by Hal Hamilton

— December 3, 2002 —

Imagine agriculture as a vast competitive game structured by economic rules. All the players are competing to win with one formula of success: the highest returns and the lowest costs.

The power of this game is that it’s the only game. To farm, buy, process and market food and fiber you play by the efficiency and productivity rules. To survive you have to compete within the rules.

Winning looks like this: countrysides without people because huge farms produce more for less. Few small grocery stores because WalMart is the best at squeezing costs out of the supply chain. Corporations gobble up one another to compete at procuring the cheapest soybeans, corn and wheat to ship around the world, mostly to feed livestock that is crammed into the most efficient possible industrial feeding factories.

Everyone is playing by the rules. The hog factory might seem to stretch the rules and let as much manure slide into the river as possible, but it’s playing by the most important rule of producing more-for-less.

In addition to explicit rules there are lots of theories and assumptions about how the game OUGHT to be played, and about how this is the best possible game anyone could be playing.

The chief creators of theories and assumptions are economists. Economists have theories about human behavior, about the value of current goods compared to goods in the future, and about nature as the source of raw materials. These theories have become the “truths” that shape the rules of the game. For example, it isn’t a big problem if players use up nonrenewable resources, like oil or phosphate rock, because the operating theory is that we’ll figure out replacement inputs before these things are all gone.

This game of agriculture has its critics, those who say we should reward soil and water stewardship, and those who say we should make sure that good food gets to people who can’t afford to pay for it. These critics don’t like the results of the current game, but they usually can’t imagine how to change the theories and rules and structures that create these results.

It is possible to opt out. Anyone can have a small farm and sell vegetables or meat to neighbors, frequently for a higher price than the neighbors would pay at the grocery store. These small farms don’t have to play by the rules of more-for-less because they’re not competing in a larger market.

There’s a limit to this strategy of “flying under the radar,” however. If your local direct marketing enterprise gets to a truly profitable scale, you suddenly become subject to the rules of efficiency and competition you might wish to avoid. There will be larger companies who will buy out your business or make products to explicitly compete with yours.

You can escape the rules of the game if you stay small enough to have personal relationships with your customers. This creates enough loyalty to justify higher prices and lower convenience. Geographic distinctiveness is sometimes enough for farmers to write the rules for their own game: the special cheeses and wines of Europe are examples.

For most farmers and food businesses, the more-for-less competition is almost impossible to escape but even harder to win. The larger society isn’t a winner either. If what we all want to win is healthy food, a vibrant rural landscape, and environmental balance we will have to shift taxes, regulations and public investments to provide incentives for those things.

To keep manure out of the rivers we’d have to put the value of clean water into the price of pork. To have wildlife and communities in the countryside we’d have to value them as highly as efficient production, and we’d have to reward their stewardship.

The current game has been in place so long it is hard to imagine a different game, let alone develop a strategy to change the game. Productivity is bountiful. The cheerleaders are persuasive. The problems created by this game are mostly off the playing field, so it appears that poverty and environmental degradation are part of some other game, not this one.

We’re coming to a moment in history, however, when the problems that result from our economic system are becoming more apparent: global climate change and wars of desperation in developing countries. In agriculture around the world we’re paving over farmland or running out of water.

The good news is that people created this game in the first place. Back a few hundred years ago, when humans transitioned from feudalism and began factories and large-scale markets, we made the rules and structures we now live in. Now we’re emerging from an extraordinary period of productivity growth, seeing some of the unintended consequences, and saying we want more to life.

We’ll just have to change what it takes to win this game. We want farmers and companies to compete for who can most efficiently produce not only milk or broccoli but also clean water, nesting sites for songbirds, and jobs for local people.

© Sustainability Institute