Napoleon wanted France to be bigger. He wanted more land. Nothing stopped him until Waterloo.
Have we, the human race, met our Waterloo? Have we finally hit the wall with our never-ending desire for "bigness"?
I decided years ago that I didn't want my farming operation to get bigger. I liked milking 45 cows, raising their feed and doing a little direct marketing. I liked being small.
"Hopelessly behind the times," I was told. Local cheese makers were giving up, local meat processing was a thing of the past. Small farming was dead. The developing world couldn't feed itself and needed industrial farming systems.
Who could argue with the Green Revolution? Until the current food crisis. It's not so much a shortage of food, but a shortage of cheap food. The poor can't afford to eat and the middle class feels the pinch. Why wasn't industrial agriculture, farming fence row to fence row, feeding the world?
There's the rub -- feeding the world was never the intention. Back in the '70s well-meaning researchers and eager graduate students, myself included, were convinced we could eliminate hunger in our lifetime. We had good intentions, but the big picture was always about making a profit.
Farmers, using cheap fuel, fertilizer and plenty of chemicals, could plant more acres, produce enough volume and generally make a profit. This, of course, benefited the seed and chemical companies, which long ago figured out that small farmers saving their own seed and tending small acreages didn't spend much money.
The big meat packers and dairy processors anticipated the end of local processing. Their market share increased and they grew larger. By breaking the labor unions, they could pay lower wages, bring in immigrant workers, increase profits and grow even larger.
It was a grand plan. Agribusiness corporations were increasing profit margins quarter after quarter. The bigger they grew, the better it worked. Prices paid for animals, milk and grain fell as farms grew larger and produced more. Small farmers couldn't compete as per unit profit margins fell and only the larger producers could survive.
Oil prices went up and farmers were urged to grow more corn for ethanol. More land went into corn production, wheat acreage fell, speculation pushed prices up and food prices soared. The International Monetary Fund estimates that 50 percent of the increase in food price was due to ethanol production. Instead of feeding the world, industrial agriculture starves it.
While oil companies banked huge profits, people lost their homes, jobs and farms. We have become too dependent on globalization and the big corporations that control it.
Small is the future. We know indigenous farmers can produce more food using traditional farming methods. They have no need of genetically modified seed or chemicals. All they need is an end to wars and, as Frances Moore Lappe would say, "more democracy." The World Bank and the G-8 need to let them make their own decisions and feed themselves.
Western countries need to take a step back. We cannot continue to feed grass-eating animals a diet of grain, nor can we continue to fill our fuel tanks with grain. We cannot continue to encourage and subsidize industrial agriculture at the expense of small local producers.
What we can do is return to local and regional food production. We can allow the rest of the world to feed themselves by reining in the influence of multinational grain and chemical companies. We can redevelop local communities and keep local dollars local, rather than filling the coffers of offshore corporate bank accounts.
Accepting the value of "smallness" and living more locally is the solution. Embracing small and local addresses the failure of systems -- whether it is the failure of the globalized food system to embrace food sovereignty, the failure of capitalism and its penchant to move more wealth to those who already have more than enough, or the failure of an entire society that has based its existence on oil.
Waterloo is synonymous with defeat, but it was also a victory against empire. We need another victory against empire. We need to reclaim our sense of local and realize the necessity of being small and interdependent. We need to end thousands of years of thinking bigger is always better.
Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer in Wonewoc and a policy fellow for the Food and Society Fellows Program.
© 2008 Capital Newspapers