Can Small-scale Growing “Feed the World”?
Can Small-scale Growing “Feed the World”?
Written by the Food Logistics Committee, Food & Solidarity. This is Part 2 of the two-post Food Logistics series. It follows Part 1, which explained why Food & Solidarity do not attempt to grow produce at scale , and here we examine whether small-scale growing can “feed the world”, and how colonial and market forces shape that possibility.
Can Small-scale Growing “Feed the World”?
There’s an appealing idea that if every community grew food locally, cities could feed themselves. But the reality is that small farms and gardens can’t meet the needs of an urban population under the conditions we live in, and without changing who owns land and controls markets, and what the state does about subsidies, prices, and corporate power.
Across the UK, long-term pressures from supermarket buying power, land concentration, and Agricultural Policy continue to squeezed small farms out. A handful of farms manage to sell veg boxes or organic produce, but most have to rely on off-farm jobs, contract supply to retailers, or subsidies to survive.
This is not because farmers aren’t trying hard enough, it’s because they operate within a food system structured around class and capital. Labour productivity, farm incomes, and retail food prices are locked together. For most small producers, that means there’s no way to produce the kind of surplus needed to feed thousands of households without being pulled into supermarket contracts or pushed out of farming altogether. These are the relations that determine whether small, low-input farms can produce a surplus to feed non-farmers or are forced into wage labour and niche markets. The claim that agro-ecological smallholders alone can “feed the world” doesn’t, at the current time, survive contact with the current realities of land, labour, and markets
How Colonialism Remade Food
This didn’t happen by chance. The shift from peasant-based food systems to capitalist agriculture was built on the deliberate destruction of the protections that once existed both here, and throughout the world. In India, China, and throughout Africa during the late 19th century, local grain reserves and relief systems were dismantled and/or banned under British rule. When poor harvests struck, grain was still exported abroad to meet international prices, as harvest failed in relatively richer Europe and the USA. Even as millions starved. Famines became catastrophes not because there was no food, but because food was pulled away under the dogma of free markets. Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and the cold logic of Social Darwinism.
Colonial policies, backed by new railways and ports, tied peasant farming into global circuits. Crops that once fed local communities were diverted for export, rent increases forced growers to switch to growing cash-crop and a sub-substance existence, using stored grain even during good seasons. Famines were rationalised as “natural” disasters, when in fact they were manufactured by political and economic choices. The lesson is clear: people can go hungry in the shadow of plenty when food is organised for profit rather than for need. That is the world we have inherited: a food system born from colonial extraction, made global through empire, and still structured today by the same logics by supermarket chains and commodity markets…. Without the community grain stores.
From 1950-2000, the world population grew to six billion, and is projected to increase to nine billion by 2050\. Such expansion was not possible without the extraordinary development of productivity in industrial high-input farming.
What our Parcels Achieve
This history matters because it explains why charity nor laissez-faire economics cannot solve hunger. Food & Solidarity parcels are not handouts that let governments off the hook. They are a form of solidarity: we pool resources so that no one in our community goes without, while also confronting the systems that makes people need parcels in the first place.
We see this clearly in child poverty. Nearly one in three children in the UK now grows up poor, (46% in Elswick, 42% in Arthur’s Hill and the city centre, and 38% in Benwell) not because of personal failings but because of political choices, low wages, unaffordable rents, and cuts to benefits. This is tied to housing too: members in cold, damp, or unsafe homes often come to us in crisis. Our parcels put food on the table immediately, but our organising, against evictions, for repairs, for better a better lot in life, builds power. They are part of building collective power to tackle the root causes of poverty.
Join us
Food & Solidarity is built by members who contribute what they can. Your membership funds essential food parcels and supports campaigns for housing justice, against child poverty, and for an internationalist food system based on solidarity. By joining, you’re not only helping distribute food, you’re part of building the power needed to change the system that causes hunger in the first place.
