In the 20th century, a dramatic
transformation took place in the developed world as the economy shifted from
agriculture to manufacturing. Since 1900, the number of U.S. farms has fallen
by 63 percent, while the average farm size has increased by 67 percent.
Moreover, those farms are increasingly specialized: In the early 20th century,
a large number of small farms grew an average of five crops. Today, the U.S.
agriculture industry is made up of a small number of large farms that each grow
just one type of crop.
The most profound change, though, has
been in the nation’s workforce. According to the United States Department of
Agriculture’s Economic Research Service,1 the percentage of the U.S. workforce employed in
agriculture fell from 41 percent in 1900 to just 1.9 percent in 2000. From
1930 to 2002, agricultural gross domestic product as a share of total GDP
dropped from 7.7 percent to a mere 0.7 percent.
People in the developed world now eat
more food and that food is healthier than ever before, with only a tiny
fraction of our labor and capital devoted to agriculture. In fact, according
to a new book called A World Without Agriculture,2 by Harvard Professor C. Peter Timmer,
there are now more lawyers in the United States than there are farmers, and
there are fewer farms than there are dry cleaners.
Investment in agriculture has fallen
gradually over time, but since the 1980s, it has collapsed altogether in
developed nations, largely due to the fact that food has been generally cheap —
too cheap to make agriculture an attractive investment.
As the shares of GDP and employment
represented by agriculture have declined, there has been a migration from rural
to urban areas, leaving fewer people to work on farms. The rise of industrial
and service sectors as sources of higher profits has marginalized farming in
richer nations. In the process, there has been a demographic shift to lower
birth rates, as well.
This transformation, which took the
developed world 250 years to complete, now threatens to change the developing
world in just a couple of generations. One reason is that global economic
realities far beyond the control of local farmers or even individual nations
are driving much of the...
