(1) Sir James Goldsmith, The Trap, Carroll & Graf, New York 1994.
{p. 103} You believe that intensive farming, on which modern agriculture is based, damages public health and destabilizes society. Why?
Intensive farming is based on the belief that food is like any other product and that agriculture will respond to technology in the same way as industry does. If new technology is introduced, the argument goes, enhanced efficiency and productivity will follow. Large, mechanized modern farms using the latest scientific discoveries will produce more food, more cheaply, for the benefit of the economy and of people throughout the world. The necessary elimination of rural jobs, the reasoning continues, is no different from the daily loss of industrial jobs due to technological innovation. What is more, men and women will be liberated from the land and made free to participate in the dynamic sectors of contemporary industry, where they will contribute to the growth of GNP and to public prosperity.
At first sight this seems obvious. Yet it is totally wrong. When people leave the land, they gravitate to the cities in search of work. But throughout the world there are not enough urban jobs and the infrastructure – such as lodgings, schools, hospitals, etc. – is already insufficient. The result is increased unemployment,
{p. 104} with the attendant costs of welfare, as well as a need for substantial expenditure on infrastructure. These are the indirect costs of intensive agriculture and they must be taken into account.
There is also a deeper price. When, as a result of change, jobs are lost in a particular industry the fundamental balance of society is not altered. Some declining companies necessarily suffer while other, more competitive entities emerge. But loss of rural employment and migration from the countryside to the cities causes a fundamental and irreversible shift. It has contributed throughout the world to the destabilization of rural society and to the growth of vast urban concentrations. In the urban slums congregate uprooted individuals whose families have been splintered, whose cultural traditions have been extinguished and who have been reduced to dependence on welfare from the state. They form an alienated underclass. From the first world to the third, these huge shantytowns have become tragic, morbid intumescences. The cost of such social breakdown can never be measured. The damage is too fundamental. Throughout the world social breakdown in the mega-cities threatens the existence of free societies.
As Jose Lutzenberger, the far-sighted former Environment Minister of Brazil, writes, the notorious slums of Brazil, known as favelas, were the direct result of the rural dislocations caused by the Green Revolution of the 1950s. This was the first major scientific
{p. 105} initiative to apply intensive farming to a large area. It was supposed to end, for all time, famine throughout the world.
But do you question the assertion that intensive agriculture is more productive?
The only measure by which large farms are more productive is in the use of labour. If productivity is measured in terms of production per acre, or per unit of energy, or relative capital input, it is the small farm which comes out best.
