<http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland>
Hungry for land: small farmers feed the world with less than a
quarter of all farmland
GRAIN | 28 May 2014 | Reports
It is commonly heard today that small farmers produce most of the
world's food. But how many of us realise that they are doing this
with less than a quarter of the world's farmland, and that even this
meagre share is shrinking fast? If small farmers continue to lose the
very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to
feed itself.
GRAIN took an in depth look at the data to see what is going on and
the message is crystal clear. We need to urgently put land back in
the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform
central to the fight for better food systems.
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Governments and international agencies frequently boast that small
farmers control the largest share of the world's agricultural land.
Inaugurating 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming, José
Graziano da Silva, Director General of the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO), sang the praises of family farmers
but didn't once mention the need for land reform. Instead he stated
that family farms already manage most of the world's farmland1 - a
whopping 70%, according to his team.2 Another report published by
various UN agencies in 2008 concluded that small farms occupy 60% of
all arable land worldwide.3 Other studies have come to similar
conclusions.4
But if most of the world's farmland is in small farmers' hands, then
why are so many of their organisations clamouring for land
redistribution and agrarian reform? Because rural peoples' access to
land is under attack everywhere. From Honduras to Kenya and from
Palestine to the Philippines, people are being dislodged from their
farms and villages. Those who resist are being jailed or killed.
Widespread agrarian strikes in Colombia, protests by community
leaders in Madagascar, nationwide marches by landless folk in India,
occupations in Andalusia - the list of actions and struggles goes on
and on. The bottom line is that land is becoming more and more
concentrated in the hands of the rich and powerful, not that small
farmers are doing well.
Rural people don't simply make a living off the land, after all.
Their land and territories are the backbone of their identities,
their cultural landscape and their source of well-being. Yet land is
being taken away from them and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands
at an alarming pace.
Then there is the other part of the picture: that concerning food.
While it is now increasingly common to hear that small farmers
produce the majority of the world's food, even if that is outside of
market systems, we are also constantly being fed the message that the
"more efficient" industrial food system is needed to feed the world.
At the same time, we are told that 80% of the world's hungry people
live in rural areas, many of them farmers or landless farmworkers.
How do we make sense of all this? What is true and what is not? What
action do we take to deal with these imbalances? To help answer some
of these questions, GRAIN decided to take a closer look at the
facts.5 We tried to find out how much land is really in the hands of
small farmers, and how much food they produce on that land.6
The figures and what they tell us
When we looked at the data, we came across quite a number of
difficulties. Countries define "small farmer" differently. There are
no centralised statistics on who has what land. There are no
databases recording how much food comes from where. And different
sources give widely varying figures for the amount of agricultural
land available in each country.
In compiling the figures, we used official statistics from national
agricultural census bureaus in each country wherever possible,
complemented by FAOSTAT (FAO's statistical database) and other FAO
sources where necessary. For statistical guidance on what a "small
farm" is, we generally used the definition provided by each national
authority, since the conditions of small farms in different countries
and regions can vary widely. Where national definitions were not
available, we used the World Bank's criteria.
In light of this, there are important limitations to the data - and
our compilation and assessment of them. (See Annex 1 for a fuller
discussion of the data.) The dataset that we produced is fully
referenced and publicly available online and forms an integral part
of this report.7
Despite the inherent shortcomings of the data, we feel confident in
drawing six major conclusions:
1. The vast majority of farms in the world today are small and getting smaller
2. Small farms are currently squeezed onto less than a quarter of the
world's farmland
3. We are fast losing farms and farmers in many places, while big
farms are getting bigger
4. Small farms continue to be the major food producers in the world
5. Small farms are overall more productive than big farms
6. Most small farmers are women
Many of these conclusions might seem obvious, but two things shocked us.
One was to see the extent of land concentration today, a problem that
agrarian reform programmes of the 20th century were supposed to have
solved. What we see happening in many countries right now is a kind
of reverse agrarian reform, whether it's through corporate land
grabbing in Africa, the recent agribusiness-driven coup d'état in
Paraguay, the massive expansion of soybean plantations in Latin
America, the opening up of Burma to foreign investors, or the
extension of the European Union and its agricultural model eastward.
In all of these processes, control over land is being usurped from
small producers and their families, with elites and corporate powers
pushing people onto smaller and smaller land holdings, or off the
land entirely into camps or cities.
The other shock was to learn that, today, small farms have less than
a quarter of the world's agricultural land - or less than a fifth if
one excludes China and India from the calculation. Such farms are
getting smaller all the time, and if this trend persists they might
not be able to continue to feed the world.
Let's go through these findings point by point.
1. The vast majority of farms in the world today are small and getting smaller
By our calculations, over 90% of all farms worldwide are "small",
holding on average 2.2 hectares (Table 1). Even if we exclude China
and India - where about half of the world's small farms are located -
from the calculations, small farms still account for over 85% of all
farms on the planet today. In over two-thirds of all countries, small
farms - as defined in each country - represent more than 80% of all
farms. In only nine countries, all of them in Western Europe, are
small farms a minority.8
How many small farms are there - and how much land do they have?
Click here to view in full screen
Due to a myriad of forces and factors (such as land concentration,
population pressure or lack of access to land) most small farms have
been getting smaller over time. Average farm sizes have shrunk in
Asia and Africa. In India, the average farm size roughly halved from
1971 to 2006, doubling the number of farms measuring less than two
hectares. In China, the average area of land cultivated per household
fell by 25% between 1985 and 2000, after which it slowly started to
increase due to land concentration and industrialisation. In Africa,
average farm size is also falling.9 In industrialised countries,
where the industrialisation of agriculture is rampant, average farm
size is increasing, but not the size of small farms.
