The Need for Sustainable Food Production Systems - Agroecology: The Ecology of Sustainable Food Systems - page 15

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

Input
Farming
Marketing

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

FIGURE 1.9 U.S. farmers' declining share of the consumer food dollar, 1910 to 1997. Marketing represents all services performed
after food leaves the farm gate. The farmers' share includes payments to local governments and hired labor. Inputs include all purchased,
nonfarm inputs. Source: Data from Stewart Smith, University of Maine, 2005.

Smaller-scale farmers seem to have little power
against the advancement of industrial agriculture. Smaller
farms cannot afford the cost of upgrading their farm equip-
ment and technologies in order to compete successfully
with the large farm operations. Moreover, the increase in
the share of the food dollar going to distributors and
marketers, coupled with cheap food policies that have kept
farm prices relatively stable, has left many farmers in a
tightening squeeze between production costs and market-
ing costs. Their share of the consumer food dollar, as
shown in Figure 1.9, has dropped from almost 38% to less
than 8% (Smith, pers. comm.).
Faced with such economic uncertainty, there is less
incentive for farmers to stay on the land. One trend is for
larger farmers to buy out their smaller neighbors. But
when agricultural land is adjacent to rapidly expanding
urban centers, such as in California, the incentive instead
is to sell farmland at the inflated value it has as urban
land. Because of this dynamic, the agriculturally rich
Great Central Valley of California has seen the loss of
hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland to devel-
opment since 1950, and the rate of loss of agricultural
land in the state as a whole averaged 49,700 acres annually
from 1988 to 1998 (Kuminoff et al., 2001).
In less developed countries, the growth of large-scale
export agriculture has an even more ominous effect.

As rural people — who were once able to feed themselves
adequately and sell surplus food to city-dwellers — are
pushed off the land, they migrate to cities, where they
become dependent on others for their food. Since more of
the food produced in the countryside is destined for export,
increasing amounts of food for the expanding urban areas
must be imported. Because of this dynamic, exports of
food to developing countries from developed countries
increased fivefold between 1970 and 1990, and during the
1990s, developing countries increased their food imports
at the rate of 5.6% per year (FAO, 2003). In the period
between 1980 and 2000, the quantity of coarse grains
exported from developed nations to developing nations
more than tripled (FAOSTAT, 2005). This imbalance
threatens the food security of less-developed countries and
makes them even more dependent on developed countries.

G LOBAL I NEQUALITY

Despite increases in productivity and yields, hunger per-
sists all over the globe. In some countries, such as India
and much of Africa, the percentage of chronically hungry
people has actually increased in recent years (FAO, 2004).
There are also huge disparities in calorie intake and food
security between people in developed nations and those
in developing nations. At the beginning of the 21st century,