Farming ousted by services as world's top employer

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Some 42 percent of workers drive buses, answer telephones, trade stocks or hold other service jobs, according to the UN's International Labor Organization. Agriculture accounts for 36 percent of global employment.

A decade ago, those numbers were reversed. And as the service sector has grown, the industrial sector's share has stagnated at about 22 percent of all jobs, suggesting a sea change in how economies evolve.

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Now Canada can be another neoLiberal experiment in laissez-faire resuscitated from the grave like Chile was. We'll have monopoly banking and financial McServices with compound interest up the wazoo and unregulated markets in everything imaginable except our own natural wealth. All those goodies will be siphoned off to the imperial master nation as usual. We'll end up buying soylent green at inflated prices if they have their way.

[ 06 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Subsistence farmers may be poor by your standards, but they subsist and they subsist on their own terms. It is left out of the analysis, but many of these farmers, if not all, are driven off the land which is taken over by plantation owners who grow crops for export.

The farmers then learn a new poverty. The poverty of the slum where they live not on their own terms. Their sons become gang members or soldiers and their daughters prostitutes.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
The vast majority of the world's farmers are in a situation that would have been familiar to Malthus: working small plots of land with primitive tools and in extreme poverty. The fact that more and more of them are able to escape this life is an encouraging development.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
The vast majority of the world's farmers are in a situation that would have been familiar to Malthus: working small plots of land with primitive tools and in extreme poverty. The fact that more and more of them are able to escape this life is an encouraging development.

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For example, in Canada most of the shift is related to fossil fuels and labour saving technology. In Colombia, not all of the shift but a great deal of it is related to guys with guns.

As well, in Canada, the shift has gradually taken place over a number of decades while in developing countries it has occurred over a number of years.

There are some excellent books on the rise of ghettos as farmers are being forced from their land and into cities were for far too many they live as human seagulls fighting each other over other people's garbage.

I don't mean to be offencive, Stephen, but you might consider visiting these new Utopias were people no longer perform the meaningful work of growing food but become the human waste of the global economy which is geared to benefiting very, very few.

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

You measure wealth only in material value when spirituality, independence, and knowing the security of your place on the land can provide a wealth far greater than all the Wal-Marts in all the world.

Is it possible that you could understand that?

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

Edited to be less acerbic. I am trying to change my ways.

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
No country has ever become rich and stayed agrarian. Nor do I know of anyone who has figured out how that could be done.

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But Asian tiger economies didn't just eliminate out small scale farming in one fell swoop of an IMF and World Bank pen. After WWII, Japan and Korea didn't bring in western logging companies to strip land of forested areas to make way for mechanized farming on a large scale. The first generations were allowed to continue peasant farming to earn money while important investments were made in health care and education in those countries. Poverty was reduced gradually by what were essentially socialist methods not free market ones in those countries.

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Stephen Gordon: The vast majority of the world's farmers are in a situation that would have been familiar to Malthus: working small plots of land with primitive tools and in extreme poverty. The fact that more and more of them are able to escape this life is an encouraging development.

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Not to mention that without a population of propertyless agricultural workers, stripped of any means of production or access to land, capitalism as an economic system would never have taken off in England and then in the rest of the world.

By your logic, a person who had everything but no income, is better off living in a slum and battling over scraps if it can be shown that person now has an income of several cents a day.

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Wood: [Locke] introduced an important theoretical innovation by justifying colonial appropriation of unused land without the consent of any local sovereign, providing settlers with a systematic argument that justified their actions on the basis of natural law, without any reference to civil authority.

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Locke's argument turns the world upside down by claiming that the settlers, rather than being thieves and robbers, are adding value to the land and, therefore, deserve the "natural right" to appropriate land that doesn't belong to them. As Wood points out, Sir John Davies made precisely the same arguments that Locke made for the dispossession of American Indians for the colonial settlement of Ireland.

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
You guys are getting awfully worked up denouncing a process that multiplied incomes by a factor of at least ten.

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What about the estimated 35 million food insecure Americans?. This is the hub of neoLiberal capitalism central.

