How about those production disparity ratios? It is amazing to note how much agricultural technology has accelerated in just a brief amount of time, and how vastly different systems now operate alongside each other.
Brent W.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart: A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis.
How about those production disparity ratios? It is amazing to note how much agricultural technology has accelerated in just a brief amount of time, and how vastly different systems now operate alongside each other.
Brent W.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Chloe Johnson:
ReplyDeleteWhile reading this article, I found the production disparity ratios to be shocking. These ratios have also spawned problems that have created a domino effect so detrimental it sends entire countries into poverty. I also found it hard to believe that a problem this big can ever be truly corrected. However, after reading Mazoyer's reading it is quite clear if something is not done, this problem will ultimately lead to the demise of both agricultural systems and people. While reading this article I could not help but agree with Mazoyer and Roudart's solution. The solution reads “as soon as food commodities are priced approximately the same for workers from both systems, the disparities in productivity per worker are expressed purely and simply as disparities in income.”(pg. 453) I think that because this is the problem that causes the majority of the other problems to occur, by fixing this the others may be solvable as well. However, if agricultural technology continues to accelerate at such a fast pace the world may never be able to escape this massive problem.
Chloe Johnson
Chloe,
ReplyDeleteTo read more about production disparity in the world, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is an excellent resource. Main site here:
http://www.fao.org/
Information from Mazoyer here: http://www.fao.org/docrep/x4400e/x4400e10.htm
--Brent W.
- Sang Hyun Park (Tue/Thu 6:30pm - 8:00pm)
ReplyDelete“Disadvantaged by their low level of equipment, the producers of the developing countries tried to take advantage of their natural advantages by specializing, at least partially, in tropical export crops, for which there was initially less competition” (442).
In the past, some countries didn’t have enough equipment or technology, so they tried to differentiate and specialize their products to make less competitive circumstances in the market. It was a kind of fundamental crisis and basic solution which couldn’t be sustained for a long time. That’s why soon after these undeveloped countries had to compete with developed countries. I think this kind of situation brings people's motivation to enhance their technology in agriculture. They have been trying to specialize their products and develop their technology as well.
Small farms have been focusing on expansion and production. Some farmers use modern equipment like seeding with special trucks and spraying with helicopters. It’s absolutely more productive. Demand has been increased a lot, so supplier has been struggling to produce products in much faster and more efficient ways.
The amount of exponential growth and the disparity of food production between people who practice the most efficient farming techniques and those who use the least efficient methods over the last hundred years has been astonishing. Mazoyer writes, "consequently, the ratio of gross productivity between the least productive manual agriculture and the most productive motorized agriculture is today on the order of more than 1 to 1000!"(441) Overproduction of products like wheat, corn, and soy in developed countries coupled with cheap and speedy shipping methods causes farmers in developing countries to take lower prices for their crops because they can be produced much cheaper in other parts of the world. This in turn causes these subsistence farmers to lose money and be unable to reinvest anything into newer tools, seeds, or pesticides. It is a vicious cycle that keeps certain areas impoverished because it becomes impossible to develop and modernize at a subsistence level. In addition, because many of these people are malnourished, they become ill and require extra care and attention. Small manual producing farms in Africa and Asia have never had the means to acquire any form of motorized mechanization and if nothing is done to help level the playing field, then it seems likely for this trend of disparity to continue far into the future.
ReplyDeleteDan T
The amount of technology that is available now is remarkable compared to the amount of farmers that are actually able to afford this type of equipment. This new technology and disparities will continue to happen as long as there is a demand for low priced items available all year round, which there will be.
ReplyDeleteThese smaller farmers are now unable to compete with these larger companies that streamline much of their production with technology and new machines to harvest their crops. These small farmers continue to have to pay for their labor costs that many of these larger companies dont have to anymore.
Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart: A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis
ReplyDelete“Therefore the fall in agricultural prices and the incomes of the poor peasantry leads to the rising unemployment and the lowering of basic wages in all branches of employment in the underindustrialized developing countries, and it drags down the prices of all goods and services supplied by these countries as well.”(Mazoyer and Roudart, A History of World Agriculture, pg. 445)
The production disparity ratio 100 years ago was 1 to 10 and today the ratio is 1 to 1,000. Because of advances in technology and transportation the numbers increased rapidly and the prices fell rapidly. The farmers in foreign countries were and are being paid less and less because of the mass production of products from the farms. The more that comes from a farm, the cheaper it will sell for. People are being replaced with machines and are being paid less than enough to be able to survive and are moving away to find other work. The system has become a vicious cycle that ultimately leads to disease. The plants and livestock are able to thrive at such numbers because they are treated with pesticides, fertilizers, and hormones to make as much as possible. In conditions of being overcrowded and under worked the plants and animals being produced are nearly inedible and this is how diseases in food come about. I feel that the only way to help this problem is to boycott buying the products. The more people that buy and support small farms and local farms, the less money is contributed to those industries increasing the disparity ratios.
Sigrid K.
2) Mazoyer, A History of World Agriculture: From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis: “Certainly, to date, this process of impoverishment and exodus has not affected all of the peasantry carrying out manual cultivation. It has affected above all the most destitute peasants from the most disadvantaged regions.”
ReplyDeleteMazoyer highlights how the “little people” and the “developing nations” are getting left behind during the current technological revolution. He and his colleagues postulate that this is a process that has been building up rapidly since the Industrial Revolution. As a senior at Boston University, I was fascinated with Soviet and pre-Soviet Russian studies. I wrote an extensive research paper on the status of the Russian peasantry during the simultaneous explosion of Bolshevism and dissemination of Chassidic teaching in the Russian countryside. To preface, the Russian countryside is so expansive that during the reign of Peter the Great, some portions of Russia did not even realize that Peter had become the Czar and they did not even participate in taxes or observe other forms of involvement of government. The same concept may be applied to Mazoyer’s theory, that the parts of the world that do not have the capital to reinvest are getting left behind in a similar way that the Russian peasantry got left behind in the 17th through the 20th centuries. They simply are not on the map for “social rehabilitation,” or in this case, “economic rehabilitation,” and they get left in the dust.
בס״ד
Avrohom S.
On Mazoyer’s “Long History of Agriculture”:
ReplyDeleteAll too often you see how people get greedy and try to make as much money as they can without stopping to consider the consequences, or at whose expense they are making money. Developed nations are stomping out small farmers in other countries with their large quantities of cheap grain. Mazoyer argues that this is the reason for so much poverty in underdeveloped countries. The commodity market doesn’t help because it puts a middle man in the picture who decides the price structure for much of our agricultural system. We see things like this right here in the US with big companies like Wal-Mart forcing small mom and pop operations out of business. Think small and think local.
Ryan C.