An excellent article. The issue of world hunger is not about to go away. On the contrary it is destined to get much, much worse. The breakdown of rural communities and elimination of subsistence or self sufficient farming has been deliberated and continues. Big business and governments need people to be dependent on them. They have done an excellent job of driving people off farms and into cities where they consume more and are reliant on government in a multitude of ways.
At the time of the Great Depression many people had some idea on self sufficiency and were practicing it to some extent. Many still had relatives on farms and they were used to growing their own vegetable and keeping chooks. Perhaps there was a pig being fattened in a pen at the bottom of the garden. The pig and chooks were being fed on food scraps from the house - something that is illegal to do now. Life was simpler and driving a car to work was a rarity. The next (and looming) Great Depression will be much more difficult for just about everyone

Not only has this crisis been entirely predictable, but it’s also been stage-managed. For centuries, mass starvation has been both a tool of imperial power and a manager of populations. The British Empire, for example, routinely used famine as a means of imperial control and punishment – especially in Scotland, India and Ireland.

Ironically, one of the catalysts of the food crisis may end up being one of its saviours – i.e. peak oil. Global free trade, and its destruction of worldwide agricultural and industrial self-sufficiency, was only made possible through accessibility to cheap oil. Without cheap oil, the economics of global cheap labour is no longer feasible. So too, the viability of the military machine for controlling the irate, hungry masses will also dwindle – as all modern armies must run on oil.

We are moving into interesting times, where it’s unlikely that the affluent Western countries will be immune from global famine. Indeed, because these countries have long since lost their self-sustainability mechanisms, they are probably the least likely to make the vital adaptations needed to survive.

What a silly article. There was a global food crisis in the 1970s and small peasants were leaving the land in Colombia. What happen, did millions across the world starve following this global food crisis? No of course they didn’t. Was the global food crisis averted by giving land to the landless? Of course this didn’t happen.

More and more people are leaving the land for precisely the reason given by the author from his experience in Colombia: “the peasants growing little food in tiny strips of land”. Anyone with any knowledge of agriculture would understand that larger mechanised farms are far more efficient and can grow more food per area than small inefficient farms. The evidence is apparent from production figures. In the 30 years since the 1970s, agriculture production has increased despite a reduction in the amount of land farmed. All of this on the back of people leaving the land in droves.

This is simply more misguided Marxist philosophy that has done more to engineer hunger than anything else in the past century, population growth included. Marxist “back to the land” movements have resulted in hunger in the former USSR following the collectivization of farms, in China during the cultural revolution and today in North Korea and Zimbabwe.

"Give land to the landless and hunger will diminish; perhaps cease"

They did that in Zimbabwe, how did that work out again?

Agronomist is correct in one sense. It is true larger mechanised farms are more effcicient. That was in part what drove the Stalinist regime in the USSR - who were not in any sense marxist - to collectivise, with the resultant starvation that their action imposed. Trotsky wrote about this in terms of the scissor hands of the working class and the peasantry cutting against each other and suggested ways to address the problem. Forced collectivisation was not one of those solutions.

To describe North Korea or maoist China as marxist is itself nonsensical. Where for example is the working class revolution that led to the supposed working class state in either of these two monstrosities? Where is the withering away of the stae? Where is the democratic rule of the majority (ie of workers) in the interests of workers? Nowhere. These regimes, like all stalinist regimes, are state capitalist. They are a mirror of the West, not its antithesis.

In saying that large mechanised farms are more efficient, agronomist misses the truth in the article, namely that by forcing small farmers into a global market or off the land the ability to feed the poor diminishes. This is highlighted by the fact the gains in bringing people out of malnourishment or starvation made in the last twenty years through market forces and a form of market imposed collectivisation have been wiped out by the rising price of staples around the world in less than twelve months.

The ‘big farms are better’ paradigm has been disproved over and over again by many studies, which have been pointedly ignored by mainstream agricultural ‘wisdom’.

Small farms use more labour (usually family members) per hectare than big farms and thus minimise labour costs and maximise work quality through closer supervision. Compared to large farms, small farmers can cultivate their land more intensively, use more natural fertilizing methods and irrigation systems, vary their range of crops and create less ecological impact.

Just because agriculture production since the 70s has supposedly increased despite a reduction in the amount of land farmed, this does not mean that the outcome has been equitable – quite the opposite. Large farms are much more capital intensive, creating larger revenues for smaller numbers of people, while more and more people are forced to become food consumers, rather than food producers.

Estimates of agribusiness productivity do not take into account the hidden costs to the rest of society by the mass dislocation of existing farmers. As big farms buy out small farms, the displaced workers then move either to the cities, where they put further strain on jobs, resources and social infrastructure, or to other land areas where they displace local agricultural workers.

The ‘big farms are better’ paradigm is just the modern incarnation of feudalism, which assumed that peasants could only be ‘productive’ if a lord and master owned their land, ruled their lives, told them what to produce and regularly extracted the fruits of their labours.