FAO's plan to feed the world

FAO 's main policy document is full of contradictions, half-truths and fallacies. Most importantly, it concentrates on oil increasing world food production without adequately addressing how to make food available to all those who need it. The document basically calls for a continuation of 'business as usual' - the continuation of its promotion of unsuitable modern farming technologies, the conversion of tropical forest to farmland, the spread of hugely expensive irrigation schemes, and the export of the produce of the Third World to the well-fed of the North. The policies outlined would inevitably further indebtedness, impoverishment, environmental degradation and famine in the Third World.

FAO's principle analysis of global agricultural production and trade is contained in World Agriculture: Toward 2000, a report issued for the 1987 FAO Conference. [1] The report "examines world agricultural perspectives and policy issues for the 15 years between the mid-1980s and 2000". According to its authors, it "represents a global assessment of possible future world and country-group production, trade and nutrition". [2]

Work on the report began in the mid-1970s, and it has gone through several drafts before reaching its present published form. As such, it may justifiably be seen as FAO's most definitive and considered statement on world food and agriculture its 'master plan' for feeding the world.

A better fed World?

The report is defiantly optimistic. From the outset, it takes the view that, despite technical and political problems, the agricultural policies pursued by FAO and governments over the past quarter of a century have, by and large, been a success.

"The outstanding fact in food and agriculture is that the past 25 years have brought a better-fed world despite an increase of 1.8 billion in world population. Earlier fears of chronic food shortages over much of the world proved unfounded. [3] [4]

Nonetheless, the report acknowledges, somewhat cryptically, that "the problem of hunger was solved only for the majority of the world's population" and estimates that between 350 million to 510 million people are "seriously malnourished". [5]

It is understandable that FAO should wish to place a positive gloss on the state of world agriculture but, even allowing for the undoubted gains in production that have been made for certain crops over the past 25 years, one might have expected an acknowledgement that such gains are beginning to falter; that more people than ever before now live in a state of chronic hunger, as opposed to periodic hunger; and that the prospects for world food supplies have rarely looked so dim.

Falling Yields

Between 1950 and 1985, world grain output increased 2.5 times, growing at 3 percent a year. But since 1985, as Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute points out, there has been no appreciable increase. [6] Indeed, production actually fell in 1987 and again in 1988. The 1989 harvest was only 1 percent higher than in 1988, while the world's population grew at 1.7 percent.

In effect, grain output per person is down nearly 7 percent. In Africa, the output of grain per person has fallen by 20 percent since the late 1960s. Commenting on the figures, Brown argues:

"Although five years is obviously not enough time to signify a long-term trend, it does show that the world's farmers are finding it more difficult to keep up with growth in population"

Increasing Malnutrition

Similarly, World Agriculture: Toward 2000's claims on the extent of malnutrition are at odds, with those of other UN agencies - and, indeed, with the data which the report itself presents. Its upper estimate of 530 million people living below the breadline (a figure equivalent to twice the population of the United States) is well below the 730 million which UNICEF estimates as "chronically deprived of the food necessary to enjoy an active life". [7]

Moreover, the claim in the report's introduction that the Third World is "better fed" fits uneasily with the statement (tucked away in the body of the text) that

"the numbers of undernourished people in the developing countries (outside the Asian Centrally Planned Economies) were conservatively estimated by FAO to have risen slightly over the 1970s." [8]

Elsewhere, the report acknowledges that,

"The per caput (sic) food supplies in the low-income countries, excluding China and India, were in, 1983-5 no higher than 15 years earlier."

and that

"The trend has been for the incidence of undernutrition to rise in Africa and remain nearly stationary in Asia in terms of the absolute numbers affected." [9]

In fact, the figures suggest that the numbers of malnourished people are growing at an accelerating rate - from an additional 1.5 million people a year in the 1970s to eight million a year in the 198Os. [10] As Lester Brown notes,

"Infant mortality rates - a sensitive indicator of nutritional stress - appear to have turned upward in many countries in Africa and Latin America, reversing a long-term historical trend." [11]

In India, "over 85 percent of children under five are below the normal state of nutrition". [12] Although Africa is often portrayed as the worst affected region, a 1987 UNICEF report notes,

"In 1986, more children died in Bangladesh than in Ethiopia, more in Mexico than in the Sudan, more in Indonesia than in all eight drought-stricken countries of the Sahel." [13]

FAO's strategy

Given its uncritical assessment of the "gains" of the past 25 years, it comes as no surprise that World Agriculture: Toward 2000 sees future progress in agriculture lying in a continuation of past policies, albeit with some fine-tuning. Further modernising agriculture, together with more vigorous attempts to integrate rural peasants into the market, forms the cornerstone of the report 's development strategy.

