1% of Farms Operate 70% of World's Farmland (theguardian.com) 115
One percent of the world's farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches and orchards, according to a report that highlights the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises. The Guardian reports: Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings. Taking the rising value of property and the growth of landless populations into account for the first time, the report calculates land inequality is 41% higher than previously believed. The authors said the trend was driven by short-term financial instruments, which increasingly shape the global environment and human health.
Landlessness was lowest in China and Vietnam, and highest in Latin America, where the poorest 50% of people owned just 1% of the land. Asia and Africa have the highest levels of smallholdings, where human input tends to be higher than chemical and mechanical factors, and where time frames are more likely to be for generations rather than 10-year investment cycles. Worldwide, between 80% and 90% of farms are family or smallholder-owned. But they cover only a small and shrinking part of the land and commercial production. Over the past four decades, the biggest shift from small to big was in the United States and Europe, where ownership is in fewer hands and even individual farmers work under strict contracts for retailers, trading conglomerates and investment funds.
[Ward Anseeuw, senior technical specialist at the International Land Coalition, which led the research along with a group of partners including Oxfam and the World Inequality Lab] said these financial arrangements are now spreading to the developing world, which is accelerating the decline of soil quality, the overuse of water resources, and the pace of deforestation. This is also connected to social problems, including poverty, migration, conflict and the spread of zoonotic diseases like Covid-19. To address this, the report recommends greater regulation and oversight of opaque land ownership systems, a shift in tax regimes to support smallholders and better environmental management, and great support for the land-rights of communities.
Landlessness was lowest in China and Vietnam, and highest in Latin America, where the poorest 50% of people owned just 1% of the land. Asia and Africa have the highest levels of smallholdings, where human input tends to be higher than chemical and mechanical factors, and where time frames are more likely to be for generations rather than 10-year investment cycles. Worldwide, between 80% and 90% of farms are family or smallholder-owned. But they cover only a small and shrinking part of the land and commercial production. Over the past four decades, the biggest shift from small to big was in the United States and Europe, where ownership is in fewer hands and even individual farmers work under strict contracts for retailers, trading conglomerates and investment funds.
[Ward Anseeuw, senior technical specialist at the International Land Coalition, which led the research along with a group of partners including Oxfam and the World Inequality Lab] said these financial arrangements are now spreading to the developing world, which is accelerating the decline of soil quality, the overuse of water resources, and the pace of deforestation. This is also connected to social problems, including poverty, migration, conflict and the spread of zoonotic diseases like Covid-19. To address this, the report recommends greater regulation and oversight of opaque land ownership systems, a shift in tax regimes to support smallholders and better environmental management, and great support for the land-rights of communities.
Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Farms have enormous efficiencies of scale. Small farms are very inefficient in terms of food output per area, and they are much more likely to misuse and overuse fertilizers, pesticides, and other man-made tools that support high-yield farming. Insisting on farms being small, single-family affairs means insisting on needing lots more farmland, lots more chemicals, much worse environmental impacts, and many fewer forests and other natural environments.
Re: Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:2)
No, he is 100% on point. It is you that has no clue on either farming or economics.
Re:Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they are inefficient, but there is maybe too much variance in "small farms" to be able to easily say they're good or bad in terms of health. Vanity farms and Amish style farming are going to tend to be pretty low on pesticide use. They will tend to have better quality soil and have higher food nutrition than industrial scale farms. Show and tour farms are likely split between genuinely avoiding all pesticides, or just using an organic veneer with heavy pesticide use to ensure pretty food to display. Family farms in poorer areas are going to run the full gamut, from people looking to make more money with an organic label to people looking to feed themselves first and foremost to people looking to rip every cent they can out of the ground and damn the watershed.
Frankly this deserves some unbiased research.
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a good example is that algae blooms are somebodies elses problem.
monsanto is a kind of different kind of inefficient.
and organic has some pluses.
all farmers want to plant a crop that generates the most money.
i wonder.
is there a machine learning solution to farming a small farm.
so as to make it more efficient than the corporate farms
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Similarly, suburban homes are very inefficient in terms of number of people sheltered per area, yet people think installing solar panels and converting their lawns to food production makes them "green."
