Farming outside North America is different, but still subject to the same climatic constraints and market logics that shape agriculture in the US and Canada. Some foreign agribusinesses compete with farmers in North America, but the majority of farmers in the world engage only in subsistence agriculture, a type of farming designed to feed only the farmer’s family, rather than the international marketplace. In some parts of Africa and Asia, over 80% of the population is engaged in subsistence farming. Still, food shortages are common in many parts of the world. By comparison, in the US, agricultural workers account for only 2% of the workforce, yet food is somewhat abundant, leaving the rest of the population to pursue other activities.
Agricultural success and failures are easy to find. Food shortages occur in many countries because the population of many regions has exceeded the local carrying capacity of the land. Unfortunately, too many people live in regions of the world where poor soils and harsh climates limit agricultural productivity. Despite harsh climates and poor soils, farmers in some developing countries, have developed highly efficient farming techniques uniquely adapted to local conditions. Agricultural economists have suggested that some techniques, including slash-and-burn, and wet rice farming are more productive per acre or unit of energy than the best US farms.
Herding and Ranching
In the places where there is not enough rain or it’s too cold for field crops, livestock production predominates. Many regions focus on cattle ranching as we do in the drylands of the US, but sheep ranching is more popular in regions where the British colonial influences linger. Pastoralism is a nomadic herding alternate to ranching occupying large stretches of our planet’s lands ill-suited for crop agriculture. Nomadic herding requires those who tend herds of animals (e.g., cattle, sheep, reindeer, etc.) to move frequently in search of grazing pastureland. Without constant migration, herds may overgraze the land, causing livestock and people to starve. Pastoralism can only support a small population, so it is the world’s most land-extensive form of agriculture.
Wet Rice Cultivation
Figure 3-29: Cambodia. Agricultural laborers work to plant rice in a flooded "paddy". The water functions mainly to inhibit weed growth. Sometimes fish are intercropped in the field, helping control mosquitoes and providing protein.
Rice feeds more people on earth than any other crop. Billions rely on rice as the main staple of their diet. The great rice production areas of the world are in South and East Asia, where the seasonal monsoons and quality soils make it a logical agricultural option. Americans grow rice too, mainly on irrigated acreage in California and the Mississippi Delta, using advanced machinery, and even airplanes, for seeding. Not only is most Asian rice still planted, weeded, harvested, and processed by hand, but there is also a significant amount of manual labor involved in the maintenance of the rice paddies to keep water in the fields at an ideal depth to ensure that rice matures properly. Luckily, for those who depend on rice for sustenance, it is a wildly productive plant, capable of massive caloric yields per acre. In the last two generations, thanks to scientific advancements in rice genetics and fertilizer science, known as the Green Revolution, rice farmers in Asia often harvest fields twice or even three times per year, vastly increasing yields over the levels known in the 1940s. Asian rice cultivation remains exceptionally labor-intensive and land-intensive– making it the opposite of nomadic pastoralism which requires few people and supports few.
Because rice provides only carbohydrates, people living in wet rice regions must supplement their diets to remain healthy. So many Asians, even those living in big cities, maintain intensively cultivated vegetable gardens. Paddy rice farmers also practice a type of intercropping by introducing fish and other forms of aquaculture into fields. By putting fish that eat bugs into rice paddies, farmers can reduce both pesticide and fertilizer costs while adding dietary protein and a commodity they can sell at local markets. As a bonus, fish also eat mosquito larvae, helping reduce the instance of mosquito-borne diseases, like malaria.
