Last updated on August 31, 2011
“A&P was at the center of a bitter political struggle that lasted for nearly half a century–a struggle that went far beyond economics. At its root were competing visions of society. One vision could be described with such words as ‘modern’ and ‘scientific,’ favoring the rationalism of cold corporate efficiency as a way to increase wealth and raise living standards. The other vision could fairly be termed ‘traditional.’ Dating to Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries, the traditional vision harked back to a society of autonomous farmers, craftsmen, and merchants in which personal independence was the source of individual opportunity and collective prosperity.”
This is from Marc Levinson’s The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, which tells the story of the famous A&P chain of grocery stores and which I began reading as soon as I received it earlier this week.
My interest in Levinson’s book stems from my interest in agricultural value chains in developing countries, but I think it will make for great reading in my law and economics seminar next spring when we talk about vertical integration and the Sherman Antitrust Act. Indeed, in September 1946, A&P was found to have used its size and market power to offer prices that were too low, thereby pricing its competitors out of the market.
Regarding the struggle between a modern and scientific vision on the one hand and a traditional vision on the other hand, I cannot help but be reminded of the over-romanticizing of small farmers and the accompanying disdain for agribusiness that I encounter all too frequently in development policy circles.
Unfortunately for those who love the idea of small farmers, it is highly unlikely that small farmers can feed the world. It is much more fruitful to think of organic, locally grown agricultural commodities as a luxury good that some of us are fortunate enough to be able to afford than it is to try to impose one’s preferences on people who cannot afford it. This might be the topic of a future post.
Current research supports the idea that small farmers can feed the world, actually, and feed it in a culturally appropriate, ecologically sensitive way. Might I direct you to recent writing by Olivier de Schutter and the IAASTD report? I will also point out that post-harvest losses range from 15-50% in developing countries and quite inexpensive technologies and infrastructure could reduce this dramatically.
I will grant you that industrial agriculture is quite good at generating feedstock for biofuels and confined animal feeding operations. Unfortunately, it is also good at driving traditional farmers from their lands into unemployment in urban slums or plantation labour that does not provide a decent living.
Thanks for your comment, Eden. My view is that it’s not so much about feasibility as it is about desirability. Small farmers could perhaps feed the world (although I have my doubts, seeing as to how we don’t observe the counterfactual), but at what price? The transaction costs of collecting from many smallholders would eventually add up to higher food prices. As a development economist, I’m not sure this is what I want for the world’s poor.
As for driving traditional farmers from their lands into unemployment in urban slums or plantation labor that does not provide a decent living, if countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and the countries of Western Europe managed to industrialize their agricultural sectors without these problems, I believe developing countries can as well. But once again, not observing the counterfactual and not having experimental data available, this remains speculative.
I would argue that we don’t see industrial agriculture feeding the world. We see millions of hungry still, and we see huge profits at the top of the value chain. Current low prices – created by dumping of subsidized agricultural products – are still too high for many in developing nations. This is a broader question of poverty, not of food prices, and a question of who controls agriculture.
You might want to read up on colonization to discover why the countries you list were able to industrialize their agricultural sector. (This will also shed light on the pains -deaths, poverty – accompanying Britain’s agricultural revolution, for example.) At the height of the industrial revolution, Britain was reliant on grain imports from India’s peasant agriculture. Many of the costs of this modernization were (and still are) externalized.
Which brings us to the other issue that has been elided – the unsustainability of and the degradation created by fossil-fuel dependent monocultures.
P.S. – an article on agroecology – cutting age science and small-scale farming: http://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/node/971