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Re: Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you want to be green, move to the city [city-journal.org]!
Indeed. . .a dramatic reduction in birthrates.
In the future, the people who will consume the fewest resources and emit the least pollution will be those who were never born.
It's a wash.
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Or we can just have fewer people. The US has an OK population density, but Europe has too many people already.
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The US has an OK population density, but Europe has too many people already.
Then there's Asia ...
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Perfect is the enemy of good.
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"suburban homes are very inefficient in terms of number of people sheltered per area"
But they at least provide shelter. The median farm in the US produces less than $10,000 in agricultural product. Note that is not net income, just gross sales. Most farms in the US are not even trying to be farms. They're just tax dodges or excuses to drive big tractors around for fun.
Re:Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:5, Interesting)
Entirely depends on social context. In Peru most of the farms are small and pesticide/fertilizer usage is low because farmers can't afford them. The result is that when you buy one of the 2000 (literally) varieties of potatoes at the market you might need to dig grubs out of them, you need to check the corn for weevils, and you sift the flour to get the worms out before baking. On the other hand the meat that we buy in the market on Sunday was eating grass on Saturday, the potatoes were just dug up on Friday, and there are fruits and vegetables unavailable anywhere else because they don't grow in big monocultures. We think that it's worth it, and will be retiring there in the next year or two
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Low productivity means more land must be cultivated to feed the same population. So more wilderness is lost.
Re:Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:5, Informative)
I get you you mean, but in Peru less land is under cultivation today than under the Inca. The only wilderness being lost to farming is in the Amazon where some of the agricultural mega-corps are growing industrial plantations of yucca (manioc). Admittedly Peru is exception to the rule.
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Considering that the world is getting more over-populated, while at the same time we are also becoming more over-weight and obese, should the production focus less on maximising output, but on improving sustainability, a better integration into the environment as well as a better redistribution.
The report doesn't just seem to indicate a shift in total ownership towards a smaller group of people, but an imbalance in general.
I believe it's fair to say that the largest farms should move away from mono-cultures
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Yes, the conditions that support that kind of situation are the ones that limit farm productivity. Peru grows about 15 metric tonnes of potatoes (to consider your example) per hectare, versus 19 in Colombia and 49 in the US and NZ. And you don't have to dig grubs out of the latter.
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On the other hand almost no one in the US and New Zealand (including potato farmers) know what it's like to have access to over 2000 kinds of potatoes. You probably think a potato is a potato, but you're wrong. The differences between compis, huayros, peruanitas, etc. are incredible, and delicious. Then there are other root crops that you've never heard of like olluco and tayacha, and more fruits than you can shake a stick at. Paq'ai, massasamba, tumbo, moquillo, the list goes on and on.
Agribusiness wou
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But the Peruvian ones are probably tastier potatoes in the end
There's a reason why say, tomatoes grown in a home garden are tastier than the ones you find in the supermarket, and it's not because it took a week to ripen in the tru
Re: Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:5, Informative)
Respectfully, no. Wrong.
Small farms are overall better managed, have far better soil quality, and rarely use chemical fertilizer. They also are key to providing variety in crop be it plant of animal.
Re: Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:4, Informative)
The "inverse relationship" theory between farm size and crop yield has been thoroughly falsified for the high-yield approaches that are able to feed billions of people on the planet. The conditions for small farms to be better-managed are the same conditions that make them vastly less productive per unit area: low availability of technology, inconvenient terrain, and so forth.
These big, high-yield farms also need much less human labor; for example, studies show that Iowa (with mostly big farms) produces almost 1470 kg of maize per hour of labor, versus about 1 kg per hour of labor in Kenya. For rice, California produces 850 kg per labor hour; Indonesia, less than 2. Subsistence farming is a terrible inefficient use of both land and labor.
