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Small farms don’t produce most the of the worlds food – but they could produce all
Small farms don’t produce most the of the worlds food – but they could produce all
Recently, I wrote an article about how difficult it is to survive as a commercial smallholder and floated some ideas of why that is and what can be done about it. I want to follow up with two articles. This one is about the production capacity of small farms and the next one will be on labor productivity and its implications for the space of consumption for small holder farmers and its capacity to generate surplus labor for other societal purposes.
I often see the claim that peasants/small farms/small holders/family farms produce seventy percent of all the food in the world. The 70 figure originates from a report by the ETC Groups in 2009, Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises. The original has been revised and the current version from 2017 states that the ”ETC Group estimates about 70% of the population – 4.5–5.5 billion of the world’s 7.5 billion people – depend on the Peasant Food Web for most or all of their food”.
While I am a small farmer myself and very sympathetic to the future of small farms in a similar way as the ETC group, I think it is important to have the facts straight. To begin with, the poorest 70% consume a lot less than 70% of the food in the world, as people in the richer countries, who mainly depend on the industrial food chain consume a lot more food per capita. Notably, the ETC report says that 70% of the population depend on the peasant food web for most or all of their food. This is not at all the same as that peasants produce 70% of the food as ”to depend on” doesn’t mean that all their foods come from this food web.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Little Fish with Big Impact In Trouble on U.S. West Coast
Little Fish with Big Impact In Trouble on U.S. West Coast
Scientists are concerned that officials waited too long to order a ban on U.S. Pacific sardine fishing that goes into effect July 1. The dire state of the sardine population is a cautionary tale about overharvesting these and other forage fish that are a critical part of the marine food web.
One of the most spectacular fisheries collapses in U.S. history occurred off the West Coast in the 1950s, when hundreds of boats severely overfished a Pacific sardine population already in decline from a natural down-cycle. The resulting crash decimated the largest fishery in the Western Hemisphere, closed down Monterey, California’s famed Cannery Row, and so depressed sardine populations that they did not recover for nearly 40 years.
Given that record, it’s easy to understand the recent dismay of many fisheries scientists, who have watched U.S. Pacific sardine numbers plummet as fishing has continued amid another natural downturn. In April, after documenting an estimated 90 percent decline in the stock — from an estimated 1.4 million tons in 2007 to roughly 100,000 tons today — the Pacific Fishery Management Council decided to close the sardine fishery. That moratorium takes effect July 1.
The impacts are huge for the West Coast fishermen and seafood processors who have once again come to depend on sardines. In 2012, when nearly 100,000 tons of sardines were caught off the U.S. coast, this fishery was worth more than $21 million. But scientists are particularly concerned about what this means for the marine food web. Many fisheries experts, including some scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), think the fishery closure has come too late.
‘We’ve failed to respond quickly and that’s pushed these fish to lower levels,’ says one scientist.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
