Agriculture today is increasingly production for cash — and that means that the lifestyles and needs of both producers and consumers are afflicted by the blight of profit, like in any other sphere of capitalism, with poor working environments, ecological destruction and second-rate products. In socialism, human “intervention ” in the form of agriculture would no longer be dominated by the impersonal forces of the market, but would be under conscious human control. Socialism could use the technology developed by capitalism in frame- works best suited to the requirements of farmers and consumers alike, and would substitute production for the sake of capital accumulation with production solely for the satisfaction of needs and desires.
Ecology is about the relationships of living organisms to one another and their physical environment. This complex of relationships is arranged into a number of relatively well-defined ecosystems.
Left to itself, an ecosystem will tend to evolve in a process of “ecological succession", from a simple pioneer stage, through intermediate stages, towards a natural “climax". This is when the diversity of life forms that a particular area can support (under prevailing physical and climatic conditions) has reached its full potential, when there are no more ecological niches or unutilised food resources left for new arrivals to exploit. A climax community will tend to be a relatively stable one — that is, the populations of its constituent species fluctuate very little over time — because of the checks and balances they exert upon each other through the food chain.
Human intervention in nature has the potential to profoundly alter this picture. In a sense, though, to talk of intervention is a misnomer. Strictly speaking, we are part of nature—albeit, a uniquely self-conscious part—and act upon other parts of it to meet our material needs. However, because everything is connected in nature, such actions cannot fail to have ecological repercussions for us and other species. A relatively early example of human intervention is agriculture.
Agriculture entails some reduction in the complexity of plant and animal species inhabiting a particular area; it represents a shift backwards along the line of ecological succession. The climax community is replaced by a “successional community” in which nutrients are made available to a relatively smaller and less diverse number of domesticated species selected for human consumption, with potentially destabilising consequences for the ecosystem in question.
This need not necessarily give cause for concern. In any case, we have little choice in this regard, the existing population could not support itself by reverting to hunting and gathering. What should really concern us now is the sustainability of our agricultural practices. This behoves us to take into account the ecological consequences of such practices, to devise some workable compromise between the pressure of human needs and the ecological integrity of nature.
Typically, this is what traditional systems of fanning tended to do. Indeed, the sustainability of such systems is evidenced by the fact that many small farmers, largely concentrated in the so-called Third World, still substantially rely on a repertoire of time-honoured techniques. These help to reinforce, and in turn are rooted in, the social relations of production of traditional societies, characterised by a strong sense of communality and co-operation. Two closely related aspects of this ecological approach to fanning are diversity and self-sufficiency.
The precise package of techniques adopted will tend to subtlely differ from one locality to the next. This is indicative of a highly sophisticated understanding on the part of traditional farmers of the specific environmental constraints they face, and to which they must adapt, with little or no assistance from outside.
Transition to the market economy
Nevertheless, the outside world has increasingly intruded into the realm of traditional farming. With the historical expansion of the market economy, the relationship between human groups and their environment has undergone a profound transformation. Despite the persistence of a large non-market sector—mainly in the Third World, where much of the output of peasants is destined for household consumption or localised gift exchanges—the market has become the dominant economic system in the world today; it connects every part of it in a complex pattern of physical and informational flows.
How has this affected people’s relationship with the land? In small-scale, autarkic pre-capitalist societies, direct dependence on local resources meant that wanton exploitation of these resources would spell ecological (and thus economic) ruin and the disintegration of the community—unless it could migrate or develop new resources.
With the coming of the market economy, the purpose of farming changed radically—from production for local need to production for the market. This has brought about a corresponding change in the nature of farming. An ecological mode of farming, emphasising risk avoidance and long-term stability of output, has gradually given way to a more ecologically exploitative, “industrial” mode of farming.
This mode of fanning is driven by the need to maximise output, to produce agricultural surpluses, to feed a growing urban population resulting from the development of capitalism, This physical separation of the producers and consumers of food, highlighted by the largely one-way flow of organic material (food products) between them, has entailed not only an increasing problem of waste disposal in the urban centres but also a discontinuation of the traditional practice of recycling such material.
When nutrients removed from the soil as harvested crops are not returned to the soil, agricultural productivity will steadily fall—unless this loss can be made good in some other way. That is precisely what industrial fanning has endeavoured to do through increasing applications of industrially produced artificial fertilisers (and other) inputs to boost yields. Thus, by replacing a cyclical flow of nutrients with a linear one it has reduced the dependence of farmers on local resources but only by increasing their dependence on resources originating outside their locality.
It is important to realise that it is not global economic integration as such that is the cause of the abandoning of “conservationist” agricultural practices. What has caused this is the form economic integration has taken historically until now—the profit-driven market economy.
The dynamic of capitalism, regulated by the law of market competition, is to accumulate capital through the maximisation of profit. This puts pressure on economic actors to cut their unit costs in order to undersell their rivals, not to do so would be to risk being priced out of the market. This, in turn, disposes them to adopt both a short-term and narrow view of production.
Commercial farming
From this perspective, the return of off-farm organic wastes to the land, for example, while technically feasible, will be seen as economically undesirable. Firstly, though the benefits it could bring cannot be doubted, these need time to take effect and in the world of business competition “time is money”. Hence, it will tend to be bypassed in favour of techniques which produce more immediate results.
even where these deplete the natural productivity of the soil in the long run.
Secondly, there are costs considerations which make such a proposition problematic. Thus, domestic sewage and industrial wastes tend to be mixed because it is cheaper to dispose of them in this way, rather than separately. This means, however, that the resulting mixture cannot be applied to the land because of the high levels of toxic chemicals and heavy metals it contains. But while it might thus make “economic sense” to apply artificial fertilisers to the land, rather than separate out domestic sewage for recycling, there are other hidden costs involved in such a course of action; these are not reflected in the narrow definition of“cost” employed by a market-based methodology of cost accounting. An example is the leaching of nitrates into rivers which then have to be removed through expensive technology to make drinking water safe. Such incidental costs are treated as “externalities” insofar as they are not shouldered by the enterprise—the commercial farmer—responsible for them, which would make such an enterprise less competitive were it to take such costs into account.
This is not to suggest that production for the market must completely rule out ecological or organic methods of farming. Nevertheless, such methods go against the grain of capitalism. Organic products are usually more expensive than those produced by industrial farming. Farmers hooked on industrial farming often find it very difficult to convert to organic agriculture; in the transition they will usually have to contend with a significant drop in output and probably profit too. Above all, organic agriculture faces formidable and well-organised opposition from multinational corporations supplying industrial inputs to farmers. It is thus hardly surprising that only a tiny fraction of agricultural land in the developed capitalist countries— less than 3 percent in Europe—is devoted to organic agriculture.
In contrast to capitalism, socialism, as a society freed from the profit motive and competitive pressures “to produce as much cash as possible, as cheaply as possible, and as quickly as possible”, will be able to adopt agricultural methods which will achieve a working compromise with nature respecting the long-term considerations which ecological science teaches are vitally important.
Robin Cox
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