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Fertilizers and pesticides are expensive and the small farmers I've known in Canada, if only due to finances, are careful in their use. They usually have more of a long term view then the next quarters stock price like most corporations as well.
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Agricultural robots can apply pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers to the exact spots where they are needed, reducing consumption up to 95%.
There is a technological solution to every problem.
Re:Small farms are environmentally bad (Score:4, Interesting)
Agricultural robots could also negate the need for pesticides, plucking weeds and insects, not sure about fungus though. Of course the need for insecticides is largely tied to mono-culture. Likewise the need for fertilizer goes down with crop rotation and those farmers fields are good for disposing the chicken and cow shit.
Many years ago when I had a pesticide applicator ticket, it was stressed to always prefer mechanical control rather then chemical control.
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Chickens in battery cages is also more efficient. The same could be said for the majority of the population, battery cages and only allowed out when work to be done. It is more efficient.
Smaller farms represent a life style than many HUMAN BEINGS prefer and it would seem a shame that efficiency would demand misery by default. I would think more effective automation, makes family farms more possible and the size of family farms should be defined within a range, not too big and not to small, in order to crea
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why wouldn't small farms expend effort to be as efficient as possible ? they don't have money to waste either.
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"Farms have enormous efficiencies of scale. Small farms are very inefficient in terms of food output per area, and they are much more likely to misuse and overuse fertilizers, pesticides, and other man-made tools that support high-yield farming. "
Most farmers are hobbyists running on fumes and they all produce the same shit and wonder why they aren't making any money.
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Small farms are very inefficient in terms of food output per area,
That is nonsense. And the rest of your post is even bigger nonsense.
Drawback of small farms is: less output per work hour not per area.
and many fewer forests and other natural environments.
That is that is the biggest nonsense, countries that have small farms like Germany, France, Thailand: have those farms surrounded by nature and forests.
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The data disagrees with you. For example, http://www.fao.org/family-farm... [fao.org] -- I didn't check every row, but the UN shows that small farms generate less food per hectare than larger farms. If you look at the "Inputs" tab, the larger farms also use less fertilizer and less seed per hectare than the smaller farms.
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but the UN shows that small farms generate less food per hectare than larger farms.
Yes. But not for the reasons people state here. The only reason making it true is more efficient usage of time of workers and machines. If you can run your harvester 5km in a straight line, without any tree, bush or other hurdle, and then turn and do it again, it is a difference to my wives field where you can only run 30m. Snd then you have to slow down as you go over the border of the rice paddy. And then you have to travel
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You can dislike the data all you want, but you need more than "that's childish" or "that makes no sense" to rebut the kind of data that the UN presented and that I cited. It's not like the UN's data is an aberration; the USDA also found (https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2018/december/productivity-increases-with-farm-size-in-the-heartland-region/) that larger farms have efficiency advantages for input costs, specifically including seeds and labor.
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You are bad in reading.
Obviously "that larger farms have efficiency advantages for input costs, specifically including seeds and labor." that is true. And that is what I said. But the parent claimed larger farms produce more food per area. And that makes no sense. Same for seeds. How should it be possible that you need x seeds per square meter or square foot on a small farm, but less on a big farm? Seriously? How should that be physically be possible?
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The usual explanation is that larger farms tend to have more human and technological capital available. They can afford to send someone to college for specialized training, or hire a college grad who has learned how to take advantage of newer techniques. They can afford fancier equipment that measures the local microclimate more completely, spreads seeds more evenly, puts the seeds into the ground better, deals with pests or disease more efficiently, irrigates more precisely when and where needed, harvest
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AGAiN:
that is a relationship between money and work invested.
Not a matter of hectare size. You gain nothing in "yield per hectare" by just working on 5 times as many hectares. You only gain the efficiency increase you mention.
And if all those efficiency increase ALSO increase yield per hectare, then obviously it is not: the farm size.
Sorry, if you make some research then it is important to draw your conclusion from the right reason.
