

Yesterday we launched in London what we hope will be a new direction for the environmental movement, one which takes green thinking in a more progressive and pragmatic direction. We call it ‘ecomodernism’.

The idea is to build a new cross-political movement of people who believe that humans are capable of using technological innovation to solve critical environmental problems, such as climate change, at the same time as allowing economic growth to eradicate poverty in developing countries. Traditional environmentalism has tended to insist that human prosperity and our environment are on a collision course: as we make clear in our manifesto, we don’t think this has to be the case.

We would have hoped that we would find an ally in George Monbiot. George is no friend of poverty, and his newly-launched movement for rewilding absolutely necessitates the kind of agricultural modernisation we are calling for in our manifesto. Only with more productive farms to feed the majority of humans who now live in cities, can enough free land be spared for nature and rewilding.

However, in his column yesterday, he rejects ecomodernism by making a sweeping claim. There is, he writes, “an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the crops they produce. The smaller they are, on average, the greater the yield per hectare.” The implication is that agricultural modernisation is neither land-sparing nor beneficial to the poor.

To suggest that smallholder farmers are more productive ... than large-scale modern farmers is simply wrong.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There are, it is true, many studies showing an inverse relationship between yields and farm size in developing regions. But the relevant comparison is not between small farms and slightly larger ones in poor countries. It is between smallholder farms in developing nations and farms of any size in developed nations (which are almost always larger than farms in poor countries).

One widely cited study found that the smallest African farms produced about 25% more yield per hectare than the largest African farms. But the average American farm produced about 10 times more yield per hectare than either. Yield gaps between farmers in rich nations and those in poor countries are profound. US farmers harvest five times more per hectare than African farmers in maize and more than three times in rice. To suggest that smallholder farmers, particularly those in subsistence rain-fed agriculture, are more productive per unit of land than large-scale modern farmers is simply wrong.

Monbiot acknowledges that the reason that small farms in poor countries have higher yields than larger ones is because they have higher labor inputs, but fails to consider the implications of this fact. In poor nations, the lack of access to alternative livelihoods for large rural populations is the reason that labor is cheap and relatively high yields can be achieved on very small farms. Awash in cheap labor and lacking access to capital, markets, and infrastructure, farmers raise yields by applying more labor.

Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned Read more

But any nature and land-sparing vision predicated on this model of agriculture would require maintaining large rural populations throughout the developing world in a state a of deep agrarian poverty, with no alternative livelihoods to speak of. Could you, in theory, raise yields dramatically through high inputs of labor (albeit also with healthy inputs of synthetic fertiliser, irrigation, and pesticides as well)? Perhaps. But doing so would only be possible given a very large pool of cheap or free (eg family) labor.

This seems to us to be neither a particularly plausible way to reduce human impacts on the environment nor an acceptable future for the billion people today living on less than a dollar a day. To suggest, as Monbiot does, that poor farmers are better off remaining on the farm is to suggest that they are better off remaining poor.

Without question, the journey from subsistence economies to modern livelihoods is not an easy one and moving from the farm to the city does not guarantee a better life, at least in the short term. But the last two centuries offer ample evidence that by just about every metric of human health, freedom, and material well-being, urbanisation, industrialisation, and agricultural modernisation are processes that have been overwhelmingly positive for humans.

Moreover, as a leading proponent of rewilding, we hope that Monbiot will think a bit harder about where all those rewilded landscapes in which, he hopes “nature is allowed to do its own thing, in which it can be to some extent self-willed, driven by its own dynamic processes” are likely to come from. On a planet of 7, going on 9 billion people, agricultural modernisation and intensification are clearly the most plausible path to leaving more of the Earth to nature.