In my essay on economic development (“What worked”, MESSENGER, July 3/2013) I cited the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on “A New Global Partnership” (UN Publications, 2013) that aims at eradicating absolute poverty and transforming national economies through sustainable development. Thus, in the chapter on “goals and global impact,” the Panel stresses that poverty must be reduced while mitigating global climate change and promoting a “low-carbon trajectory”. The key contributors to achieving this goal are: more sustainable transport infrastructure; improved energy efficiency and use of renewable energy; the spread of more sustainable agricultural practices; tackling deforestation and increasing reforestation in the context of improving peoples’ livelihoods, and food security, taking into account the value of natural resources, and bio-diversity (p. 17). What the Panel is trying to promote in fact is no less than a systemic approach towards an economically, socially, and environmentally sound “peasant agriculture”.

What exactly does “peasant agriculture” mean? The socio-economic term “peasant agriculture” is defined by more than one of the following characteristics:

- agricultural activity is spread over a nation-wide network of small and medium-sized farms;

- producers operate under various legal statuses (such as: individual property, contracts with state or municipality, collective property redistributed on an annual basis, cooperatives, etc.);

- agricultural production, horticulture, and/or animal husbandry serve either subsistence purposes, local markets, or contribute to larger value chains both at the local and national levels;

- production is diversified and mostly organic or at least based on little chemical input;

- production is truly “cultural” in the sense that the agro-culture is consistent with the historical and contemporary social context.

As envisaged by the Panel, both nationally and globally, peasant agriculture shall constitute an environmentally sound basis for food and livelihood security, long-term local development, income generation, enhanced productivity, as well as legal protection of the rights of peasants and their families.

It is important to emphasize that peasant agriculture is not about a romantic dream of bucolic rural living in an ideal paradise. No, rather it means: extremely hard work, comprehensive skills, and a diversity of structures which is key to viable and productive peasant agriculture. The agricultural sector shall be subject to the same rules as the national economy in general. The presence of innovative small and medium-sized enterprises – the backbone of any wealthy and healthy society – ensures that there is a broad variety of producers, value chains, overlapping structures, and complementary activities. Large-scale foreign investments may help to boost a viable national economy; however, such investments alone cannot prevent a country from declining, unemployment, and poverty.

In order to be sustainable, peasant agriculture must be productive and competitive. Productivity relates not only to large size and techno-chemical input but also and even more so to education and skills, experiences and adapted methods, as well as the use of environmentally sound technics and innovative technologies. As established by the 2008 Report of IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development), peasant agriculture is in many cases more sustainable and more productive in the medium and long term than the monoculture type of environmentally disastrous agriculture. For example, in Bulgaria, a Swiss expert transformed 1000 ha of conventional rose oil mono-culture into an organic one. According to him, the next step would be to cut the field into small pieces of a few hectares only: “Private farmers would increase productivity by four or five times”, he stated; with world market prices per kilo being as high as they are, this would be a dream for many farmers.

Today, peasant agriculture is coming under extreme pressure worldwide, and this pressure is likely to increase in the future. Although an important factor, the main source of that pressure is not climate change and degradation of renewable resources (soil, humus, water). The main threats to peasant agriculture come from two opposite sides: widespread poverty driven by unproductive subsistence farming, on the one hand, and large-scale land grabbing by big investors – be they private or state agencies, on the other. The Institute of Geography of the University of Berne estimates that between 2000 and 2013 at least 83 million hectares of land were affected by these factors (45 million hectares in Australia alone). Huge monocultures such as wheat, palm oil, soya beans, sugar cane, and bio-fuel plants deplete soils and water resources and require enormous amounts of pesticides and herbicides. China alone spent over 50 billion US $ on land purchases in third countries (mainly Africa).

Feeding a growing (urban) world population is of course a huge challenge. And as commodity prices increase, agricultural giants use every opportunity to buy land from the marginalized and poverty-driven smallholders, whose lack of productivity is very much the result of neglect by the state. The globally widespread degradation of fertile land and humus layer through overuse and unsustainable methods represents a vicious cycle that cannot easily be reversed given that increasing areas of arable land are controlled by third countries and/or foreign companies. Against this backdrop, genetic engineering is offered as a wonder weapon to fight food insecurity, diseases, degradation and make plants more robust and products ever tastier. Since the humus layer in the most fertile areas is being destroyed, scientists develop new seeds and cultivation methods that are suitable for much harsher environments. However, one should not be blind to the risks associated with these efforts. First, there are many uncertainties about the impacts of hybrid seeds on health, livelihoods, and the environment. Second, we should be concerned by the fact that because of intellectual property rights, the gene banks are held by a few global giants.

Peasant agriculture is not a panacea either, and it cannot cure all the problems faced by the world of agriculture. However, it may promote a feasible, realistic, and democratically accepted alternative to the vicious cycle briefly described above:

- In countries that have most of their workforce in rural areas, agriculture is first and foremost a social factor and not just an economic one. For this social aspect not to be neglected, the local population has to have access to fertile land. In many countries, this may require no less than large-scale land reforms. In the past twenty years, the absence of land reforms together with resource degradation and climate change has provoked land flight, rural uprisings, armed violence, and civil unrest in many countries of the world (e.g. the Sahel belt in Africa). While disruptive in the short run, this civil unrest presents an opportunity for change. Land reforms are often directly linked to, if not triggered by, movements for more democracy and local autonomy at the municipal or village levels.

