Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  The most famous advocates for subsistence economy were a couple of communists. In 1932, Scott Nearing and Helen Knothe Nearing established a farm in Vermont as an experiment in living. Scott Nearing was born in Morris Run, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a house on a hill overlooking the Morris Run Coal Company. As the son of its owner, he stood to inherit it. Instead, he declared himself a Marxist and denounced private property. Nearing taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business during the First World War but was refused reappointment in 1915. A career in politics followed, in which he opposed the war as a pacifist, visited the Soviet Union to write about its educational policy, and joined the Communist Party of the United States. Innumerable writings and lectures had not brought about revolution by 1930, so he and Helen bought a farm in order to recover the only source of autonomy available to them amid an economy they considered hopelessly corrupt. They relocated to the coast of Maine in 1952, founding Forest Farm.

  The Nearings published The Good Life in 1954. The book made them celebrities among readers looking for alternatives to industrialized food, suburban sprawl, and a society increasingly dominated by corporate power. They described their farm as a “subsistence homestead” (without any apparent reference to the New Deal) and “a semi-self-contained household unit, based largely on a use economy and, as far as possible, independent of the price-profit economy which surrounds us.” They advocated the concept of dual transactional realms decades before it entered anthropology. Aside from maple syrup, they declared, “we will not sell anything else from the place. Any garden or other surpluses will be shared with neighbors and friends in terms of their needs.” The Nearings became peasants by choice, linking an old New England makeshift with an antimodernist agrarianism.6

  The United States itself advocated self-sufficiency as part of a nationalist campaign to send food grown commercially to soldiers overseas during two world wars. In 1917, a timber-industry millionaire named Charles Lathrop Pack organized the United States National War Garden Commission. “Food gardens for defense” rallied citizens to “sow the seeds of victory” by planting their own vegetables. And in 1943, the USDA estimated that 20 million households had harvested 40 percent of the fresh fruits and vegetables they consumed that year.

  Nation-states, however, are complex bureaucracies that often pursue contradictory policies. That same year, a different branch of government promulgated a contrary position on self-provisioning when the Supreme Court decided the case Wickard v. Filburn. Roscoe Filburn owned a farm in Ohio where he planted wheat. Under the authority of the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act (or AAA), the United States limited the area planted in wheat and other crops to prop up prices and ensure farmers a basic standard of living. Filburn believed that he followed the law when in 1940 he seeded the eleven acres allotted to him, plus an additional twelve acres for his own use. Someone complained, and the government levied a fine of 49 cents on each of Filburn’s 239 “illegal” bushels. Filburn argued that his own bread made from his own wheat had no effect on the national price, so it didn’t fall under the law. When a federal district court ruled in his favor, the United States appealed, naming as plaintiff Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard.

  The Court rejected Filburn’s argument. Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote the unanimous opinion. The purpose of the AAA was to maintain a high price for wheat, and that required the government to limit the volume in the market. Jackson averred that homegrown wheat influenced the market by its absence. Farming that “supplies a need” eliminates purchases, affecting the price of wheat in commerce. Filburn did not do anything as radical as declare his farm an autonomous commune. He merely wanted to monetize half of his crop but not the other, to live between transactional realms by playing community and market off each other. He did what farmers had always done—eat this and exchange that. But the Court advanced a capitalist metaphysics. For farmers who planted key commodities, the market was not an option. It enveloped them.7

  Some of the same controversy followed the United States into its first decades of purposeful international economic development. The reformers, folklorists, and avant-garde farmers did not make that policy, but it borrowed something from their desire to see peasant agriculture succeed. The New Deal’s administrative legacy of social planning and environmental engineering, coupled with the compulsion to remake the world during the Cold War, prepared the soil for a scientific project that eventually proposed the transformation of peasant societies. But not everyone involved understood the project the same way or agreed about it. American anthropologists and economists pursued research into how peasant farmers did things, how hard they worked, and what they yielded. American technocrats entered Mexico, the Philippines, and India and discovered unincorporated peasants growing unhybridized crops—like history standing still.

  * * *

  THE GREEN REVOLUTION WAS SUPPOSED to modernize the great heathendom. After the Second World War, the Ford and Rockefeller foundations proposed to export American agricultural science to the developing world. They would give peasant farmers improved plants and other tools in order to boost their harvests, ending hunger and poverty. The Green Revolution provoked new interest in peasant food systems and household economies among anthropologists, economists, and others interested in theories of development. At the center of this extraordinary debate was the question of what peasants accomplished with their labor. Some experts believed that agrarians produced little more than what they needed to meet their most basic needs.

  William Arthur Lewis offered a model that gained enormous influence when he published it during the early 1950s. Lewis argued that nonindustrial rural societies include lots of people with little or nothing to do. Though he offered no evidence, he maintained that labor was so ineffective and yields so low that the contribution of each additional person could be calculated at close to zero. When industrial production begins in these regions, said Lewis, the differential in wages attracts underemployed villagers. Wages don’t need to be much higher than the value of food grown on the homeplace. New mill and mine workers would seem to offer a market for household farmers to sell their surpluses, if any, but Lewis said that peasants just can’t win. Growing more food causes prices to drop, leaving them no better than before. Lewis came up with an elegant model of a so-called dual economy, in which subsistence and capital exist together until the latter devours the former.

