Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Control of Farmland
The effects of the industrialization and globalization of agriculture can also be seen in pat-
terns of farmland ownership and control. A global system of food production, one that is
increasingly coming under the control of large national and multinational corporations, has
begun to refashion how and, more importantly, where food is produced. Driving the global/
industrial system of farming is the continual search by agribusiness firms for areas of low-
cost production. In a global system of food production, labor and capital flow to places where
maximum profits can be extracted. In this system, farmland becomes a “staging area” for the
production of food, and given that the supply of farmland exceeds demand, there is little in-
centive to protect any particular tracts of land from nonagricultural development. 10
Land, unlike the other factors of production, is not geographically mobile. However, as
capital and labor migrate from place to place, land has the potential to be brought into and
taken out of production from one growing season to the next, depending on where maximum
profits can be extracted at any given time.
In most nonextractive enterprises, land serves as a “condition” of production in the sense
that it provides the space or location for an economic activity (e.g., the land on which a man-
ufacturing plant is situated). For most agricultural activities, however, land is a “means” of
production. As the British geographer Richard Munton notes: “For most systems of farming
the soil itself provides the growth medium, while acting as a store for capital inputs of vary-
ing duration, ranging from the ephemeral (chemical nutrients) to the long term (irrigation
systems). As land varies in its fertility and in its relative location, these characteristics confer
advantages on some parcels of land at the expense of others.” 11
Over the long term, technological advances in the agricultural sciences will continue to
raise productivity levels on most farmland around the world. Whether production increases
can match growth rates attained over the past forty to fifty years remains an open question at
this point. However, over the short term we are likely to see more and more farmland move
out of the hands of the people who work it. Absentee landlords are becoming a permanent
fixture on the American agricultural landscape.
A global system of agricultural production operates at its highest economic efficiency
when the factors of production can be freely substituted for one another. If land can be
brought into and taken out of production on a seasonal basis, then it acquires the same degree
fluidity as capital, labor, and management. In California, which produces the largest agri-
cultural sales of any state in the nation, for example, the amount of farmland on which the
same individual (or set of individuals) was both owner and operator decreased by almost 10
million acres between 1950 and 1997. However, the amount of farmland that was owned by
someone other than the operator and leased to the operator by a neighboring farmer or ab-
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