Setting out its specific goals, Toward 2000 gives highest priority to increasing agricultural production in the developing world by 3 percent a year up to the year 2000 - "an improvement of around 30 percent on average on present yields". [14] Although the report acknowledges that achieving this growth in production "presents mankind with serious challenges", it sees the task as "surmountable". [15] The increased yields are to be achieved through:

• Increasing the amount of land available to agriculture.
  FAO projects that, for developing countries as a whole, 22 percent of the extra agricultural production required by the year 2000 will be obtained by increasing the area of land in agricultural use by 83 million hectares - equivalent to the total area of arable land in Western Europe. In Latin America, 39 percent of the desired increase in production will be obtained by extending the area under cultivation; in Sub-Saharan Africa, 26 percent; and in Asia, 11 percent. In the Near East and North Africa, there is no new land that can readily be brought into production without "major investments or new technologies for marginal rainfall areas and soils". [16]
• Increasing cropping intensity
  In addition to increasing the amount of arable land, the report argues for a 6 percent increase in cropping intensity (the number of times an area is cropped in one year). [17] The amount of harvested land will thus effectively be increased by 115 million hectares.
• Intensifying production through the use of off-farm inputs.
  According to the report, nearly two-thirds of the desired growth in output will be obtained through intensifying production. To achieve that goal, FAO argues for a doubling in the volume of fertilisers used by farmers, a doubling in the use of Improved cereal seeds and a doubling in the number of tractors used in the Third World. Expenditure on 'plant protection chemicals' - that is pesticides - is projected to increase at "somewhat less than three percent a year". [18]

To pay for the programme, FAO argues for an increase in agricultural exports and economic development.

The extensive solution

FAO's proposal to extend the land under cultivation suffers from two major flaws. First, there is little land left in the world that can advantageously be converted to agricultural use; and, second, water shortages place a major constraint on any programme of extensification. Though both problems are acknowledged in the report, neither are adequately addressed.

No More Land

Since 1981, the world's agricultural base has actually fallen by some 7 percent, primarily due to environmental degradation and water shortages. [19] Indeed, much of the land brought into cultivation since the 1950s has proved quite unsuitable for permanent agriculture and large areas of agricultural land and rangeland are being abandoned every year:

• One third of the world's cropland is already suffering from soil erosion.
  • In Africa, according to FAO, soil erosion could reduce agricultural production by a quarter between 1975 and 2000. [20]
  • In India, an estimated 800,000 square kilometres are affected. In many areas, agricultural land is now so degraded that it is being transformed into scrub or desert.
  • According to the Worldwatch Institute, some six million hectares a year - an area twice the size of Belgium - is being lost to such desertification.
• Deforestation is adding to the problems.
  • In Indonesia, forest destruction has resulted in an estimated 8.6 million hectares being officially classified as 'critical land' - that is, land which is so degraded that it is generally unable to sustain even subsistence agriculture. [21]
  • Throughout the tropics, deforestation has rendered vast areas vulnerable to flooding: in India, the vulnerable area has risen from 19 million hectares in 1960 to 59 million in 1984.
• One fifth of the world's irrigated land - some 40 million hectares - is conservatively estimated to be suffering from waterlogging or salinisation. [22]
  • In Egypt, 35 percent of cultivated land is affected by salinity and 90 percent by water-logging.
  • In China, more than 930,000 hectares of irrigated land has been abandoned since l980. [23]
  • In India, it is estimated that almost as much irrigated land is now being taken out of production due to salinisation and waterlogging as new irrigated land is being brought into production. [24]
• Finally, agricultural land is being lost at an increasing rate to homes, factories and roads.
  • A 1980 UNESCO report estimates that in the developing world, "at least 3,000 square kilometres of prime agricultural lands are submerged every year under urban sprawl". [25]
  • FAO itself admits that the "loss of good agricultural land to non-agricultural uses" now constitutes "a significant constraint to future expansion of food production".

One is thus bound to ask: Where will the 83 million hectares which FAO seeks to bring into production be found? Toward 2000 is candid: "Most of this land will have to be transferred from tropical forests". [26] The implications for tropical deforestation are devastating. Rangelands, too, will be brought under production, despite their ecological fragility. [27]

Although FAO recognises that the bulk of this new land is "only marginally suitable for annual crop production", it is adamant that adverse ecological effects can be avoided. Where tropical forest areas are to be opened up to agriculture, FAO recommends sites being "carefully selected, cleared and prepared". [28]

The very scale of the intended expansion, however, makes it highly improbable that "careful site selection" will take place. The roads to the newly opened-up land would encourage forest encroachment by the landless, and the number of settlers who would be likely to gravitate to "specially selected sites" would make further expansion into surrounding forests almost inevitable.

