Intensive farming and poverty

Hunger is a global emergency: as many as two billion people live in poverty and approximately one billion live in 'utter poverty' with daily hunger and deprivation.

With approximately 75 per cent of the world's poor living in rural areas, tackling poverty means addressing the problems that these poor rural populations face. The majority of these people are farmers, or depend on agriculture-related activities for their incomes, yet they do not produce or earn enough to meet their basic needs.

Is intensive farming the answer?

Intensive farming used to be promoted as one means of alleviating hunger, as it can provide a cheap and plentiful source of protein. In fact, the international development community, including some of the organisations that made-up the MakePovertyHistory coalition, used to support the uptake of intensive farming in developing countries.

In recent years, however, support for intensive farming has faded significantly due to new information highlighting the long-term problems inherent to these systems. It is now widely recognised that the short-term gains are far outweighed by the long-term problems. Among others, these include environmental pollution, increasing cases of foodborne illness and obstructing poverty elimination.  

Forced out of business

As intensive farms are highly mechanised - requiring very little manual labour, their introduction into rural areas tends to reduce rural employment. Local small-scale farmers may also be forced out of business as they struggle to compete with their new rival. For example, in the Brazilian state of Santa Catarina there were 130,000 pig producers in 1990, but by 2000, through industrialisation, there were only 16,000 left. In 1998 alone, over 20,000 families left the countryside.

In contrast to this, extensive farming allows small farmers to provide food for their families and to earn extra income by selling produce to nearby markets and urban areas.

Destabilising food security

Some developing countries are using currency they can ill afford to import cereals for use as animal feed in factory farms. Others are using domestically produced cereals which could better be used feeding local people instead of animals. For example, several kilograms of human edible grain are needed in factory farms to produce one kilogram of meat.

Despite this, the lure of 'cheap and plentiful protein for all' often proves too appealing. As a result, the spread of factory farming to these regions is occurring at an alarming rate.