What about the 350 million Indians said to be going to bed hungry every night of their wretched lives, and the appalling infant mortality rates in that country which are still higher than Mao's China of 1976 ?.

Mexico signed on to neoliberal free trade rules. 80 percent of that country's exports go the U.S. and with workers paid what are essentially slave wages.

But transnational corporate profits are way up world wide for sure.

11,000, 000 children around the forever developing third world are dying of the liberal capitalist economic long run each and every year like clockwork.

Noam Chomsky says democratic India manages to put more skeletons in capitalism's closet every eight years than was true of all of China's years of shame, 1958 to 1961.

80 percent of chronically hungry nations already export cash crops to "the market" in obeyance of world trade and neoLiberal guidelines for development.

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Life, the universe, everything:

Did you ever notice how there are no poor in rural areas? None one in rural Canada, is poor. Farmers are all rich, rich I tell you. That's why even the largest farm operations in Canada have to find 25 to 33% of their income from off-farm sources to maintain a middle-class level of income.

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I'm guessing that this was supposed to be ironic, because it doesn't make sense otherwise. It is indeed the case that farming is not a get-rich-quick career path. That's sorta why its share of employment is steadily decreasing.

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And Stephen, check you figures 2% is the number of primary food producers. The numbers in actual food production and terriary industries is much, much higher.

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Just 12 percent of the earth's surface is fertile enough under the right conditions to feed the world.

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Yet every year 25 billion tons of topsoil is lost to the world. That's almost four tons for every person on the planet-year after year. With it goes the livelihoods and lives of all the people connected to that land.

Especially at risk is the fragile soil in arid regions that are found in over 100 countries and are home to over 40% of the world's population. The loss of topsoil and soil fertility in these dry regions is called "desertification".

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:

It is indeed the case that farming is not a get-rich-quick career path. That's sorta why its share of employment is steadily decreasing.

Those workers are classified as part of the manufacturing sector.

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Yet these farmers are living in the promised land of non-subsitance farming. If your presumptions are correct shouldn't they be rolling in the dough rather than just in the hay?

The point is we have disconnected people from their food. Food production is food production, and we might call it something else, but it is still food being produced, or in our case having all kinds of preservatives and additives added to support the system, not health.

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Life, the universe, everything ]

The vast majority of Canadians have lost the cultural knowlege of what it's like to not have fairly simple access to either, let alone how to grow food in the first place.

There are no food shortages in Canada. We throw away enough calories to furnish the truly hungry people of the world, everyday, as a matter of our market economics.

[ 07 September 2007: Message edited by: Farmpunk ]

Have you ever canoe the upper Grand River?

So, I anticipate, you might answer, "well, what about wants?"

But wants are extraneous. If you don't know of something, like a 53" television set, you don't want one. Hence the value of marketing. Marketing brings to your attention those things you may want if only you knew about them. And why do we want them?

Because we associate material trappings with wealth and wealth with privilege. So even if we are not wealthy we might be able to garner privilege, better treatment, if we appear wealthy. The clothes make the (wo)man, so to speak. A home is a castle.

But an Amish man I know is one of the happiest men I have ever met. He is genuinely happy. He farms with his wife and raises a small amount of livestock. He travels by foot or rides a horse and buggy. A trip to his farm for me is a short trip. For him to visit me would take a day. He has his land, his family, and a smile that must be answered.

By the standards you apply, he is probably poor. He has no electric light, no forced air gas, no jacuzzi, no television, not even a transistor radio. And there certainly is no Cadillac in his driveway. But I don't think you will ever convince him he is poor.

And you won't convince me either.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
By the standards you apply, he is probably poor...But I don't think you will ever convince him he is poor.

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Money is an imperfect measure of wealth.

I say we stop calling people/countries/etc. "rich" and "poor." Those words are so imprecise.

Instead, how about the words "moneyed" and "less-moneyed"? That would be more accurate.

I would like to live in a community where I can do many things, including working the land for wholesome local food.

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Originally posted by gram swaraj:
S Gordon, forcing people off of their land is good for lowering the price of slave-wage labour.

