Steven Gorelick lays out just a few of the policy changes, priority shifts and new approaches that could help save rural life, and lead to more sustainable farming. Firstly, and most obviously, rather than specialise their production for export, farmers should be ecouraged to diversify their production for local and regional markets. More localised food production and marketing systems would be far more diverse than today's homogenised global system, and would more closely reflect the geographical,climatic, and cultural diversity of the places where food is produced and consumed. If a greater proportion of the food people eat were to be locally produced, ecological niches for food production would be matched by the economic niches farmers need tosurvive. A mix of local, regional, national, and international production would still be available - the goal would not be to put an end to the international trade in food, but to avoid transporting food thousands of miles when it could instead be produced next door. Such a shift would help revitalise rural economies decimated by the global economy. Less money would be skimmed off the price of food by corporate middlemen, and far more would remain in the hands of farmers. This would especially be the case with the direct marketing of food via farmers' markets and farm stands, box schemes and other forms of community supported agriculture. If farmers were not impelled to specialise their production in a few global commodities, the trend towards ever larger and more highly mechanised farms would abate. Since small farms use a proportionally higher amount of human labour than mechanised inputs - UK farms under 40 hectares, for example, provide five times more per-hectare employment than those over 200 hectares - a return to smaller farms would help bring back some of the 700,000 farm jobs the UK has lost during the last half-century of agricultural 'progress'.
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