Significantly, Toward 2000 does not even mention that much of the forest and rangeland that FAO seeks to open up for agriculture already belongs to forest or pastoral peoples, who may be less than happy to see it developed for agriculture.

Water Shortages

Land shortages apart, a second constraint on the expansion of agricultural land is the growing shortage of water. As Toward 2000 notes,

"it is water rather than land which is the binding constraint for almost 600 million hectares of potentially suitable arable land. It is only when this water constraint is released that other technical constraints such as nutrients and pests become Important." [29]

In many areas, natural water shortages have been exacerbated by the introduction of irrigation. In Tamil Nadu, India, water-tables have dropped by up to 30 metres in a decade as a result of irrigation. In Maharashtra, some 23,000 villages are now without water, whilst in Gujarat, the figure is 64,500. 20 percent of the irrigated land in the US is irrigated by pumping water in excess of aquifer recharge. In Texas, for instance, water tables have been falling by some 15 centimetres a year on over 1.5 million hectares of irrigated land.

Nevertheless, Toward 2000 calls for a 16 percent increase in the area under irrigation, from 110 million to 170 million hectares, projecting that this should contribute 50 percent of the desired increase in yields. In the Near East and North Africa, "Irrigation of rain-fed and desert lands will be the sole source of expansion of harvested land". [30]

Again, one is bound to ask: where will the water come from? [31] Leaving aside the overwhelming social and ecological arguments against building large-scale dams to provide irrigation reservoirs, the number of dam sites that can be economically and safely exploited is limited. [32] Dams are thus unlikely to provide the necessary water. Groundwaters, too, are already over-exploited and, given the rates of abstraction required for FAO's programme, would only provide a temporary solution.

The only other major source of water is that 'saved' through the more efficient management of irrigation schemes. The report rightly notes that "water wastage in irrigation is a serious problem" - but argues that such wastage can be reduced through "high technical and managerial skills", recommending in particular that higher water charges would discourage the overuse of water by farmers. [33]

At no point, however, does the report address the social implications of raising water charges - notably squeezing small farmers out of production. [34] Nor does the report even attempt to respond to the growing consensus that the problems of water wastage are intrinsic to the bureaucratic nature of large scale irrigation schemes - the rules governing water allocation are invariably designed to make life easier for government officials, with no knowledge of local conditions, rather than to meet the needs of farmers. [35]

The net result of FAO's plan to extend the amount of land under cultivation is thus likely to be a massive increase in environmental degradation - principally as a result of deforestation - combined with increasing pressure on water resources. As a strategy for increasing food production, it is hopelessly flawed.

Increasing cropping intensities

Increasing cropping intensities - the second plank in FAO's strategy - is equally wrong-headed. Toward 2000 acknowledges that the soils underlying tropical forests "are quite poor in structure and in plant nutrients" and explicitly recognises that "long fallow periods during which natural vegetation can be re-established" have historically provided the key to successful forest farming in the tropics. [36] It goes on:

"The danger is that pressure on land is causing the fallow periods to be shortened and natural vegetation is not being re-established for long enough to replace the nutrients removed during the cropping cycle."

Nonetheless, the report urgently recommends that fallow periods be shortened in order to obtain higher yields. Indeed, according to the report,

"much of the increase in harvested land, will stem from reduced fallow periods in areas of sedentary agriculture and of shifting cultivation."

It admits that this could have "grave environmental consequences", but insists that the use of organic manures and mineral fertilisers would solve the problem. [37]

Even assuming that fertilisers could indeed compensate for the loss of nutrients due to reduced fallow periods - and this is far from proven - the long-term result of intensifying cropping patterns can only be the progressive degradation of the forest and eventually of the land itself. High rainfall is likely to cause the rapid run-off of fertilisers; moreover, the longer that an area is cropped, the greater the stress placed on the structure of the soil, reducing its capacity to store water and increasing the risk of erosion.