Table 1: Global distribution of agricultural land
2. Small farms are being squeezed onto less than a quarter of global
agricultural land
Table 1 reveals another stark fact: globally, small farms have less
than 25% of the world's farmland today. If we exclude India and China
again, then the reality is that small farms control less than a fifth
of the world's farmland: 17.2% to be precise.
India and China merit special attention because of the huge number of
farms and farmers they are home to. In these two countries, small
farms still occupy a relatively large percentage of farmland. If we
put the figures into a graph, we can see more clearly the disparity
between the number of small farms and how much land they have .
We find the most extreme disparities in some 30 of the countries for
which we have sufficient data. Here, more than 70% of farms are
small, but they are relegated to less than 10% of the country's
farmland. These worst cases are listed in Table 2.
Table 2: Worst off
Box 1: A word about Africa
As can be seen in Table 1, we find that small farms in Africa
represent almost 90% of all farms but have less than 15% of the total
agricultural land. Our figures contradict the frequent assertion that
most farmland in Africa is managed by small farmers.10
Data on who uses what land in Africa are hard to get. Most of
Africa's traditional land tenure systems have been seriously eroded
and even dismantled, beginning in colonial times. In many countries,
ownership of land has been vested in the state or allocated to
plantation companies or local chiefs. This has profound implications
for classifying land and accounting for its use.11
Additionally, there is the problem of defining what constitutes
agricultural land. In many cases, African governments measure
"agricultural land" as the area being used by sedentary farmers at a
given period of time, thereby leaving out large areas of land used by
pastoralists for seasonal grazing. Also, land under fallow, shifting
cultivation and land used by communities that farm within forest
areas are often excluded.12 The FAO, by contrast, includes permanent
pastures, uncultivated savannah and lands sown to permanent crops in
its definition of agricultural land.
As a consequence, most national censuses in Africa register just a
fraction of the area of agricultural land recorded by the FAO - less
than half, as far as the entire region is concerned. The FAO's
approach is a more realistic and inclusive way of measuring land use
by small producers, which is why we used FAOSTAT's figures to
establish the amount of farmland in Africa.
Where land is assumed to belong to the State - and is not accounted
for as cropped or used by local farmers - this provides a basis for
land grabbing by big farmers and companies, the rationale being that
they will develop the unused land. Under customary law, however,
these lands belong to the local communities and are often actively
used.
Given that we used, wherever possible, national census data provided
by governments to calculate the amount of land in the hands of small
farmers, it is possible and even likely that we underestimate the
situation in Africa. Small farmers in Africa are probably using much
more than the 15% of the region's farmland than we our data shows -
but communities' access to that land is not guaranteed and can be
lost at any moment.
3. We're fast losing farms and farmers in many places, while big
farms are getting bigger
Almost everywhere, big farms have been accumulating more land over
the last decades, with many small and medium-sized farmers going out
of business. The statistics are dramatic. The official data that we
were able to access are summarised in Table 3.
The situation seems most dramatic in Europe, where decades of EU
agricultural policies have led to the loss of millions of farms. In
Eastern Europe, the process of land concentration started earnestly
after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the enlargement of the European
Union. Millions of farmers were forced out of business by the opening
up of East European markets to subsidised farm produce from the West.
In Western Europe, meanwhile, biased agricultural policies coupled
with large scale infrastructure, transportation and urbanisation
projects have been taking a vicious toll. Large farms now represent
less than 1% of all farms in the European Union as a whole, but
control 20% of EU farmland.13, 14 A recent report by the European
Coordination of La Via Campesina and the Hands off the Land Alliance
found that in the EU, farms of 100 hectares or more, which represent
only 3% of the total number of farms, now control 50% of all farmed
land.15
Table 3: Losing farms, concentrating land
Official data on farm losses and land concentration in Africa and
Asia are harder to get, and the situation there is less clear, since
contradictory factors and forces are often at play. In many countries
with high levels of population growth, the number of small farms
actually increases as small farms are divided up between children.
But at the same time, land concentration is growing.
The rapid expansion of huge industrial commodity farms is a
relatively recent phenomenon in Africa, while it has been going on
for decades in many countries of Latin America (e.g. soybeans in
Argentina and Brazil) and in several parts of Asia (e.g. oil palm in
Indonesia and Malaysia). Box 2 and Graph 2 give the background and
figures for a few major industrial crops. The conclusion is
inescapable: across the world more and more fertile agricultural land
is occupied by huge farms to produce industrial commodities for
export, pushing small producers into an ever decreasing share of the
world's farmland.
This trend is compounded by yet another recent phenomenon: the new
wave of land grabbing. The World Bank has estimated that between
2008-2010 at least 60 million hectares of fertile farmland were
leased out or sold to foreign investors for the purpose of large
scale agricultural projects, with more than half of this in Africa.34
These massive new agribusiness projects are throwing an incalculable
number of small farmers, herders and indigenous people off their
territories.35 Yet no one seems to have a real grasp of how much land
has changed hands through these deals over the last few years. The
scores, possibly hundreds, of millions of hectares of agricultural
land being taken away from rural communities are not yet captured in
the official statistics that were available for this report.
