The increases in food yields were very real-it is stupid of some "organic" critics of modern agriculture to claim otherwise-with wheat yields growing between 3 and 4 percent a year between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, and rice yields between 2 and 3 percent. But over the last two decades the increases have fallen until they are barely ahead of (declining) population growth: "Output from the Green Revolution has reached a 'plateau"' .33 Ever greater quantities of fertiliser are required to increase output, water sufficiency becomes a growing problem, concentration on a very narrow range of crop types increases the dangers from plant diseases, and world acreage devoted to food is not growing. As a World Bank Development Report admits:
Many agriculture-based countries still display anaemic per capita agricultural growth and little structural transformation . . . The same applies to vast areas within countries of all types. Rapid population growth, declining farm size, falling soil fertility, and missed opportunities for income diversification and migration create distress as the powers of agriculture for development remain low. 34
The problem is not that somehow, after 200 years, Malthus has been vindicated. Means exist to raise food output to cope with world population, expected to grow another 50 percent and then slowly decline. The problem is the existing "structure of agricultural accumulation". 35 Global agriculture since the mid-1970s has been increasingly structured by a handful of agribusiness corporations, mainly based in the US, that control agricultural innovation, supplying the inputs (seed varieties, fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural machinery) for the world's farmers, big and small. Their interest is in keeping those inputs standardised (so keeping down their own costs of production), with as little regard for particular local growing conditions as possible. Their research has "focused on innovations that reduced costs rather than enhanced yields".36 The result has been little in the way of innovation to suit the needs of the world's 400 million small farmers-except to preach GM crops as a magic solution, regardless of their potential side-effects on local ecologies and the inapplicability of those so far developed to conditions in very wide parts of the world. Meanwhile, individual developing countries have reduced agricultural investment to around 4 percent of GNP compared with 10 percent in 1980.37 Yet, as Ronald Trostle of the US Department of Agriculture's economic research unit says, "it was always publicly funded research that was more likely to concentrate on innovations that would increase yields and production, particularly in parts of the world where farmers are unable to pay royalties for new varieties of seeds" .38
The New Limits of Capital
321