Future Agricultures DEBATE
Big farms or small farms:
how to respond to the food crisis?
Contributors:
- Derek Byerlee and Alain de Janvry, Co-Directors of the World Development Report 2008, Agriculture for Development, www.worldbank.org/wdr2008.
- Thomas Lines, Freelance Consultant and Author of Making Poverty: A History (Zed Books, 2008)
- Stephen (Esteban) Bartlett, Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)
- Peter Rosset, Associate, Global Alternatives
- Roy Keijzer, Coordinator, Agromisa
- Jerome Gefu, National Animal Production Research Institute
- Herment A. Mrema, Executive Director, Africa Rural Development Support Initiative (ARUDESI)
- Louis Pautrizel, GRET.org
- Ruchi Tripathi, Head of UK Policy and Campaigns,
Concern Worldwide (UK) - Jeremy Keenan, School of Oriental and African Studies
- C. Devendra, International Livestock Research Institute
- Wolfgang Bayer, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
- Colin Poulton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
- Michael Loevinsohn, Applied Ecology Associates
- Andrew Dorward, School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS)
- Paul Wagstaff, Concern Worldwide
- Josien Kapma, "St Ulrich Group" / "PTD-Forum"
- Dr. Shahid Zia, Oxfam GB
- Sam Moyo,African Institute for Agrarian Studies
- Peter Hazell, member of Farm Africa’s Board of Trustees
Contributions
Derek Byerlee and Alain de Janvry, Co-Directors of the World Development Report 2008, Agriculture for Development, www.worldbank.org/wdr2008.
Paul Collier (November/December 2008 issue) sets out three priorities to overcome the world food crisis—moving to large-scale commercial farms to replace peasant or smallholder farming, promoting genetically modified organisms, and reducing distorting subsidies to biofuels in the US. We think that Professor Collier got two of these right, but missed the boat with his anti-smallholder bias to modernizing agriculture, especially in Africa.
There are three reasons why a focus on smallholder farming is a proven strategy for accelerating growth, reducing poverty, and overcoming hunger.
First, smallholders have proven to be efficient commercial farmers, when given a chance. This is evident from the Asian Green Revolution experience led by smallholders in the 1960s and continuing until today. In India, cereal yields are now 2.6 times what they were in the 1960s, with nearly 90 percent of farmland controlled by farmers with under 10 hectares. And this was not through organic agriculture — Asian smallholder farmers now consume over half of the world’s fertilizer. Failure to realize a Green Revolution in Africa reflects a consistent policy bias against agriculture and smallholders in particular, by both governments and donors. When given the opportunity, smallholders in Africa have proven to be just as responsive in adopting new technologies as their Asian sisters. Witness the adoption of hybrid maize in much of southern Africa, the smallholder dairy revolution of east Africa, and the cocoa, cassava, and cotton successes of West Africa. And witness also the many failed starts with large-scale farming in Africa, dating from colonial times.
Second, accelerating smallholder productivity is win-win in terms of increasing food production and reducing poverty. From 1991 to 2001, China doubled its cereal yields based on smallholders with an average of 0.4 ha of land, while dramatically reducing rural poverty by 63 percentage points and taking a historically unprecedented 400 million rural people out of poverty. Over the same period, the Brazil model of large-scale farming espoused by Professor Collier nearly matched the Chinese record of productivity growth, but the number of rural poor actually increased.
Finally, Professor Collier equates the global food crisis and the hunger of some 900 million people with food supply alone. Yet increasing food supply is only one side of the solution—generating incomes for the poor to access food is equally if not more important. We should not forget that 75% of the world’s poor are rural, and that they mainly depend on agriculture and related activities for their livelihoods. Since the majority of these rural poor are net buyers of food, raising the productivity of the land they control so they can better feed themselves is essential to gain access to food.
While we recognize that large-scale agriculture has a place in a some land abundant areas of Africa if it is driven by markets rather than subsidies, and the rights of current land users are adequately protected, it would be a huge mistake to forsake the proven power of smallholders to jump start growth, reduce poverty, and solve the hunger crisis in Africa and beyond. Promoting smallholder farming is not “romantic populism”, but sound economic and social policy.