Indeed, maintaining the productivity of the soils in bush-fallow systems, has as much to do with the size of the plots cleared and the choice of crops grown, as it has to do with the availability of nutrients. If soil cover is sparse or the plot too big, then the soil may be exposed to intense sunlight, which, in areas where the soil has a high iron content, can lead to 'laterization', the soil becoming brick-hard and totally unusable for agriculture. Similarly, inadequate soil cover will cause unacceptable erosion. [38]

FAO's recommendation that the cropping intensity on irrigated land be increased is similarly flawed. It is not irrigation per se that has been responsible for the vast areas of land lost to salinisation but the intensive cropping of irrigated land in the absence of adequate drainage.

On poorly drained soils, fallow periods are essential if water-tables are to be allowed to fall between cropping and the land is not to become waterlogged. Where irrigated land is cropped on a perennial basis, without adequate drainage, notes Victor Kovda of the University of Moscow, one of the world's foremost authorities on the subject, salinisation is "practically universal". [39]

FAO does not deny this and calls for better management - in particular, the installation of proper drainage - to overcome the problem. [40] Yet again a pious exhortation is presented as a serious solution to an intractable problem. For, whilst proper drainage would indeed prevent salinisation, its installation is extremely expensive and, in some cases, could double the cost of the irrigation project. Even without drainage, few irrigation schemes are economic, the revenue they raise typically covering less than 10 percent of their construction, operation and maintenance costs. [41]

Moreover, even where drainage is installed, the problem is not solved but simply transferred: once flushed out of the land, the saline irrigation water - sometimes highly contaminated with pesticides - invariably ends up in the nearest river, its salinity often rendering the river water unfit for agriculture downstream.

Once again, Toward 2000 has opted for a strategy that can only exacerbate the problems of environmental degradation - and thus, ultimately, famine.

Increasing off-farm inputs

The third component of FAO's strategy is further to intensify agriculture, primarily through the increased use of off-farm inputs and through mechanisation. FAO does not discuss in any detail the social and economic impact of increased intensification for small farmers, limiting its discussion to the role that off-farm inputs will play in boosting yields. The claims made are questionable. The passage on fertilisers is illustrative.

In FAO's view,

"Fertilisers have become a sine qua non of agricultural production over much of the developing countries and will become so in most other areas before the end of the century." [42]

In the last 25 years, fertiliser consumption has increased worldwide from 14 million to 125 million tonnes, an increase of more than 11 percent per year. Undoubtedly this has brought increased yields of wheat and rice but, worldwide, farmers are now confronting diminishing returns on fertiliser use, with the result that yields have tended to fall not increase.

Twenty years ago, farmers in the US corn belt could have expected a tonne of fertiliser to add 15 to 20 tonnes to their grain harvest. Today it can only increase production by about 5 to 10 tonnes. In the tropics, diminishing returns on fertiliser use have set in even faster; a problem attributed to the lower organic content of most tropical soils. In Indonesia, for example, the increased yield resulting from one kilogramme of fertiliser nutrients, fell from 10 to 5 kilogrammes of unmilled rice between 1972 and I984.

The impressive yields initially gained through fertiliser applications result from nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous being made directly available to plants. But the long-term fertility of the soil depends on more than the availability of these three elements: of critical importance are the levels of organic matter in the soil, the availability of essential trace elements such as magnesium, zinc and copper and the water-retaining capacity of the soil.

By replacing organic manures, fertilisers lead to a marked deterioration in soil structure, leaving the land prone to erosion and compaction. Each inch of top-soil lost in the US reduces yields of wheat and corn by an average of 6 percent and the problem is very much worse in tropical areas, where the top-soil tends to he much thinner and more prone to erosion by wind and water. [43]

The choice of crops grown plays a critical role in determining erosion rates. Many of the most common export crops - on which the bulk of fertilisers used in the Third World are employed - are particularly ruinous to the Soil. [44] Coffee plantations in Brazil have affected much of Brazil's soils to the point that they can hardly ever be restored to crop production. [45] Equally soil-depleting are tobacco and groundnuts.

FAO now seeks to extend the use of chemical fertilisers beyond the export economy. The long-term result is likely to be the progressive degradation of yet more land. Again, in the long term, it is a strategy that can only entail less food being available for the hungry. [46]

Mechanisation

Closely allied to FAO's plans to intensify off-farm inputs is its plan to increase the number of tractors in the Third World by four percent per annum, bringing the world's total "tractor park" to 6.5 million by the year 2000. [47] However, it is by no means clear that mechanisation can advantageously replace the bullock or the buffalo, in traditional Third World agricultural systems. As Ranil Senanayake notes of Sri Lanka,

"The loss of the buffalo means the loss of nutrients to the farmer and his family, as the buffalo is a major source of milk and curd. It also means a loss of organic fertiliser in the form of urine and dung. Further, it leads to job opportunities for the village youth who were employed as herdsmen." [48]

On certain types of soil, compaction due to the use of tractors and other heavy machinery can reduce yields by up to 14 percent. The many fragile soils of the tropics are especially prone to this problem. A greatly expanded use of tractors also has implications for farmers' self-sufficiency, making them reliant upon the supply of spare parts and fossil fuels.

