If you’ve been to the Bangkok Farmers Market already, you’ll know that many of our traders are small-scale farmers.
Common sense might tell you that although it is quite charming to be able to buy your vegetables directly from a small-scale farmer, what our modern, urbanized world really calls for is large, industrialized farming.
Only the really big farms can invest in the required machinery and technology, and achieve the efficiency of output needed to feed the millions of people in the big cities.
If you thought that (as I did), you would be quite wrong. Small-scale farming is actually considerably more land-efficient than industrial farming.
What’s more, according to the economic historian, Joe Studwell, small-scale farming is the rock on which the Asian economic miracle was built.
In his brilliant new book, How Asia Works, Studwell recounts how Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China all engaged in land reform after the Second World War, taking land from the big landlords and redistributing it to farmers in small lots.
“In 2009, Roger Doiron, a blogger for the popular website Kitchen Gardeners International, weighed and checked the retail prices of all 380kg of the fruit and vegetables that his 160-square-metre kitchen garden produced; the garden’s retail value was USD16.50 per square metre.
That meant a total value from his plot of USD2,200 – equivalent to USD135,000 per hectare….
As a very loose benchmark, the wholesale price of the US’ most common and successful crop from large-scale farming, corn, equated to USD2,500 per hectare in 2010.”
Joe Studwell in How Asia Works.