‘The modernist cant that traditional intensive cultivators must be taught how to farm with machines, purchase inputs and scientific knowledge is directly contradicted by the land productivity, the reliability, the ecological sustainability of these systems’.

 

Robert McC. Netting has written a thought-provoking monograph that sheds a new light on the widely unquestioned modernist evolutionary discourse on agricultural development. He fosters a needed reflexion about our conception of ‘modernity’ and gives a powerful blow to the western confidence over what ‘modern agriculture’ is about.

 

McC. Netting’s central claim is that practice of smallholder intensive agriculture by family households is a sound mode of production, which, contrary to standard wisdom, is not doomed to fade away into the expanding western style industrial agriculture.

 

This paper intends to highlight the most valuable insights of Netting’s work, and still point out its problematic stances. It reflects a personal reaction to a highly stimulating work.

 

Positive aspects

 

 

To me, the most valuable aspects of McC. Netting’s work are 1) its attempt at pointing out a cross-cultural type 2) its eclectic theoretical inspiration 3) its demonstrating the systemic coherence of smallholder intensive farming 4) its emphasis on the widely overlooked complexity of ‘traditional’ farming practices 5) its reassessing what ‘technical progress’ means 6) its attacking the modernization theory of agricultural development 7) its emphasis on the sustainability issue 8) its search for a synthetic model of intensive farmers’ behaviors.

 

· Revealing a cross-cultural type of farming practice

 

 

McC. Netting’s first concern is to show that there is such as thing as a well defined, cross-cultural, smallholder intensive type of farming, contrary to the common understanding that pictures it as a mere step towards a supposedly ‘scientific’ agriculture. The author thereby takes up a very ambitious ethnological comparison of practices and institutions in societies all over the world. The monograph, based on an impressive erudition, convincingly shows that evidence of intensive, permanent farming systems is present on almost every continent.

 

McC. Netting meticulously points out characteristics that co-occur and suggests a cross-cultural ‘Ideal Type’. Though it is obviously central to his enquiry, he only briefly mentions Weber’s concept of ‘Ideal Type’ (p.3). He uses a wide and rather ‘floating’ vocabulary in order to make his point: he talks about his search for a ‘generalizable category’ (p.7), a ‘definable cultural eco-system’ (p.3), a ‘techno-social type’ (p.9).

 

Because of his aim of revealing a cross-cultural type, McC. Netting is forced to neglect in his discussion most cultural aspects, on the ground that “there is no shared culture of meanings among the many disparate groups of smallholders”. His work is a quest for a “functionally meaningful and coherent system that transcend the distinctions of societies” (p.4).

 

 

 

· A complex blend of theoretical inspirations

 

 

A characteristic of the monograph I found extremely appealing is the rich set of theoretical sources McC. Netting draws upon.

 

A functionalist work

 

A striking characteristic of McC. Netting’s work is its functionalist outlook. In his search for an ideal type of intensive farming, the author always favors an ‘integrated, systematic perspective’ (p.64) that makes sense of a social phenomena by looking at the larger picture and showing how this feature is ‘useful’ (that is functionally consistent) with other aspects of society.

 

For instance, the ‘ethics of dedicated work’ that characterizes smallholder societies is seen as being ‘peculiarly appropriate to the tasks of intensive agriculture’ (p.203 and p.63). Also marriages are shown to be responsive to environmental constraints (p.100). Another example is the “functional relationship of the household and the farm enterprise” (p.83).

 

This paradigm of a functionally coherent social system permeates McC. Netting’s work. Indeed, it is no hazard if functionalism is the main theoretical viewpoint of this study, as one of its central aim is to give a conceptual autonomy to the notion of ‘intensive farming. Indeed, in order to impose a new concept, one is tempted to insist on its internal coherence – that is its functional fitness. Here we see that the ambition of legitimizing a new concept pushed McC. Netting into a functionalist framework.

 

A work in the rational choice perspective too

 

McC. Netting is also greatly influenced by the rational choice perspective that is nowadays so dominant in the realm of social sciences, and whose epitome is neoclassical Economics. Sometimes the author openly acknowledges its debt to neoclassical economics (e.g. p.16). But the rational choice perspective is mainly felt through the omnipresence of some of its crucial concepts, such as ‘calculation of interest’ (e.g. p.17), ‘transaction costs’ (e.g. p.7’), ‘uncertainty’ (e.g. p.75), ‘benefits of specialization’ (p.69), ‘rationality’ a-culturally defined as utility maximization (e.g. p.71 when McC. Netting speaks of ‘sane household’), ‘free-rider problem’ (e.g. p.85), the system of ‘incentives’ (e.g. p.74), ‘implicit contracts’ (e.g. p.65).

