C. Pollak and I exchange as follow:
"On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, boddhisatva wrote:
> The challenge is to modernize agriculture in the best way feasible.
I don't think anyone by a straw man would argue with that."
Don't be so sure, comrade. There are plenty of people on the left who are simply against modernization.
Next exchange
"> I can't help but take today's NY Times Op-Ed entitled "The Cancun
> Delusion" as a something of a personal vindication.
I wouldn't if I were you. It's based on the delusion that high-tech American style farming has a higher yield per unit land than low tech. It doesn't. American farming has been wasteful of land since the very beginning precisely because we had so much. (Land-mining Michael Perelman once called it.) What it is remarkably productive in is in output per unit labor -- which is not necessarily what you want to maximize in countries which have lots of labor and little land."
There simply is no question that modern agriculture produces more yield per unit land. Absolutely no question. Most critiques of U.S.-style agriculture come from a time before "no-till" when Midwestern farmers were incredibly spendthrift with their super-abundant topsoil and also generally take in the dustbowl experience where grain farmers farther West based their farming on the mistaken assumption of consistent rain year in and year out and destroyed thousands of acres by exposing them to drought. Therefore many leftists assume that modern methods cause more topsoil erosion than traditional methods. In fact, the opposite is true.
The fallacy that traditional methods of tillage conserve more topsoil are based on the observation that they do not generally till as deeply as machine methods, which is true. However, deep tillage is an antiquated approach and was nothing more than a time-saver for the farmer. It is not necessary. Modern agriculture is now shallow-till or no-till. Traditional farmers, on the other hand, do not have the no-till option. What's more, their tillage methods, being so slow, cannot be timed in order not to leave the land vulnerable to erosion due to drought or flood. Recent dustbowls have come from traditional agriculture, not modern agriculture.
Finally, it is completely fallacious to say that the third world has lots of labor and little land. Even India has wild, undeveloped lands and Africa has truly incredible amounts of land. Moreover, we are talking about hand agriculture how much value is added by hand agriculture? Very little, in general. The idea that we should encourage more hand agriculture flies in the face of any concerted effort to increase world GDP, which is absolutely desirable.
The Cancun negotiations seem to offer a pretty stark refutation of the idea of the productivity of high-tech agriculture. If it's so productive, why do American cotton farmers -- the most highly technologized in the world -- need massive subsidies to keep dirt poor Malian peasants on small plots from eating their lunch?
Michael ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk