GLOBAL AGRICULTURE : The Face of Farming: Bounty and Poverty : Harvest of Prosperity Bypasses Third World

A swift tour through the world of agriculture reveals a myriad of faces and problems.

The Kenyan farmer in a tattered fedora, his frown etched with reluctance, ponders a British expert’s suggestion that he switch to a new cash crop. An Indian scours the skies of Haryana state for signs of the gray clouds that carry the monsoon rains to his parched land. A Japanese grower contemplates an uneasy future because he is one of only six rice farmers left in the hamlet of Tominaga Higashi as the young flee their remote villages for township jobs. A comandante in Las Marias, wearing unkempt green fatigues and sporting a thick mustache and a few days’ growth on his chin, insists that the Salvadoran government turn over land to him and fellow guerrillas now that peace has come.

Farmers this diverse create a world of agriculture weighed down by puzzling contradictions:

* Enough crops are now produced to feed everyone on Earth. Yet 700 million people face starvation every year, and most of them are poor farmers.

* Almost all experts agree that Third World development has been crippled by political bias against the small, impoverished farmer. National leaders ignore the needs of the rural areas while--out of fear of urban food riots--catering to the demands of city dwellers. Yet experts are unsure how to turn things around and give the farmers a fair deal.

* The temptation to ignore agriculture remains strong even in countries outside the Third World. Agronomists, for example, look on Ukraine as a granary of enormous potential. Yet the Ukrainian government seems more concerned about the problems of nuclear weapons than food; foreign aid donors are more concerned about democratization than cultivation.

* Thirty thousand U.S. farms vanish every year, devoured by the maw of agribusiness. Some of the spirit of America seeps away with these farms. Yet most analysts insist that the loss strengthens U.S. agriculture and, in the long run, helps the world.

* For years, almost everyone except rich landlords agreed that land reform was the key to Latin American economic development. The great latifundios , or grand estates, had to be shattered and the pieces turned over to land-poor peasants. Yet only El Salvador and Nicaragua have major land-reform programs, and they embrace change only because peace agreements, hammered out under international pressure, oblige them to parcel out land to soldiers who have laid down their arms.

Amid all these contradictions, however, two truths persist:

First of all, countries cannot successfully industrialize if their farmers are too poor to buy manufactured goods. The United States became an industrial nation only after its farmers prospered. This truth is often ignored.

“We were once a society where most people were farmers,” pointed out Merle Jensen, a professor of plant science at the University of Arizona. “Now only 2% of the population are on the farms. If you ask people where you get milk, they say you get it from a Safeway. They don’t know that it comes from a cow. But what made our country strong was our strong land base. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington--they were all farmers.”

Keys to Success

Per Pinstrup-Andersen, the Danish agronomist who is executive director of the prestigious International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, paints a natural progression in development throughout the world. Farmers with income can buy manufactured goods. This fosters industrialization, which, in turn, leads to larger farms, and these eventually give way to the corporate farms of agribusiness.

That is the history of agriculture in the United States and, to some extent, Europe. For successful development, said Pinstrup-Andersen, the first steps, the economic empowerment of farmers, cannot be skipped.

Pinstrup-Andersen notes that the newly industrialized countries of Asia--countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia--invested first in the rural areas, financing infrastructure, agricultural research, land reform, irrigation and savings and credit institutions.

“They started in agriculture,” he said. “That was the locomotive that made the train go.”

Second among the truths of agriculture is the human side to farming, a cultural bridge, that is not always easy to cross.

Three decades ago, David Hapgood, an Africa specialist who worked as a consultant to the Peace Corps, wrote in a prescient book, “To achieve a better material life, African farmers must adopt a whole set of new techniques, and for this to happen, millions of peopleliving in isolation from the urban centers must decide they want to make revolutionary changes in their lives.”

Hapgood was not talking about inundating farmers with tractors and chemical fertilizer. He was talking about the need to change a way of thinking and looking at the world.

In India, for example, a Peace Corps volunteer came upon a farmer some years ago who had developed animal feed that was cheaper and more nutritious than any other in the region, but he refused to market it. The idea of transporting the feed long distances to customers without payment in advance paralyzed him. He had to have money in his hands first.

An efficient trading system is based on some form of trust, but the countryside farmer could not cope with trust.

Farmers sometimes will accept change and then regret it.

The West African country of Senegal is notorious for its bureaucratic elite, men who plan vacations in Paris but rarely leave the capital of Dakar to talk with farmers. In the 1970s, these bureaucrats encouraged peanut farmers throughout the country to buy fertilizer from the government on credit.