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I think economists look at it from a POV that the confiscated land will produce more food per unit area than small scale farming is doing for poor countries currently. Their arguments tend to resemble Josef Stalin's argument for confiscating land from Ukrainian kulak farmers in the late 1920's-30's. Except that there exists proof today that modern farming techniques are capable of squeezing more out of the land than was true of the 1930's. And instead of increasing food production to feed war communism, the task at hand today seems a far simpler one: to raise GDP. It's just not clear who is benefiting from the GDP effect and hidden costs for raising GDP. They simply point us to the magic of the market place as a point of reference.

And not all of it is confiscated from peasant farmers. Some of the land will be leased out to large agribusinesses which aren't interested in leaving fields to fallow for regeneration periods. The big companies squeeze as much out of land as possible with chemicals and high tech irrigation techniques and move on to the next piece of land when the ground they've used up is worthless as crop bearing land.

The country's GDP tends to go up when forests are clear cut, mining opened up to western companies and industrialized farming takes over. And the difference in the numbers looks pretty good at face value. But the IMF and world bankers tend to want to tie development loans to poorest countries for just that, industrial and agricultural development with poorest peasant class out of the picture altogether. Loan stipulations insist that very little money be invested in health care, education or infrastructure which was proven to lift western economies out of the doldrums post-WWII.

[ 08 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

What the Cubans are doing in agriculture, despite the 5-decade embargo/blockade by the U.S., is in marked contrast to this; they are moving strongly towards what we would call organic farming, reducing the use of pesticides, etc., and trying to tackle the highly complicated problem, common to all societies, of finding the right balance between rural and urban development.

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Originally posted by N.Beltov:
Perhaps then, more sustainable agriculture will be a lever by which socialism as an economic system ultimately prevails over capitalism.

And that would be poetic justice, since capitalism originated, not in the cities as some assert, but through capitalist agriculture that preceded the industrial revolution and manufacture.

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Bravo!

Excellent post from Bookish Agrarian. (See you're not a thread killer after all.)

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I really do think that there is public momentum to participate in changing how food is grown

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I applaud what the NFU is doing. But I like to observe people and one thing I have concluded is that it will be impossible to convince food shoppers if you can first convince farmers.

I see farmers driving right past the farm gates and the independents to the Superstore where the food they grew is not being sold.

I see them buying the processed food produced by the giants from products grown no one knows where. Some of them have yellow "Farmers Feed Cities" stickers.

I think FM is over-romanticizing the farming life, though. It is a hard life, and if that were not the case there wouldn't be so many trying to get to the cities.

You say "there wouldn't be so many trying to get to the cities?" Prove that is their first choice if a choice at all? That is premise without any support.

You say "the government has a duty to provide for the transition from agrarian to industrial society." It does? Why? In whose interests?

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It Italy, where capitalistic production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. The serf was emancipated in that country before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed his into a free proletarian, who, moreover, found his master ready waiting for him in the towns, for the most part handed down as legacies from the Roman time. When the revolution of the world-market, about the end of the 15th century, annihilated Northern Italy's commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The labourers of the towns were driven en masse into the country, and gave an impulse, never before seen, to the petite culture, carried on in the form of gardening.

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from Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, Ch XXVI, "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation".

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Then why do so many farmers, everywhere throughout the world, want to stay on their land?

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Why are they not staying there if they want to stay there ?

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You say "there wouldn't be so many trying to get to the cities?" Prove that is their first choice if a choice at all? That is premise without any support.

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Their first choice is a better life.

There's a good article in this month's Adbusters, by Dee Hon that describes the plight of rural Chinese peasants. They can barely grow enough to eat, which is why city life is better for them.

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You say "the government has a duty to provide for the transition from agrarian to industrial society." It does? Why? In whose interests?

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I think the government has a duty to act for the benefit of its citizens. You're right, though, that is an opinion.

If it doesn't provide for the transition from agrarian to industrial economy, then many will suffer.

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Governments are complicit in theft of the land. They always have been. Rather the theft of First Nation's land here or elswhere, or the ongoig theft of indigenous lands.

