Extracts - the future of small-scale farming

High commodity prices, growing demand for biofuels, a possible shift to low-carbon agriculture, booming consumer demand in the cities and in the North for year-round supply, and growing markets for organic and Fairtrade products could all work in favour of small farmers in the coming years. Whether they can break into these new and growing markets will depend largely on their ability to organise and upgrade their production.

Domestic and regional markets may offer more potential than Northern export markets, especially in light of the latter’s tariff barriers and intimidating array of health and quality standards (although smallholders in Latin America appear to have had some success in riding the globalisation wave). Africa’s domestic consumption of food staples, including cereals, roots and tubers, and traditional livestock products produced and consumed mainly by poor people, is estimated at around $50bn a year, more than five times greater than the value of its traditional commodity exports, and this is expected to double by 2015.

However, with urbanisation and the spread of supermarkets, local markets are becoming more like international ones. Small-scale agriculture will have to learn how to meet more exacting quality standards and face intense competition even to sell locally, or else will be left with the lowest-value dregs of the market. The hiding places from globalisation are shrinking, and both state action and producer organisation are essential to equip small farmers to keep up with the pace of technical and commercial change, and to reform the business model that currently excludes them.

The countryside in many developing countries is being rapidly transformed. While change has brought a mixed bag of opportunities and threats for poor farmers, the threats are greater and the opportunities are slimmer than for large farmers and other powerful players. Many of these changes are likely to drive up inequality in the countryside, both between rich and poor, and between women and men. Poor farmers are more vulnerable, more likely to be squeezed out of new, higher-value agriculture, and less likely to benefit from new technologies.

How governments and rural people shape and adapt to change will to a large extent determine the course of global poverty and inequality over the coming decades. Only a concerted effort by a combination of

effective, accountable states and active, organised citizens to redistribute power in agricultural markets can arrest growing inequality and rekindle agriculture’s ability to trigger national economic take-off and poverty reduction.

In any case, many rural communities will in all likelihood face a future of out-migration and an ageing population. In Peru’s Sacred Valley, as the evening sun lights up the plots of maize and the dusk is redolent with the smells of eucalyptus and herbs, 18-year-old Segundino punctures the beauty of a tourist paradise: ‘We grow maize, potatoes, wheat, everything, but I want to finish school and carry on studying. Farming is pure sacrifice. Here in the community it’s just work and school. We play the odd game of football, but that’s about it. I want to go to the city.’