 

A work inspired by certain Marxist concerns

 

Marxism is certainly not a core perspective in McC. Netting’s work. Communist collectivism is for instance strongly opposed as a viable form of agricultural production ; and the Marxist evolutionary view of economic history is denied. As the author puts it : “smallholders flourish in a such a variety of ideological and political contexts that links between infrastructure and superstructure become tenuous” (p.19).

 

However, one can easily point out some significant themes that suggest that Marxism is part of the theoretical blend McC. Netting uses. For instance, in perfect harmony with its functionalist outlook, this work is characterized by a strong ‘materialism’, in the sense that material conditions of livelihood and the constraints of economic production are given a causal privilege over other social phenomena. Moreover, the author sees the smallholder as representing “a bastion of resistance to the alienation of employment in capitalist industry” (p.329). It is no coincidence that the concern over ‘alienation’ strongly comes up in the Epilogue: the reader clearly feels that an almost romantic idea of non-alienated work is central to McC. Netting’s sympathetic feelings towards smallholder intensive farming.

 

McC. Netting makes the good point that for both the Marxists and the free-market liberals, the ‘agreed upon path to agricultural development has been the large-scale, mechanized, energy-dependent, scientific, industrialized farm” (p.21). In a way, these two enemies have agreed upon an implicit ‘evolutionary modernization theory’ that lays out supposedly ‘obvious’ stages of global agricultural development.

 

· Intensive farming as a sound socio-techno type.

 

McC. Netting’s contention is that this distinctive social system cannot be consigned to some evolutionary stage. Rather it appears as a very sound and coherent mode that have proved adaptable enough to pervade a wide range of societies throughout the world.

McC. Netting takes great care in pointing out the functional optimality, the symbiosis between intensive agriculture and householder. Among the many findings of the monograph, let us mention two important examples.

 

The household, through its mobilization of ‘family labor’, enjoys advantages in transaction costs, incentives and monitoring. It deals better than farm enterprises or collective farms, with the massive amount of human labor intensive farming requires. Anyhow, ‘many of the tasks of intensive agriculture have such a low marginal returns that an employer cannot profitably hire someone to do them’ (p.156).

 

The specialized knowledge of the specific microenvironment on the smallholding is central in explaining the high land productivity. The household is the optimal setting whereby such a localized knowledge of a land’s agronomic attributes can be efficiently spelled out and transmitted to younger generations.

 

· Uncovering the overlooked complexity of ‘traditional’ farming practices

 

Another point of the monograph that I found fascinating is its showing the overlooked complexity of so-called ‘traditional’ farming practices. This complexity is primarily embodied in a highly detailed knowledge of the agronomic characteristics of the land. Conditions vary within hundreds of meters. Diversification of agricultural production requires a deep knowledge of ‘ecological niches’ (p.39). This complex knowledge, that can be linguistically studied as an ‘ethnoscience’, is critical to the sustainability and continuity of an intensive agro-ecosystem. In a nutshell, as McC. Netting puts it: “the critical element in the process of intensification are knowledge of the local environment and the specific requirements of domesticated plant and animal species”(p.56). A dramatic consequence of this claim is that “ technological invention and scientific discovery are not the crucial causal factors in the course of agricultural intensification” (p.57). As we can see, McC. Netting forces us to reconsider the common western conception of what are progress and technology.

 

 

 

· Putting into question the western understanding of progress

 

“The evolutionary assumption that manual labor in agriculture is backward, extremely time consuming, onerous and coerced and that replacement of such labor by technological energy is therefore the only route to abundance and freedom, is still very much with us”. (p.125)

 

McC. Netting fights again the basic prejudice of the urbanized western world against technologically simpler farmers that ‘work too hard for miserable returns’. Such a negative description implies a set of evolutionary assumptions about the present and future of agriculture. McC. Netting addresses this prejudice by claiming that “labor saving is not the chief end of life and farm work is not a bad thing” (p.331). Within western culture, what is implicitly understood as being a ‘progress’ is always some sort of labor saving. As the author puts it: “Euro-centric models of change in agriculture have always equated progress with the increasingly efficient substitution of alternative forms of energy for human labor” (p.49).

 

McC. Netting rightly underlines the need to increase the weight of other criteria in our understanding of ‘progress’ – criteria such as energy consumption and environmental sustainability. Intensive farming is characterized by the use of sustainable techniques that prevents the erosion and degradation that frequently accompany large-scale, extensive land use. Therefore, the evaluation of technology along the single axis of labor saving is nowadays inadequate.