The usual explanation is that larger farms tend to have more human and techn
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Unless you have a rich uncle who's willing to subsidized your small-farm experiments, you can't separate larger farms from having more money to invest. Sorry that reality disturbs your dreams, maybe you've been licking too many Chinese boots. Their boot polish probably has some noxious chemicals that affect your brain.
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maybe you've been licking too many Chinese boots.
I do not live in China, idiot. And I do not buy Chinese products, except perhaps a Huwaii next year.
you can't separate larger farms from having more money to invest.
They usually have not. In the US all large farms are operated at the edge of bankruptcy.
In Europe we only have small farms, and in Thailand most farms are small, and they flourish.
Ooops ..
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US farms are profitable [usda.gov], larger ones especially so, and US farms overall are becoming more profitable [fb.org]. You have been consistently wrong in this thread and in others. You have never once admitted it. You only move the goalposts while rejecting facts.
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And why do US farms constantly go bankrupt and get bought up by neighbours :P ??
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the larger farms also use less fertilizer and less seed per hectare than the smaller farms.
And that makes no sense, you need the same amount of seeds in modern planting, per sqm, regardless how big the field is.
Not if you're not growing the same crops. OP seems to assume from the data that this is the case but, what stuck me on eyeballing the data, there's an odd reverse in the numbers when it comes to the Value of Food Production per Hectare figures.
Large(r) farms produce more food per hectare, etc., as was claimed but small farms produced crops with, roughly, twice as much "value" per hectare.
Ergo, we might literally be comparing apples to oranges, therefore any claim on 'efficiency of use' is suspect.
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That is what I meant.
The limit is working hours. A small farm need more working hours per hectare than a big one.
It is not per se in the hectares.
What the small farms produce depends on what they want. We produce only rice, like every one around us. Basically the cheapest/low value thing to produce.
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Your metrics are all wrong. Efficiency is not the only priority. Even the metric of measuring the mass of inputs vs output is a simplistic flawed metric. So is volume... Over farming which produces poor quality food which leaves you hungry and eating more... increases sales... and that must be good because it boosts the economy! Plus you need more inputs and a more delicate dependency scheme.
Economic metrics are often extremely harmful and dangerous. More economic activity because of added middlemen, more
Look everyone, I found an example of Pareto! (Score:2, Interesting)
They spent a lot of time typing words on their keyboard without actually saying anything meaningful. Not everybody needs to own land. Personally, if I had a farm, I wouldn't even know what to do with it. I own a small plot of land that my house sits on, but it isn't going to be used for farming any time soon, if ever. Moreover, you'll find plenty of people who make a shitload more than I do in big cities that don't own any land at all, and if anything they own a section of a building, though more likely the
Re: Look everyone, I found an example of Pareto! (Score:2)
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If you want to make a living farming as a small business, owning some land is pretty important. You don't need to own that plot of land you live on but have probably decided it is better then renting.
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You don't need to own that plot of land you live on but have probably decided it is better then renting.
Eh it has its pros and cons. Honestly in several ways living in an apartment was better. To get to the gym, I just walked downstairs. To take out the trash I just set it in front of my front door every Thursday. One time the motor in my fridge quit working in the middle of the night, and one of the maintenance people (who live on site) came over and fixed it within 20 minutes and it didn't cost me a cent because none of the food spoiled. If the air conditioning ever quit working, it's not my problem. I had
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OTOH, I'm renting in a rural setting and don't have any of those benefits of living in an apartment. The worst part is the insecurity, I have a pretty good deal but one day the landlord will pass on, the kids will want the money and I'll be left looking for a new home in a market with a very low vacancy rate along with high rents.
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This, amazing as it may seem, has nothing to do with you. This is about other people. Other people who have decided they want to be farmers. That 99% of the people who decided to farm only control (own or rent) 30% of the land is an example of wealth disparity.
That factory farming by that 1% produces large scale monocultures (which, according to article are bad for the environment) and use more chemicals is a reason this growing impact concerns the rest of us more than just random wealth disparity.