Another way of looking at land distribution is through the Gini
index, a statistical tool that ranges from 0 (indicating perfect
equity) to 1 (total inequity). For example, when calculated for
income distribution, countries with a Gini index above 0.5 are
considered "highly unequal". GRAIN gathered Gini indices for
agricultural land distribution in more than 100 countries.36 Most
have indices exceeding 0.5, with many reaching 0.8 and some even
surpassing 0.9. In the Americas, all countries for which we found
information have indices over 0.5, and most of them reach to 0.8-0.9.
In Europe, of the 25 countries for which this information is
available, only three have an index under 0.5. Where more than a
single year's data was available, the most common tendency was for
the index to go up, indicating that land inequality is increasing.
4. Despite their scarce and dwindling resources, small farmers
continue to be the world's major food producers
At a time when agriculture is almost exclusively judged in terms of
its capacity to produce commodities, one tends to forget that the
main role of farming is feeding people. This bias has infiltrated
national census data, too, as many nations do not include questions
about who produces what and with what means. However, when that
information is available, a clear picture emerges: small farmers
still produce most of the food. They are feeding the world. The UN
Environment Programme, the International Fund for Agricultural
Development, FAO and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
all estimate that small farmers produce up to 80% of the food in the
non-industrialised countries.37
Table 4 shows the percentage of food produced by small farms in those
countries where GRAIN was able to obtain good data. Across a diverse
range of countries, the data shows that small farmers produce a much
larger proportion of their nations' food than might be expected from
their limited landholdings.
Table 4: Lots of food from little land
If small farmers have so little land, how can they provide most of
the food in so many countries? One reason is that small farms tend to
be more productive than big ones, as we explain in the next section.
But another factor is this historical constant: small or peasant
farms prioritise food production. They tend to focus on local and
national markets and their own families. Much of what they produce
doesn't enter into national trade statistics, but it does reach those
who need it most: the rural and urban poor.
Big corporate farms, on the other hand, tend to produce commodities
and concentrate on export crops, many of which people can't eat as
such. These include plants grown for animal feed or biofuels, wood
products and other non-food crops. The primary concern for corporate
farms is their return on investment, which is maximised at low levels
of spending and thus often implies less intensive use of the land.
The expansion of giant monoculture plantations, as discussed earlier,
is part of this picture. Large corporate farms also often have
considerable reserves of land that lie unused until land that is
currently being cropped or grazed is exhausted.
Small farmers are not only our main source of food at present, but
also for the future. International development agencies are
constantly warning that we need to double food production in the
coming decades. To achieve that, they usually recommend a combination
of trade and investment liberalisation plus new technologies. But
this will only create more inequality. The real solution is to turn
control and resources over to small producers themselves and enact
agricultural policies to support them.
In a recent paper on small farmers and agroecology, the UN Special
Rapporteur on the Right to Food concludes that global food production
could be doubled within a decade if the right policies towards small
farmers and traditional farming were implemented. Reviewing the
currently available scientific research, he shows that agroecological
initiatives by small farmers themselves have already produced an
average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with
an average increase of 116% among all African initiatives assessed.
Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries provided a doubling
of crop yields in a short period of just three to ten years.53
The real question, then, is how much more food could be produced if
small farmers had access to more land and could work in a supportive
policy environment rather than under the siege conditions they are
facing today?
5. Small farms not only produce most of the food, they are also the
most productive
For some, the idea that small farms are more productive than big
farms might seem counterintuitive. After all, we have been told for
decades that industrial farming is more efficient and more
productive. It's actually the other way around. The inverse
relationship between farm size and productivity has been long
established and is dubbed "the productivity paradox".54
In the European Union, 20 countries register a higher rate of
production per hectare on small farms than on large farms. In nine EU
countries, productivity of small farms is at least twice that of big
farms.55 In the seven countries where large farms have higher
productivity, it is only slightly higher than that of small farms.56
This tendency is confirmed by numerous studies in other countries and
regions, all of them showing higher productivity on small farms.
Our data indicate, for example, that if all farms in Kenya had the
current productivity of the country's small farms, Kenya's
agricultural production would double. In Central America and Ukraine,
it would almost triple. In Hungary and Tajikistan it would increase
by 30%. In Russia, it would be increased by a factor of six.57
Although big farms generally consume more resources, control the best
lands, receive most of the irrigation water and infrastructure, get
most of the financial credit and technical assistance, and are the
ones for whom most modern inputs are designed, they have lower
technical efficiency and therefore lower overall productivity. Much
of this has to do with low levels of employment used on big farms in
order to maximise return on investment.58
Beyond strict productivity measurements, small farms also are much
better at producing and utilising biodiversity, maintaining
landscapes, contributing to local economies, providing work
opportunities and promoting social cohesion, not to mention their
real and potential contribution to reversing the climate crisis.59
6. Most small farmers are women, but their contributions are ignored
and marginalised
The role of women in feeding the world is not adequately captured by
official data and statistical tools. FAO, for example, define only as
people who get a monetary income from farming as "economically active
in agriculture". Using this concept, FAOSTAT indicates that 28% of
the rural population in Central America are "economically active" and
that women form just 12% of that group!60
This distorted view does not change significantly from country to
country. However, when data is more specific, a totally different
picture emerges. The last published agricultural census figures from
El Salvador indicate that women are just 13% of "producers", meaning
farm holders, much in line with the number provided by FAO.61
However, the same census indicates that women provide 62% of the
labour force used on family farms. The situation in Europe is better
for women, but still highly unequal. There, the data show that women
comprise less than a quarter of farm holders and on average have
smaller farms than men, but provide almost 50% of the family labour
force.62
Statistics about the role of women in Asia and Africa are difficult
to obtain. According to FAOSTAT, only 30% of the rural population in
Africa is economically active in agriculture and 40% in Asia - around
45% being women and 55% men.63 Yet studies carried out or cited by
FAO show totally different numbers, indicating that in
non-industrialised countries 60 to 80% of the food is produced by
women.64 In Ghana and Madagascar, women make up about 15% of farm
holders, but provide 52% of the family labour force and constitute
around 48% of paid workers.65 In Cambodia, just 20% of agricultural
land holders are women, but they provide 47% of the paid agricultural
force and almost 70% of the labour force on family farms.66 In the
Republic of the Congo, women provide 64% of all agricultural labour
and are responsible for around 70% of food production.67 In
Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, they are 53% of the active population in
agriculture.68 There is very little data on the evolution of the
contribution of women to agriculture, but their share would likely be
growing, since migration is resulting in mostly women and girls
picking up the workload of those who leave.69
According to FAO, fewer than 2% of landholders worldwide are women,
but figures vary widely.70 There is broad consensus, however, that
even where land is registered as family or joint property between men
and women, men still enjoy much wider powers over it than do women.
