Labor, Markets, and Agricultural Production

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429714047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Focusing on the complex and often contradictory relationships between agricultural production and markets, Labor, Markets, and Agricultural Production examines the micro-macro linkages between farm production, farm labor issues, and the degree of autonomy or dependency vis-Ã -vis markets. By comparing the case of farmers in Peru, generally regarded as peripheral agricultural producers, with that of European farmers able to easily access the centralized markets of the EEC, Dr. van der Ploeg is able to draw general conclusions about the ongoing process of commoditization of agriculture and the roles farmers play in agrarian development.

1
Heterogeneity and Styles of Farming

There are a great many ways to farm, greater even, if that’s possible, than the number of erudite models that have been devised for understanding, managing, and possibly neutralizing such diversity. Such models include Grigg’s “agricultural systems” (1974), Dumont’s “types d’agriculture” (1970), the “ecosystems” of Geertz (1963), the “bedrijfstypen” of the Dutch Agro-Economic Institute, the “aziende tipiche” of Italian research from Medici (1934) to de Benedictis and Cosentino (1979) and Brusco (1979), the “land-labor institutions” of South America described by Pearse (1976), and the “styles of farming” identified by Hofstee (1985). And the list could be greatly extended.

The intricacies and implications of the different classifications are equally diverse. Large geographical units, ranging from zones, provinces and states, to countries and even subcontinents, are generally the starting point for comparison and further elaboration. Some research traditions depict the differences between various systems by assuming a certain homogeneity within given geographical areas. Others highlight the heterogeneity found within different production zones. Table 1.1 presents a tentative overview of this heterogeneity. The table is based on one of the most obvious forms that diversity can take within what are otherwise relatively homogeneous agricultural areas, i.e., on the highly differing production results per object of labor (where object of labor can refer to a unit of land, herd of cattle, etc.). Under similar conditions (of an ecological, economic and technical kind), such different physical levels of productivity imply a varying input of production factors and non-factor inputs per object of labor and highly different levels of technical efficiency.¹ A greater insertion of production factors and inputs per labor object is often associated with higher technical efficiency. This is an argument which I shall take up later. In such a case, we speak of an intensive style of agricultural practice. When a relatively low input of production factors is combined with a relatively low level of technical efficiency, we speak of an extensive style of agricultural practice.²

Table 1.1. Hectare Yields for Different Styles of Agriculture

Agricultural System	Ha. Yields with Extensive Style of Agriculture	Ha. Yield with Intensive Style of Agriculture
Rice in S. of Guinea-Bissau	820 kg/ha	1,410 kg/ha
Groundnuts in Guinea-Bissau	1,500 kg/ha unpeeled	2,200 kg/ha unpeeled
Cotton around Bagoue Ivory Coast	878 kg/ha	1,364 kg/ha
Food prod. Senoufozone Ivory Coast	28 mil F/ha	31 mil F/ha
Food prod, in thinly pop. Ignamezone, Ivory Coast	2,850 Kcal/ha	3,240 Kcal/ha
Cocoa, Nigeria	300 lbs/acre	550 lbs/acre
Potatoes, Anta Pampa, Peru	1,820 kg/topo	3,180 kg/topo
Cotton, coop, & communal, Bajo Piura, Peru
- on good land	10.7 cargas/ha	12.1 cargas/ha
- on poor land	7.1 cargas/ha	8.4 cargas/ha
Minifundia agriculture. Antioquia, Colombia	100 (index)	153 (index)
Mixed agriculture, Campania, Italy	3.08 milj.l/ha	5.46 milj.l/ha
Dairy farming, Po plain, Italy	4.16 milj.l/ha	6.43 milj.l/ha

Source: Based on Cabral, 1956; van der Ploeg, 1981; Peltre-Wurtz and Steck, 1979; SEDES, 1965; Uroy, 1979; Galletti et al., 1956; van de Ploeg, 1977; CEC, 1976 and 1977; Bolhuis and van der Ploeg, 1985; this study Chapters 2 and 3. Average input of production factors per hectare as veil as average technical efficiency were calculated for each agricultural system. When both were high then the farm was classified as belonging to the intensive style, and when both were low, as belonging to the extensive style. In all sets of data at least 74X of the farms could be classified as belonging to one or the other style.

It is customary in comparative research to present an agricultural system’s level of development in terms of the average production of grain equivalents per hectare. At present, in most West African countries, this figure amounts to 1.5 ton gr.eq./ha. In The Netherlands, it is 10 ton gr.eq./ha. This last figure is even more impressive when compared to the 4.5 ton gr.eq/ha. obtained eighty years ago. In Italy, where higher temperatures slow down the conversion of energy and nutrients in biomass, a lower level is achieved, namely, an average production of 7 ton gr.eq/ha. While not disputing the significance of average differences, the data summarized in Table 1.1 demonstrate unequivocally that at each level of development a degree of diversity can be identified. The key question, however, is whether such diversity is structurally meaningful, or whether the distribution is simply random. This question is not new: indeed, one might even postulate that agricultural science advances through the repeated reconceptualization of such differences. Some theories maintain that they are essential as a starting point for analysis, while others, theoretically at least, see them as somewhat irrelevant.

