Capitalism Threatens Agricultural Biodiversity

It’s said that variety is the spice of life, but capitalism—particularly as applied to agriculture—is doing much to destroy the variety of life on earth. Nonhuman life forms that occupy the land—plants, animals, insects and microorganisms—do not, as far as we know, hold opinions on economic philosophies. Yet, economic activities shape many aspects of their existence, and they in turn have many effects on humanity.

No More Family Farms

Agriculture, essential to human survival, becomes increasingly perverted by the capitalist profit motive as agricapitalism pushes out family and middle-sized farms. Strictly speaking, of course, the family farm, on which the farmer and his family members performed all the labor, is a thing of the past, at least in this country. The few that remain cut no figure in the agriculture industry. They were pushed out by the growth of the middle-sized farmer, who first brought hired labor, advanced machinery and industrial methods of production to the industry. Now, of course, even the middle-sized farmer is being pushed out by the huge agricapitalist concerns that increasingly dominate the countryside.

This is not news, of course, because the process of concentration in agriculture has been going on for generations. Socialists are not among those who would say that this is wholly a bad thing. The development and application of science and technology in agriculture have, so to speak, plowed the way for greater productivity and efficiency. They have opened the door to the production of an agricultural abundance that can be produced with a minimum of arduous toil. That potential will be realized under a sane socialist system of industrial democracy and production to meet human requirements. Not so under capitalism, however, where science and technology in farming have been perverted to profit demands, have aided in reducing the agricultural and rural populations to a fraction of the national population, and have increased the burden and exploitation of a dwindling number of agricultural workers. These, however, are not the only baneful effects capitalist concentration has on agriculture.

All businesses have to operate with profit as their goal. To achieve profits, farm capitalists look for ways to cut production costs and improve yields. The advances in labor-displacing mechanization mentioned have played the primary role by reducing the amount of human labor power needed to farm. Another way is to design or discover a plant having characteristics that make it easy to harvest, and then to concentrate on the cultivation of that plant.

Such plants may have consistent growth patterns, so that an entire field of the plant would stand at the same hei.....



Biodiversity Loss

Historically, of course, cotton and tobacco were the “cash crops” in the South, while wheat and corn filled the same role in the prairie states. Agricapital.....



Consequences of Biodiversity Decline

What happens when only a few varieties of food crops remain in the fields? Remember that the size of the population of any living creature largely de.....



Cloning Not a Factor

Incidentally, the recent advances in cloning that prompted Davidson’s article obviously are not responsible for the enormous loss of agricultural diversity ove.....



The Socialist Solution

In a socialist economic system, food production would be organized for consumption and not for profit