When the peanut crop failed in a drought, the bureaucrats refused to ease or forgive the payments. Instead, they dispatched the army into the countryside to collect the debt or collateral. Some frustrated farmers gave up their peanut cash crop and returned to subsistence farming.

Former Agriculture Secretary John R. Block talks about the Ukrainian farmer much the way Hapgood once talked of the African farmer.

After years of taking orders on a government collective farm, Block said in an interview, it takes “a great leap of faith” for a Ukrainian farmer to seek credit and strike out on his own.

Africa at Nadir

Yet Hapgood’s thoughts on the human factor have not been heeded often, and Block’s observations may meet the same fate. Agricultural aid programs often fail because donors neglect to spend enough time with millions of little farmers to help them make those revolutionary changes prescribed by Hapgood or take those great leaps of faith described by Block.

In any survey of worldwide agriculture, Africa lies at the nadir. It does not produce enough food to keep up with its growth in population. Per-capita food production dropped by almost 3% in 1992, the latest figure available.

Sixty percent of its rural population lives in poverty, largely the result of a refusal to invest in rural areas by the post-colonial governments of the 1960s.

“The bias against agriculture was severe in Africa,” Pinstrup-Andersen says. “Most countries felt that industrialization was the solution and that agriculture was backward and should be ignored. They wanted to skip a phase of development. They were looking toward Europe, not East Asia. And they failed to see that agriculture was leading the way to industrialization in East Asia.”

In the 1980s, the World Bank tried to reverse the bias through what economists called “structural adjustment.” It pressured African governments to remove tariffs that protected inefficient industries, to allow food prices to rise to world market levels and to devalue their currencies so farmers would get more money for their exports and pay less for imported goods.

But so far there is little convincing evidence that these programs have provided major help to the small farmers and the economies of these countries. Moreover, these programs try to effect change from on high, unlike Hapgood’s suggestion that agents of change must work closely with individual farmers.

Critics also contend that structural adjustments ignore the diversity of farmers and the tendency of some, in fact, to hold town jobs even while they or their families till the land. A policy might help this farmer in one sector of his livelihood while hurting him in the other.

The World Bank and the Overseas Development Institute of London recently completed a study of 60 years of farming and grazing in the Machakos district near Nairobi in Kenya. It underscores the rapidity of change in some areas of Africa and the difficulty of figuring out how to encourage it.

In the 1930s, British colonial administrators fretted over the Machakos district. The Kamba people grazed cattle in the hilly, semi-arid district and farmed just enough food to eat themselves. The land was so eroded that, according to one commission, “it is not too much to say that a desert has already been created.” In 1937, a British official reported that “natives will show you gulleys up to 30 feet deep with vertical sides that used to be paths through the bush.”

The population of Machakos has increased more than five times since then--from 225,000 to 1.4 million. There is little erosion now. Although the numbers of cattle, sheep and goats have doubled in 60 years, the district is under heavy cultivation and terraced against erosion. Using ox-drawn plows, the farmers produce cotton, coffee, corn, mangoes and tomatoes for markets. The value of its agricultural production is now 15 times larger than it was in 1930--or about three times more per person.

In a survey, two-thirds of the Kamba community leaders and farmers said they were better off than their fathers. Among the dissenters was a woman who said, “My father could sing and dance, but I have no time.”

There were many agents of change. The British used forced labor in the 1940s to install terracing to prevent heavy rainfall loss and erosion on the hills. But resentful farmers refused to keep these terraces in repair.

In the 1960s, however, after government officials slowed down their propaganda for terracing, word spread among the Kambas that a different type of terrace would save their soil. Almost all the farmers started using this new kind of terrace.

Government extension workers introduced new varieties of corn to the Kambas, but the farmers evidently switched to cash crops like coffee, cotton, mangoes and tomatoes on their own. Farmers also adopted the plow without pressure from government workers. The salesmanship of itinerant traders and the desire to imitate the white settler farmers in Kenya probably led to its use. And the farmers took to these innovations without any major sources of credit. They simply saved their money and paid in cash.

The key to the success of Machakos, said John English of the World Bank, one of the report’s authors, “was a general environment that encouraged people to change.”

The Latin Gap

In Latin America, agriculture is blighted by the great gap between the latifundios --a legacy of the Spanish colonial era--and the impoverished, often landless peasants. To compound the problem, the latifundio is usually wasteful--huge tracts are not cultivated. And the landlords have not modernized and mechanized their estates into any kind of agribusiness.

Latin America has also been hurt by the decreases in world prices for many of its agricultural products. In 1992, for example, the world prices for bananas, coffee and cotton all dropped.