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Thomas Lines
Freelance Consultant and
Author of Making Poverty: A History (Zed Books, 2008)
It is rather unfortunate that the terms of debate should be framed by a man like Paul Collier. From his dreaming spire in Oxford, he looks down on the world through the wrong end of a telescope. Like many unimaginative economists, he starts with the market – and the world market to boot. Yet he understands neither agriculture nor world markets. And he does his case no good by patronising his opposition as ‘populist’, ‘ideological’, ‘romantic’ and even ‘romantic populism’.
One such term is the ‘war on science’. Has he not seen the IAAKSTD report of 2008, in which eminent scientists drew radically different conclusions from his? At times he shows an awareness of the problems implied by his approach, but then rapidly shifts away from them. Two examples: ‘Some have criticized the Brazilian model for displacing peoples and destroying rain forest’ and ‘the political coalition against GM foods has only expanded.’ Indeed so, since members of that coalition understand what Collier does not: we have played around with nature for long enough.
He writes that in large-scale commercial agriculture, ‘if output prices rise by more than input prices, production will be expanded.’ But as he also half-concedes, this has not happened. On the contrary, according to my calculations oil and fertiliser input prices have risen far more than crop prices – so the food crisis is above all a crisis of industrial agriculture. Between the commodities boom of the late 1970s and the one just ended, prices for maize and rice, deflated by those of developing countries’ manufactured imports, actually declined by 25 and 45 per cent respectively on a three-year moving average. Meanwhile real oil prices rose by 59 per cent and phosphates by 46 per cent.
Collier asserts that, ‘Where poor farmers are integrated into global markets, they are likely to benefit.’ Wrong again: over the same period, the largest price falls were in crops produced by poor farmers for globally integrated markets. Real coffee prices fell by 63 per cent, cocoa by 65 per cent and cotton, 57 per cent.
Collier shows no understanding of how commodity markets work. He writes, ‘global food prices must be brought down’; well, now they have been, as usually happens rapidly after price spikes, especially one so dramatic as this. But from China to Nigeria to France, the sons and daughters of farmers are leaving the land in droves since it no longer provides a decent livelihood. With prices low, for how long will big investors want to replace them?
We should start our analysis not with the market but the problems that need to be addressed: poverty and hunger. First determine who and where poor and hungry people are, then why they are so and how their lives can be improved. That is what I did in my book, Making Poverty: A History. This is not romantic or populist but practical good sense. And it did not lead me to airily dismiss, like Collier, the notion that ‘Peasants, like pandas, are to be preserved.’ The greatest numbers of poor and hungry people are peasants: smallholders and rural landless. What would the good professor do? Shoot them? Expropriate them and hand their land and livestock to big units, like Stalin in 1930? Stalin’s collectivisation programme was based on much the same faulty reasoning as Collier’s.
He ignores the fact that today’s poorest countries are generally small as well as remote, agrarian and commodity-dependent. That is why they fare badly under globalisation. The immediate need is not closer integration in world markets but shelter from those markets’ damaging influence. This applies above all in Africa: build links between African countries rather than between them and the outside world, to enable food surpluses in one area to meet shortages in others. Surplus farmers will then benefit from a good harvest and not see it frittered away in collapsing prices. In the long run that will provide the basis of all development, which is domestic accumulation, not external investment.
Collier offers modern Brazil and industrialising England as models. More relevant perhaps is Denmark, another small country which prospered on the back of small-scale agriculture, exporting food to its neighbours. That helped it to create an unusually harmonious society – unlike today’s Brazil or 19th-century England.
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Stephen (Esteban) Bartlett, Agricultural Missions, Inc (AMI)
A very important topic and distinction. It is precisely the scale of production and the respective models that accompany either small or large farms, that determines the social and economic character of agriculture, its ecological sustainability (ie how it maintains soil fertility), and its usefulness as a shield against hunger for the many.
Very simply put, small farms are necessary in order to end hunger. 80% of hungry people worldwide are rural people or rural migrants whose land holdings or economic or social infrastructure are insufficient to produce an income that can feed, clothe and educate their families. This is a result of land concentration into fewer hands, ie larger farms.
The green revolution may have increased yields in certain grain crops for those able to take advantage, that is, those with capital to spend on seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. But social inequalities widened, and ecological limits came to bear, ie the law of diminishing returns came to bear on increasing uses of pesticides as resistances built up, soil lost its natural fertility (due to lack of organic material being returned), etc... Lands became concentrated into fewer hands due to the industrial model.