Self-sufficiency vs international trade

Although FAO tells us that the "self-sufficiency objective remains at the centre of agricultural policies" this is difficult to reconcile with its commitment to world trade and hence to the export-orientated economy. [49] But for FAO, "national self-sufficiency" does not mean a country's ability to feed its population from its own resources, it merely means that a country is able to pay for its imports. [50] Hence Toward 2000 can state that

"the pursuit of improved self-sufficiency (in the deficit countries) as postulated in this study, is compatible with expanded trade in general, as well as among the developing countries." [51]

FAO admits that for

"developing countries as a whole ... the short term impact of trade balances would be negative, because of increased world prices they would have to pay for their imports." [52]

Nevertheless, it insists that in the medium and long term "greater access to international markets would yield important benefits". In particular, it "would massively increase the market in sugar, vegetable oils, tobacco, pulses, tropical beverages, and forest products", in addition to the market in meat and dairy produce.

For this reason, Toward 2000 is emphatic in its support for the proposals being put forward at the current Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). FAO is particularly impressed by a ministerial declaration that the negotiations

"shall aim to achieve greater liberalisation of trade in agriculture and bring all measures affecting imports, access and export competition under strengthened and more operationally effective GATT rules and disciplines." [53]

This, FAO insists, "points to the essence of what is required". However, the current GATT proposals would be disastrous for small farmers, making it 'GATT-illegal' to protect them from the dumping of cheap food imports. If US proposals at the Uruguay Rounds are adopted, it would be illegal to restrict exports of food, even if a country's people are starving.

Increasing investment

To attain the production levels it projects, Toward 2000 estimates that

"a cumulative gross total of nearly $850 billion at prices of 1980 will need to be invested in primary agriculture and $635 billion in supporting activities between 1982/84 and 2000." [54]

These figures "do not include investments related to the industrial production and distribution of agricultural inputs (e.g. fertiliser plants)" nor investments in agricultural research or in forestry and fisheries. [55] The total investment required is thus likely to be well in excess of the projected $1,500 billion.

FAO recognises that this investment would require high rates of economic growth, something which is also promoted as a means of increasing "effective demand" - that is, the ability of people to pay for their food - which FAO sees as critical to combating hunger.

Toward 2000 is rightly critical of past strategies for achieving economic growth in the Third World, arguing that the emphasis on industrialisation as the engine of growth has been detrimental to agriculture.

"Economic policies in most developing countries up to quite recently, gave priority to industrialisation as the core of development strategy but without sufficient appreciation of the necessity for vigorous agricultural growth as an essential condition for industrialisation to firmly take root. The consequences for agriculture were serious." [56]

But can the required investment be achieved through increased production in the agricultural sector without jeopardising food availability? The answer is emphatically "No". Toward 2000 estimates, for example, that 16 percent of the required investment - some $240 billion - is required for irrigation. It is inconceivable that such a sum could be raised without the bulk of the newly-irrigated lands being used to grow high-value cash crops, primarily for export.

In that respect, the future is likely to be no different from the past. Indeed, despite FAO's claim that "raising staple food production has been given higher priority [than export crops] in the 1970s and 1980s", [57] much of the land already brought into irrigation has been given over to export crops. Even where the land has been specifically intended for peasant farmers, plantation agriculture has taken over - or the farmers have been persuaded to grow cash crops for local or foreign companies under contract. [58]

Senegal's massive Manautali irrigation scheme, for example, was originally promoted as a 'communal development programme'. In fact, local farmers will receive less than 10 percent of the 370,000 hectares of irrigated land - the rest going on large mechanised farms, including 30,000 hectares of rice plantations. [59]

The tendency for small farmers to be squeezed off their land - irrigated or otherwise - is likely to become still more pronounced if FAO persuades governments to adopt its proposal to raise a proportion (it does not give precise figures) of the necessary finance for its programme by taxing the agricultural community and by charging for veterinary services and irrigation water. The report argues:

"An agricultural-led development strategy implies that agriculture can become an important source of investment capital and government revenue ... A thriving agricultural community reaping the benefits of increasing productivity, promoted, in part, from public expenditures on such activities as research, extension and transport, can, and should, sustain a tax load." [60]

In addition, Toward 2000 urges "the mobilisation of rural savings and their channelling to investment opportunities in rural areas". [61] Here, FAO is clearly out of touch with reality. The rural poor of the Third World have increasing difficulty in financing their next meal, let alone a global agricultural programme. Further taxation, together with the removal of subsidies, can only exacerbate their plight.