For example, a common situation is that men can make decisions about
the land on behalf of themselves and their spouses, but women cannot.
Another impediment is that in giving credit, governments and banks
require women to present some form of authorisation from their
husbands or fathers, while men encounter no such barrier. It is no
surprise, then, that available data show that only 10% of
agricultural loans go to women.71
Additionally, inheritance laws and customs often work against women.
Males tend to have priority or outright exclusivity in the
inheritance of land. In many countries, women can never gain legal
control over land, with authority passing to their sons if they are
widowed for example.
The data above support the contention that women are the main food
producers on the planet, although their contribution remains ignored,
marginalised, and discriminated against.
Reversing the trend: give small farmers the means to feed the world
As the data show, land concentration in agriculture is reaching
extreme levels. Today, the vast majority of farming families have
less than two hectares to feed themselves and humankind. And the
amount of land they have access to is shrinking. How are small
farmers supposed to sustain themselves in these conditions?
Most families that depend on a small farm need to have family members
working outside the farm in order to be able to stay on the land.
This situation is often described euphemistically as
"diversification", but in reality it means accepting low wages, and
bad working conditions. For the rural families of many countries, it
means mass migration leading to permanent insecurity both for those
who leave and for those who stay. Also, living and working on a small
farm often consists of long and difficult working hours, no holidays,
no pensions, no retirement for the elderly and irregular school
attendance for children.
If this land concentration process continues, then no matter how
hard-working, efficient and productive they are, small farmers will
not be able to carry on. The concentration of fertile agricultural
land in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing
number of people going hungry every day. Genuine land reform is not
only necessary, it is urgent. And it must carried out in line with
the needs of peasant families and small producer communities. One of
these needs is that land be redistributed to small farmers as an
inalienable good, not as a commercial asset that can be lost if rural
families are not able to cope with the highly discriminatory
situations that they face. Farming communities should also be able to
decide by and for themselves, and without pressure, the type of land
tenure they want to practice.
The situation facing women farmers also requires urgent action. Many
international agencies and governments are currently discussing these
issues. Land access for women is specifically part of the Millennium
Development Goals. The FAO has written numerous documents advocating
for women's rights over land and agricultural resources. The issue is
being considered by the UN Development Programme, the World Bank, the
Gates Foundation, the G8 and the G20, among others. However, what
these institutions are advocating is often not what women farmers and
women's organisations have been struggling for. Such institutions
often advocate a system of land rights based on individual property
titles that can be bought and sold or used as collateral. This is
likely to lead to further concentration of land, just as the
allocation of individual land property rights to men has done
historically around the world.72
Doing nothing to turn this situation around will be disastrous for
all of us. Small farmers - the vast majority of farmers, who tend to
be the most productive and who produce most of the world's food - are
losing the very basis of their livelihoods and existence: their land.
If we do nothing, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself.
The message, then, is clear. We urgently need to launch, on a scale
never seen before, genuine agrarian reform programmes that get land
back in the hands of small and peasant farmers.
Annex 1: The data
What sources of data were used?
Gathering and analysing data on land distribution and food production
raises major questions and problems. First, data on farms, farmers,
rural people and food are often patchy, slanted, or influenced by the
politics of those who collect them. Second, classification criteria
and definitions are highly variable.
Although government statistics are no exception to such problems, we
have used government sources, most often provided by national
agricultural censuses, as much as possible because they provide the
most comprehensive data. We also used data provided by FAOSTAT and
other FAO sources, and we incorporated data from research papers when
other data was not available at national level. This means that we
have used data from various years, in some cases from 10 or more
years ago. If this had any impact on our results, it is most likely
that the amount of land in the hands of small farmers has been
overestimated, since with few exceptions the worldwide trend is
towards less land in the hands of small farmers. The sources for each
case are indicated in the dataset accompanying this report.73
Outside Europe and the Americas, data for around one-quarter of the
world's countries - representing around 12% of all agricultural land
and about the same fraction of global rural population - was either
partial or not available. We estimated the number of farms and small
farms and the amount of land in the hands of small farmers in these
countries based on total agricultural land (provided by FAOSTAT),
rural population (provided by UN Department of Economic and Social
Affairs) and average household size per country (provided by UN
Habitat).
