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In her book ‘Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine’, Anne Applebaum describes how Russia’s Communist leadership used food—or in this case a lack of food—for political ends. She describes how, across the Soviet Union, 5 million people died of starvation during the great famine of 1931 to 1934, of which 3.9 million in Ukraine. The famine was largely politically induced.

Ms Applebaum writes that the Russian Empire had been struggling with food supplies since the outbreak of the First World War. When war broke out the Imperial government had centralised and nationalised the country’s food distribution system, eliminating middlemen and traders. By doing so they created administrative chaos and severe food shortages.

When the Bolsheviks seized power they quickly realised that the fate of the revolution depended on their ability to ‘reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread’. But instead of relaxing the food distribution system, they tightened it further. Lenin in particular denounced traders as ideological enemies, writing,

‘The peasant must choose free trade in grain – which means speculation in grain, freedom of the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and starve; the return of the absolute landowners and the capitalists; and the severing of the union of peasants and workers – or delivery of grain surpluses to the state at fixed prices.’

Of course Lenin gave the peasants no choice: he forced them to sell their grain to the state at fixed prices.

It was a policy that Stalin later copied, taking it to extreme lengths.  In 1928 he launched the government’s first ‘Five Year Plan’, an economic programme that mandated a massive 20 percent increase in industrial production. At a party plenum he told party members that ‘…for hundreds of years England squeezed the juice out of all of its colonies, from every continent, and thus injected extra investment into its industry’. He argued that without colonies the only way the USSR could achieve its goals was through the exploitation of the country’s peasants.

As Ms Applebaum writes, Stalin ‘had determined that the peasantry would have to be sacrificed in order to industrialise the USSR, and he was prepared to force millions off their land.’

Russia had had a long tradition of communal agriculture, and prior to the revolution the majority of Russian peasants had held land jointly in rural communities. Ukraine had no such tradition; most of the land was owned and farmed by individual peasants.

The Soviet government arbitrarily divided peasants into three categories: ‘kulaks’, or wealthy peasants; ‘seredniaks’, or middle peasants; and ‘bedniaks’, or poor peasants. The author writes that ‘very quickly, (the kulaks) became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution.’ They were arrested, deported or killed, their grain and their animals confiscated and their land ‘collectivised’.

Stalin believed that collectivisation and the elimination of the kulaks would lead to greater efficiency and increased output, while at the same time convert the peasantry into ‘proletarianised’ wage labourers.

He believed that the political and economic future of the Soviet Union lay in industrialisation. Politically, he believed that wage labourers could be ‘controlled’ more easily than peasants. Economically, he felt that the only way a country could grow was through industrialisation—and that that could only be achieved by redeploying the surplus, both in labour and food, from the countryside to the cities.

He used brute force and mass murder to try to achieve these aims, while deliberately setting high prices for industrially produced goods and low prices for agriculturally produced goods.

The state would fine peasants who could not deliver grain, charging them up to five times its worth. Those who could not or would not pay had their property confiscated.

it wasn’t just the rich peasants that were under attack. The government issued orders to arrest ‘the most prominent grain procurement agents and most inveterate grain merchants…who are disrupting set procurement and market prices.’ Trading grain became a crime.

In the end, his policies led, as Mikhail Gorbachev later admitted, to a new form of serfdom. They also led to a collapse in agricultural production, mass murder and mass starvation.

Food has always been used as a weapon. Even in recent history, unscrupulous leaders have used food, famine and starvation as a weapon, supplying food to their supporters and denying it to perceived enemies.

Meanwhile, most classical economists still share Stalin’s view that industrialisation is the key to a country’s economic development, and that cheap food is an important policy tool in achieving that objective. Cheap food forces farmers to become more efficient, while at the same time freeing up labourers to work in the factories where ‘real wealth can be generated’. Cheap food also transfers wealth from rural to urban areas, ‘subsidizing’ the wages of workers in the cities.

In her book Ms Applebaum clearly shows that famines are not necessarily the result of bad weather, nor cheap food necessarily an accident of market forces.

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Regular readers will know that one of the recurring themes in my books and blogs is the idea that power has shifted along the supply chain first from farmers to traders, then from traders to processors, then from processors to retail and finally from retailers to consumers. The Internet and social media have empowered the final consumer. Not only that, but the gamma, the rate of change in consumer preferences, has accelerated.

I was reminded of this when I read this week that Borden Dairy Co, a major US milk processor, had followed hard on the heals of Dean Foods Co., another major US milk processor, to file for bankruptcy. Both are based in Dallas Texas, and between them they control(led) 13.5 percent of the US dairy market.

