{"id":13200,"date":"2015-10-09T07:16:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-09T12:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13200"},"modified":"2015-10-09T07:16:10","modified_gmt":"2015-10-09T12:16:10","slug":"the-persistence-of-the-peasantry-further-notes-on-the-inverse-productivity-relationship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=13200","title":{"rendered":"The persistence of the peasantry: further notes on the inverse productivity relationship"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The persistence of the peasantry: further notes on the inverse productivity relationship<\/a><\/h3>\n
Look, I\u2019m really, really sorry. I said I wasn\u2019t going to write another blog post about ecomodernism but \u2013 no, no, please don\u2019t go! This post strikes to the heart of what Small Farm Future is all about, and raises some interesting agricultural issues \u2013 the fact that it also engages with the ecomodernism debate is almost incidental, really. And I promise some other stuff next up. Just bear with me one last time.<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n

So first a brief summary of my ecomodernism wars to date: the \u2018ecomodernists\u2019 brought out their\u00a0Manifesto<\/a><\/em>\u00a0in April; I wrote a critique of it that was published on the\u00a0Dark Mountain<\/a>\u00a0website in July; Mike Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute wrote a critique of my critique on Twitter, to which I responded with a\u00a0follow up essay<\/a>; to Mike\u2019s hot denial, I described \u2018ecomodernism\u2019 as \u2018neoliberalism with a green veneer\u2019; Mike came to Britain to help Mark Lynas launch ecomodernism over here, but somehow the veneer slipped off on its journey across the Atlantic, and the two of them found themselves sharing a platform with those well-known environmentalists\u00a0Owen Paterson and Matt Ridley<\/a>, much to Mark Lynas\u2019s\u00a0later regret<\/a>. Meanwhile, George Monbiot wrote a\u00a0critical article<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em>about ecomodernism, to which Ted Nordhaus, Mike Shellenberger and Linus Blomqvist wrote a\u00a0critical response<\/a>. And Mark Lynas exchanged a couple of remarkably polite\u00a0comments<\/a>\u00a0with me. Few dead yet.<\/p>\n

But let us now home in on the issues raised by George Monbiot in his\u00a0Guardian\u00a0<\/em>article with which Nordhaus et al (henceforth NSB) take issue, concerning small farm productivity and agrarian development. Monbiot made three main points:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The ecomodernists claim that small-scale farming in poor countries is unproductive, but while its\u00a0labour<\/em>\u00a0productivity is low its productivity per unit\u00a0area<\/em>\u00a0is often higher than larger scale farming<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The persistence of the peasantry: further notes on the inverse productivity relationship Look, I\u2019m really, really sorry. I said I wasn\u2019t going to write another blog post about ecomodernism but \u2013 no, no, please don\u2019t go! This post strikes to the heart of what Small Farm Future is all about, and raises some interesting agricultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[20,8075,6996,9739,5647,9738,5125],"class_list":["post-13200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-agriculture","tag-ecomodernism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-peasantry","tag-productivity","tag-small-farm-future","tag-small-scale-farming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13201,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13200\/revisions\/13201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}