Dear C.'s,
I can't help but take today's NY Times Op-Ed entitled "The Cancun Delusion" as a something of a personal vindication. After spending years on the lists being attacked because I question the left's love of peasant farming, we now see the realities laid out clearly in Cancun. Reduce subsidies to 1st world agribusiness and you open markets to 3rd world agriculture in which case you encourage either environmental degradation by peasant farmers or agricultural modernization that pushes many of them off the land. Fail to open markets and you simply continue to starve the cash market for 3rd world staples and move 3rd world farmers into specialties like flowers and fruits and vegetables destined for the North (not to mention opium and coca).
There are very few nations in which agricultural autarky is possible and probably none where it is desirable. Agriculture is a very difficult business with naturally small margins and large financial risks due to weather and pests. Acting rationally, typical unhedged, undiviersified producers (and even some hedged, diversified producers) will always tend to over-produce, over-pollute and overextend their land's capacity. To both diversify and compete with undiversified producers, agricultural producers must either have very large operations themselves so that they can produce each product in their range efficiently or have easy access to complex hedging strategies that imitate this physical diversification - and enough capital to make the hedges worthwhile.
Eventually, agricultural producers will link into communes across national boundaries (it's already happened) but under any economic regime, the small family farm is a thing of the past and rightly so. It's an unreasonably tough way to make a living in a modern world. There's nothing good about small-scale, low-tech farming. It's just unnecessary hard work. The challenge is to modernize agriculture in the best way feasible.
peace,
boddi