What definition of small farms was used?
What is a small farm? The area of land it occupies is not the only
significant parameter. Twenty hectares may be very big in India but
very small in Argentina. Access to irrigation, the fertility of the
soil, the type of production being undertaken, climate and topography
are all factors in determining what is considered a small farm and
what is not. There is clearly no universal definition of a small
farm, and GRAIN had no possibility of adopting one. Building or
proposing an all-encompassing definition was impossible because in
many cases it would have rendered the available data inapplicable or
impossible to interpret.
We also avoided the concept of "family farm" that FAO and others are
now promoting in the context of the International Year of Family
Farming. Although it can be a meaningful concept in many countries,
the definitions used are so broad and ambiguous that they can hide
serious contradictions, sometimes with unintended consequences. In
addition, few official statistics provide data on family farming.
Hence, we decided to use the definition of "small farms" provided by
the national authorities of each country. When such criteria were not
available, we adopted the definition of the World Bank (farming
households with less than 2 hectares). An exception was made in the
case of the US, where according to official criteria any farm with an
annual turnover of less than US$250,000 is considered small. Given
that this would seriously contradict other criteria on what a small
farm is (such as the destination of production or the source of
labour), we opted for the criterion put forward by Lincoln University
in Nebraska, which defines a small farm in the US as one with a
turnover of US$50,000 or less per year.
We have, therefore, used several definitions of small farms in this
report. These definitions are based on data and measurements as
disparate as gross income, gross sales, amount of land, source of
farm labour and type of resources - or combinations of these. Still,
we believe that this approach gives the best approximation of
reality, since the criteria used by each country do represent certain
aspects of small farms.
What kind of land are we talking about?
Farmers, and more so small farmers, carry out a wide range of
agricultural activities under quite diverse arrangements. These
include intensive management of horticultural crops, crop rotations
with annual forages, agroforestry, shifting cultivation, livestock
rearing, fish farming and pastoralism, or any combination of these.
Governments and FAO classify land under different categories
according to how the land is used, and they collect data accordingly.
The EU accounts for all the land within a farm, no matter how it is
being cropped or utilised. The same holds for the US, Brazil,
Argentina and India. But in Africa, many governments exclude communal
land and grazing areas from the statistics, thus greatly
underestimating the land area used by farmers. Once again, different
criteria are being employed, and we had no means of selecting or
disaggregating data (for example, cropped land versus total
agricultural land) governments or other agencies had collected under
a single heading.
The FAO provides figures on total agricultural land for almost every
country in the world, even for those where no census data are
available, and defines total agricultural land as the sum of the
following areas:
* arable land - land under temporary agricultural crops, temporary
meadows for mowing or pasture, land under market and kitchen gardens
and land temporarily (for less than five years) fallow.
* permanent crops - land cultivated with long-term crops which do not
have to be replanted for several years (such as cocoa and coffee);
land under trees and shrubs producing flowers, such as roses and
jasmine; and nurseries (except those for forest trees, which should
be classified under "forest").
* permanent meadows and pastures - land used permanently (for five
years or more) to grow herbaceous forage crops, either cultivated or
growing wild (wild prairie or grazing land).74
We used the FAO's more inclusive definition and the associated
statistics to calculate the total agricultural land in each country.
Missing: the landless, the urban food producers, extractive
industries and land grabbing
Our research left out numerous realities, either because they were
outside the scope of this study or because we did not find enough
data. One important missing element is the situation of landless food
producers and workers. Landlessness is a major and increasing reality
in many countries, as the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra
(MST), the largest social movement in Brazil, so clearly testifies.
Nor did we examine urban food producers, an increasingly important
factor in global food production. Very few countries provide data on
them, and we could not compile significant figures on their situation
worldwide.
Through our work and that of our partners, GRAIN is keenly aware that
urbanisation, the extractive industries, hydroelectric dams and many
other industrial mega projects are increasingly advancing over
farmland, forest lands, water sources, farming communities and
indigenous peoples' territories. They are massively affecting the
availability of agricultural land in the world, but since much of
their rapid expansion is relatively recent, they are often not
adequately addressed in agricultural land statistics.
And finally, also missing in our calculations is the recent wave of
land grabbing that is now handing millions of hectares of fertile
farmland to large corporations and depriving tens of thousands of
farming communities of their livelihoods. Today's massive land grab
took off only in the last decade and has yet to be captured in the
official statistics.
Notes
1 Graziano da Silva, opening speech at the Global Forum on Family
Farming, Budapest, 5 March 2014. http://tinyurl.com/nmkhffc.
2 Sarah K. Lowder, Jakob Skoet and Saumya Singh, "What do we really
know about the number and distribution of farms and family farms in
the world?" Background paper for The State of Food and Agriculture
2014. FAO April 2014. Figure quoted on page 8.
http://tinyurl.com/qh6ql7l. See also: FAO, "Family farmers - feeding
the world, caring for the earth", 2014, http://tinyurl.com/osuelv8
3 Beverly D. McIntyre (editor), IAASTD "International assessment of
agricultural knowledge, science and technology for development:
global report", 2008, page 8, http://tinyurl.com/mlmuzqy
4 Wenbiao Cai, a professor at the University of Winnipeg, states in
several studies that small farms account for most of the farmland in
the non-industrialised world. Other examples include allies of small
farmer movements like Miguel Altieri, who says that small farms in
Latin America "occupy 34.5% of the total cultivated land"
(http://tinyurl.com/qxxxf5u), or Greenpeace, who say that
"Small-scale farmers form the larger part of global agricultural
land" (http://tinyurl.com/p233eef).
