A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje;

Author:Chris Smaje;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)

CHAPTER TEN

Dearth

Is there a danger of food shortages or famine in societies that aren’t integrated into a wider economy able to smooth out the inevitable peaks and troughs of local production, or increase food availability through high-tech means, especially during an emergency? The image of desperate, starving peasant farmers haunts popular consciousness. As do the words of historian Richard Tawney: ‘the position of the rural population is that of a man standing permanently up to the neck in water so that even a ripple is sufficient to drown him'.58 Language like ‘subsistence farming’ doesn’t really help, since the distance from subsistence to bare subsistence and thence to hunger seems short. The decline in major famines since the 1960s is often attributed to globalisation, diversification out of agriculture, and economic development.59 Surely nobody can conscionably argue we should reverse all that?

But there’s a more complex story to tell, and it turns on what we mean by ‘integration into a wider economy’. The starting point is a degree of uncertainty about premodern hunger and famines – how widespread were they, who suffered from them, and why? Solid data are hard to come by, but there are plausible grounds to think they were less widespread than we might think – and that their victims were often poor people caught in the arable corners of their day, people who struggled mostly because the powerful didn’t much care about their fate. Modern famines are similar. When we see a man up to his neck in water, it’s worth checking if someone is pressing down on his head. Evidence from various times and places suggests that independent smallholders with secure access to enough land haven’t usually suffered from catastrophic hunger.60

In fact, modernisation has often been a driver of hunger. England’s last serious famine was in the 1620s, striking commercial livestock farmers, not autonomous peasants, who were ‘victims of premature specialisation’, unable to sell their produce at sufficiently high prices to afford the grain they needed to survive.61 The completion of the first era of globalisation in the 19th century prompted major famines in Asia and Latin America as peasants were forcibly incorporated as colonial subjects into the world economy, while the turn to commercial production of staple foods for global markets in some cases worsened inequality, hunger and disease. Integrated global markets and their speculative structures can actively fuel hunger, which occurred, for example, in the 2008 food-price spike.62

Tawney’s metaphor is often applied indiscriminately to all historic peasant societies, but he was actually addressing his comments to parts of 1930s China after the modernising convulsions of the 19th century. The same occurred with 20th-century modernisation in Africa – and indeed in the 20th century more widely. The decades around the two world wars were, in the words of famine expert Alex de Waal, ‘the most dreadful period of famine in world history’ caused by modern governments fomenting famines or acting indifferently to their occurrence.63

De Waal imputes the decline of famines over the last 50 years or

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