Small farms are key to human survival

There is a future for small farms. Or, to be more precise, there can be and should be a future for them. Given the dependence of ‘modern’ low-diversity agriculture on ‘traditional’ high-diversity agriculture, the long-term food security of humankind will depend on small farms and their continued provision of the environmental service of in situ conservation of crop genetic diversity. Policies to support small farms can be advocated, therefore, not merely as a matter of sympathy, or nostalgia, or equity. Such policies are also a matter of human survival. The diversity that underpins the sustainability of world agriculture did not fall from the sky. It was bequeathed to us by the 400 generations of farmers who have carried on the process of artificial selection since plants were first domesticated. Until recently, we took this diversity for granted. The ancient reservoirs of crop genetic diversity, plant geneticist Jack Harlan (1975, p. 619) wrote three decades ago, ‘seemed to most people as inexhaustible as oil in Arabia.’ Yet, Harlan warned, ‘the speed which enormous crop diversity can be essentially wiped out is astonishing.’ The central thesis of this essay is that efforts to conserve in situ diversity must go hand-in-hand with efforts to support the small farmers around the world who sustain this diversity. Economists and environmentalists alike by and large have neglected this issue. In thrall to a myopic notion of efficiency, many economists fail to appreciate that diversity is the sine qua non of resilience and sustainability. In thrall to a romantic notion of ‘wilderness,’ many environmentalists fail to appreciate that agricultural biodiversity is just as valuable – indeed, arguably more valuable from the standpoint of human well-being – as the diversity found in tropical rainforests or the spotted owls found in the ancient forests of the northwestern United States.