5 A number of people generously took time to review and comment on
earlier drafts of this report or help us with certain problems. Their
inputs were very useful and we are grateful to all of them. They
include: Maria Aguiar, Valter Israel da Silva, Thomas Kastner, Carlos
Marentes, Pat Mooney, Ndabezinhle Nyoni, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg,
Mateus Santos, Chris Smaje and Liz Aldin Wiley.
6 When we talk about "farmers" or "peasants" in this report, we mean
food producers including people who raise livestock, such as herders
or pastoralists, fishers, hunters and gatherers.
7 The land distribution dataset compiled by GRAIN can be downloaded here.
8 Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg,
Netherlands and Norway.
9 Peter Hazell, "Is small farm led development still a relevant
strategy for Africa and Asia?", 2013:
http://ppafest.nutrition.cornell.edu/authors/hazell.html
10 For example, FAO affirms that "Eighty percent of the farmland in
sub-Saharan Africa and Asia is managed by smallholders" in
"Smallholders and family farmers", 2012: http://tinyurl.com/nb5t5jx
11 The discussion of some specific country cases can be seen in "Land
Tenure and Administration in Africa: Lessons of Experience and
Emerging Issues" by Lorenzo Cotula, Camilla Toulmin and Ced Hesse; in
"Paradigms, processes and practicalities of land reform in
post-conflict Sub-Saharan Africa" by Chris Huggins and Benson
Ochieng; in "Land tenure and violent conflict in Kenya in the context
of local, national and regional legal and policy frameworks" by Judi
Wakhungu, Elvin Nyukuri and Chris Huggins; in "Land reform in Angola:
establishing the ground rules" by Jenny Clover, as well as in "Land
reform processes in West Africa: a review" by SahelSahel and West
Africa Club Secretariat
12 This is the case, for example, of Botswana (2011 Annual
Agricultural Survey Report) that does not account the land used for
traditional livestock rearing, although traditional herds of cattle
and goats are composed of more than 4 million head. It is also the
case of the World Bank, which states that "Land abandoned as a result
of shifting cultivation is excluded" from their definition of
agricultural land.
13 EUROSTAT, Statistics in focus 18/2011, "Large farms in Europe",
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_OFFPUB/KS-SF-11-018/EN/KS-SF-11-018-EN.PDF
14 Unless otherwise stated, figures on countries of the European
Union are based on the Agricultural Structure Survey of 2007, as
published data from the 2010 survey did not allow us to do the
necessary calculations.
15 ECVC and HOTL, "Land concentration, land grabbing and people's
struggles in Europe", 17 April 2013.
www.eurovia.org/IMG/pdf/Land_in_Europe.pdf
16 O. Nagayets, "Small farms: current status and key trends", 2005
http://tinyurl.com/ocp7quw
17 Statistics Bureau, Government of Japan, "Agriculture",
http://www.stat.go.jp/english/data/chouki/07.htm
18 Government of Australia, "Australian farmers and farming", Dec
2012,
<http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features10Dec+2012#FARMING>
19 Stephanie Mulet-Marquis and John R. Fairweather, "New Zealand farm
structure change and intensification", Lincoln University, 2008,
<http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/Documents/4322_RR301_s14339.pdf>.
20 I Wayan Rusastra, "Land economy for poverty reduction: Current
status and policy implications"; Capsa Palawija News, April 2008;
Indonesia Agricultural Census 1963, 1993, 2003. Main Results; Lani
Eugenia, "Significance of family farming in the Asian Region: The
Indonesian agriculture sector"
21 State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan. "The
Agriculture of Azerbaijan. Statistical yearbook 2012"
22 "Preliminary report on agriculture sample survey 2005", Bangladesh
Bureau of Statistics, 2005
23 All figures for countries of the European Union were obtained from
EUROSTAT, http://tinyurl.com/kbmom54 and http://tinyurl.com/l9aqu39.
Country specific data can be found by searching "farm structure
survey [name of country]"
24 See Argentine government statistics at
http://www.indec.gov.ar/default_cna.htm and
http://www.indec.gov.ar/censoAgro2008/cna08_10_09.pdf
25 Government of Chile, Agricultural census,
<http://www.ine.cl/canales/chile_estadistico/censos_agropecuarios/censos_agropecuarios.php>
26 A.M. Ibañez. "La concentración de la propiedad rural en Colombia:
evolución 2000 a 2009, desplazamiento forzoso e impactos sobre el
desarrollo económico" (PRIO, Policy brief 5/2009); Oxfam. "Divide and
purchase. How land is being concentrated in Colombia"; Y. Salinas.
"El caso de Colombia". Study on landgrabbing commissioned by FAO LAC
Regional Office
27 Government of Uruguay, "Censo 2011",
http://www.mgap.gub.uy/portal/hgxpp001.aspx?7,5,149,O,S,0,MNU;E;55;1;MNU
and "Censo general agropecuario 2000",
http://www.mgap.gub.uy/Dieaanterior/CENSOVOL2/data/11.htm
28 Tables with government data can found at
http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/index.php.