Until the 1950s, diversity between, and especially within, agricultural areas was classified and understood in terms of intensive and extensive styles of agriculture practice. Thus the concept of “intensification” meant the ongoing development of intensive styles of farming; it referred to the progressive raising of intensity levels. The term “extensification” referred to the opposite tendency.

But these terms were anything but neutral. Intensive agriculture stood for better agriculture. It was not only desirable; it equaled progress. “Good farming,” wrote Graham Brade-Birks (1950:XVI), “means farming so carried out as to produce the maximum economic output from the land.” He described this “good farming” as “intensive farming,” directed to “those practices designed to produce a very high output.” Technical efficiency and economic results followed logically from each other. In contrast, extensive farming, “the practice of using the minimum amounts of labor, cultivation and manure,” was referred to as “a low standard of farming.” An authoritative Dutch author of the time, Minderhoud, wrote “intensification is rooted in the rule of raising the net yield, while extensification lies in saving labor and capital: thus one has to take a reduction of yield in kind for love” (1948:45).

Also interesting, in retrospect, is the debate which was then taking place over the farm economy ratio behind both processes of development. Minderhoud criticized those who “calculate at which intensity total production costs per kg are the lowest and give the impression that the farmer must strive for that.” Contained in this whole issue is the question of which of the concepts corresponds most accurately to actual relations in agriculture and can thus be used as normative, as goals at the enterprise level. In short, what we now know as an established theory, namely, neoclassical agricultural economics, was then still subject to fondamental differences of opinion. Thus, according to Minderhoud, the proposition that the farmer must strive for the lowest price per unit of end product, “the problem is incorrectly posed.” Situations vary and thus “the manner in which the soil can be rationally exploited” also varies. His comment that “many American writers, … take the circumstance of sufficient ground, but insufficient labor and capital as a starting point for consideration, with the consequence that West European readers find them difficult to follow,” is a telling one (1948:52).

Minderhoud and Brade-Birks are exponents of a tradition which is difficult to reconstruct in retrospect and therefore may provoke surprise. There existed a broad consensus in which the bipolar dimensions just noted were taken as obvious, for the most part as an undisputed parameter for the ordering of diversity and as an analytical starting point for developing an understanding of the differential processes which such diversity brought about. Contained in such ideas was the unquestioned norm about the nature and direction of further agrarian development—namely, progressive intensification.

The 1950s marked a gradual but definitive turning point: a new paradigm became dominant. The core of the new tendency was neoclassical agricultural economics, a model for examining, describing and, if necessary, reorganizing the adjustment of agrarian enterprise behavior to market and price relations. In essence, this model comes down to projecting current price relations on the farm enterprise in order to specify precisely the “optimum” solution. The model implies a situation that is both thoroughly atomized and completely static. Development at farm enterprise level (a shifting “optimum”) is only possible within this model by the grace of changing market relations and technical progress, mostly understood as the taking up of externally-developed innovations. It is striking that, with the emergence of this neoclassical model, concern for a dynamic that could be produced within the farm itself disappears from the literature. Agriculture appears increasingly as “the text-book paradigm of neoclassical perfect competition” (Lipton, 1968), and so the concept of intensification logically loses its meaning. Intensity level becomes a derivative of the enterprise as an economic organization orientated to the market. Indeed, particular agrarian subsectors can then be defined as “too intensive” (Galletti et al., 1956:308). Finally, categories such as intensive and extensive completely disappear from applied agricultural science. New parameters rule.

The agro-economic definition of the optimum—given a series of assumptions, such as the same economic and institutional conditions for all enterprises, the same technological level, and a striving for profit maximization by each and every producer—means that “only one point would be observable on the production surface” (Yotopoulos, 1974:265). Empirical diversity, from being the first tenet for theoretical construction, now becomes a residual factor, or worse still, an “anomaly.”

In the recent literature, insofar as diversity and its implications get any attention, one or more of the following factors are usually referred to:

1. Diversity in hectare yields between otherwise “identical” enterprises would primarily point to variation in micro-ecological conditions: the vagaries of climate and soil are to be understood, as one Peruvian author expressed it, as “Satan and Messiah”; as prosperity for some, adversity for others.
2. A more elaborated view (which often rests on tautological argumentation) reduces differences in hectare yields to differences in price and cost levels.

One encounters a clear description of both viewpoints in Mellor (1968:259): “Studies that demonstrate peasant farmers to be, on the average, in good economic adjustment with their environment normally include considerable variability around that average. It is usually not clear to what extent such variability arises because some peasant farmers are not in optimal economic adjustment and to what extent the environment itself differs significantly from one farmer to another. Certainly the latter is true in part. Soils and othe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Heterogeneity and Styles of Farming
• 2 Dairy Farming in Emilia Romagna, Italy
• 3 Potato Production in the Peruvian Highlands
• 4 Peasant Struggles, Unions, and Cooperatives
• 5 Commoditization and the Social Relations of Production
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index