At a time when the world finds itself in the midst of a climate emergency and biodiversity destruction, both being inextricably linked, a study by Nature Food has shown that agriculture accounts for nearly 34per cent of the Green House Gas (GHGs) emissions. While the future of an industrialised food and farming system is increasingly coming under lens, once again the global agri-business industry is using the Russia-Ukraine war to build up the food security narrative to further strengthen the existing food supply chains.
Essentially, the more the focus shifts to transforming agriculture the more it ends up being the same. But behind all the talk of reducing agriculture sector’s carbon emissions, a despicable trend to push farmers out of agriculture is clearly emerging. This comes with the emphasis on drastically cutting down on livestock populations. Both the policy packages are being driven by the need to curtail nitrogen emissions and thereby restore biodiversity and encourage conservation. But seen along with the ensuing Agriculture Revolution 4.0 relying heavily on digitalisation, robotics, precision technologies and synthetic foods, it will eventually lead to more concentration and accumulation of power, and that too in the hands of a few conglomerates.
In fact, it is taking us to a stage when the world will literally be eating from the hands of a few.
Let’s first try to understand the corollary. The less the number of farmers, the faster it helps in the corporate takeover of agriculture. What better opportunity than using the climate change argument to reduce the number of ‘peak polluter’ farms, and also reduce the number of livestock by 30 per cent by the year 2030. While forcefully evicting farmers was something that was never considered earlier, and that too despite angry farmer protests hogging the news headlines in the recent months in the Netherland, the Dutch government is still offering 100 per cent value of the land to farmers who give up voluntarily. If this fails, the forced buyouts will begin next year.
In a country where 45 per cent of the nitrogen emissions come from agriculture, climate change is coming in handy to swiftly remove 3,000 farms out of a total of 11,200 arable farms, roughly a fourth of the farms that exists. This is quite a steep reduction.
In UK, where less than 1per cent of the population remains in farming, farmers are being offered a one-time payment of 100,000 pound sterling if they decide to quit farming by either selling their land, or leasing it out or planting trees on it. All this in the name of soil restoration, and environmental conservation, but at the same time turning a blind eye to limit heightened pollution levels emanating from the number of environment destructive factory-farms and mega-farms that are growing exponentially. Once again, climate change is coming in handy to push farmers out of agriculture.
As I mentioned earlier, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has in a consultation paper emphasised on the application of automation, drones and precision technologies to improve food production and meet the challenges of ensuring food security. While cutting down on the number of farms, the Netherlands too is relying on the same strategy.
Now let’s look at New Zealand’s ‘fart tax’ that it intends to impose on livestock as a way to limit methane emissions. Although New Zealand is a small country but its per capita emissions are very high. Being a dairy country, most of these emissions come from its cows. To meet the obligations spelled out at the United Nations CoP26, New Zealand has announced its commitment to reduce its emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 to keep global warming below the prescribed 1.5 degrees. Beef and sheep farming are expected to be severely hit, threatening the major economic activity of the island nation.
While the environmental groups want still tougher regulatory measures to cut down on emissions, and are calling for a crackdown on the devastation caused by fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilisers and chemical pesticides, farmer groups are vehemently opposed. Nevertheless, as a study by GRAIN had shown, despite the push for reducing the application of chemical fertilisers, the combined profits of nine of the world’s biggest fertiliser companies, which stood at $ 13 billion in 2020, is expected to rise to $ 57 billion by the end of 2022, a whopping increase of 440 per cent over its 2020 profits.
Detailing how concentration of power in a hands of a few players is further strengthening control over the industrial food chain, a three-year study by the acclaimed international organisation ETC has shown how through a series of acquisition and mergers between livestock, fisheries, commodity trading and food retail, using the emerging tools of digitalisation and automation will eventually push farmers out of agriculture. With several governments investing in robotics and trying out the application of automation on the farm, the Financial Times has in a video report shown new age entrepreneurs experimenting with production of food under industrially-controlled conditions claiming they are actually in the business of ‘manufacturing farm lands,’ which means they are neither using land nor do they require farmers to undertake crop cultivation. This trend is only growing.
What began in the 1960s and 1970s as the Green Revolution; is now headed for the next phase — Agricultural Revolution 4.0. From the 1960s when the global economic design relied, in the name of enhancing economic growth, on deliberately keeping farm prices low so as to encourage increased migration from the villages to the cities, the world has come a long way. In the years in between, the intensive farming systems requiring the application of external chemical inputs and increased mechanisation led to environmental degradation and thereby accelerated GHGs. While the underpinning was on moving farmers out of agriculture, it made agriculture to slowly but steadily move into the hands of a waiting corporate.
As the population in agriculture continued to dwindle, the percentage of family farmers in the rich developed countries saw a steep decline. In the US, against 15.3 per cent farming population in 1950, only 1.5 per cent of the population is now left on the farm. In France, the farm population has declined to 3 per cent. In Germany, against 24.3 per cent in 1950, farm population in 2021 was only 1.2 per cent. Picking the trend, the decline in farming population is also progressing fast in the developing countries. As if this is not enough, and instead of putting policies in place that decarbonises the economy, agriculture is becoming a soft target to achieve net-zero emissions.
In just a decade, between 2005 and 2015, Europe lost 4 million farms, which means more than 1,000 farms a day. The worrisome pattern of shrinking farming population and reduction in farming acreage has been accompanied with a growth in agri-business. With sophisticated technology taking over, new mergers and acquisition have reshaped the control in the hands of a still small number of players. To illustrate, if only two seed companies now control 40 per cent of the global seed market is any indication, down from 10 seed companies some 25 years ago, it signifies the growing influence of a small number of agri-business companies dominating the entire food chain.
The gloom that has descended following the rapidly changing climatic patterns has to be contained by rapidly evolving policy fixes. The resilience of the agriculture sector to enhance long-term food security needs strategic plans that begin with the basic question: why should farm numbers continue to fall? Why should agriculture be pushed to stage where farmers become an endangered species? Why should the future of food go into the hands of Big Food, Big Tech and Big Finance? The romance with food, especially traditional foods, will disappear once the technological giants take over.
Reversing the decline in the number of farmers and ensuring the economic sustainability of agricultural production depends on how the world transforms the broken food system. Although eco-efficiency and sustainability are important, an eclipse of farming and an endangered farming community is not the future. Farming cannot be sacrificed to realise the net-zero aspirations. Addressing the climate change aberrations need the reset button.