Last updated on April 13, 2014
A new study by Jennifer Leavy and Naomi Hossain, of the Institute for Development Study:
So who wants to farm, and under what conditions? Where are economic, environmental and social conditions favorable to active recruitment by educated young people into farming? What policy and programmatic conditions are creating attractive opportunities in farming or agro-food industry livelihoods?
This paper explores these conditions in a context of food price volatility, and in particular rising food prices since 2007. To do so, it analyses primary qualitative research on the attitudes of young people and their families to farming in 2012, a time when food prices had been high and volatile for half a decade. In theory, assuming higher prices benefit small farmers, food farming should be more attractive since food prices started to rise in 2007.
But this simple causal assumption overlooks both that in many developing countries, it takes considerable economic power – ownership or access to cultivable land and affordable credit for inputs – to turn a profit in farming. It also fails to take into account more sociological explanations governing work and occupational choice – status aspiration and merit on the one hand, and perceived risk on the other.
These two explanations help to explain why young people from relatively low income families, particularly those most likely to innovate and raise productivity levels, do not perceive farming as a realistically desirable occupational choice.
This brought to mind one of my favorite articles on food policy, written by Paul Collier and published in Foreign Affairs in 2008:
The first giant that must be slain is the middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture. With the near-total urbanization of these classes in both the United States and Europe, rural simplicity has acquired a strange allure. Peasant life is prized as organic in both its literal and its metaphoric sense. (Prince Charles is one of its leading apostles.) In its literal sense, organic agricultural production is now a premium product, a luxury brand. … In its metaphoric sense, it represents the antithesis of the large, hierarchical, pressured organizations in which the middle classes now work. … Peasants, like pandas, are to be preserved. But distressingly, peasants, like pandas, show little inclination to reproduce themselves. Given the chance, peasants seek local wage jobs, and their offspring head to the cities. This is because at low-income levels, rural bliss is precarious, isolated, and tedious.