SMALL-FARMS-L Archives

Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

SMALL-FARMS-L@LISTSERV.FAO.ORG

Options: Use Classic View

Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Condense Mail Headers

Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-2"
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 16:11:41 +0000
Reply-To: AIS <[log in to unmask]>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: "Moderated conference on small farms and food security (October 2016)" <[log in to unmask]>
From: AIS <[log in to unmask]>
Parts/Attachments: text/plain (23 lines)
This is Francisco Gurri, again, in response to Bazyli Czyżewski (message 65).

Bazyli suggests that "subsistence and semi-subsistence farms in less developed countries would use"...non sustainable.. "capital intensive practices" to be competitive in the market. I agree, and they actually do. The minute small householders embrace national policies and start practicing agriculture as a business, they increase their use of fertilizers, weed killers, they reduce biodiversity and become all together less sustainable. Their adoption of a market-oriented agriculture is usually celebrated by local authorities. Unfortunately, peasants soon start reducing diet diversity, increase their dependence on store food items and eventually it affects their nutritional status. It is particularly damaging when the crop they decided to specialize on no longer provides profits or there are downsides to the market. In the tropical forests I work in southern Mexico, where the jungle is what provides soil fertility, intensification for the market soon leaves peasants out of options. Men are forced to migrate and abandon agriculture and food production. Women stay behind, and they buy small animals that may overgraze the already damaged fields.  

Household agriculture can provide a sustainable living, and as many have shared in this e-mail conversation, they can feed entire provinces. They are not, however, good businesses. As a farmer once told me "la Milpa (the particular polyculture practiced in Mexico) is what we poor people do". The solution, as shown many times over, is not turning them into commercial agriculturalists. As Bazyli and others point out in this conversation and most case studies show, this just makes things worse: environmentally and nutritionally.  

Specific policies can be developed to encourage food production and increase household income without transforming their survival strategy into a business. More tax money should be directed towards small producers. God knows we have enough agricultural policies and agricultural subsidies to make "big agriculture" profitable and competitive, I don´t understand why anyone should expect that only small householders should be competitive in the market on their own. Maybe, if they had lobbying power their purchasing power would not be as poor.

Francisco D. Gurri García, Ph.D.
Investigador Titular C y Coordinador:
Departamento de Ciencias de la Sustentabilidad,
El Colegio de la Frontera Sur-Unidad Campeche.
Mexico
Tel: 52 (981) 127 3720 ext. 2504.
E-mail: fgurri1 (at) gmail.com

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/434322/ ].

########################################################################

To unsubscribe from the SMALL-FARMS-L list, click the following link:
https://listserv.fao.org/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SMALL-FARMS-L&A=1

ATOM RSS1 RSS2