> Brad, productivity does not just translate into cheap food. Processors
> and suppliers also capture quite a bit of the productivity gains.
According to Levin and Lewontin ('The Dialectical Biologist', 1985), on the US situation:
"The consumer has not benefited. The average price of food has risen more rapidly than the average of all prices. The ratio of food prices in 1970 to that in 1930 was 2.48; the ratio for all purchased goods and services was 2.33. So food has become not cheaper but relatively more expensive, even though farm productivity has risen more rapidly."
also:
"Farmers, then, are a unique sector of petty producers who own some of the means of production but whose conditions of production are completely controlled by suppliers of inputs and purchasers of output. They form the modern equivalent of the "putting out" system of the pre-factory era. Tehy are the conduits through which the benefits of the agricultural research enterprise [which has a significant state sector] flow to the large concentration of capital. Because of the physical nature of farming and the structure of capitalist production and investment, this is a stable situation and must be understood not as an exception to the rule of capital but as one of its forms."
and:
"At present only 10 percent of the value added in agriculture is actually added on the farm. About 40 percent of the value is added in creating the inputs (fertilizer, machinery, seeds, hired labor, fuel and pesticides), and 50 percent is added in processing, transportation, and exchange after the farm commodities leave the farm gate."
This, incidentially, is the real meaning of GM for Monsanto and buddies - carving a bigger slice of the pie in the farm inputs market, and expanding along the chain into the outputs market.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.