantry to protect nature and to fight against climate changes. It advocates a modernization of peasant agriculture, through mechanization, biotechnologies, genetic modified organisms, etc. It envisages a partnership between the private sector, civil society and peasant organizations. But all this remains within the same philosophy (see the introduction paper of Laurent Delcourt). No structural transformation is envisaged. It is a transformation within the system. One recent example is the AGRA Program in Africa, promoting hybrid seeds, genetic modified organisms, etc. The project was initiated by Rockefeller and the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation is founding several of the projects, including one of Monsanto’s, which received more than 100 million US dollars from the Foundation.
On the contrary, another type of transformation can be envisaged. Very soon after the 2008 report of the World Bank came a report of the “Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Sciences and Technology for Development (IAASTD), where the four hundred specialists consulted came to the conclusion that peasant agriculture was not less productive than industrial agriculture and has an added value: its cultural and ecological functions (see Laurent Delcourt).
This raises immediately the question of the conditions necessary for an efficient peasant agriculture. It is no more necessary to prove its agricultural productivity. But there are also other economic, social and cultural conditions to make of village life a dignified and valuable milieu, especially for the youth. It will be also necessary to revise the relations between urban and rural areas. This is what we will discuss in the following documents, after the description of the situation of peasant agriculture in various countries of Asia.
All this also raises a more fundamental question: the necessity of searching for real alternatives and not only an accommodation of the capitalist system. This means a revision of the paradigms of collective life for mankind on the planet: its relation with nature (from exploitation to respect), the production of the bases for life of any kind: physical, social, cultural, spiritual of all human beings in the world (an economy based on use values and not primarily on exchange values); a generalized democracy for all social relations, including the one between men and women and all institutions; and finally interculturality, which means a possible role of other cultures, knowledge, philosophies, and religions other than the western ones to define development and propose an ethics.