While outright imperial violence is now rarely used to alter a developing country's food system (and may tarnish the prestige of States that use it), detrimental forces are still at work. To make clear the nature of these forces, and in support of the proposition that the industrialized countries' dominant model is being exported, we must see how and why this model itself developed. The point of the exercise is to show its costs and diminish its prestige - a prestige which gives this model a psychological advantage directly influencing decisions made in the Third World. Countries though nominally independent may still be colonized both economically and intellectually. This state of affairs is often promoted by industrialized countries which have a short-term interest in keeping the Third World dependent on their agricultural methods, processes and products, and in maintaining an international division of labour in which the southern hemisphere continues to supply cheap traditional cash crops as well as, increasingly, luxury agricultural products to northern markets. The rich countries may also, consciously or unconsciously, regard their own achievements as the only viable solutions for problems posed elsewhere.
This combination of forces creates a three-fold and self- sustaining dependency. First, southern countries accept and practise an imported food system model, requiring expensive inputs, as a supposed avenue towards development. Second, this model proves incapable of solving their food problem and thus fosters increased food imports. Third, to pay for these imports, agricultural export production (using, again, costly imported techniques) must be increased, thus reducing resources devoted to the attain-ment of an authentic national food system. And so on, in a vicious spiral.
What, then, is the nature of the dominant model? For the sake of clarity, one can show a food system as a line composed of three segments:
These categories can be considerably refined; they nevertheless apply to the means employed by any human community for feeding itself. In the now developed countries, the first and last segments of the line have come entirely under the control of industry (often called 'agribusiness'). This development has made it meaningless to speak in classic economic terms of the primary (agricultural), secondary (industrial) and tertiary (services) sectors at a time when agriculture has itself become entirely dependent both on industrial products and on services (like bank credit and transport) both upstream and downstream from the farm.
Historical Development of the Dominant Model
The historical conditions of countries where the high-technology (HT) food production and distribution system developed made it an entirely rational and effective response to the problems posed in these societies. In the United States, for instance, vast land areas coupled with limited manpower made early mechanization imperative - indeed agricultural productivity in the United States has always been measured in terms of output per man, not per unit of land. By the 1850s, tens of thousands of machines were already used in America. Harvesters were most popular because they insured the farmer against disaster and helped him spread his risks. With a harvester, he could reap crops on as much land as he could sow - impossible if he relied on hand cutting. An inventive explosion of agricultural technology - all of it labour saving - took place in the nineteenth century: steel-share mould- board ploughs, drill planters, mechanical screws for land clearing, barbed wire allowing enclosure of much larger areas in a shorter time, and grain binders were a few of the items, besides harvesters, enjoying widespread use in the latter half of the century. The Civil War, which took so many men away from farming, the emancipation of slaves and the burgeoning industrial development creating a demand for factory workers all strengthened the trend towards HT agriculture.
The desired results were soon manifest: in 1800, 373 man-hours were needed to produce 100 bushels of wheat and 34 man-hours for the same amount of corn. By 1900, the figures were reduced respectively to 108 and 147. But by 1959, the necessary man-hours were only 18 and 22.15 The first agricultural revolution in the now-industrialized countries consisted in a shift from human to animal-mechanical power. The second revolution, which has taken place especially since World War II, is based on scientific innovation and automotive power. It has reduced labour input even more drastically through the use of self-propelled machinery, genetically improved varieties and much greater amounts of fertilizers and pesticides.
The HT model is today capable of feeding 220 million Americans through the efforts of fewer than 2.5 million farmers and of producing millions of tons for export besides. There is no question that it has been successful. There is no question either that this model is generally regarded throughout the world as the most 'modern' and 'efficient' ever devised. This is true enough - but only for those countries whose specific needs are met by it. The United States was land-rich and labour-poor. Nearly all today's developing countries are land-poor and labour-rich. A production system entirely conceived to economize labour and spare workers for other tasks will have the same consequences when used in countries whose chief unresolved dilemma is to give productive employment to the great majority of the population that lives in rural areas yet which cannot find a livelihood there. Countries which adopt such a model must, therefore, expect it to contribute to labour displacement and to encourage out-migration towards already unmanageable cities where few jobs in industry or services are available. On these grounds alone, there is reason to question both the 'modernity' and the 'efficiency' of the HT model when applied to the Third World.
