I read recently that farmers, who have made up the majority of the world population for millennia, have all but disappeared from Europe ‘in the blink of an eye’.
Up to the mid twentieth century almost half the working population was involved in food production in European countries – now it has fallen to single percentage figures. It has been replaced by large-scale agribusiness, with vast amounts of land farmed by a small number of landowners. It has resulted in much more food being produced, much more efficiently. It has also been ‘heavily subsidised, economically unjust, and ecologically disastrous, in a climate-threatened economy of shortages, destabilised supply chains, growing economic protectionism, and degradation of soils all over the world’. [1]
Jeremy Clarkson’s Clarkson’s Farm has alerted Brits generally to the hardships that modern farmers face. It is desperately hard to make a living as a farmer; it’s unrelenting work, for widely unpredictable gains which at their best might be very little. Yet we all need food. In a rational economy, one would think that food production is something that could never lose money. But humans are anything but rational.
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