Both companies blamed the collapse in dairy milk consumption for their difficulties. Per capita consumption that has fallen more than 40 percent since 1975, of which 25 percent since the start of the century. And according to the USDA, per capita consumption continues to fall at 2 percent per year.

The reasons for milk’s fall from favour are numerous. Some people have stopped consuming milk on health grounds, concerned about its fat (and weirdly, its sugar) content, or because of their perceived lactose intolerance. Others cite concerns about animal welfare, particularly the way that young calves are seperated at a young age from their mothers. Others are concerned about the GHG emissions of livestock farming in general.

Partly as a result of these concerns milk has been facing stiff competition from the growing availability of plant-based milk substitutes such as soy and oat drinks. But it has also been a victim of a trend away from eating breakfast at home. The bowl of cereal (with milk) has lost out to the (dry) cereal bar that can be eaten on the move.

The collapse in milk consumption has forced many dairy farmers out of business. The U.S. has lost nearly 20,000 licensed dairy farms, a roughly 30 percent decline, over the past decade. In court filings, Borden said that 2,730 US dairy farms had gone out of business in the last 18 months alone. Ironically, this has increased the pricing power of the farms that have managed to stay in business. As a result farm gate raw milk prices have increased by 27 percent since this time last year, squeezing processor margins.

At the same time there has been a new entrant into the milk-processing sector: a customer has become a competitor. Walmart, previously one of Dean’s major clients, opened its own milk processing plant in Indiana in 2018. Some in the business have accused Walmart of using liquid milk as a ‘loss leader’ to attract customers into their stores.

Companies in the sector are doing what every sector under pressure does: cutting costs by reducing capacity through consolidation while diversifying into other products where demand is growing, whether they be plant-based milk substitutes or value-added dairy products such as cheese and yoghurt.

And while demand for ordinary milk is falling, demand for lactose-free or lactose-reduced milk is increasing, as is demand for specialty dairy products. US sales of flavored whole milk jumped 8.9% in the first ten months of last year while sales of lactose-reduced or lactose-free milk grew 11% between November 2018 and November 2019. Grass-fed milk sales grew about 51% in that period.

Some companies have even taken the dramatic step of exiting the shrinking dairy market to concentrate solely on the expanding plant-based substitute market. Elmhurst 1925, which operated dairy facilities in the New York City region, closed in 2016 and emerged a year later as a plant-based beverage producer without any cow products.

Unfortunately neither Borden nor Dean Foods were nimble or flexible enough to avoid bankruptcy. Borden’s CEO told Bloomberg, “Borden has a 163-year history that has stood for the goodness of dairy for all that time. We’re going to stay squarely focused on that.”

Finally, I was shocked to find out this week that Charles Darwin never said, “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” It’s a shame because it is a great quote, one that obviously applies in this case.

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Over the holiday period I enjoyed reading Wilding – The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree. It is the (true) story of how the author and her husband Charlie Burrell stopped traditional farming on  Keppe Castle Estate, 3,500 acres of heavy weald clay in West Sussex, and let it return to nature, with only the occasional nudge from themselves.

Before the Second World War Britain imported about three quarters of the country’s food by ship each year. During the war enemy submarines and warships prevented much of this food from getting in. Fearing food shortages, the British government launched ‘The Dig for Victory’ campaign. People were urged to use every spare piece of land to grow vegetables. More importantly, marginal farmland was switched to intensive crop production and grazing. When the war finished, the country did not return that marginal land to nature but instead farmed it more intensively.

It was this typical marginal British farm that the author’s husband, who had studied agricultural at college, inherited in 1987 at the age of 23. His family had owned the land since it was a medieval deer park. It is situated on the famously heavy clays of the Sussex Weald: poorly draining “marginal” soil that sets like concrete in summer and porridge in winter.

Although intensively farmed since the war it had rarely made a profit. The couple thought that they could turn the business around by investing heavily in better dairy cattle and new technology, but by the end of the century they were deeply in debt and still losing money.

They had little choice but to sell off their farm equipment and dairy herd, letting off two-thirds of their land on contract to a neighbouring arable farmer. The land closest to their home they returned to nature, spraying it first with glyphosate (!) and then replanting it with native grass seeds. Three years later the neighbouring farmer let his contract drop, also unable to make a profit from the marginal soil, and the couple let that land return to nature as well. Slowly they introduced free-roaming grazing animals – cattle, ponies, pigs and deer – to act as proxies for herbivores that would have grazed the land thousands of years previously.