Latin America is more urbanized than the rest of the Third World. But those who remain in the rural areas are worse off than rural people anywhere else. Sixty-one percent of its rural population is below the poverty line--just enough more than Africa to make it the highest percentage in the Third World.

For years, experts have preached the need for land reform that would put small farmers on the unused expanses of the latifundios.

In Nicaragua and El Salvador, where bloody civil wars marked past decades, the governments have pledged to buy land and distribute it to former soldiers from both sides of their conflicts.

“It’s not being done particularly well,” said Jeff Whisenant, the director of Latin American programs for Lutheran World Relief. “Can the governments drag their feet? Yes, they can. And the price of land goes over the top as soon as landowners realize what is happening.”

Asked if land reform would work if these governments had both the will and the funds, Whisenant said: “And if pigs had wings, they would fly. There’s no doubt that land reform ought to be done. But it’s rare that those components (will and funds) are there.”

Asian Disparities

Asia has more rural poor than any other continent. The International Fund for Agricultural Development, a U.N. agency, says that 633 million rural Asians live below the poverty line, two-thirds of the worldwide total.

But the picture is not uniform. China and East Asia are doing well economically with strong agricultural sectors; in fact, no area had higher increases in per-capita food production in the 1980s. But in Bangladesh, the worst case, 86% of the rural population is poor.

In the 1960s and 1970s, there had been fears of deadly famines in South Asia, but these were averted by the Green Revolution. Scientists introduced high-yield seeds that multiplied production, and the fears of famine have dissipated.

Some critics, however, say the Green Revolution has enriched large landholders and widened the gap between the rich and poor farmer.

“This is not true,” Pinstrup-Andersen says. “These assertions are based on the first two years of the Green Revolution. This bias toward the large farmer turned away after two years. Small farmers then used the seeds and benefited. It takes time to take a risk.”

But he is worried now whether food production in South Asia will keep up with population growth: “I am afraid they will be short of food and be too poor to buy it.”

Subsidized Europe

In Europe, a great deal of money and time is spent trying to protect the small farmer, to protect a rural heritage.

France, for example, does not want to lose a landscape crowded with small, plush, undulating farms with their antique stone houses and cavernous ancient barns. More practically, almost any Norman farmer will spit invective against Polish beef slipping across the borders.

One irony of the subsidy program: Though designed to help the small farmer, the subsidies, according to the U.N.-affiliated Food and Agricultural Organization, have gone mostly to large farms in Europe.

The subsidies have generated a good deal of overproduction--at great budget cost--and now the Common Market is cutting price supports for grains and beef. Specialists predict substantial drops in production by the end of the century.

The huge stockpiles of food in Europe and the United States raise the question of why so many millions should go hungry in the Third World. But many developing countries lack the hard cash to buy American and European food, and the shortage is not made up by food relief programs, which are strapped for funds.

New U.S. Ways

As for the United States, studies indicate that change is as prevalent in American rural life today as it was among Kenya’s Machakos in recent decades. But it is, of course, of a different nature.

The number of American farms has declined from 6 million in 1930 to slightly more than 2 million. But food consumption has increased, and American farmers now earn 10 times as much from exports as they did then. Most rural Americans no longer live and work on farms.

A team of professors led by William P. Browne of Central Michigan University and Jerry R. Skees of the University of Kentucky published a book that tried to shake some myths. “The trailer park and the factory are very real,” they wrote. “Moreover, life inside them is typical for far more rural people than is life on that picture-perfect farm. . . . Today only a minority of rural people rely on farming.”

They also reported that the middle-sized American farm was vanishing and rural America was splitting into large corporate farms and small farms that barely produce. They said 70% of U.S. farms earn less than $40,000 a year. And 1% of farms--the large ones--earn 37% of all farm income.

As rural people leave the farm and look for jobs in factories that locate near cheap labor, rural poverty persists. The rate is the same as it was in the 1960s. The transformation of American agriculture into big business seems inevitable. “The tiny farms cannot compete in the global economy,” said Block, who was President Ronald Reagan’s agriculture secretary.

Yet Prof. Jensen of the University of Arizona wonders whether the American farmers have not become so big, so technically advanced, that they fail to understand the problems of the rest of the world.

“We have leapfrogged way ahead of all those people who sit on a donkey,” he said. “We have gone so far ahead and left those people behind that we are sort of an island. We are not really working with the little guy on the donkey.

“If we don’t go back and drag those people up, either through education or extending them the new technology, it’s just going to be worse. And by worse I mean there will be more boats heading toward our shores.”