A bit of history: the development of the industrial food and farming system

The story of the farming crisis in Britain is not just the story of how farmgate prices have plummeted over the last five years sending many British farmers into financial crisis, the crisis in farming is much longer and deeper than that. It is the story of how farming in the UK has been transformed from the occupation of the bulk of the population into a resource and capital-intensive, highly industrialised operation with a dramatic decline in the number of small and family farmers and farm workers.

It is also the story of the transformation of the food system from the local/regional supply of food products to the sourcing of lowest-cost agricultural raw materials on the global market.

Major historical events mark the progress of this transformation in the UK. The enclosure of the commons, at its peak in the 1700s, brought an end to subsistence farming and turned peasants into free labour. The Industrial Revolution brought time and labour-saving technology to the fields and created an army of hungry town-dwelling factory workers to feed. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 marked the end of UK market protectionism and allowed the flow of imported grain from the Americas.

The introduction of refrigerated ships in the 1880s and the activities of the Co-operative Society in the UK further encouraged an international trade in food, especially perishable foods, with the UK importing wheat, meat and dairy produce from the Americas and Australasia and sugar, coffee, tea and other tropical produce from colonies.

By the start of the Second World War, 70% of the UK's food needs were imported. Shortages of food during the war demonstrated the importance of national food security, and postwar UK farm policy used generous production subsidies to encourage farmers to maximise yields by the application of industrial methods. In the past fifty years, farmers in industrialised countries have been spectacularly successful at increasing food production.

Encouraged by government agricultural policies and by the development of new agricultural technologies; pesticides, chemical fertilisers, plant and animal breeding, antibiotics and machinery, farmers can now produce much more from the same land.

Compared to 1950, per hectare yields of wheat, barley, potatoes and sugar have tripled, while milk yields per cow have more than doubled.[4] At the same time, fewer and fewer people are involved in the production of our food. The industrialisation of agriculture has replaced farm-based processes and farm labour with ever greater amounts of capital, for example by replacing farm animals and labour with machinery and the removal of the processing of milk and cheese from farms to factories.

By this means, an ever-increasing proportion of the value generated by agriculture is moved away from farmers and flows into the hands of food corporations.[5] Between 1910 and 1990 the share of the agricultural economy received by US farmers dropped from 21% to 5%, the gains being taken up by agribusiness corporations.[6]

The development of GM crop technology can be seen as a further step in the industrialisation of agriculture, through the appropriation of genetic resources. This technology, driven largely by capital investment from biotechnology corporations, aims to replace a previously free resource - farm-saved seed - with seed purchased from patent-holding corporations.

As the food system has been restructured by corporate capital, a relatively small number of agrochemical corporations have grown in stature by providing the agricultural inputs upon which industrial agriculture depends. At the same time, the deregulation and globalisation of trade has led to the global production (and increasingly global consumption) of standardised processed foods and meat products. This has given a small number of very powerful food corporations (grain traders, food processors and supermarkets) the ability to scour the world, taking advantage of differences in safety and environmental regulation, labour costs etc, in their search for cheap food. As a result, the power and the profits in the global food system have shifted away from farmers to the agribusiness corporations that produce and sell inputs to farmers and the food corporations that process, package, and market food to consumers.

The industrial model of agriculture is now a global phenomenon, but with varying degrees of penetration. In developing countries low input farming methods still survive and the knowledge, skills and value to society of these traditional farming methods are gaining wider recognition and support.[7] In industrialised countries, a small but increasing number of conventional farmers, and new entrants to farming in particular, are producing food using alternative farming systems, which aim to be not only economically, but also socially and environmentally sustainable (see box 'Sustainable Agriculture' on page 39).

References
[3] William Heffernan with Mary Hendrickson and Robert Gronski (1999) Report to the National Farmers Union: Consolidation in the Food and Agriculture System www.nfu.org/images/heffernan_1999.pdf Viewed 6/1/04
[4] Jules Pretty et al (2000) 'An assessment of the total external costs of UK agriculture', Agricultural Systems 65(2) pp.113 -136
[5] See for example: Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler (2001) Food in Society: Society Culture and Geography London:Arnold; David Goodman and Michael Watts (eds) (1997) Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring, London:Routledge
[6] USDA (1998) A Time to Act: A Report of the USDA National Commission on Small Farms www.reeusda.gov/smallfarm/report.htm Viewed 12/2/04
[7] For example see: Deccan Development Society www.ddsindia.com/ Viewed 12/2/04; UBINIG http://membres.lycos.fr/ubinig/about2.htm Viewed 12/2/04; MASSIPAG www.masipag.org/ Viewed 12/2/04; SEARICE www.searice. org.ph/ Viewed 12/2/04