Reality check

Small-Scale Farmers and Development: Assume a Different Economic Model

One version of an old joke features a shipwrecked economist on a deserted island who, when asked by his fellow survivors what expertise he can offer on how they can be rescued, replies, "Assume we have a boat."
In Mexico earlier this month, I was thinking that the real-life version of the economist's solution is: "Assume we have employment." But it's no joke. A World Bank economist had just spoken during a seminar at Mexico's National Autonomous University on Mexican farm policies in the wake of NAFTA. Earlier, I had presented my recent paper, "Agricultural Dumping Under NAFTA," which came out in the new report "Subsidizing Inequality," released in Spanish by the Woodrow Wilson Center and its Mexican partners.
The World Bank economist on the afternoon panel delivered a barely modified version of the Bank's longstanding diagnostic on small-scale agriculture:
Small landholdings make inefficient use of land, he explained, and the food crops smallholders grow can be produced much more efficiently by industrialized farmers in Mexico and the United States. NAFTA gives Mexico tariff-free access to those goods, so Mexico's two million small-scale corn farmers should enjoy the cheaper tortillas and seek more productive activities, growing high-value crops or moving out of agriculture. Mexico's agricultural policies should be geared not toward increasing smallholder food productivity but toward providing the social safety net that can help them make that transition while improving infrastructure and public services in rural areas.
Moving out of agriculture? Into what? "Assume we have employment" can be the only answer. Because just as shipwrecked survivors can't sail home on an economist's theoretical boat, Mexico's small-scale farmers need real jobs, not assumed jobs, if they are to give up their lands and their homes.

Of course. Get them off the land, then take over all the farms and give it to a very large agri-business concern using GMO seeds, herbicides, pesticides but also using cash to line the pockets of politicos and World Bank execs.