29 James MacDonald et al, "Farm size and the organisation of US crop
farming" Economic Research Report No. 152, USDA, Aug 2013,
http://tinyurl.com/m8lqvyv
30 See World Rainforest Movement, "An overview of industrial tree
plantations in the global South: conflicts, trends, and resistance
struggles", 2012, for a discussion on this.
31 EJOLT, "The many faces of landgrabbing", EJOLT briefing, 10 March 2014.
32 Nikos Alexandratos and Jelle Bruinsma, "World agriculture towards
2030/2050. The 2012 revision", FAO, 2012
33 Corley, R.H.V. (2009): How much palm oil do we need? Environmental
Science & Policy 12: 134-139
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901108001196>
34 Other agencies like the International Land Coalition-led Land
Matrix put the figure at 203 million hectares but over a ten year
period (2000-2010):
<http://www.landcoalition.org/sites/default/files/publication/1205/ILC%20GSR%20report_ENG.pdf>
35 See http://farmlandgrab.org for a range of published reports and
day to day accounts.
36 See the land distribution dataset compiled by GRAIN.
37See, for example, Kanayo F. Nwanze, IFAD. "Small farmers can feed
the world"; UNEP, "Small farmers report"; FAO, "Women and rural
employment fighting poverty by redefining gender roles" (Policy Brief
5)
38 National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus,
"Agriculture of the Republic of Belarus" 2013
39 Statistics Botswana, "Stats brief", 2009 and 2010 annual
agricultural surveys preliminary results
40 Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estadistica, "Censo
Agropecuario 2006", http://tinyurl.com/m376s82
41 Eduardo Baumeister. "Características económicas y sociales de los
agricultores familiares en América Central." INCEDES, 2010.
http://tinyurl.com/n33wlh9
42 Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Chile, http://www.ine.cl,
"Censo Agropecuario 1997".
43 Braulio Machin Sosa et al., ANAP-Via Campesina, "Revolución
agroecológica, resumen ejecutivo"
44 Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos, Censo Nacional
Agropecuario 2000, http://tinyurl.com/ngvm5te
45 IV Censo Agropecuario 2007-2008. Ministerio de Economía de El
Salvador. http://tinyurl.com/qatfm5y
46 Hungarian Central Statistical Office, "Total Standard Gross Margin
of farms engaged in agricultural activity by type of farming and size
class, 2007" 2/2 (Million HUF).
47 Agency on Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Statistical
Yearbook "Kazakhstan in 2009"
48 Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize et al (eds). "Agricultural land
redistribution. Toward greater consensus". 2009.
49 National Institute of Statistics, press release No. 149 of July 2,
2012, "General agricultural census 2010"
50 Russian Federation Federal State Statistics Service, Russia in Figures 2011.
51 Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Dept of Ag Economic Research,
Economics and Management. Discussion paper No. 16.08. "The economic
effects of land reform in Central Asia: The case of Tajikistan"
52 State Statistics Service of Ukraine. "Main agricultural
characteristics of households in rural areas in 2011"
53 Olivier de Schutter, "Agroecology and the Right to Food", Report
presented at the 16th Session of the United Nations Human Rights
Council [A/HRC/16/49], 8 March 2011, http://tinyurl.com/nmxyf87
54 See, for example: Michael Carter, "Identification of the inverse
relationship between farm size and productivity: an empirical
analysis of peasant agricultural production"; IFAD, "Assets and the
rural poor. Poverty Report 2001"; Giovanni Andrea Cornia, "Farm size,
land yields and the agricultural production function: An analysis for
fifteen developing countries;" H.N. Anyaegbunam, P.O. Nto, B.C. Okoye
and T.u. Madu, "Analysis of determinants of farm size productivity
among small-holder cassava farmers in south east agroecological zone,
Nigeria".
55 The nine countries are Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy,
Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. See
"Large farms in Europe", Eurostat Statistics in Focus 18/2011,
http://tinyurl.com/ny3qsgv.
56 Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and
Sweden. Ibid
57 These figures are obtained by extrapolating the productivity of
small farms indicated in the sources for table 4 to 100% of
agricultural land.
58 Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, University of Wageningen, personal
communication, 25 March 2014.
59 For a discussion of food systems and the climate crisis, see:
GRAIN "Food and climate change, the forgotten link", Sep 2011.
http://www.grain.org/e/4357
60 FAOSTAT, http://faostat3.fao.org/faostat-gateway/go/to/download/O/OA/E
61 Government of El Salvdor,
<http://www.mag.gob.sv/index.php?option=com_phocadownload&view=category&id=35&Itemid=229>
62 EU Agricultural Economic Briefs. "Women in EU agriculture and
rural areas: hard work, low profile", Brief No. 7, June 2012.
63 FAOSTAT. Search done within "resources" and "population", using
annual time series.
64 FAO, "Women and rural employment. fighting poverty by redefining
gender role", 2009.
65 Ministry of Food and Agriculture of Ghana. Agriculture in Ghana.
Facts and Figures 2010. Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and
Fishery of Madagascar. Recensement de l' Agriculture. Campagne
Agricole 2004-2005
66 FAO and National Institute of Statistics of Cambodia. National
Gender Profile of Agricultural Households, 2010.
67 IFAD, Republic of the Congo. Country strategic opportunities
programme, 2009 EB 2009/98/R.20.