  But there are problems with the model. For one thing, the historical relationship between the two modes of production more often finds subsistence surviving by being incorporated into the circuit of capital. This was part of the argument of the last chapter. In this sense, there is no dual economy but a single economy, in which the household mode of production is co-opted. And while Lewis was right that those lacking money but wanting it migrated to wage-paying work, he had no sense of the historical reasons behind that transition. An enclosed or degraded ecological base has its own story, one apparently beyond economic analysis. The condition and ownership of the landscape forms no part of the model, making it look like the decision to work for wages comes from rational economic calculation, not desperation. It’s no great insight to say that people waste their labor whenever they plow up gullied soil or that a vanished forest leaves nothing to hunt or gather. Most of all, how did Lewis know that agrarian labor produces zero value? He didn’t.8

  Other economists repeated the same statement as fact. The assertion came from almost every development economist working in the 1950s and 1960s. Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan advised the World Bank, “All the agrarian economists of the world agree that if those people were removed from the land agricultural output, far from falling, would increase.” Labor productivity shimmers as the ultimate standard of economic viability, yet, by that measure, peasants appeared to waste the land they occupied. Every development economist of the era owes something to James Steuart. They tended to depict the peasants of the world like Steuart’s vinedresser: primitive and obsolete, their l
abor futile, their product invisible and useless to the state.9

  Anthropologists did not suffer from the same failure of imagination. They might have had much less influence than economists and administrators over the direction of the World Bank, but they had one thing that these others lacked: evidence from fieldwork. In a sense, economics and anthropology both traced their origins to the speculations of Enlightenment philosophers about the origins of modern times. What passed for the study of cultures in the nineteenth century was “human geography,” a delusional set of racial theories derived from environmental determinism. After 1900, with the ascent of Franz Boas and his students Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, anthropology emerged as a powerful empirical study. But it took decades for attitudes to change. In 1952, Carl Sauer still rebuked the old orthodoxy in an address to fellow geographers: “There is no general law of progress that all mankind follows; there are no general successions of learning, no stages of culture, through which all people tend to pass.” One researcher exemplified the new empiricism. He transcended the prejudices of his time and championed a despised form of land use, revealing its internal coherence and ecological logic. His name was Harold C. Conklin.10

  In 1957, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published Conklin’s dissertation on the upland burning and rice planting of Hanunóo farmers on Mindoro, one of the largest islands of the Philippines. The subject might sound hopelessly obscure. It isn’t. The remarkable thing about Hanunóo Agriculture is that it provides a detailed rationale for a kind of farming no economist thought about, not for one second. Reformers regarded “slash and burn” as a nuisance at best; at worst, thoughtless destruction. Burning appeared to lay waste to valuable timber. Among people accustomed to constant cropping—who could not recall a time when fire played a part in shaping the world’s landscapes, who measured other systems against their own reliance on industrial fertilizers—the shifting cultivators of the tropics were savages.11

  Conklin helped to promote the word swidden and explained it in spectacular detail. The Hanunóo burn the forest and plant rice among the smoldering branches and stumps, cultivating the same clearings over a series of years before abandoning them. The trees gradually return, and around twenty years later the slope is burned again. Until Conklin, no anthropologist had asked how swidden systems function, how villages organize themselves around forest practices, and what kinds and quantities of food they harvest. He revealed shifting cultivation to be subtle, restorative, productive, and deeply connected to the lives of the Hanunóo. Forging knives, felling trees, cutting brush, and setting fire to the mountain itself—all demand divisions of labor according to age and gender and rites for satisfying controlling spirits. The rice that comes off the mountain occupies a central place in offerings and feasts. The book amounts to something more than a report but a case for swidden as one of the world’s essential social ecologies.12

  Conklin might have anticipated the massive development project then simmering during the years of his fieldwork. Rice yields in the Philippines had not increased since 1918. That and a rising population forced the government to import 65,000 tons of rice a year by the 1950s. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations decided that science could turn the trend around. But their solution indicated that they had abandoned much of the original humanitarian project. Instead, they favored high-technology plants that needed other high-technology inputs, like harvesting machines, pesticides, and fertilizers. In particular, they embraced a program of seed invention. One historian has called it “a Manhattan Project for food.” The foundations combined to establish the International Rice Research Institute at Los Baños in 1960. Over the following decade, researchers set out to transform rice. Its stalk would be shorter (to minimize the energy expended to grow it), its color darker (to absorb more sunlight), and its head more rigid (the better for machines to harvest it). Six years later, the IRRI announced the first harvest of IR-8, an artifact of the Cold War, a plant that did not come from any specific environment or agrarian culture but that would create such abundance that it would lift the tropics out of poverty all by itself.

