IB History Agricultural and Environmental Factors Notes

Agriculture and environment: Rural crisis before and during the Depression

Agriculture entered the crisis before 1929

1. Wartime demand encouraged expansion. Farmers increased acreage and borrowed for land and machinery during the First World War.
   1. European recovery reduced export demand after 1918. Production remained high while overseas markets contracted.
   2. Surpluses pushed commodity prices down. Farm incomes fell through much of the 1920s even as urban industry expanded.
   3. Debt made falling prices dangerous. Farmers had to sell more output to meet fixed mortgage and equipment payments.
   4. Rural weakness reduced national demand. Farm households bought fewer manufactured goods, which affected shops, transport, and industry.

The United States faced a long farm depression

1. US farm prices fell sharply after the wartime boom. The purchasing power of farm products dropped while many costs and debts remained fixed.
   1. Mechanization raised output. Tractors and combines increased productivity but also encouraged larger farms and further borrowing.
   2. Federal policy did not solve overproduction. The 1920s debate over the McNary-Haugen bills showed disagreement over whether government should support prices.
   3. Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover rejected permanent price guarantees. They preferred cooperation, efficiency, and limited federal intervention.
   4. The Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 proved insufficient. The Federal Farm Board could purchase surpluses but could not control production or restore demand.

The Dust Bowl turned economic crisis into migration

1. Drought began across the Great Plains in the early 1930s. Low rainfall exposed soils that had been intensively ploughed during earlier expansion.
   1. Deep-rooted prairie grasses had been removed. Without vegetation, dry topsoil was vulnerable to strong winds.
   2. Dust storms destroyed crops and health. Black blizzards reduced visibility, damaged lungs, buried fences, and stripped fields.
   3. The disaster was environmental and human-made. Drought triggered the crisis, but farming practices and fragile land use intensified it.
   4. Around 2.5 million people left the Plains states during the 1930s. Many travelled west, although only part of this movement went to California.

Tenants and sharecroppers carried unequal burdens

1. Farm consolidation displaced labour. Mechanization and falling prices encouraged landowners to reduce tenants and hired workers.
2. Sharecroppers lacked control over production decisions. They received a portion of the crop but remained dependent on landowners and local credit.
   1. African American sharecroppers faced racial discrimination. Local officials and landowners often controlled access to relief and removed tenants from programme benefits.
   2. The Agricultural Adjustment Act reduced cultivated acreage. Payments went mainly to landowners, who did not always share them with tenants.
   3. New Deal farm policy raised some prices but redistributed hardship. Its benefits varied by class, race, crop, and region.

Canada's Prairie provinces faced parallel pressures

1. Western Canada depended heavily on wheat exports. Falling world prices reduced farm income and provincial revenue.
   1. The Prairies suffered drought through much of the 1930s. Crop failure, wind erosion, and grasshopper infestations compounded economic distress.
   2. Saskatchewan experienced exceptional hardship. Relief costs overwhelmed local and provincial resources.
   3. Canadian banks remained stable but farm debt remained severe. Branch banking prevented US-style failures without protecting producers from price collapse.
   4. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration began in 1935. It promoted water conservation, community pastures, shelterbelts, and improved land management.

Latin American agriculture depended on export markets

1. Many rural economies relied on one or two commodities. Coffee, sugar, bananas, wheat, meat, and cotton linked producers to volatile world demand.
2. Price collapse reduced wages and employment. Plantations and estates cut labour when export earnings fell.
3. Government revenue contracted. Customs and export taxes funded states, so falling trade weakened public spending.
   1. Foreign companies controlled key sectors in some countries. Profits, credit, and marketing decisions could be made outside the producing country.
   2. Land concentration intensified inequality. Large estates often coexisted with landless rural workers and smallholders with limited credit.

Brazil responded by destroying coffee

1. Brazil produced most of the world's coffee. Overproduction had already created large stocks before global demand fell.
   1. The government bought and destroyed surplus beans. Millions of bags were burned or dumped to reduce supply and support prices.
   2. The policy protected part of the export economy. But it could not fully restore demand or prevent unemployment and fiscal strain.
   3. Getulio Vargas expanded state intervention after 1930. The crisis weakened the old coffee oligarchy and encouraged industrial diversification.
   4. Coffee policy illustrates a central dilemma. Price support aided producers but shifted costs to the state and did not address unequal land ownership.

Mexico combined depression with agrarian reform

1. Mexico's economy faced falling exports and returning migrants. US deportation and repatriation campaigns sent large numbers of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans south.
   1. Agrarian reform expanded under Lazaro Cardenas after 1934. The state redistributed land through ejidos and supported peasant organization.
   2. Land reform had political as well as economic aims. It strengthened the revolutionary state and weakened some large landowners.
   3. Productivity outcomes varied. Access to credit, irrigation, transport, and equipment shaped whether redistributed land succeeded.
   4. Mexico offers a contrast to price-support policy. Reform changed landholding while Brazil focused more directly on managing an export commodity.

Local variation and human cost across the rural crisis

1. Mechanization increased both output and exposure. Tractors and harvesters improved productivity, but loan repayments became difficult when wheat, cotton, and corn prices fell.
2. The 1929 crash intensified an existing farm crisis. Urban financial collapse restricted credit and demand, but rural hardship had already persisted through much of the 1920s.
3. Foreclosures accelerated social disruption. Banks repossessed farms when borrowers could not meet mortgages, displacing owners and weakening community institutions.
4. Tenant farmers faced greater insecurity. They lacked land as collateral and could be removed when owners reduced acreage or joined federal crop-control programmes.
5. Cotton dependence deepened southern poverty. Low prices and unequal landholding left much of the rural South vulnerable before drought and national unemployment intensified hardship.
6. Black Sunday symbolized the Dust Bowl. On 14 April 1935, a massive dust storm crossed the southern Plains and helped transform regional disaster into a national political issue.
7. Dust storms damaged health as well as farms. Fine soil entered homes and lungs, causing dust pneumonia, livestock deaths, school closures, and continuing displacement.
8. California agriculture depended on insecure labour. Migrants entered a system of low wages, temporary contracts, poor housing, and employer control rather than receiving automatic economic recovery.
9. The Soil Conservation Service promoted new practices. Contour ploughing, shelterbelts, crop rotation, and reseeding aimed to reduce erosion and connect environmental knowledge with federal policy.
10. The Resettlement Administration aided selected families. It offered loans and planned communities, but resources were too limited to reach every displaced tenant or bankrupt farmer.
11. Prairie relief created federal-provincial tension. Local governments lacked sufficient revenue, while disputes over responsibility delayed consistent aid to unemployed and displaced families.

Historians disagree over causation

1. Environmental interpretations emphasize drought. They treat rainfall failure as the immediate trigger of crop collapse and migration.
   1. Political ecology emphasizes land use. It links the Dust Bowl to ploughing, mechanization, tenancy, and incentives that encouraged risky production.
   2. Economic interpretations stress global prices. Falling commodity demand harmed farmers even outside drought zones.
   3. New Deal interpretations divide over effectiveness. Some emphasize conservation and price recovery, while critics focus on tenant displacement and unequal benefits.
   4. A comparative judgement must separate trigger from vulnerability. Drought explains timing in some regions, but debt, overproduction, and export dependence explain why losses became systemic.

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