68 FAO, Gender Team for Europe and Central Asia. "The crucial role of
women in agriculture and rural development"
69 International Organization for Migration. "Rural women and
migration"; B. Dodson et al. "Gender, migration and remittances in
Southern Africa"; A. Datta and S.K. Mishra. "Glimpses of women's
lives in rural Bihar: impact of male migration".
70 Cheryl Doss et al. "Gender inequalities in ownership and control
of land in Africa. Myths versus reality"
71 See
<http://www.fao.org/assets/infographics/FAO-Infographic-Gender-ClimateChange-en.pdf>
72 On this, see for example the discussion by Celestine Nyamu-Musembi
in "Breathing Life into Dead. Theories about Property Rights: de Soto
and Land Relations in Rural Africa", Institute of Development
Studies. 2006
73 The land distribution dataset compiled by GRAIN can be downloaded here.
74 See FAOSTAT glossary at
http://faostat.fao.org/site/379/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=379
Box 1: A word about Africa
As can be seen in Table 1, we find that small farms in Africa
represent almost 90% of all farms but have less than 15% of the total
agricultural land. Our figures contradict the frequent assertion that
most farmland in Africa is managed by small farmers.10
Data on who uses what land in Africa are hard to get. Most of
Africa's traditional land tenure systems have been seriously eroded
and even dismantled, beginning in colonial times. In many countries,
ownership of land has been vested in the state or allocated to
plantation companies or local chiefs. This has profound implications
for classifying land and accounting for its use.11
Additionally, there is the problem of defining what constitutes
agricultural land. In many cases, African governments measure
"agricultural land" as the area being used by sedentary farmers at a
given period of time, thereby leaving out large areas of land used by
pastoralists for seasonal grazing. Also, land under fallow, shifting
cultivation and land used by communities that farm within forest
areas are often excluded.12 The FAO, by contrast, includes permanent
pastures, uncultivated savannah and lands sown to permanent crops in
its definition of agricultural land.
As a consequence, most national censuses in Africa register just a
fraction of the area of agricultural land recorded by the FAO - less
than half, as far as the entire region is concerned. The FAO's
approach is a more realistic and inclusive way of measuring land use
by small producers, which is why we used FAOSTAT's figures to
establish the amount of farmland in Africa.
Where land is assumed to belong to the State - and is not accounted
for as cropped or used by local farmers - this provides a basis for
land grabbing by big farmers and companies, the rationale being that
they will develop the unused land. Under customary law, however,
these lands belong to the local communities and are often actively
used.
Given that we used, wherever possible, national census data provided
by governments to calculate the amount of land in the hands of small
farmers, it is possible and even likely that we underestimate the
situation in Africa. Small farmers in Africa are probably using much
more than the 15% of the region's farmland than we our data shows -
but communities' access to that land is not guaranteed and can be
lost at any moment.
Box 2: The invasion of the mega-farms
Why are small farmers increasingly pushed into an ever smaller corner
of the world's farmland? There are many complex factors and forces at
play. One is population growth in rural areas in many countries,
where small farmers are increasingly forced to divide their land
among their children, resulting in smaller and smaller farms, as they
have no access to more land. Another is urbanisation and the covering
of fertile farmland with concrete to serve expanding cities and their
transportation needs. Yet others are the burgeoning spread of
extractive industries (mining, oil, gas and now fracking), tourism,
and infrastructure projects - and the list goes on.
Overwhelming as these pressures are, perhaps the single most
important factor in the drive pushing small and medium-sized farmers
onto ever smaller parcels of land is the tremendous expansion of
industrial commodity crop farms. The powerful demands of food and
energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct
local food production to the production of commodities for industrial
processing. Graph 2 shows how just four crops - soybean, oil palm,
rapeseed and sugar cane - have quadrupled the amount of land they
occupy over the past five decades. All are grown mainly on big
industrial farms.
A massive 140 million hectares of fields and forests have been taken
over by these plantations since the 1960s. To put things in
perspective: this roughly the same area as all the farmland in the
European Union. And the invasion is clearly accelerating: almost 60%
of this land use change occurred in the last two decades. This
doesn't take into account any of the other crops that are fast being
turned into industrial commodities produced on mega-farms or the
tremendous growth of the industrial forestry sector. The FAO
calculates that in developing countries alone, monoculture tree
plantations grew by over 60%, from 95 to 154 million ha, just between
1990 and 2010. Others put this figure higher, and point out that the
trend is accelerating.30 Many of these new plantations are
encroaching on natural forests, but they are also increasingly taking
over farmland.
Graph 2: click to enlarge
A research team in Austria analysed trade flows of agricultural crops
in relation to land use. They concluded that the global area of
farmland dedicated to export crop production grew rapidly - by about
100 million ha during the past two decades - while the area producing
crops for direct domestic use remained virtually unchanged.31
Without significant changes in government policies, this aggressive
attack by commodity monocultures is set to expand further. According
to the FAO, between now and 2050 the world's soybean area is set to
increase by one-third to some 125 million ha, the sugar cane area by
28% to 27 million hectares, and the rapeseed area by 16% to 36
million hectares.32 As for oil palm, there are currently 15 million
hectares under production for edible palm oil (not biofuels), and
this is expected to nearly double, with an additional 12-29 million
hectares coming into production by 2050.33 Much of this expansion
will happen in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Soybean and sugar cane
are today mostly produced in Latin America, and oil palm in Asia, but
these crops are also now being pushed aggressively into Africa as
part of the global wave of land grabbing.
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