That
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That is not news.
What do you think the shit USA did to South America was about?
The landowners there are "General Food" or other Oligarchs that happen to conquer land 200 - 300 - 400 years ago. Before WWII simple people still owned land, but the dictators, placed there by the US, took it away. And you wonder why they vote "socialism"? They want that no one can hold an absurd amount of land, and deprives everyone from having at least a little bit.
Look at Thailand. Westerners can not even own land there, becau
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Yes, the report talks about how indigenous peoples get screwed over more and it's a consequence of colonialism (or the US's softer imperialism.) That's true. They point is that previous research only suggested that 50% of the land was concentrated by those actions, but they now say 70%, a 41% increase (presumably there was some rounding on the 50/70 numbers to make the math work out.)
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Well,
for that you do not need research. That is a known fact since the 1950, hence the Cuban revolution and all the other putsches in south america (supported by the US to keep food contracts and landownership by american companies in tact).
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Oh you really read TFA then? Well perhaps you missed this bit:
Land inequality sits at the heart of other forms of inequality. It is fundamentally related and often central to broader inequalities, such as wealth inequality, political inequality, social inequality, gender inequality and environmental inequality, in particular in agrarian societies.
Have a look at that very first sentence. I really, really doubt that's the case. Sure, they did include the bit about agrarian societies, which is fine and all, except at the same time they're pretty plainly trying to pin it as being central to everything else, and it's just not. Furthermore, later on down the page, they call it out as being a global inequality crisis, which it's not. Sure, I guess if we're only talking agrarian societies, but th
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The executive summary starts with focusing or rural people. It's focusing on rural people, then points out there are 2.4 billion of them and how they tend to be from groups marginalized within their society. Chapter One (which you quoted) has that blurb, and then promptly uses the word "rural" as an adjective pretty much every time they mention people. Hell, here
Pareto's principle, Benford's and Sturgeon's law (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that 20% of x owns 80% of y is true everywhere. This is simply the nature of the world, this is evolution in action.
You don't have to be much better either, you only have to be slightly better than your competition and then you come out on top. And Sturgeon's law likewise says that 90% of everything is crap.
It works out well for us, since in agriculture, smaller farms use up more resources to have lower results, this is especially true in specialty farms (eg. organic) where more chemical crap gets sprayed on your fruits and veggies since the yields have to be perfect and the price is according.
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The fact that 20% of x owns 80% of y is true everywhere.
Except, in this case, 1% own 70%.
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Except in this case it's about leveraged short term finance, not skill at farming.
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The only thing that is less effective in smaller farms is: human hourly work Oops, that was so easy.
Organic farms do not spray chemicals, hence they are called organic. Wow, that was even more simple.
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I think you should revisit that organic farms do not spray pesticides and other chemicals: https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
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The question is what you call "pesticide" and what you call "organic". ... you can not break the rules and get away with it.
In europe organic is a "trademark"
And: in Germany it is even government regulated.
So: no, they do not do "unorganic" things with their fields. Allowed is copper ... and that basically is it. But thanks for the link. But you do know, it is about the US? Right?
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You're missing the point. Of course the world isn't flat nor is everything equally, uniformly and fairly distributed like one might imagine a "perfect world" would be like.
The point is that this wasn't always the case and the observation here is that it has shifted so now only 1% own more than two thirds of it all. And as we are growing more over-populated as a species does the divide between rich and poor get bigger, too. We need to monitor this and find out if this imbalance is still within reason or if w
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Please let me know when this WASN'T the case. This was the case during feudalism, this was the case during the industrial revolution, even in Stalin Russia this was the case.
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Please let me know when this WASN'T the case.
It's in the article and literally the very first sentence of the quote.
Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more destructive monocultures and fewer carefully tended smallholdings. ...
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So you're claiming that by extension, the fields and production were equally divided some time before the 1980's.