 

Actually, the monograph shows that the adoption of modern technology is not an evolutionary matter but rather a relative price issue. In countries where fossil fuel energy and machines are relatively cheaper than labor, so-called ‘scientific methods’ will be adopted. In places where these are expensive relatively to labor (due to a dense population) it is optimal to achieve intensification avoiding mechanization, by increasing the amount of labor applied per unit of land.

 

The optimal technique is not therefore ‘written once for all in history’, but rather depends on a local trade-off between labor and other sources of energy, a bargain that depends on their relative costs.

 

· Reassessing ‘modernity’ and the evolutionary view of agricultural development

 

 

McC. Netting goes even deeper in his criticism of modernization theory that has spread the notion of a unilineal development in agriculture. He makes a strong argument against the notion, or ‘myth’ as he calls it, of ‘primitive communism’. Modernization theory claims that there is an evolutionary watershed separating an earlier stage of communal rights from a later period of private property emerging with the market and the state. McC. Netting shows that social inequality, heritable private property rights as well as market-induced behaviors are regularly associated with smallholder intensive agriculture.

 

Actually, according to the author, intensive agriculture both correlate and requires private property rights, as shown by the dramatic failure of Chinese attempt to massive collectivization. There is always some collective work but it is best understood as an implicit contract of reciprocity (p.196). There are some common properties but they do not compete with private properties (p.181). Such societies are no egalitarian Eden. There are economic inequalities based on differences in competence, personality and motivation and so on and so forth. These societies show both social inequalities and mobility.

 

As we have seen, McC. Netting’s work partly draws his theoretical outlook from both neoclassic Economics and some Marxist concepts. However he strongly separates himself from the evolutionary bias of these two bodies of theory. For instance, along with the neoclassical economists, Marxists assume that traditional egalitarian village institutions and practices have been replaced by a competitive labor market with impersonal wage relationships. Against Marxist predictions, smallholder inequality and long tem mobility have shown over time a strong resistance to the threats of wealth polarization. McC. Netting also denounces the myth of ‘economies of scale’ that is put into question by the empirical finding that there is an inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity: smallholder agriculture is not necessarily inefficient.

 

Indeed, it may well be that we are currently witnessing a change in western peoples’ understanding of these issues, as a ‘human scale’ and the preservation of rural ‘working landscapes’ may be starting to replace the “almost universal idolatry of gigantism” (Schumacher, quoted p.332)

· Bringing to the fore the sustainability issue

 

A major aspect of McC. Netting’s work is its highlighting the key issue of environmental sustainability. The author draws on a precise understanding of what this means: 1) a relatively stable production per unit of land 2) a stable input of energy 3) favorable rates of returns between inputs and outputs both in monetary and energy terms. These three conditions ensure that “an average level of production over an indefinitely long period of time can be sustained without depleting renewable sources on which it depends” (p.143).

 

In a stunning and incisive analysis, McC. Netting shows that ‘modern’ agriculture is just not sustainable in this sense. The cost of energy, the dangers of erosion, as well as chemical pollution suggest to McC. Netting an inescapable collapse of western agriculture in the long run. I was personally stunned to learn that mechanized agriculture is ‘energy inefficient’ (p.124), that is, incurs net losses of energy once inputs and outputs are converted into a unique energy unit. Labor productivity is dramatically increased but at the cost of enormous energy inputs that involve non-renewable energies.

 

On the other hand, McC. Netting greatly insists on the intrinsically sustainable nature of intensive farming. This is due to many factors. First of all, because of land scarcity, intensive farming largely equates ‘labor intensive recycling’. Most organic material (e.g. manure) at hand is skillfully re-used in order to maintain land fertility. Moreover, the very long time horizon of the family’s intergenerational security gives the smallholder household a unique perspective on sustainability.

 

In a nutshell, McC. Netting’s contention is that smallholder systems can be shown to be economically efficient and environmentally sustainable. It is on this double ground that the author does not believe in the announced death of intensive agriculture. Because of the environmental issue, it even has a future in highly developed countries according to him (p.127, p.323).

 

 

 

 

· The quest for a synthetic model of intensive farmers’ behavior

 

McC. Netting’s work points towards a model of intensive farmers’ behaviors. In doing so, it draws on previous works of four major authors: Marx, Malthus, Boserup and Chayanov – among which the last two are the most influential upon McC. Netting’s thought.

 

Chayanov’s insight is that the major difference between a peasant family farm and a capitalist enterprise are that 1) the former relies on ‘family labor’ rather than ’hired labor’ 2) it produces mainly to satisfy the family’s own consumption needs, rather than to maximize profits on the market (p.296). As Chayanov puts it: “peasant farms often work at a consistent nominally negative profit yet survive – an impossibility for capitalist farming”. Therefore, contrary to Marx’s contention, the family farm can compete successfully with capitalist or collective farms.

 

 

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