Feeding the world 2

By Mundie Salm

As the world's population is expected to rise from 7 to 9 billion by the year 2050, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that grain output will have to rise by around half while meat output will have to double by 2050. How will this be possible?

The cover article in the Guardian Weekly of 20-26 August describes a set of 21 papers published by the UK's Royal Society, pondering this question. Concerns include the limits of water and land availability to grow the extra food, as well as control of technologies by a small group of agribusinesses. Different low- and high-tech solutions are suggested. One high-tech option is to produce artificial meat in giant vats. One can only wonder what kind of impacts such a development would have on (small-scale) livestock keeping!

In the August 26 issue of the Economist, Brazil was featured as the way forward for agriculture in order to be able to meet the needs of 9 billion by 2050. The argument here is that Brazil's large-scale, chemical input- and technology-driven monoculture agriculture producing for global markets offers an "alternative" way forward. Brazil is seen as a miracle as it has managed to transform itself from being a food importer into one of the world's biggest food producers within the last three decades. For example, in 2009, Brazil led in world exports of beef, poultry, coffee, orange juice and sugarcane. The country also accounted for about a third of world soybean exports, which it grows on 6 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

This article promotes the notion that "big is beautiful"; however, there are some issues that are skewed in the discussion. For one thing, small-scale family farming in Brazil is not presented correctly at all. The article states that whatever is not a giant operation is an unproductive and "inefficient hobby farm". It states that only 7 percent of farm output comes from family farming, and distinguishes only small-scale poultry farming as productive.

The official statistics of the Brazilian agricultural research census of 2006 show a very different picture, family farming! While making up 84 percent of farm operations on 24 percent of the farmland, family farming generated 89 percent more gross production than large-scale operations (valued at 577 reals/ha/year compared to 358 reals/ha/year). The same census also showed the importance of small-scale family farming for employment as it provides three times as many jobs than the large-scale high-tech alternative (12.3 million compared to 4.2 million people). And finally, family farmers provide an important contribution of food to Brazil's own population - up to 65 percent according to AS-PTA, Brazil's family farming and agroecology organisation. Figures from the census: 87 percent of cassava, 70 percent of beans, 46 percent of maize, 58 percent of milk, 50 percent of poultry, 59 percent of pork and 30 percent of beef production produced by family farming.

Don't these figures show that small can in fact be very beautiful - and important, especially when it comes to regional food systems and for creating local employment opportunities? 
 

Read also: Feeding the world 1

This is the second in a series of blogs as we draw up to World Food Day, reflecting on different discussions about food security and how they relate to small-scale farming.