Nor, as FAO claims, is modernisation likely to make them more affluent. On the contrary, it will increase indebtedness and further marginalise the vast mass of the rural poor. Indeed, in the North, farm bankruptcies and rural poverty are on the increase, with small family farms particularly badly hit. A major cause has been the massive borrowing by farmers in order to modernise their farms.

Industrial development

The truth is that if the projected $1,500 billion is to be raised, much of the investment will have to come through industrial development or through loans from multi-national development banks, bilateral aid agencies and large commercial banks, further increasing the already crippling debt of the Third World. In fact, Toward 2000 recognises that its projected irrigation schemes are unlikely to go ahead unless the dams that provide the water are also used to generate electricity for industry. [62]

Such industrial development, however, can only further reduce the availability of food to the hungry - thus defeating the overt aim of the irrigation projects. The most immediate consequence will be the diversion of land and water from agricultural to non-agricultural uses. The process has a momentum of its own, with one industrial project spawning further industrial and urban development.

The result is that more and more land is taken out of production to build factories, motorways, administrative centres, power stations and the rest of the physical infrastructure of a modern industrial society.

Official figures frequently underplay the seriousness of such paving-over, not least because they indicate the net loss of land without giving any indication of its quality. Yet it is generally the best land that is lost to urbanisation, while the land added to the agricultural inventory tends to be forest land or scrub-land that is usually of very much lower quality.

In Egypt, for example, the 500,000 hectares of agricultural land lost to urbanisation since the building of the high dam at Aswan, is vastly superior to the 500,000 hectares of desert that has been opened up to irrigation as a result of the dam. Without vast inputs of fertiliser, which the country can ill afford, the 'new' land can produce very little.

Industrial development also entails the diversion of water resources from agriculture to industry. In China, the demand for water in the cities has increased dramatically since the government embarked on its programme of industrial expansion. Beijing's water requirements are expected to increase by 50 percent over the next 10 years, yet already, the water table around the capital is falling by 1.2 metres a year and a third of local wells have dried up.

Yet, Chinese planners are unconcerned: they have calculated that the water will provide 60 times more economic wealth when used by industry than when used in agriculture. Where agriculture and industry are in competition for water, the water invariably goes to the urban and industrial sectors, since they are capable of paying the most for it. [63]

Omitting emissions

The trade-off between economic growth and agricultural production is further exacerbated by pollution, leading to reduced crop yields, increased emissions of green-house gases and ozone depleting substances. Yet in its 330 pages, Toward2000 devotes less than a page to discussing the threat posed by pollution to agricultural production:

• The threat to food production posed by increases in ultraviolet radiation due to stratospheric ozone depletion is acknowledged to be "of concern", but the report concludes, "Ozone depletion could decrease crop productivity but present evidence is inconclusive and it is not known whether this phenomenon will have a negative impact in this century". [64] The threat is thus apparently deemed irrelevant to the report's brief. The potential impact on fisheries is not even discussed, despite the evidence that increased levels of ultraviolet radiation could have a substantial effect on the productivity of plankton - the base of the marine food chain. [65]
• The discussion on atmospheric pollutants and their impact on crops is confined to a 14-line passage on acid rain. The impact of ground-level ozone pollution is ignored altogether, although this single pollutant probably reduces US crop yields by 5-10 percent. [65]
• The impact of water pollution on agriculture is only discussed in passing - and then largely in the context of pollution by agricultural wastes.
• There is no discussion at all on the contamination of land by industrial wastes or by industrial accidents such as Chernobyl or Seveso.
• The impact of global warming, meanwhile, is given no more than six sentences. The report acknowledges that the impact of global warming on agriculture is potentially catastrophic, but it neither discusses remedial action nor considers the implications of its proposed strategy on emissions of the gases which contribute to global warming.

