3.1 Brief notes on the reproduction approach in economic theory
Although the economic vision of the general equilibrium theory predominates globally over the last decades, many economists have contributed to the alternative approach of reproduction. Adam Smith himself, Ricardo, Marx or Sraffa, regarded economy as a cyclical process. Under that conception, production is nothing more than a necessary step, together with the distribution and consumption, in an endless spiral.
These approaches were based on the fact that any line of production required natural resources, means of production and workforce, through which it generates a product. This product had to be used to guarantee the reproduction of the elements that had taken part in its production and, once this distribution was made, a surplus could be left over – which then would generate the conflict between social classes to decide how it had to be distributed. Based on these general formulations, the main problem is how these heterogeneous assets that participate in the process are to be valued (Barceló, 1994).
Chapter 5. Socio-ecological modelling of agroecosystems
As can be appreciated, this approach has a lot to do with what we have been proposing in the previous sections. Thus, the reproductive study we propose is no less a scientific novelty. In this sense, we believe that social metabolism can contribute to the valuation of heterogeneous assets from a rich multicriterial perspective. Therefore, we consider it necessary to identify how, from the field of agrarian systems analysis, these theories had been raised to analyze its potential in the application to social metabolism.
3.2 Alexander Chayanov and the Organization and Production School
In the field of agricultural economics’ analysis at the beginning of the 20th century, Alexander Chayanov, a Russian agricultural economist and one of the greatest exponents of the Organization and Production School, developed both a theory and a proposal of quantification of farming functioning. His fundamental proposals are mainly included in his thesis of “Peasant Farm Organisation”. Their thesis confronted with the great collectivizations applied by Stalin.
The main reason for the dispute, within the theoretical arena, was that Chayanov considered in the first place that the peasant population could not be considered as a class destined to disappear during the course of history, and at the same time that it had some intrinsic characteristics, "a typical peasant economy", that had to be taken into account when considering agricultural transformations.
However, the persecution and subsequent execution of Chayanov through a process devised by the government of Stalin, left largely forgotten their agricultural proposals. In this regard, we take up from the peasant farming model defined by him ([1925]1986). His theory of peasant economies triggered the development of reproductive studies of domestic units, by accounting for the amount and allocation of land required according to the family farm composition, livestock density and cultural practices (Minami, 2009). However, Chayanov’s approach combined only units of labour time, family needs, livestock intake and farm produce translated into a monetary budget driven by an effort-consumption balance. It did not pay due attention to other biophysical requirements to ensure the reproductive capacity of other agroecosystem funds, as soil fertility. In spite of that, we regard his point of view as a good basis for the present methodological approach, by means of which the foundations of agroecology will be applied to socio-ecological relationships.
Therefore, our study retrieves the work done by Chayanov ([1925]1985; Van der Pleog, 2014) on the functioning and internal planning of economic peasant units, but incorporating a biophysical dimension for ensuring the simultaneous maintenance of a larger range of living funds. We are therefore laying foundations towards modelling the agroecosystems’ sustainability with a novel fund-flow agroecological perspective.
Despite these reproductive studies have continued to develop in the field of agrarian history, sociology or political economy (see for example Barceló, 1994; Chibnik, 1984; Colomé, 2015; Van der Ploeg, 2014; Vicedo et al., 2002; Wiber, 1985), it is also true that the approach posed by Chayanov was aimed at the implementation of proposals for economic planning.
We know that we want to model the functioning of agrarian systems from a reproductive perspective. We lack the methodological tool that allows us to take this step from the assessment of agroecosystems to their modeling. Although here, as we will see, we do not consider economic planning as an objective in itself, we do consider necessary to recover the debate about the potential to socially organize agricultural resources. The reason therefore encroaches with another branch of scientific development, which is currently used little in this sense of planning and that we consider useful for this research.
Chapter 5. Socio-ecological modelling of agroecosystems
3.3 The discredit of economic planning in 20th century Europe
Also in the context of scientific advances within the USSR, the need for economic planning led to the development of mathematical proposals on the organization of productive resources, such as the input-output tables of Leontief (1966) or the linear optimization initially raised by Kantorovicz (1939). The input-output tables allow us to clearly identify the distribution of resources on a micro or macroeconomic scale, while optimizations help to find the best way to distribute resources. These mathematical tools allow to clarify in which way the distribution of finite resources of a system, under a series of constraints, results in the accomplishment of particular objectives in the most efficient way. Shortly after the first approach to linear optimization by Kantorovicz, in 1947 the north-american Dantzig developed the Simplex algorithm, with which the resolution of these optimization models was greatly simplified (Dantzing, 1963). These are the ones on which we are interest the most for our purposes.
These tools to optimize the distribution of finite resources for production and the social debates they raised, were widely present within the USSR. But not only there. Economic planning was an object of study and discussion in the faculties of economics all around the world for a long time, raising abundant critical and heterodox debates. However, from the 1980s onwards, Neoclassical orthodox school imposes in most western faculties and planning becomes a pure engineering element that does not pose any debate about social organization. As a matter of fact, books such as those of Joan Robinson’s and John Eatwell’s Introduction to Economics (1973), in which heterodox debates were raised and neoclassical thinking was fought, are since years not referenced anymore in the syllabus of introductory courses in Economics.
Resource optimization has largely been relegated to a technical scale of production process, clearing the path for the free market as the only "efficient organizer" of the economic matrix of countries. As noticed by Polanyi (1944), elements such as labour or natural resources are therefore considered as mere inputs regulated by the market system, and the social and environmental impact they have is ignored. The discredit of economic planning and the impacts of an economy that works under the premise of economic profits, allowed the progressive increase of externalities. As shown in chapters 3 and 4, this reckless attitude to ecological and social issues, has had an enormous impact in the food systems.
The proposal we make in the present chapter, does not embrace the idea that agricultural activity should be planned on a state scale as the USSR did. We consider the hypothesis that a socially-driven planning of the flows generated in the agroecosystem, at socially affordable scales, could result in an improved efficiency of agrarian systems and could limit the negative impacts that we observe today. In doing so, however, we must include deliberative mechanisms both in the transition to new models and in our own scientific research (Duru et al., 2015; Levidow et al., 2014). One of the greatest problems in the USSR state planning that marked its inefficiency was the difficulty of achieving a bi-directional information transfer between state and society, that could have generated adaptive structures in response to the changing needs of the population (Robinson and Eatwell, 1973). In order to be able to introduce these social deliberative steps, the model we present introduces the concept of horizons. To make use of this concept effectively we want to take advantage of the path of these optimizations and see how to introduce the reproductive conception towards agroecosystem modeling.
Chapter 5. Socio-ecological modelling of agroecosystems
4. The current tools of territorial planning, the path to sustainable agrarian systems