The fact that the researchers have a very particular bias notwithstanding, there is data pre-1980s that had similar complaints, the Agriculture acts of the 1950s and 1970s clearly point that farm industrialization was happening and they tried to prop up small farms with artificial funding (Peace for Food program for example).
Cattle ranchers had the same issue around the turn of the 20th century,
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So you're claiming that by extension, the fields and production were equally divided some time before the 1980's.
No, I'm not. You are and right there in your new comment.
Why don't you just read the report and try to understand it instead of making a fool out of yourself by guessing what it is about?
Ever see a corn combine run? (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a city slicker, it's got to be the most astonishing machine [youtu.be] I've ever seen in operation. They roll across a field at the speed of a pretty good cross country runner, sucking sixteen rows of standing corn into the front and spitting chaff out the back. Kernels collect in a hopper and every so often a truck runs along side and the combine offloads them without stopping.
You can also do it with tomatoes [youtube.com] too. And wheat [youtube.com].
If you think about it, this technology makes truly huge farms possible and encourages large monoculture operations. It also makes it harder for small farmer to be competitive. It is bound to shape the food supply, biasing it towards certain crops. If you go to a supermarket, the bulk of the calories there are either made directly from wheat or corn, or indirectly as corn-fed meat.
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As a former country boy, combines are awesome! And big changes are on the way for crops that have thus far not been suitable for machine harvesting. The combination of machine vision, machine learning, and robotics, will in time, result in mechanized harvesters for practically any crop. This will reshape the agricultural labor market.
https://robomechjournal.spring... [springeropen.com]
https://builtin.com/robotics/h... [builtin.com]
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My son and some friends are working on an agricultural robot as a "capstone" high school science project.
They are designing a delta robot [wikipedia.org] controlled with a Raspberry Pi. It can do planting, weeding, thinning, and fertilizer application.
Robotics are the future of agriculture.
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Re:Ever see a corn combine run? (Score:5, Informative)
Most farmers don't own combines.
Combines are run as a service, moving from farm to farm.
So a farm needs to be big enough so the combines can operate and turn effectively, but they don't have to be big enough to own their own combine.
But the best strategy for small farms is to grow crops that don't benefit much from mechanization, such as soft fruits and vegetables that are picked by hand. To do that, you need to be close to the markets.
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That makes sense. Here in New England most farms other than tobacco and cranberries aren't that big, so we don't see them.
I'm looking forward to a greater variety of produce. It's frustrating how everything doctors want you to eat less of is cheap and what they want you to eat more of is expensive.
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As an tomato gardener, that tomato harvester looks amazing. But it would only work on a specific type of hybrid tomato. A determinate that is bred for ripening at the same time, sturdy as hell to be bounced around like that, & likely not a lot of flavor. This is why the canned tomato products out there are mostly crap.
But this is nothing new & I suppose they will crack the code sooner or later & get some hybrids with more flavor. But currently, you can't beat a homegrown heirloom tomato. L
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Speaking as an enthusiast cook, who believes that food can double as an experience besides of being a way to get calories into your body, a lot of the produce that lands in German super markets, and which comes mostly from those super farms, is of garbage quality.
So people cook with lots of salt and flavor enhancers. Flavour enhancers. For freaking tomato based foods. Tomatoes are supposed to be a source of umami in cooking not require an additional load to taste like so
Who cares what they taste like. (Score:2)
Or if they have any taste at all.
What counts is what they look like on the shelves. Red and round and perfect. OK, maybe red is not necessary, but round and perfect is. The few weirdos that notice the taste are not worth worrying about.
The ideal tomato would be as tough as a coconut so that they could be harvested by just cutting down the plant and giving it a good shake. Also that they can be harvested 3 months before consumption. Just like a coconut.
Hmm. I wonder if we could breed red coconuts? Tha
More Guardian bull (Score:5, Insightful)
What a seriously stupid article. It's quite simple : Farms in US, Australia, New Zealand and Northern Europe are often huge because of economies of scale. There is a cattle farm in South Australia which is larger than Israel. They are going to skew the results hugely.
