508 Modern Agricultural Reforms
are increasingly apt to take up pursuits similar to those of their city cousins – factory
work, retail sales, government services. Moreover, rural people in rich countries and
poor increasingly commute to urban areas for work. Hardly any rural people actually
still farm, at least in the rich countries. In the US, farmers and farm workers are
down to a couple of per cent of the workforce of the entire country.^10 Even in Iowa,
where agriculture is a larger part of the economy than in any other state, farmers and
farm workers account for only about 6 per cent of the employed workforce.^11
The swamping of agriculture is a related point, although the direction of the
argument runs the other way. It suggests that as people have left farms for the city, the
forces of the city have taken over the farms. There is nothing special about agriculture
anymore. It is an industry like any other, and a business like any other, too. In the
words of the rural sociologist William Friedland, ‘what is now called “agriculture” has
become mostly sets of industrial processes physically located in the open air rather
than under a roof.’ Agriculture has been ‘transformed beyond recognition,’ Friedland
says.^12 Increasingly, agriculture is a bad neighbour that local residents protest because
of its pollution, just like a factory. And with the coming of ‘pharming’, in which what
is grown is not food but bioengineered medicines, agriculture is no longer ‘just like a
factory’; it is a factory. There is no room here for any sentiment concerning commu-
nity ties among rural residents, or between rural and urban residents. Agriculture is
just a form of capitalism. Indeed, there is no reason even to call it agriculture any-
more, suggests Friedland, as what we think that word means no longer exists.
Besides, as the agricultural economist Stephen C. Blank argues in The End of
Agriculture in the American Portfolio, we don’t really need agriculture anymore.
Agriculture is obsolete. That’s why there’s no money in it, and that’s why farmers
are in such decline. Only a few consumers are willing to spend for their food what
it would take to provide American farmers with a decent standard of living. ‘In the
simplest terms, the production of food and other agricultural products will disap-
pear from the United States because it will become unprofitable to tie up resources
in farming and ranching,’ Blank argues. Although ‘many of them will not believe
it at the time,’ he continues, many farmers ‘will, in a number of ways, be better off
after they make the difficult decision to leave agriculture voluntarily.’ Good rid-
dance to the high labour, high risk, high capital and low profit of farming. ‘We
need to strip away the romance and nostalgia surrounding agriculture and see it for
what it is: a business,’ Blank writes. ‘We must learn to let go of farming and
ranching.’^13 We won’t starve. Farmers in developing countries, with their lower
wages and lighter environmental regulations, will be able to export plenty of cheap
food to us, Blank argues. And as long as there is plenty of edible goo for us to
microwave up whenever we require it, why should we care?^14
Now, it must be said that there is some truth to these three arguments for the
irrelevance of agriculture in the US and other developed countries. More people
do live in cities today, almost three-quarters of the developed world. The rural
people that remain lead lives that are indeed much the same as those of urban folk,
albeit with perhaps a bit more driving (or perhaps not, given the length of some
urban commutes). We must admit that much of agriculture, if not most of it,