Costs of the High Technology Model
There are other serious costs - economic, social, and environmental - inherent in this model also. It is so expensive to use that only the most competitive farms stay in business: just after World War n, US farmers spent half their gross incomes on production expenses; the figure is now 80 per cent and rising. Farm supplies are a $90 billion annual business and borrowing to purchase them has resulted in $120 billion agricultural credit outstanding. To sustain the cost/price squeeze, farmers must try to expand at the expense of their less fortunate neighbours. Four and a half million family farms have been eliminated since the 1930s, and today one-third of all food produce is supplied by a mere 2 per cent of farmers grossing over $200,000 yearly, while the top 20 per cent raise 80 per cent of all crops and animals.16 Land concentration is expected to continue: one US Department of Agriculture scenario predicts that by 1985, over 60 per cent of all farmers working in 1975 will have disappeared.17 It now costs about $400,000 to create a single job in agriculture, approximately ten times the cost of an average job in industry.
The struggle to survive imposes a goal of maximum yields today - whatever the long-term costs. Monoculture and economies of scale become the only answer: a farmer cannot afford to leave space for trees, hedges, pastures, fallow fields or 'low-value' crops. A detailed description, impossible here, of the ecological damage wrought by this system would include the increased use of fertilizers with rapidly diminishing returns; disastrous pest outbreaks (for example, the cotton boll worm) created by pesticide use which destroys natural predators, and the pollution of land, water and the rest of the food chain by these chemicals. Non-renewable energy to keep this system functioning amounts to 1,400 litres of oil per American per year. If one attempted to feed the world's 4,000 million people on an American diet using US agricultural production technologies (assuming oil were the only energy source) all known petroleum reserves would be exhausted within eleven years. Underground water reserves are being 'mined' for irrigation to the point that one reservoir, currently supplying seven States, will, at present rates, have disappeared by the year 2000. A third of US topsoil has already been irrevocably lost.18
Perhaps most alarming of all is the narrowing of the genetic base of North American crops. The devastating US corn blight in 1970 prompted a study by the National Academy of Sciences which concluded that North American crops are 'impressively uniform genetically and impressively vulnerable'. A mere six varieties of corn account for nearly three-quarters of all production, two varieties of peas for 96
per cent, four breadwheats for 75 per cent of all Canadian harvests, etc.19
When we examine the post-harvest segment of this 'modern' and 'efficient' food system, we find that it is incapable of providing a balanced diet to the entire population at a reasonable cost. The negative health aspects of the so-called 'affluent diet' are too well documented to need elaboration here.20 What is perhaps less well known is that malnutrition and outright starvation were so prevalent in the United States in the late 1960s that a federal crash programme in food assistance was undertaken. Its cost to taxpayers is presently close to $10 billion annually, and one could argue that the United States could not long sustain a post-harvest system subservient to a highly concentrated food processing industry without subsidizing the poorest consumers. About three- quarters of all profits realized in this sector go to some fifty companies; they benefit both from the sale of highly elaborate products to the majority of consumers as well as from food assistance programmes. The latter are 'backed by the American food industry which is strengthened by a substantial boost in purchasing power'. Even so, several million hungry and malnourished Americans, especially in rural areas, do not receive the food assistance to which they are theoretically entitled.21 A similar analysis of European food systems (themselves much imbricated in that of the United States) would yield similar conclusions.
We have, then, a food system which is neither environment enhancing nor ecologically sustainable, costly yet incapable of providing a nutritious diet for all the citizens of one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Its production system may - for the moment - be effective, but it is also scientifically crude and linear, relying on industrial techniques to yield an end-product (the system's only goal) that will fetch the best price on national and international markets. It is based on the survival of the fittest and elimination of all but the largest producers. Yet this is the system that more and more Third World countries are adopting - or attempting to adopt - because their dominant classes see it as more remunerative for themselves; or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, because they mistakenly equate 'Western' with 'productive' and 'superior'. The prestige of the HT model has grown highest in the developing countries at the very time when significant numbers of knowledgeable Americans and Europeans are questioning the economic, social and ecological relevance to national needs of their own systems; and particularly questioning the oligopolistic control agribusiness exerts over them.
The Interaction of the High Technology Model and Third World Food Systems
We have described the HT model, for the sake of convenience, as if it were closed, but we have already seen that no food system (even, or especially, a dominant one) is self-contained. The industrialized countries' system could not function without substantial inputs from the Third World - in fact, luxury supplements to northern diets are more than ever provided by countries which themselves have a serious food problem.
Among possible objections to the above analysis are these three:
1. At the factual level, one might argue that the Third World is not adopting the dominant food system model, nor is it continuing to supply outside food systems, along colonial lines, on unfavourable terms.
2. Assuming that developing countries are adopting the dominant model, the negative consequences described have only recently become serious. Forewarned is forearmed: these negative aspects can be foreseen, counteracted and mastered. In any event, the only way to conquer hunger is to increase food production, and the only way to do that is to modernize agriculture in ways that have proven effective in the industrialized countries.