So are we supposed to go back to peasents farming a strip of land and starving to death in a bad harvest year ?
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No, I think that it is important. Politics (at least in the USA) seem to revere the idea of the family farmer, which this article points out is largely myth, with most agricultural output coming from large agribusinesses.
Political discourse about agriculture is based on a myth. Many people support the idea of subsidizing the small family farmer, but how many would continue to support subsidies for industrial-scale agribusinesses?
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Yup. A lot like the coal industry.
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You could have at least read the summary before ranting about the Guardian.
The point here is that mega farms tend not to be as good from an environmental perspective. Monocultures and a lack of care beyond what makes the biggest profit. As an example if there is a pest problem there are various ways to deal with it, and spraying is both the most profitable and the worst for the environment. Smaller farms tend not to spray so much due to up-front costs or because they serve a niche "organic" market.
Good for
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Many years ago Richard Heinberg proposed forcibly relocating 50 million city dwellers to the countryside to work small organic farms, and presumably do handicrafts in their copious free time.
He, of course, would not be among them, as his skills as a visionary were far too valuable. That part of the article provided me with much merriment.
So after they redistribute the land to people who have no idea how to farm and have no interest in backbreaking work for mere subsistence, how do you intend to keep them th
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Pol Pot did just that, and killed millions of his citizens in the process...
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"economies of scale" are skewing farming towards huge monocultures, and huge concentrations of wealth in a small number of people.
It's worth pointing out that these are potentially problematic. Solving those problems doesn't necessarily mean a return to subsistence smallhold farming.
Garbage article except warning in the solution. (Score:2)
The problem is part of the solution. They want to redistribute land based on sex and race; I guess they think zimbabwe is something to be emulated.
Thank you (Score:2)
I want to say thank you to those few remaining honest dirt digging farmers, who don't just play video games all day, for producing our food.
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I second the motion.
What is land onwership (Score:2)
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Nope, the land you own is the land written on the deed in the land registry.
In europe that is done, depending on location, since 3000 years that way, and in the "middle east" since close to 6000 years.
No idea in what legal shit hole you live.
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The more government regulates any industry, the more consolidation will happen. In an over-regulated market, the advantage of smaller vendors in adaptability to conditions is overwhelmed by regulation that the biggest operators bought and paid for.
-jcr
You're an idiot if you believe that. Unregulated industries run down to monopolies faster than you can type the word. And they do it with slave and child-labour too, because that's cheaper.
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Because you're looking at the wrong type regulation. An unregulated ownership market - which is basically what you have - leads to monopolies as night follows day. The regulation of the individual companies' business activities and practices has nothing to do with this mathematical certainty.
The ability of small companies to "compete" is meaningless when the established players can simply buy them up for pocket change as Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft do on a regular basis.
Not that US banks have much in the w
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OTOH, most of the west does.
Kind of destroys that argument.
Bullshit! Small farms are not bad (Score:3)
When In Guatemala I saw people scrounge and struggle to find nourishment besides rice and beans. Everywhere I looked the deep black rich topsoils were 3 ft. thick. Vocanic soild from active volcanism so I asked “why”.
Guatemalans can’t afford to buy land. Corporations bought most of the country long ago. Guatemala is controlled by 6 wealthy families. The largest corporation in GT is Chichita. Banana plantations line its western Pacific slopes. The rest is dominated b palm oil plantations. Guatemala imports food for people and exports bananas.
Ecuador similarly has 18 families that control that country, exprting abroad. Its people live on a subsistence of beans and plantains.
SO don’t buy-in to the feel good corporate mentality being pedaled on here. It is bullshit. GO buy a ticket and learn what corporate land ownership means with your own boots to see what that hath wrought.
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"Landlessness was lowest in China and Vietnam"? (Score:2)
Something tells me that this report is absolutely WORTHLESS.
This is a universal phenomenon (Score:1)
When are you going to stop being surprised that the top 1% of X owns (huge)% of Y? It's true across the fucking board in every system