The couple now has 350 head of English longhorn cattle (100 cows and their youngsters), Tamworth pigs, red and fallow deer and Exmoor ponies. Rather than set targets to protect specific rare species, their principle is to allow “natural processes” to unfold. There is no predator control.

As an intensive farm, Knepp lost money in all but two years as a result of both high running costs, particularly labour, but most importantly because of capital investments in new machinery, such as dairy technology or new slurry lagoons or sewage systems to adhere to new legislation.

The ‘wilded’ farm has much fewer capital demands and only one employee. Annual farm income (not profit) is now made up of £120,000 from selling high-grade organic meat, £500,000 from renting former farm buildings to local businesses (attracting 200 full-time jobs to the local economy), £118,000 from renting seven former workers’ cottages and £230,000 from a ‘glamping’ site. The couple has recently started running ‘safaris’ to allow visitors the wildlife and explain what they are doing.

As far as subsidies are concerned, the farm currently receives £220,000 for having its land in the highest level of environmental stewardship scheme and £195,000 in “basic payments” which every British farmer receives via EU funds. What happens to these EU payments after Brexit remains an open question.

The couple admits that not every farmer is as lucky as they are. First, they got their timing right. They sold off all their farm equipment and livestock before the market tanked; as a result they were able to pay off their hefty mortgage, leaving them with no debts. This was partly because the farm has been in the family for generations: Charlie and Isabella had got the land for free, something that many farmers could only wish for. In addition, the EU was at that time just beginning to switch subsidies away from production and more towards ‘setting land aside’, leaving it idle.

Second, the couple was lucky in terms of geography: their farm is conveniently located close to London in the populated (and wealthy) South-East of England. This has obviously helped them with tourist income, as well as enabling them to rent their old farm buildings.

In a way their situation is similar to my own family smallholding outside Canterbury in Kent. As I described in my recent book, our land was worth more to the sports club next door than it was worth as a pig farm.

Wilding is beautifully written and I would recommend it highly to any nature lover. It describes in detail how wildlife has returned to the farm with astonishing results in terms of biodiversity with purple emperor butterflies, turtledoves and nightingales, to name just a few.

I would also recommend the book to any farmer struggling to stay afloat – and I know that many of you are. The author clearly explains how and why their farm failed—it was marginal land that shouldn’t have been farmed in the first place—as well as the difficult steps that the couple took in getting financial support to ‘rewild’ it. The author also clearly demonstrates how they are now beginning to take advantage of the recent trend for pasture-fed meat.*

The book is also important because the author emphasizes the point that grazing animals are—and always have been—an essential part of nature’s heritage. Indeed her most important—and most positive message—is that farming can benefit nature; it isn’t necessarily detrimental to the environment.

The author doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but at least she poses the right questions.

* If I have understood correctly, grass-fed livestock must be fed on grass for 51 percent of their lives while pasture-fed livestock must be fed on grass for 100 percent of their lives.

© Commodity Conversations® 2020

A report published in September 2019 by the Food and Land Use Coalition estimates the total value of world food production at $10 trillion per year. However, the report argues that the environmental cost of food production is an additional $3.1 trillion, an amount that is not being paid by consumers, but being passed on in debt to future generations.*

As the graph below shows, the report’s authors estimate that the annual hidden costs of our current system of agriculture are even greater once you add in health and development. However, I am not sure that one can blame our farmers for, say, the world obesity epidemic, nor for malnutrition.

However it is not clear where subsidies fit into the calculations. The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRC), using OECD data, estimate that governments pay out $700 billion in farm subsidies each year, three-quarters of which are paid directly to farmers.

The Food and Land Use Coalition estimate the figure at closer to $1 trillion per year, and argues that the world has to “switch these subsidies into explicitly positive measures.” They say that they are a massive lever that could be used “to incentivise the farming community across the world to act differently.”

The EU agricultural subsidy bill comes to $65 billion per year, accounting for around 40 percent of the EU’s annual budget. However, as the New York Times recently reported, it is not always clear where the money ends up. One well-known statistic is that about 80 percent of EU agricultural aid goes to the top 20 percent of farmers; some 125,000 beneficiaries receive around $14.3 billion, or about $113,500 per farmer.

In the past couple of years the Trump administration has given US farmers about $28 billion in additional subsidies to offset the effect of the trade wars and the resulting higher Chinese tariffs on US agricultural products.

However, when it comes to agriculture, direct subsidies are just one of the screwdrivers in a government’s toolbox. As the Food and Land Use Coalition write in another report, there are three types of agricultural support:

• Trade or border measures such as tariffs or quotas that provide market price support;
• Direct subsidies on output or on the inputs (such as fertilizers or seeds) that create incentives to increase output;
• Decoupled subsidies that avoid incentives that change output levels but provide direct income support to farmers.