- Second, land reforms should differ from context to context. In some countries, the traditional system of landlordism and “latifundismo” has to be transformed. In others, cheap labor absorbed by industrial belts has to be re-channeled towards agricultural centers. In yet other contexts, earlier land reforms and hereditary customs which led to the emergence of smallholdings of less than one hectare have to be revised. However, land reforms should not be exclusively focused on land (re-) distribution; they should create new or revitalized social, economic, and environmental conditions for agricultural production. Land reforms should aim to create security of land tenure, land distribution patterns, and plot sizes that are sustainable, and protect the local population against land grabbing from third countries. The historical context has to be duly considered, too: land reforms prove to be more successful if grounded in traditional village structures, land use systems, as well as organizational experiences (individual or collective production, etc.).

- Third, to be successful, land reforms have to be accompanied by many other changes. The underlying legal and tax conditions should be amended to facilitate private investment in local agribusiness. Adequate infrastructure has to be provided by the state, by private-public partnerships, and by the private business and financial sector. Access to rural credit with reasonable conditions (interest rates and collateral requirements), access to energy, services, insurance systems, health care, education, and culture are all part and parcel of a viable rural society. Diversity of economic activities at the village level is also necessary to absorb surplus labor and to promote social life. Local commerce and local workshops or small industries for furniture, carpentry, etc. can be envisaged in order to compete with or to contribute to larger industries. Switzerland became the most industrialized country in Europe during the 19^th century because its industries went to the countryside. The famous watches industry is a good case in point, but also the textile and machine industries went upstream in order to make use of cheap water resources and local labor. Today, IT companies can produce almost everywhere.

- Fourth, there must be an emphasis on managing “productive diversity”. Productive diversity at the national scale is a function of geographical conditions: you cannot produce the same way and the same things on steep hills or in humid valleys as you do in the lowlands or in semi-arid plains. Productive diversity depends also very much on governance. Today, the establishment of a sustainable value chain – from validating bio-diversity and (organic) farming up to transport, storage, marketing, and recycling – is very much a question of state performance and local governance. Productive diversity is key to local income generation and is a recipe against what we see in many impoverished rural contexts of the world: the “too-many-people-doing-the-same-thing-syndrome”. If the whole village wants to sell bananas or watermelons at the local market who is going to buy them and for how much? Managing productive diversity is about: food safety and quality control; access to (local) markets, market price information services, protection of nature; eco-tourism; human security, education, and vocational training; establishing relations with urban migrants. Nowadays we observe new activities such as “urban mining” and “urban farming” in big cities while at the same time innovative industries are being founded in the countryside. The inter-linkage between farm and off-farm activities is a condition for both effectiveness and efficiency within the system. The long-term goal is clear: poverty alleviation through productive peasant agriculture and transforming surplus agricultural labor force through diversified rural structures offering new economic (off-farm) opportunities.

- Fifth, the establishment of peasant agriculture is a ”creative process” in itself: it has a positive impact on income, the social fabric, and nature. Collective experiences with new products and/or new methods induce a process of learning-by-doing and education among farmers. A new philosophical or spiritual approach to labor in agriculture adds symbolic values to nature and new pride to rural society. Actors external to agriculture are also requested to contribute to peasant agriculture. Hence, there is a role for ecological, economic, social, political, cultural research and interdisciplinary reflection by academic institutions and intellectuals (particularly those of rural origin given their past experience and intimate knowledge of the countryside). Specific institutions of the civil society are crucial in order to prevent environmental degradation, on the one hand, and to promote peasant agriculture and new cultural and economic links between rural and urban areas, on the other. In the highly developed and innovative Switzerland, smaller cities are true centers for the surrounding rural population where you can get almost everything and where even youngsters may see no reason to leave. Presenting a viable alternative to the oversized megalopolis, such small and middle-size cities are adequately industrialized and properly linked to sub-urban territories that are specialized in agricultural production. Exchanges between the countryside and cities can be organized by cooperatives on both sides in order to promote direct relations between producers and consumers. When I was a student in Hamburg, around a hundred colleagues formed a consumer cooperative in order to get fresh products (for a little shop we co-financed) from peasants and producer cooperatives around the city.

For many smallholders who try to survive on shrinking income from subsistence the vision of “peasant agriculture” may sound like daydreaming; those who promote large-scale agribusiness would view it with hostility: what about productivity, profits, and return on investment they may ask. Indeed, peasant agriculture ceased to exist or is an object of systematic economic marginalization, if not destruction, in many countries around the world. National and international agribusinesses aiming at short-term profit maximization are hard at work to concentrate agricultural lands, expelling small peasants from their original settlements, pushing them to migrate to cities or abroad, and organizing slave work for those remaining (either smallholders or landless peasants). Such businesses are focused on a small number of profitable crops (among them, lately, agrofuels) and their production methods are chemically degrading soils, depleting environmental resources, and destroying nature, families, communities, and states. Huge anonymous companies are controlling the global markets be it through patents, legal restrictions on the production of, and trading with, locally grown seeds, etc.

There is no point in developing a romantic approach to peasant agriculture. The challenge is to develop a holistic approach addressing all aspects of the complex reality: effective agricultural production, sound social environment, protection of the natural environment, and promotion of local culture. Livelihood and food security are two interconnected dimensions of human security. The massive destruction of livelihoods is certainly not going to contribute to global food security. Sadly, at the same time as very large portions of fertile lands are threatened by degradation, large areas of it are not properly used elsewhere. Ukraine is a case in point: with 30% of Europe’s black soil, it could produce food in a sustainable way for one billion people (FAO report). Instead, the country is being torn apart, threatened by invasion, and agriculturally neglected. Should the growing world population tolerate the continued mismanagement and destruction of such productive resources as the black soil?

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Guenther Baechler, Ambassador of Switzerland in Tbilisi, holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a visiting professor at the Institute for European Studies at the University of Basel. He would like to thank Prof. Eric Livny, Director of ISET, for his valid commentaries.