The Worldwide Destruction of the Family Farm. Wall Street’s Unprecedented Land Grab
Sacrificing Food Security for Profit
By Colin Todhunter
Global Research
August 05, 2014
A recent review carried out by the organization GRAIN revealed that small farms produce most of the world’s food and are more productively efficient than large farms [1].
Facilitated by an appropriate policy framework, small farmers could easily feed the global population. However, small farmers are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the world’s farmland. The world is fast losing farms and farmers through the concentration of land into the hands of the rich and powerful. The report concluded that if nothing is done to reverse this trend, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.
One major reason why small farms are disappearing is the rapid growth of monoculture plantations. In the last 50 years, 140 million hectares – well more than all the farmland in China – have been taken over for soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane alone. By definition, peasant agriculture prioritizes food production for local and national markets as well as for farmers’ own families, whereas corporations take over scarce fertile land and prioritize commodities or export crops for profit and markets far away that cater for the needs of the affluent.
This process impoverishes local communities and brings about food insecurity. GRAIN’s Camila Montecinos concludes that the concentration of fertile agricultural land in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day. While industrial farms have enormous power, influence and resources, GRAIN’s data review showed that small farms almost everywhere outperform big farms in terms of productivity.
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