From Ellen Davis, ‘Scripture, Culture and Agriculture’:

The positive aim of the agrarian critique is not that all surburbanites should be farmers but rather that they should move beyond romanticism – a mind-set that always includes a deluded and therefore potentially destructive element – to a realistic relationship with the land on which all our lives depend, a relationship of multigenerational commitment and nurture. (p. 67)

She cites Douglas Boucher’s observation that:

We now see that [combating world hunger] is not simply a matter of whether food is available in the market; people must have the money to buy it. In a world economy in which food is a commodity, poverty will lead to starvation no matter how productive agriculture becomes. The basic problem for hungry people is not a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of income. (Davis, p.77)

A few years ago I heard an interview with Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winning economist whose study has focussed on the causes of famine. He had personal experience of living through a famine in Bangladesh as a child in a middle-class household, where there was always food on the table. In the interview he explained that even the most severe famines never affect more than 10% of a country’s population. The food is always there. What is lacking in a famine is the political will to get the food to those who are hungry.

Davis again:

In every country for which data is available, smaller farms are shown to be 200 to 1000% more productive per unit area. (p. 104)

In both the United States and Britain, the suicide rate among farmers is twice that of the general population; in other parts of the world it may be even higher. Rural residents experience significantly higher rates of depression and mental disorder, and studies have shown “exceptionally large increases” in the incidence of substance abuse and domestic violence. (p. 105)

Despite the food industry’s claim to be feeding the world, chronic extreme hunger has increased since the mid-1990s, with 842 million people severely undernourished – even though there is, in absolute terms, enough food in the world for the current population. …The United States and Europe dump agricultural surpluses on poor countries where local farmers cannot compete. The tragic irony is that such “food aid” increases both poverty and hunger. (p. 105)