the industrial food chain ETC Group, 2017 Who will feed us The peasant food web vs.Union of Concerned Scientists Working to promote sustainable agriculture in the United States.ActionAid International empowers smallholder farmers, particularly women.Greenpeace says the solution is ecological farming.Agricultural Transition wants to show that small-scale food producers can nourish a growing population.National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition alliance of grassroots organisations that advocates for policy reform to advance the sustainability of agriculture and food systems.Organic Consumers Association deals with crucial issues of food safety and industrial agriculture.IFOAM International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements worldwide umbrella organisation for the organic movement.La Via Campesina international movement of peasants, small and medium-size farmers, landless people.Biovision Foundation is committed to the dissemination and application of ecological farming methods.AgriCultures Network shares knowledge and provides information on small-scale, sustainable agriculture.An end to this treadmill is not in sight: The more global the market, the higher the speed and the more incalculable the game becomes for each participant. If others catch up with them, another round begins. The only businesses that can survive on the market are those that remain one step ahead of their competitors by investing in rationalization and expansion, or those with locational advantages. Production is growing and producer prices are falling. With increasing external inputs, the unit costs of production are declining and the productivity per worker is increasing. 73)It is based on technological advances achieved through mechanization, plant breeding for high-yielding varieties, the use of agrochemicals and genetic engineering, etc. Farmers who have not yet adopted the technology or practice experience a price squeeze: their incomes decrease even if they work as hard as before." ( Global, p. When others begin to use the new technology, total production increases and prices start to fall.
" The Agricultural treadmill: (.) Farmers who adopt early use of a technology that is more productive or less costly than the prevailing state-of-the-art technology, i.e., when prices have not as yet decreased as a result of increased efficiency, capture a windfall profit. The IAASTD describes this development model of industrialized nations as the “agricultural treadmill”. " Industrial Agriculture: Form of agriculture that is capital-intensive, substituting machinery and purchased inputs for human and animal labour." ( Global, p. A global increase in productivity was considered necessary to feed a rapidly growing world population. The widely held belief was that only large economic units were capable of achieving increases in productivity on a competitive basis through modern and rationalized cultivation methods, mainly with chemical inputs and the use of machinery. For more than 50 years, “grow or die” has been both the capitalist and socialist principle for progress, with just a few exceptions. Over the past decades, agricultural policy and international institutions, as well as private and public agricultural research have often considered small-scale and subsistence farmers as backward “phase-out models” of a pre-industrial form of production. In Asia and Africa, millions of small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, fishermen and indigenous peoples produce most of the food consumed worldwide, in most cases on very small plots of land. One-third of the economically active population obtains its livelihood from agriculture. Even today, agriculture is an important source of income and the world’s largest business.
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