Global Warming: FAO's Blind Spot

As the UN agency with responsibility for world agriculture, FAO might reasonably have been expected to take a firm position on combating global warming. Yet virtually all FAO's proposed measures to increase food production would increase emissions of greenhouse gases:

• According to FAO's own figures, total energy requirements in agriculture will increase by 30 percent from 1982 to the year 2000. [67] Inevitably, much of this energy will come from fossil fuels, thus increasing emissions of carbon dioxide.
• The deforestation caused by the 'transfer' of tropical forests to agricultural use will also increase emissions of carbon dioxide, the vegetation and soils of unmanaged forests holding 20 to 100 times more carbon per unit area than agricultural systems. [68] If, as is likely, much of this forest is cleared by burning, emissions of methane and nitrous oxide will also result. The ploughing up and burning of grasslands would also increase the release of carbon from soils.
• Although the sources for the increasing atmospheric concentration of nitrous oxide (N20) - a greenhouse gas 270 times more powerful than carbon dioxide - have not been properly quantified, it is thought that a large proportion of the increase is due to fertiliser use, which of course FAO wants to expand still further. [69]
• Increasing numbers of ruminant livestock, especially cattle, will increase emissions of methane. The problem is likely to be exacerbated by the intensive production methods advocated by FAO, which lead to much greater methane emissions. [70]
• Increased irrigation will also increase the production of methane. Again, intensive methods of production will add to the problem. Where rice pad-dies are fertilised with artificial fertilisers, emissions are up to four times higher than in non-fertilised rice paddies. [71]

Who will eat?

Central to FAO's agriculture development policies has been the single minded pursuit of increased production. Yet, as Toward 2000 acknowledges, increased production does not necessarily translate into increased food availability for the poor. Indeed, the report provides ample evidence that, historically, the reverse has been the case:

"Household income/expenditure surveys in a number of countries... confirm that undernutrition is largely concentrated among the landless, share croppers, small farm-holders and small-scale fishermen. Increases in domestic production of food may result in only limited improvement in food consumption of the poor, especially when production increases consist largely of items consumed mainly by middle- and high-income consumers and produced on large and medium-sized farms, especially those highly mechanized." [72]

Toward 2000 blames the failure of increased output to reach the rural poor on "the institutional setting" in which agriculture takes place in the Third World. In particular,

"very unequal distribution of assets and access to resources may result... in the benefits of growth in the agricultural sector as a whole, bypassing small farmers and agricultural workers." [73]

Few would argue with this, or with the statement that

"land redistribution and tenancy reforms are the most fundamental of direct anti-poverty measures in the rural sectors of developing countries." [74]

What the report singularly fails to address, however, is the role that the agricultural policies it seeks to promote have played - and continue to play - in creating the "institutional setting" for rural poverty. The impact of agricultural intensification on farmers is illustrative of the problem:

At the farm level, intensification removes control of agricultural inputs from individual farmers and places it in the hands of outside interests. Instead of planting seed saved from the previous crop, fertilising the land with manure and compost from their own farm waste, or controlling pests and weeds through good husbandry, farmers must buy their inputs on the open market.

Price hikes are common - in Senegal, for example, the cost of fertiliser rose some 60 percent in the five years from 1975-l980; [75] in Korea, it rose 100 percent in 1979 alone [76]. The peasant has little choice but to pay up - or go under.

In Korea, often cited as an agricultural success story, the introduction of 'miracle rice' in tile early 19705 "left producers with escalating expenses and uncertain profit margins". [77] In just two years, from 1974 to 1976, pesticide use trebled, whilst fertiliser use doubled within a decade. Farm debt meanwhile rose 63 times between 1975 and 1985 - almost ten times the rate at which income and assets increased. [78]

Mechanisation further exacerbates the problem, not least by increasing rural unemployment and underemployment. As Clarence Dias of the International Centre for Law in Development notes,

"A World Bank study estimates that for each tractor purchased in Pakistan, between 7.5 and 11.8 full-time jobs are lost. After the purchase of a tractor the average farm size increased by 240 percent within three years, mostly through the eviction of tenants. Employment per cultivated acre dropped by 40 percent."[79]

A World Bank report on Java warns that the introduction of large power tilling machines could eliminate more than a million jobs. The report quotes a Javanese worker: "the only people who like tractors are the ones who own them". [80]

The net impact is thus to marginalise farmers, divorcing them from their means of production and placing them at the mercy of market forces over which they have no control.

At the community level, the impact is equally divisive. As individual farmers carry out more and more of the tasks in the production cycle by themselves, without having to seek help from their wider family or their community, traditional systems of mutual support begin to atrophy. [81]

Meanwhile, indebtedness, unemployment and widening differences in wealth further entrench existing inequalities and create new ones. As the poorest farmers go to the wall, their land holdings are bought up by richer farmers, leading to the concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands; money, rather than the fulfilment of communal obligations, becomes the currency of power and the poor begin to find themselves excluded from resources - water, land, forests - which were once open to all.

