Who Does it Better: Small Farmers or Giant Agribusinesses?

From these farm­ers, we also learned of the health and envi­ron­men­tal ben­e­fits from this shift.

Moving up from what we learned in the Philippines to exam­ine other coun­tries, we have con­cluded that small-scale farm­ers prac­tic­ing dif­fer­ent kinds of what is now called agroe­col­ogy can feed the world. Agroecology extends the organic label to a broader cat­e­gory of ecosystem-friendly, locally adapted agri­cul­tural sys­tems, includ­ing agro-forestry and tech­niques like crop rota­tion, top­soil man­age­ment, and water­shed restora­tion. (For more details on our research and con­clu­sions, check out our “Can Danilo Atilano Feed the World?” in the cur­rent Earth Island Journal, the mag­a­zine of the California-based Earth Island Institute.)  

Eager to learn more and net­work with oth­ers from across the globe, Robin accepted an invi­ta­tion from the Transnational Institute and the International Institute of Social Studies to speak about our Philippine research at a global con­fer­ence in the Netherlands on alter­na­tive approaches to food and hunger.

She came away even more con­vinced that small-scale farm­ers are our only hope. She also came away excited to have met an impres­sive range of experts on the sub­ject, includ­ing a bold cham­pion for small-scale farm­ers: United Nations “Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food” Olivier de Shutter. Modest and artic­u­late, de Schutter looks more like the Belgian law pro­fes­sor he is than the out­spo­ken pro­po­nent of small-scale agroe­col­ogy he has become.  

A UN report may sound like dry read­ing but de Schutter’s is filled with zingers. Case in point: “Recent [agroe­col­ogy] projects con­ducted in 20 African coun­tries demon­strated a dou­bling of crop yields over a period of 3-10 years.” Indeed, de Schutter’s December 2010 report pulls together stud­ies from all over the world that ana­lyze small-scale farm­ers prac­tic­ing agroecology.

The result is pow­er­ful stuff. As de Schutter con­cludes, “We won’t solve hunger and stop cli­mate change with indus­trial farm­ing on large plan­ta­tions. The solu­tion lies in sup­port­ing small-scale farm­ers’ knowl­edge and exper­i­men­ta­tion, and in rais­ing incomes of small­hold­ers so as to con­tribute to rural devel­op­ment.” As he put it at the con­fer­ence, “Each region must be able to feed itself.”

De Schutter’s work rein­forces not just our find­ings, but what another conference’s speaker, U.S. food expert and fire­brand Frances Moore Lappé, has been argu­ing for decades: We already grow more than enough food to feed the world’s peo­ple. The prob­lem is not yields or pro­duc­tion per se; it is that con­ven­tional plan­ta­tion agri­cul­ture, com­bined with a devel­op­ment model that pri­or­i­tizes cheap exports over food crops, have pushed mil­lions off their fields. The nearly one bil­lion peo­ple who are hun­gry are in that sit­u­a­tion pri­mar­ily because they no longer have land to grow their own food or because they are too poor to
buy food.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at YesMagazine.org.