RICE AND MATH SCORES
Paddy rice farming may also contribute to the success of Asians on math tests as well. At least that’s the argument forwarded by Malcolm Gladwell a journalist who writes best-selling books that explain a variety of cultural phenomena with statistical analyses, and often, the spatial logic of geography. One theory Gladwell forwards is that Asians may be good at math because many Asian societies have long engaged in labor-intensive wet rice cultivation. The theory goes that over centuries wet rice cultivation taught Asians cultural lessons about the value of burdensome work in the rice paddies. The intense work ethic embraced by communities living in wet rice regions can be applied to other burdensome activities, like learning math. Alternatively, people from regions where agricultural abundance traditional comes without intense effort, it became easier to not recognize the relationship between effort and reward. This theory is an attempt to replace a racial or genetic narrative with a narrative about cultural practice. Geographers often argue that cultural and physical environments have a significant influence upon each other, but the specter of environmental determinism continues to prohibit many geographers from fully embracing ideas like Gladwell’s. It’s a reminder to keep in mind the logical pitfalls associated with the ecological fallacy.
Slash-and-Burn – Shifting Cultivation
Very different from wet rice farming is slash-and-burn agriculture, also known as swidden or milpa farming. Whereas wet rice farming predominates in monsoonal climates, requires good soils, a substantial labor force, and is capable of feeding millions, slash and burn farming is practiced exclusively in equatorial rainforest climates where poor soils support only small populations.
Figure 3-30: Quiche Guatemala - Typical of the three sisters field cropping system. Corn (maize), beans and squash grow in this field. Note the way in which weeds have also grown along the walkway where squash leaves have not shaded them to death. Source: Wikimedia
Slash-and-burn is practiced in rainforest areas because soils there are leached by excessive rainfall, a process that removes soil nutrients essential for farming. To add nutrients, farmers cut down patches of forest, allow the felled vegetation to dry, then burn the logs and debris. The ashes of the burnt plants are worked into the depleted soil as fertilizer. Each burnt field remains somewhat fertile for a few years before the rains once again leach away soil nutrients. When soils grow infertile, farmers must begin the process anew in a nearby field. Farmers must leave exhausted fields fallow, for several years so the forest can regrow. Eventually, farmers can return to the regrown patches of forest and begin the process once again. This type of farming requires much land, but luckily very little labor, so it is characterized as a land rotation system (rather than a crop rotation system), and it is an example of land extensive farming. Remarkably, because slash and burn farming requires so few laborers, and minimal effort to produce a crop, this kind of farming is characterized as exceptionally caloric efficient.
Slash and burn farming has also proven to be sustainable in locations where the population relying on it remains small. For thousands of years, people living in the rainforests of Asia, Africa, and Latin America used slash-and-burn agriculture without seriously threatening the ability of the fragile soils to produce food. However, explosive population growth in many of these regions threatens precious rainforest reserves as farmers burn ever larger patches of forest and shorten fallow intervals. Inga Alley Cropping, or planting crops between rows of nitrogen-fixing Inga trees, offers an intriguing alternative to slash and burn, that preserves forest cultures.
Figure 3-31: India – Farmers recently cleared this land for cropping. Done occasionally, it’s OK, but population growth makes this practice unsustainable. Source: Wikimedia.
In the Americas, slash and burn farmers often plant within the same field the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. These plants offer an ingenious solution to a variety of agricultural and dietary problems. Corn provides carbohydrates to the diet and supports bean plant vines. Beans provide protein to the diet, often deficient in poor regions of the world where fish and/or game are scarce. Beans also are nitrogen fixers, meaning they help fertilize the soil for the corn and squash. Vitamins and minerals are provided by the squash, and the broad leaves of squash plants help preserve soil moisture while discouraging weed growth. Some also believe that when intercropped (planted together in the same field), the three sisters create a sort of natural pesticide. After the harvest, farmers plow dying plants back into the ground to fertilize the poor soils.
Plantation Agriculture
In many coastal regions of the developing world, especially where European colonial powers once ruled, plantation agriculture is the dominant style of farming. In this agricultural system, agricultural land is dedicated to growing cash crops, generally at the expense of staple crops. Some of the more popular plantation crops are bananas, cotton, tea, cacao trees, and coffee.