  If the purpose of the Green Revolution was to produce more food in the same space in order to increase exports, then IR-8 advanced that mission. It doubled rice exports from the Philippines. But it left behind the people it was first intended to help. The reason had to do with the plant itself. Adopting it meant accepting its extraordinary limitations and blind spots. It could not be grown on mountain clearings. The machines needed to harvest it only worked on the flat lowlands. It required more fertilizer than traditional varieties, so it cost more to grow. In other words, it could not be cultivated by peasants. But when farmers met IR-8’s considerable demands, it rewarded them. By the 1980s, Filipino rice yielded an average of 2.3 tons per hectare, up from 1.2 tons in the early 1960s.

  Writing in 1957, Harold Conklin offered a different solution to the rice shortfall. He suggested that the government of the Philippines encourage shifting cultivation. Smoky forest openings yielded as much rice per hectare as the national average (1.3 tons per hectare), with a labor efficiency of 4 liters harvested for every labor-hour expended. And while this was not nearly the yield of IR-8, the same clearings turned out much more than rice, which accounted for about 20 percent of the Hanunóo diet. Villagers planted maize, millet, sorghum, sweet potatoes, various yams, manioc, taro, bananas, various peas and beans, peanuts, cacao, citrus, mangoes, papayas, onions, eggplants, chili peppers, tomatoes, garlic, various squashes and melons, and cotton. This is not a complete list. Said Conklin, understating his position, “Both technologists and conservationists could profit from a closer look at the varied actual forms of land usage practiced in Philippine forested areas.”13

  Conklin argued a point that those committed to industrial monoculture must have found absurd, that swidden offered an effective means of employing forested land. If it could be brought out of the mountains to other locations and conducted by commercial farmers, he believed, it would feed the hungry and contribute to the betterment of all Filipinos. He gave a contrary vision to that of the high-modernist inventors of IR-8. The Hanunóo didn’t need the Green Revolution—the Philippines needed Hanunóo agriculture. Most of all, Conklin upheld agrarian practices as viable and stable, a source of ecologically benign food production, not a problem to be overcome.14

  Economists became interested in peasant economy at around the same time, influenced by William Arthur Lewis but also by the work of anthropologists like Conklin. With the Green Revolution at full throttle, questions flew as to whether agrarians should be replaced. The economist Theodore Schultz published Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964) to defeat a single often-repeated statistic of the “zero-value” theory—that at any given time, 25 percent of any agrarian population had nothing to do. Not only did this number make no sense to Schultz, it seemed to come from out of nowhere.

  No economy has full employment, said Schultz, and farming did not demand eight or ten hours of work a day. He called out development experts who seemed to travel the world looking for rural inefficiencies and decrying them as affronts to the gospel of modernity. Schultz said that they observed people at leisure, not people with nothing to do. The year after Transforming Traditional Agriculture appeared, Ester Boserup published The Conditions of Agricultural Growth (1965), demonstrating that farmers worked harder and longer whenever they needed to increase yields. Lacking Boserup’s insights, Schultz relied on what seems in retrospect a discomfiting and even insulting natural experiment. He asked whether India’s influenza epidemic of 1918, resulting in the deaths of 20 million people, or 6 percent of the population, reduced the area sown to crops. It did. This proved, in other words, that not only did all agrarians work, they worked at productive tasks, using their resources to the best advantage. One sentence sent doubt rippling through the development agencies: “There are comparatively few significant inefficiencies in the allocation of the factors of production in traditional a
griculture.”15

  None of this should be taken to mean that Schultz considered traditional agriculture worth saving. His goal was its transformation. He simply had a different notion for how that should be done. He helped launch the “human capital” argument. Rather than invest in machines that peasants couldn’t use, he said, development banks and foundations should invest in education. Looked at one way, such a policy might have prevented the massive migration to slums that followed from the industrialization of agriculture in Mexico and other countries or might have held it off a little longer. But Schultz ends up in the same place as the technocrats who invented IR-8. The goal of teaching peasants was to adapt them to high-modernist technology. He held fast to the economist’s creed that everyone thinks like Adam Smith. Yet if that were true, then why did villagers decline more powerful tools, more fecund animals, and every new advantage offered to them? He was amazed at a report from Guatemala, where farmers insisted on using hoes and machetes though the region where they lived was “not an isolated subsistence economy, but is closely integrated into a larger market economy.” He never understood the household mode of production and transactional realms, so he could make no sense of peasant economy.16

  Around this time, anthropologists began to question the idea that peasant economies needed transformation at all. They applied to agrarian decision making the same assumption of functionality and internal coherence that Conklin applied to swidden. In 1952, Melville Herskovits described his own abandonment of smug triumphalism. “Ten years ago, the word ‘primitive’ came easily to the lips. It is only with … the growing integration of peoples of the most diverse cultures into the world scene, that the essentially pejorative and tendentious character of this designation, like others such as ‘savage,’ ‘backward,’ or ‘early,’ when applied to any functioning way of life, became apparent.” The scholar who most fully embraced this revisionism was Marshall Sahlins. He didn’t merely write against a decade of development thought and centuries of political economy; he dethroned modernity itself.