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| American corn—one way or another, it's what's for dinner
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By Matthew Yglesias
America got its start as an agricultural
wonderland, a continent-sized expanse of free land up for grabs for anyone with
the gumption to sail across the ocean and steal it from the Indians. The United
States’ great East Coast metropolises arose as export terminals for the
agricultural bounty this land bore. Our early infrastructure megaprojects,
canals and railroads, served to further expand the scope of agricultural
shipping, and their intersections brought us the cities of the Midwest. And
though America has industrialized and then unindustrialized, agriculture
remains a great constant of our economy. Relatively few Americans farm today,
but the much-derided mainstream commercial agriculture sector in the United
States remains a major engine of productivity and could easily be become
stronger yet.
How productive is America’s farm sector?
Viewed in one light, it seems not so impressive: The 2009 output equaled
170 percent of 1948 output, for an average annual rate of 1.63 percent—well
below the economy-wide average.
But the agricultural industry was already
mature in 1948, so seems unfair to expect its productivity to increase at the
same rate as computer production or jet airplane manufacturing. What’s more,
productivity derives from multiple sources. A firm, country, or sector can
increase output by increasing the volume or quality of inputs—more workers,
more machines and capital goods, more land and energy—as well as by increasing
the efficiency with which these inputs are used. And here’s where America’s
farms look like champions. Total growth in agricultural inputs was only 0.11
percent during this period, meaning that almost all the growth in agriculture
was due to “total factor productivity,” otherwise known as the secret sauce by
which an industry gets more efficient at turning inputs into value.
One tangible sign of America’s sustained
agricultural productivity is that we are a large net exporter of
agricultural goods. Farming, in other words, stands alongside software, media,
financial services, tourism, airplanes, and military equipment as one of
the main things we sell to the world in exchange for our imports of oil and
consumer goods.
The lion’s share of our exports—about $50
billion worth last year—were basic staples: soybeans, corn, wheat, and cotton.
The big destinations for American farm goods are our neighbors in Canada and
Mexico, plus the hungry mouths of land-scarce Asia—China, Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan. And rising living standards in the Pacific Rim promise even more
agricultural bounty ahead. As people get richer, they start to want to eat more
meat. America exports meat ($12.5 million worth of pork, beef, and chicken in
2011), but, more to the point, our staple grains feed animals. A cow is
essentially a low-efficiency, high-status method of transforming grain into
food for humans, so steady growth in world demand for meat implies enormous
growth in demand for feed crops.
But to fully take advantage of these trends,
America needs to increase its overall agricultural output, not just our total
factor productivity. That means getting more inputs.
Perhaps the most important trend to reverse
would be the long-term decline in the quantity of American farmland. Over the
past 40 years, about 125 million acres of American land have gone out of
cultivation. While the government shouldn’t try to force land back into
agricultural use, it’s well worth reconsidering policies that have tended to do
the reverse.
Urban and suburban jurisdictions tend to put
severe restrictions on how dense developed land can become. In very
land-constrained places like Silicon Valley, this results in high housing
prices and slow population growth. But most of the United States is more
spacious than that, and excessive restrictions on apartments and townhouses
merely result in outward expansion into farm territory. In Washington, D.C.,
for example you can’t build skyscrapers downtown, which, among other
things, encourages the construction of office complexes in the suburbs. When
jobs sprawl away from the center, housing patterns grow ever-more-diffuse and
begin to eat into farmland. Less restriction on the use of urban and suburban
land would mean more space available for use for agricultural production.
The other input where we’re most clearly
falling short is people. Land and transportation infrastructure alone wouldn’t
have turned America into a farm powerhouse if people hadn’t moved here from
Europe to till the soil. The same situation applies today, when immigrants and
especially temporary seasonal workers are a key element in the agricultural
labor force.
In recent years, unfortunately, the country’s
political mood has wrought a crackdown on unauthorized immigration—a move that
fantasists insist will mechanically push up wages for American workers. In
reality, the lowest wages Americans will accept will in many cases be too high
to be profitable, leaving crops rotting in the fields rather than
picked by visitors from Latin America. This merely wastes resources and reduces
overall incomes throughout the country. What’s needed isn’t tolerance of
illegal border crossing, but expanded temporary-worker programs ideally purged
of the requirement that migrants work exclusively for one employer, which too
often open workers to abusive treatment.
The days when the United States was a nation
of farmers are long gone, but we’re still the Earth’s greatest agricultural
producer. The world, meanwhile, is a big and increasingly hungry place. With a
few smarter policies to bring more land into cultivation and an adequate supply
of workers to till it, this strong point of the American economy could get even
stronger.
Also in the special issue on the future
of food: five “food frontiers," including technologies to make diet food
tastier and fight salmonella; small-scale farmers decide whether to embrace automated
agricultural equipment; and the case for bringing back home ec. This project
arises from Future Tense, a joint partnership of Slate, the New America
Foundation, and Arizona State University.
Original Article Here
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