There are multiple, serious problems with the plantation agricultural systems, but most countries find it difficult to develop viable, profitable alternatives. Many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America rely on plantation-style agriculture because they have no other industry capable of earning much needed foreign currency like US Dollars or Euros. An over-reliance on cash crops can lead to food insecurity – or famine. When all the best farmlands in a country are planted with export-oriented cash crops, the production of food for local consumption is diminished. Secondly, many plantation regions are guilty of monocropping, the practice of relying on a single crop. Not only are monoculture economies vulnerable to crop failure (e.g., insect invasions, diseases, droughts, etc.), they can be devastated by unpredictable swings in market prices for their product. The US has regions where monoculture is common, but the US economy is diverse and can easily withstand the failure of a single crop or commodity market. Many developing economies do not have this luxury. If the market price for the main farm commodity falls, or a blight attacks the main crop, the entire economy can be in trouble and the burden of such failures always falls on the poor, especially those working on plantations.
Figure 3-32: Coffee Prices, like many other agricultural commodities, are prone to dramatic changes in price, supply and demand. Unpredictable economic conditions are a result. Source: Financial Times.
Commodity prices can fall when too many competitors join a market, bloating the supply and crashing the price. Coffee, in particular, has seen wild price swings since the 1960s. One cause of the famous Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980s was a collapse of export agricultural commodity prices at the same time as a spike in world oil prices that caused a global recession.
Plantation agriculture is also responsible for most of the nearly intractableland tenureproblems that plague many countries engaged in plantation agriculture. During the 18thand 19th century, colonial powers like England and Spain robbed indigenous people of their land and forced them to work on plantations. Others became peasants, confined to marginal lands least desired by the colonial, landed elites. In many cases, families of elites and peasants continued in their roles for many generations, and in the process, created both a permanent underclass and a landed oligarchy. Violent clashes between socialist or communist land reform advocates and capitalists who favored the status quo erupted frequently during the 20th century, especially in Latin America. The economic hopelessness and violence that plantation agriculture spawned spurred migration. In Latin America, those fleeing plantation economies came to the United States, where opponents of land reform efforts in Latin America simultaneously oppose immigration from Latin America.
Because plantation agriculture is often highly competitive, and sometimes a highly profitable endeavor, efficiency is a paramount concern. Large plantation operations take advantage of economies of scale that small-hold farming cannot, so there is significant pressure from the market, and the agribusiness corporations who own large plantation, to ensure that massive farms continue to use the best farmlands in a country. In those rare instances where land reform has taken place, and highly productive agribusiness farmlands were redistributed to the poor; the export economy has faltered, and economic chaos ensued. Zimbabwe’s land redistribution is the classic modern example.
WE ARE THE WORLD
Figure 3-33: Philadelphia, PA. Live Aid was a significant cultural event raising awareness of African famine. Though money and awareness were raised, most involved failed to understand the economics and politics behind the famine. Source: Wikimedia
In the mid-1980s, a drought, war, and bad governmental policies in the Horn of Africa led to one of the great humanitarian crises of the modern era. Famine struck Eritrea and Ethiopia causing an estimated half-million deaths. A documentary news crew broadcast the tragedy back to the rest of the world, shocking many into action. Two of the better-known charity relief efforts came from pop and rock musicians. Live Aid, Band Aid and USA for Africa were efforts launched by famous music acts to raise money and awareness of the crisis. Donations poured in because people believed that the crisis was largely the result of a natural disaster. Few knew that during this great famine, Ethiopia remained a net exporter of food. Grain and other agricultural commodities were being shipped from Ethiopia around the world, often as animal feed, while thousands within the country starved. Transportation and safety issues were partly to blame, but in the end, the Ethiopian famine was caused by a land tenure crisis and poverty as much as drought and desertification. When poor people can’t grow food, they often cannot buy food either. The aid money that poured in did help some in the region, but corrupt local officials likely siphoned off much of the food aid intended for the truly needy.
