If there is nobody left knowing how to cultivate them, there is going to be a problem...
I pointed this out the other day in Bruce McF's latest Arc of the Sun diary. And that current prices might persuade peasant farmers to stay on the land - though we have to stop bringing world prices down with our subsidised exports (we = EU & US).
OTOH, we shouldn't give up farming. There's a free-trade notion that says we don't need agriculture any more (like we didn't need industry?), and we should just import from the cheapest bidder (comparative advantage). Which, practically, means buying from Cairns Group and emerging agri-countries that run wide-scale production of dubious sustainability. And (Doha Round) from plantation-type farming that should be encouraged (invested in by capitalists) in poorer countries, where lucky peasant farmers will be able to get wage-slave jobs and we will be told they have been raised out of poverty.
My view is we should aim at self-sufficiency, as far as possible, for all. Free-traders' schemes take no account of ecology or of human society, do not cost these into their utilitarian calculations, forget past agronomic experience of virgin deforested soils exhausted by colonial cropping (North American forest, C17 - C19?). Rather than go for plantation monocultures, we should encourage sustainable, smart small farming providing basic food plus cash crops for sale on regional and national markets. Food will be more expensive? Good. Then it will pay farmers to stay on the land, it will maintain and enrich social structures that are otherwise doomed by uprooting and flight to the cities. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Another point made by Mazoyer is that large-scale farms are actually quite inefficient ; that economies of scale happen only up to 5-7 workers per production units, and that after that you meet diseconomies of scale.
Also, the amount of food GDP going to the producer will rise again : even France or the US spend ~15% of GDP on food, but most of that goes to Agrobusiness and supermarket nowadays, not farmers. i.e. food prices for the end buyer need not rise that much. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
That's interesting... So what is the optimal farm size, in terms of people and land area? When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes
Land area OTOH is very variable, depending on the type of production, the amount of capital available... A shepherd with a dog can look over a much larger herd than without...
The insight is that agriculture is very easy to decentralise, which is why economies of scale don't apply. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
At least, not in this century ... maybe we can get an elsewhere to import some high value things from down the track, if we don't screw the pooch too badly in this coming century. Utsukushikereba sore de ii