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Why are they not staying there if they want to stay there ?

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Their first choice is a better life.

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There's a good article in this month's Adbusters, by Dee Hon that describes the plight of rural Chinese peasants. They can barely grow enough to eat, which is why city life is better for them.

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I think the government has a duty to act for the benefit of its citizens. You're right, though, that is an opinion.

If it doesn't provide for the transition from agrarian to industrial economy, then many will suffer.

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You think an industrial society is somehow progress because you have wet naps, vacuum cleaners, and SUVs. But the trade-off is global poverty, global environmental degradation, mental and physical disease, and the constant hum of brutal violence always just below the surface, for us. For others, it smashes bones and lives with a ruthless recklessness and efficiency of which only industrial war is capable.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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In developing nations, they are being forced from their land. In western nations, family farms can't make a living. That doesn't mean they want to leave. In fact all the evidence suggests they would prefer to stay.

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The solution is simple:

Get all the nations on the farm to agree to outlaw large corporate farms, and use family farms exclusively.

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Why can they barely grow enough to eat? If they could grow enough to eat, would they prefer to remain of the farm? Context, again, is everything.

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Why does it matter ? Haven't I shown that you're over romanticizing the farming life ?

"Subsistence farmers may be poor by your standards, but they subsist and they subsist on their own terms. It is left out of the analysis, but many of these farmers, if not all, are driven off the land which is taken over by plantation owners who grow crops for export.

The farmers then learn a new poverty. The poverty of the slum where they live not on their own terms. Their sons become gang members or soldiers and their daughters prostitutes. "

They're the ones leaving the lifestyle that you're over romanticizing.

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Who will suffer and why? Again, you are expressing your own perspective. One that is based upon presumptions untested. I once asked a friend if he would give up five years at the end of his life if it meant he could enjoy a greater material lifestyle now. He agreed he would. I then asked, "and what if the preceding five years is one wracked by cancer, pain, and where no bodily function is possible without the help of strangers?" No answer.

You think an industrial society is somehow progress because you have wet naps, vacuum cleaners, and SUVs. But the trade-off is global poverty, global environmental degradation, mental and physical disease, and the constant hum of brutal violence always just below the surface, for us. For others, it smashes bones and lives with a ruthless recklessness and efficiency of which only industrial war is capable.

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The trade-off isn't poverty. If you read Paul Krugman, you can see that global trade is helping very poor people acquire more wealth.

Agricultural policy is something I know one or two things about. While the hyper-concentration in agri-business is a major problem it is a symptom, rather than the root problem.

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
In fact all the evidence suggests they would prefer to stay.

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[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Well, according to this UNESCO survey of the situation in China, an important issue is the regulations that make it difficult for people to move from rural areas to the cities. Nowhere is there any suggestion that people are being 'forced off the land'; they're fleeing it.

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A steep rise in soybean and cotton imports, mainly from the United States, has led to falling prices for Chinese farmers, with the result that “many . . . get almost nothing from the plant[s]” and twenty million have given up farming altogether, according to the November 30 issue of Beijing Review.

The lowering of import tariffs, in line with China’s WTO accession agreements, is also pressuring domestic producers of wheat, rice and vegetables, says the news weekly.

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This is, of course, the same destructive and unsustainable global economy romantacized by Michael Hardner.

So again we see farmers forced from the land as opposed to voluntarily and happily choosing a life in the slums amid open sewers, disease, violence, and poverty.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
What is it with this 'forced from the land' meme? If there is a 'force' at work, it's the force of attraction of better-paying jobs in the cities.

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I think Stalin said something similar to the Kulaks. Something to the effect that if they were going to wobble on food production, then they might as well be cranking out munitions for the coming war against fascism slash crisis of western capitalism part deux.

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Have to say it sounds and awful lot like the over-romanticising is those who think global trade comes with huge, cost-free benefits.

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I'm not doing that.

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Originally posted by Michael Hardner:

I infer that there are costs in my previous post, where I mention that the government has a duty to support people in transition.