At the national level, agricultural intensification has massively increased dependence on foreign imports. Within four years of the Green Revolution being launched in India, 20 percent of the country's export earnings were being spent on fertiliser imports alone. [82] Oil imports have also risen, whilst the penetration of foreign multinationals into the agricultural sector has made many Third World countries little more than client states for agribusiness interests. [83]

Mounting debts have brought IMF restructuring programmes, triggering off a further cycle of impoverishment as welfare programmes are cut and agricultural production is still further intensified to increase export income.

Forced Intensification

In effect, by attempting to "transform agriculture into a dynamic productive sector" [84] by corralling peasants into the market and pushing for the "widespread diffusion of new technologies" to replace "backward agricultural technologies", [85] FAO is promoting the systematic marginalisation of rural people. In doing so, it is actively reinforcing the very "institutional setting" that deprives the poor of food, creating new power structures that are antithetical to the interests of farmers.

It is no coincidence that the intensification of agriculture has met with resistance in many countries. In South Korea, for example, the 'miracle' strains of rice met with widespread opposition.

"When official campaigns failed, local agricultural officials resorted to force to meet quotas. Rooting out rice fields planted to traditional rice was a common practice." [86]

In Senegal, Mohamed Gakou describes how, for a large rice project, the new farming methods

"are applied under the supervision of supervisors. This supervision sometimes takes the form of draconian constraints. The least lack of respect for the new techniques being disseminated and the time-table for crops, leads to the peasant's expulsion from the project zone and the repossession of the plot." [87]

In the context of such clear conflicts of interests between the needs of local people and the requirements of a "dynamic agricultural sector", any programme of land redistribution is likely to be piecemeal and short-lived. FAO itself admits that the "history of land reform is... largely one of failures". [88] Nor are the three 'success' stories cited in Toward 2000 - the Republic of Korea, Indonesian Transmigration and West Bengal - without critics:

• In Korea, the farmers have land - but intensification is crippling them with debt.
• In Indonesia, the Transmigration Programme has deprived indigenous groups of land and destroyed vast areas of forest: many settlers have returned home to Java unable to earn a living from farming the outer islands of the archipelago.
• In West Bengal,

  "land reform and tenancy control laws were executed by a local bureaucracy largely indifferent, occasionally corrupt and biased in favour of the rural oligarchy ... Quite frequently, protective tenancy legislation may have worsened the conditions of tenants." [89]

The beneficiaries of agricultural intensification, meanwhile, have been local elites and the agribusiness interests of the North. For them, the programme outlined in Toward 2000 represents a bonanza. It is no coincidence that FAO's Farm Mechanisation Working Group includes Caterpillar Tractors, John Deere, Fiat, Massey Ferguson, Mitsui, British Petroleum and Shell.

Food and Community First

In seeking to cast world hunger as an essentially technical problem - a lack of fertilisers, pesticides and modern know-how - Toward 2000 sidesteps the root cause of the crisis in Third World agriculture. For the crisis stems not from "backward agricultural technologies" nor from the "under-productiveness" of traditional farming practices, but rather from the growing separation between producers and the means of production and between producers and their produce.

Successive studies have highlighted the productivity and sustainability of traditional peasant farming in the Third World and indeed of organic methods in the North. [90] Yet, such studies are studiously ignored in Toward 2000. Similarly, the report downplays the inventiveness, dynamism and independence of local people. Instead, they are portrayed as in need of "educating", of "training" and, above all, of being "managed". But managed by whom? And in whose interests?

If the poor are to be fed with justice, the way forward lies down a very different route. The need is for an agriculture that:

• Maximises food availability rather than food production;
• Employs methods of farming that are not disruptive of the climate or of the environment;
• Keeps control of production within the hands of the farmer and the community;
• And maximises co-operation between farmers, thus strengthening the community and providing support to farmers in times of hardship.

Such an agriculture exists and is widely practised throughout the Third World. The most urgent priority is thus to cease those policies that are undermining the viability of traditional peasant systems and to create the wide economic and social change necessary to permit small farms to flourish.

If that means a vastly reduced role for agencies such as FAO, then so be it. For there is little that a bloated arid centralised bureaucracy in Rome can teach the peasants of Africa, India or South America in terms of agriculture: but, sadly, much that it can do to make their way of life unsupportable.

In that respect, Leo Tolstoy's comment on the predicament of the peasant is as relevant today as when it was written over a century ago:

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back."

It is a prescription that FAO, and the rest of the development industry, should heed.

Notes and References