3. The role of bilateral and multilateral assistance is to help Third World governments attain the development objectives they have themselves defined, and modernization along dominant model lines is what they want. It is not in the province of donor governments or agencies to contradict them.
Concerning the first objection, I have attempted elsewhere to show in some detail that the Third World is in fact adopting the dominant model as well as supplying its supplementary food needs on unequal terms.22 Suffice it here to summarize some major points.
The Third World as a Market for the HT Model
The Green Revolution strategy is a text-book case of the industrial input-intensive method of agricultural production. It should have been clear from the outset that only the better-off Third World farmers with access to credit would be able to adopt it and that small producers would find themselves at an immediate competitive disadvantage. This is exactly what has happened. Competition for land has increased as agriculture has become a profitable investment and rural dispossession has, as a result, intensified. The outcome is that while food production has indeed increased (although less than often claimed) fewer people proportionally are able to buy it and millions have been deprived of the means of producing food for themselves.23
Such effects were perhaps not intentional, but this commercialization of agriculture was certainly encouraged, as one US planner noted:
The agricultural modernization (the Green Revolution) seeds signal could be the seedbed of new market economies in the world's low income countries ... [Green Revolution farms must] make economic ties to a wide array of agribusinesses - manufacturers of agricultural equipment and chemicals, storage and warehousing operations, processing firms and distributing organizations ... Businessmen from the more developed economies and international lending agencies are all engaged in efforts to ... spread the use of the new technologies.24
Mechanization is not, strictly speaking, necessary to Green Revolution husbandry, but it is often perceived by larger landholders as an effective means of social control and preferable to dealing with potentially restive agricultural labourers. Many governments' policies, particularly in Latin America, have directly encouraged mechanization, with the result that, by 1972, 2.5 million jobs had been lost on that continent alone, according to a 'conservative estimate' by an FAO expert.25
The Green Revolution has also had the effect of reducing drastically the genetic variety of cultivated species in the Third World - thus increasing vulnerability to disease and eliminating part of the germplasm resources upon which all countries must rely for genetic improvements in the future.26
Large centralized storage and processing facilities for cereals and oilseeds on the industrialized country pattern are increasingly favoured by lending agencies (and TNCs). An FAO expert paints this picture:
Piles of rice bran rot in a government rice mill. Groundnut mills set up as outlets for farmers' crops stand idle because of lack of supplies. A grain marketing board operating grain stocks ... finds that it must add 100 per cent to its purchasing price to cover all costs and losses incurred. Another board sends soldiers to induce farmers to sell their grain ... Further examples could be cited in the livestock, meat and dairy sectors. Most of these operations were initiated and implemented in developing countries with the assistance ... of bilateral or international expertise ... What went wrong?27
His answer is that the realities of local economies are not considered; post-harvest losses increase (in transport or through quickly spreading infestations) while the cost added to food by centralized storage and processing is at least 20 per cent. Family or village level storage and processing is far less wasteful and less costly.
But foreign food-processing firms typically gain returns on investment averaging 14 to 16 per cent in Latin America (doubtless more in Africa and Asia) as compared to 4 to 6 per cent in developed countries.28 This gives them an obvious incentive to produce in the poorer countries where labour is cheap and generally unprotected by trade unions. They then tend to siphon off local raw materials for processing the same kinds of high-value- added products they manufacture in rich countries. The promotion of baby formulas, bringing increased infant mortality and malnutrition in their wake, is one of the best-known examples,29 but soft drink, breakfast cereal, snack food, and other processors have all found lucrative markets in the Third World. The role of TNC advertising firms i
s crucial in this regard.30 Animals are increasingly fed with grain suitable for human beings - or with feedstuffs grown on land previously devoted to food crops. Hatcheries, ranches and even beef-cattle feed-lots are now among the preferred investments of TNCs.31
The Third World as Supplier of Northern Food Systems in a Context of Uncertainty
On the supply side, developing countries are now providing industrialized country markets not only with traditional tropical cash crops but more and more with luxury goods like meat, fish, off-season fruits or vegetables, flowers, and even pet foods. Traditional Third World exports are declining in relative importance and value. Taking 1967 as a base year with an index of 100, US imports of tropical products reached all of 101 in 1977. But the US Index for 'supplementary' imports (that is, animal or vegetable products which can also be raised in temperate-zone countries) was 165 in 1977. Total US imports of supplementary products were valued at more than $6 billion in 1977, and over 50 per cent of these products came from developing countries. Poorer nations of Latin America or Asia now supply 20 per cent of US meat imports and over 70 per cent of the imported vegetable products.32 Similar trends are apparent in Europe, for which Africa is the chief supplier of off-season luxury produce, frequently grown by peasants under contract to TNCs.33