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They'd better not come to Canada. Our guys in Ottawa operate on a points system. And we're running an infrastructure deficit across the land. Besides, we're trying to maintain 2 percent inflation. What would we do with all those castaways of third world capitalism?.

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Au contraire.

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What is it with this 'forced from the land' meme? If there is a 'force' at work, it's the force of attraction of better-paying jobs in the cities.

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We are fortunate to have a poster from the NFU with us. What sort of North American statistics would you like to document the decline of the family farm and the rise of the Corporate Collective farm?

There are many groups who work with Latin American peoples who can detail for you the forced displacement of indigenous peoples from their lands.

And of course there is the entire history of efforts at land reform in Latin and South America. What did those peasants want with that land (if they could get it), do you think?

And Africa ... Well, Africa is an example of global excess and the costs paid in human misery.

But you don't want to hear any of that.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Bookish Agrarian ]

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
They are not being forced off the land, they are pursuing better alternatives. And for the most part, they're finding them.

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Well we'll just have to take your word for it that they are not, you repeat, not being forced off the land. There is no comparison between this non-event and the two million or so Kulaks forced off their land and middle class liquidated by Stalin as reported by Josef Goebbels to Europeans in the 1930's.

Because if there really were anywhere from 200, 000, 000 to 400, 000, 000 Indian farmers alone about to lose their way of life in the next number of years as pointed out by Devinder Sharma, then it would be a human tragedy of monumental proportion.

There are more than 800 million chronically hungry people in the world. 25 years ago there were only half a billion. And now Liberal capitalism has created 30 million 'food insecure' Americans in the heart of the neoLiberal experiment.

[ 09 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]

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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:

Yes, this makes farming an even less attractive proposition when compared to the alternatives available - which is why people freely leave rural life. They are not being forced off the land, they are pursuing better alternatives. And for the most part, they're finding them.

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I live in a suburb of Vancouver where housing lots tend to be about 70 feet wide and 200 feet deep - about 4 times the size of a typical lot in the city of Vancouver. There's a two-lane road out front for cars plus parking on both sides of the street (4 lanes total). There are no sidewalks and no back alleys.

If I could re-design my neighborhood, here is how I would go about it:

1) Tear-up most of the 4-lane road in front and tear-up driveways in front of each house. Recycle the pavement. Use it to build a one-way back alley with parking on each side.

2) Convert the middle 1/3 of the road/parking area out front into a covered, glass-enclosed multi-lane walking/cycling path with evacuated tube solar water heaters on the roof (these solar collectors work down to 40 degrees below zero. 200 million people in China already use them). Grow grass, fruit trees and blueberry bushes on the area of the roadway where 2/3 of the pavement has been removed as well as in the areas where the driveways used to be.

3) Create large vegetable gardens in back yards adjacent to the back alley. Homeowners who enjoy gardening and who have time for it can do their own gardening. Those who don't have the time or inclination can fence an area off from the rest of their yard and allow neighborhood urban farmers to grow food there in return for a cut of the crop going to the homeowner. Or do a little of each, with the area of the back yard nearest the alley worked by urban farmers, an area of the yard closest to the house worked by homeowners. Require that any motorized tillers etc. must be quiet and clean brushless electric-powered units, not noisy and smelly gasoline-powered machines. No pig or cattle farming in residential areas. A few chickens might be ok, provided the roosters are de-crowed.

4) Allow the area of each yard used for growing food to be subject to low farm tax rates instead of high residential tax rates. Compensate for the reduced tax intake by implementing steeply-progressive property taxes on residential land owned beyond the amount required to grow enough food for each family. Also shift local road taxes off property taxes and onto gasoline taxes. Implement rush-hour-only road and bridge tolls on large, single-occupant vehicles. Give each homeowner the option of installing parking meters on their side of the back alley with 50% of the revenue offsetting their individual property taxes and the other 50% going to the municipality.

5) Convert attached garages into flexible living areas that can be used as home offices, home workshops, rec rooms, or rentable self-contained suites.