The nature of agricultural support has changed substantially in the past 20 years or so. The traditional pattern of agricultural support involved substantial support to farmers in the rich countries, while poor countries, on balance, used to tax agriculture. In wealthy nations, average rates have fallen and there has been a move away from trade measures and towards decoupled protection that seeks to avoid pushing for higher agricultural production and reducing the market access opportunities of other countries.

In developing countries, agricultural policy has shifted from net taxation to net assistance: most support is provided through border measures that generate revenues, such as tariffs, rather than subsidies paid by governments.

In an interview for my 2015 book The Sugar Casino, Sunny Verghese, CEO of Olam and current chair of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, estimated that “between 55 and 60 percent of global agriculture is unviable (economically and environmentally), only supported by government subsidies and transfers from taxpayers to the farmers.” He cited 2012 figures that showed that the 30 OECD countries paid out US$387 billion in farm subsidies, while the rest of the world paid out around $615 billion.

I asked Sunny how he would resolve the dilemma that you need higher agricultural prices to reflect the true cost of food, but that higher prices will affect the poor people the most. He suggested a “simple” answer: transfer all the subsidies that the rich world gives to farmers who don’t actually need the money – to the poor.

“We need to start to try and use those subsidies to ensure that people below the poverty line are not impacted by high food prices,” he told me.

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*I remember seeing another study, perhaps by the WWF, that estimates the annual environmental cost of food production at $2 trillion, but I have been unable to locate the report. If anyone does know where I can find it, please let me know.

According to research by ‘New Which?’ UK food prices are lower in real terms now than they were 30 years ago. White fish is the only food that has risen in price during that period, from £12.21 per kg in 1988 to £14.41 per kilo now. All other foods researched by the magazine now cost less than in 1988.

Sugar—a food close to many of our hearts—has halved in inflation-adjusted terms from £1.44 per kg to £0.75 per kg over the past 30 years. Vegetables have also halved in price over the period, while meat (beef, pork and chicken) have all fallen between 10 and 15 percent. Bananas have seen the biggest fall in price, from £2.82 to £0.94 per kilo. Bananas are the top ‘impulse buy’ foods in UK supermarkets.

‘New Which?’ suggests three reasons why this has happened:

• Increased yields, or what the magazine calls the ‘industrialisation’ of farming;
• Increased imports, or what could be considered as increased competition for UK farmers—either that or economics doing its job through ‘comparative advantage’. It may be cheaper for example, to import winter strawberries from Spain rather than to grow them in UK greenhouses;
• Increased purchasing power of the supermarkets as they compete with each other to be the cheapest.

In the 1950s, UK consumers spent a third of their income on food. By 1974 this had fallen to 24 percent and it is now estimated to be around 10 percent. After Singapore and the US, the UK spends the lowest proportion of household income on food shopping.

However it is not just in the UK that food prices have fallen. The UN’s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) has published an index of world food prices since the early 1960s. In inflation adjusted terms the index is now at the same level as in 1961, and significantly lower than during the commodity price boom of 2006-2012.

This is an extraordinary occurrence when you consider the massive increase in population over the period, as well as the increased diversion of crops to both biofuels and livestock.

On the other side of the coin, energy prices—a major component of food production costs—have doubled in real terms since the 1960s.

Cheaper food my be good for consumers, but it makes life tougher for the world’s farmers. Last year the legendary cocoa trader Derek Chambers retired after 50 years in the business. In a farewell interview he told Bloomberg, “It is a great regret of mine that farmers in West Africa were poor when I came into the business and are still poor, probably even poorer now.”

(He had particularly harsh words for the movement for greater sustainability in the food supply chain: “The business that has grown up around the need for sustainability does not benefit the farmers anywhere near as much as it does the NGOs, companies and individuals involved in the circus.”)

Low food prices don’t just keep producers in poverty, they may also mean increased waste. When grocery shopping accounted for a quarter of a UK family’s budget they probably paid more attention not to waste food than now when it only accounts for 10 percent of the family budget.

Most importantly, current low food prices don’t cover the full cost of producing it: externalities such as deforestation, water pollution, and GHG emissions, along with the declining health of our soils, are currently not paid by anyone. Instead they are building up as debts to be paid by future generations—our children and grandchildren.

There is an old saying in economics that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. Someone is paying – or will pay – the true cost of our food, even if we aren’t!

© Commodity Conversation ®