Feeding the Farmers First

 

Below is the opening paragraphs for “Feeding the Farmers First” by Terry Leahy.

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The title for this book has been taken from a slogan devised by MASIPAG in the Philippines. MASIPAG is an organization of 30,000 smallholder farms (Wright 2008). The members are reacting to the extreme poverty and food insecurity that has been their lot, despite decades of promises and some quite drastic land reform. Land reform in the Philippines has been compromised by a cycle of debt. Smallholder farmers get into debt to engage in “modern” and “scientific” agriculture (MASIPAG 2013). Far too often, they end up selling their land to discharge the debt. Even when this disaster has not happened, the small income they are deriving from selling their agricultural products, after paying off their debts, has been insufficient to buy a diverse and adequate diet. MASIPAG wants a long-term solution that can withstand changes in the global economy, ensure food security and remove the cycle of debt.

A central part of their approach is “Feeding the Farmers First”. I first came across this slogan at a Newcastle gathering on development work. A representative from MASIPAG had prepared a banner with the slogan. As Gabriel Diaz, a farmer and trainer from Mindanao, explains:

There is a big difference between the MASIPAG and non-MASIPAG farmers. In MASIPAG, the farmer holds the decisions. For farmer-led agriculture the farmer is not dependent on the inputs or seeds from other people. He has control over the inputs and can reduce them. The inputs we use come from the farm. The focus is the security of the family. We don’t get hungry. The first thing we think of in our farm is our family having enough to eat. This is before going to market. (Bachmann, Cruzada and Wright 2015: 22)

This strategy flies in the face of decades of development advice. Most rural development projects around the world attempt to move farmers out of “traditional subsistence” farming and into commercial farming. Economic orthodoxy has it that the most effective way to produce wealth is to make sure that each section of the global population produces those particular goods and services which they alone can produce most cheaply, where they have a “comparative advantage”. The outcome would be that all goods would be produced at the cheapest possible world price. So poor farmers in the developing countries should be growing crops for the world market. Doing that, their hours of labour would be spent producing the things that they alone can produce most cheaply – usually luxury crops requiring a lot of labour.

 

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