Myth of Large Farms Feeding the World

According to UN reports, Small farms produce 80% of the consumed food in developing countries.

There is possibly no institution more important to the survival of humanity right now than the small farm. To most, this statement may seem unbelievable. Surely, it is the vast mechanized farms, the mega farms and latifundia that are feeding the world. While it is true the Norman Borlaugh’s green revolution of the 70s increased food security, and saved millions of lives from starvation and food shortages during the late 20th century, but since the 1990s, that has changed drastically. The cost and degradations of soil resulting from using petro-chemicals has meant the green revolution method was unsustainable in most areas, and it was was small farms that provided sustenance for people. Secondly, since the 1990s the take over of small farms and lands by mega-corporations in the 2nd Big Game(See farmlandgrab.org for extensive list of land takeovers in the last two decades around the world) , has resulted in a decline in food safety.

There are two misconceptions hidden within the notion that big farms feed the world. The first misconception is that they grow food. 60% of large farms grow bio fuels, often sky-rocketing the prices food in local areas. Guatemala went from poor subsistence, but self-sustainability in 2000, to having the greatest malnutrition rates in the western world by 2008. Eight years was all it took for U.S. to flood the country with cheap grains, destroy small farmers and for large corporations to step in and buy out their lands, to replace them with corn for biofuels, resulting in skyrocketing corn prices and hunger.

The second misconception is that large farms are sustainable. They are not. The green revolution depended on billions of tons of petro-chemical based fertilizers. In addition to being costly, (over 12,000 farmers committed suicide in India in 2012 due to debts to the chemical fertilizer and seed company Monsanto) they eventually deplete the soil and leave it ruined and polluted. It is estimated that 1 kilo of industrial farmed food require 9 liters of oil for mechanized watering systems, airplane spraying, harvesters, storage, refrigeration, transport and packaging. In addition to all the CO2 to contend with from the fossil usage, there is billions of tons of food waste (2.5 billion tons in 2022) from over production and and global tranportation losses, dumped in landfills, increasing methane levels. Both these cause climate change resulting in greater natural catastrophes from drought to fires, from floods to hurricanes. Combines further compact soil into cement like hardness making it essentially dead. The future based on large farms is not bright.

In contrast, UN reports from 2014 and 2022 show that small scale farms managed by an estimated 2.5 billion people, farming 500 million smallholder farm households, provided 80 percent of the food consumed in the developing world (June 4th 2013). The Transnational Institute agrees, arguing that tradition agroecology and small farms are the only way forward due to the close link between mega-farms and ecological crises. Small farms as the solution to our world’s troubles is also the conclusion of the groundbreaking, A History of World Agriculture by Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart. The myth of the large farm has to die if we are to survive this century. This blog will look at the benefits, the methods, the history of the small farm and of farming in general, and show why a return to the small farm is the way of the future.

Image by author, of the Oil Octopus, originally published in Energy, Education and War, by Yuko Kosokawa and Keith Wesley Adams, (Kaibunsha, Japan, 2016)