6) Build new garages in the back alley, each with a general purpose loft apartment/workshop/studio/office above and make the roof a greenhouse with evacuated tube solar water heaters and some photovoltaic panels plus hookups for more photovoltaic panels as prices decrease. Make the ground floor area general-purpose as well so that people who don't own cars or those who park their cars in the alley can use the ground floor of the garage as a workshop, office, self-contained apartment, etc. Install hydronic floor heating in each level.

7) Massively insulate each building so as to reduce heating requirements by 90%. Do insulation upgrades during the time of year when seasonal workers are laid off and give seasonal workers first priority to do the work. Money saved on Employment Insurance payouts can offset a lot of insulation upgrade costs.

8) Replace the roof on the main house with a greenhouse, evacuated tube solar water heaters and some photovoltaic panels with hookups for more photovoltaics as prices decrease.

9) Build a solarium/greenhouse across the entire south-facing back of the main house.

10) Drill vertical holes in the ground and install water pipes that can be used to transfer excess solar heat into the ground during the summer and recover that heat when needed in the winter.

11) Rewrite zoning laws so that homeowners are encouraged to run small, quiet, home-based businesses (such as a hairdressing salon, appliance repair shop, telecommuting office work, etc.) in the general purpose areas that used to be attached garages. Require that customers must arrive on foot, by bike, or in quiet, clean hybrid/electric vehicles. No noisy, smelly diesel vehicles (including buses) in residential areas!

12) Provide videoconferencing-linked university classrooms in each neighborhood to reduce the need for students to commute back and forth to physical classrooms and to make advanced education easily available to all Canadians - including people who live in small, isolated villages.

[ 15 September 2007: Message edited by: Cycling Commuter ]

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Originally posted by Cycling Commuter:
If I could re-design my neighborhood, here is how I would go about it:

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Who would pay for the glass enclosed solar water heated bike path for you to ride your bike in?

Ideally, sure, all of what you've outlined could work and would be beneficial. Now make it happen, start investigating the reality of folling your plan.

Brits can apply for something like $20K in subsidies to put "solar shingles" to replace pan tiles on roofs.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
They're doing most of those things in Europe now which C-Commuter mentions.

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Who would pay for the glass enclosed solar water heated bike path for you to ride your bike in?

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Community Supported Agriculture

Join and Support your Local Farmer's Market and Food Coops in Ontario

Order a Weekly Produce Basket from Food Coops and Local Farmers

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Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
Who pays for roads, snow removal, and maintenance?

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Originally posted by remind:

That would still have to go on regardless if there are bike paths that are covered, have you thought of the costs, monetarily and environmentally, to make that glass/plastic for huge covered bike paths for a handful of people?

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Originally posted by Fidel:
I really admire those people who bike to work and school like they do. I think to myself how they're really trying either for the health benefits or the environment or both. Ottawa has bike paths all over.

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Most places have bike paths all over and they have to be paved before people will use them.

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We've spent billions in North America on roads and highways to basically prop up big three car makers.

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BS, they have been made to connect our population as spreadout as it is. It is not feasibble to have "bike paths" everywhere, the weather simply does not permit it.

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It's time taxpayers invested in greener transportation, mass transit, bike paths, pedestrian paths and maybe one of those Maglev rail systems at some point. Christ knows we've shovelled enough profits from oil and gas south of the border to have paid for at least one high speed intercity system by now.

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Originally posted by Fidel:
But highways carry cars, and combustion of fossil fuels is a large part of the problem. Without roads and highways, the car companies wouldn't have become as big as they are today without taxpayer spending on millions of miles of roads and highways.

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I agree it is and we need advanced rail systems not utlilizing fossil fuels. However roads were built because we have a huge country that needs to be connected, and very sparse population except along the 49th.

It is short sighted to believe we should not have built roads and that we did because of the car corps.

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If they can burrow a chunnel under the English channel to France, and the Russians can extend a rail system began by the Tsars across 8 or 9 or 11 time zones, and China can do highspeed rail between Beijing and Shanghai, then I think Canada can do better than the patchwork highway system and privatized railways not transporting enough goods and people that we have.

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