Studies have shown that, the world over, on average the smaller the farms are, the more productive they are in overall calories per acre. We are not talking about the yields of large scale monocultures, but of a diversity of crops and animals raised in given areas. (www.foodfirst.org Peter Rosset)
Regarding GMO seeds, it is now widely known that their main function is to make large scale monocultures easier (more convenient) to produce, through the use of herbicides sprayed over the crop, that the plant can withstand. Overall yields of GMOs have been shown to be below those of the best hybrid or even open-pollinated varieties of the major grains and oilseeds. Conventionally grown hybrid grain crops continue to out-produce GMO crops.
Finally, the argument that large farms of "efficient" monocultures ("efficient only in the sense of how much food each farmer can produce, but not how much can be produced sustainably, or even economically, on a given piece of land) are needed in order to combat hunger is completely false. If rural peoples are to feed themselves, farms necessarily need to be smaller, so that living wage employment is more widely distributed and small-scale farmers have the means to grow their own foods, plus surpluses to sell. It is the lack of support on the part of governments and the international financial institutions that imposed harmful conditionalities for decades now (including the de-funding of grain reserves!) for small-scale farming that has marginalized that sector, not any inherent inefficiency in that way of life or that scale of production.
Once small farmers organize themselves into cooperatives, the small scale of their individual farm holdings becomes irrelevant. Their closer attention to the soil, their use of diverse plantings, their use of animal manures and other green manures, and their attention to micro climate through maintenance of wood lots, etc..for the domestic products forests supply, including medicines, all make small farms more effective in addressing economic impoverishment, in slowing or reversing the rural exodus to the cities, and in providing the community necessary to maintain a resilient rural culture.
It is likely that if you argue otherwise, your bread might very well be buttered in some way by the status quo of corporate, industrial-scale production, or some academic institution that thrives off the spouting of cleverly worded abstractions in the interest of capturing "research"
funding. The debate over small versus large farms is really a debate about corporate control and profit-taking by producers of industrial inputs versus the survival of independent small-holders, the people that Thomas Jefferson swore were the bedrock of democracy, without whom democratic process would dry up and wither on the vine...
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Peter Rosset, Associate, Global Alternatives
I am surprised to find this debate starting all over again, and would like to ask readers to look over the following essays I wrote during an earlier iteration of these debates. In them I challenge the conventional wisdom that small farms are backward and unproductive. Using evidence from Southern and Northern countries I demonstrate that small farms are "multi-functional" - more productive, more efficient, and contribute more to economic development than large farms. Small farmers can also make better stewards of natural resources, conserving biodiversity and safe-guarding the future sustainability of agricultural production.
http://www.foodfirst.org/node/246
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2000/00july-aug/interview.html
http://www.foodfirst.org/pubs/policybs/pb4.html
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Why should we debate on Big Farms or small farms as if we have to chose?
A discussion about the future of Big Farms and small farms together will be more opportune. And this discussion has not to be focused only on Africa and other regions in the Tropics, but also looking at the development of our own farming systems in Europe and similar areas in the industrialized countries. The worldwide migration of people, products and capital from rural areas towards the cities is still ongoing. How to stop this phenomena and how to develop the rural areas worldwide, so young people prefer to stay and see that there is still a future for them in agriculture and local agro-industry.=============================================
Professor Paul Collier’s thesis incriminating poor countries for lack of progress in food production, especially in the wake of the worsening global food crisis (and economic meltdown?) as hinging on the preponderance of small farms raises more questions than proffering feasible and sustainable solutions. One question is: for whom do large-scale commercial farmers in poorer countries produce? The argument for big farms as a means of boosting food production does not provide answer for the food shortage experienced in Africa and other poor regions. This is because most (if not all) of the large-scale commercial farmers in these regions produce essentially for Western markets where they are able to recoup their investments faster than they would have if they had targeted their production for domestic markets, where agricultural produce pricing is very erratic and responsive to a variety of environmental, socio-economic and political uncertainties. These capital rich investors who are often members of the political and economic elite are able to easily deploy resources. However, there are only a handful of such advantaged capital rich investors that are willing to invest in food production for the purpose of alleviating domestic food crisis. Even when large scale farming had been embarked upon in most African countries, monumental failure had repeatedly been bitterly encountered.
The bulk of African farmers are resource-limited residing in remote areas. It was the small farms that dot African communities that feed the various populations in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It is a fact that these countries, like Nigeria , produced in excess of home consumption needs. Indeed, Nigeria (in the years preceding the discovery and exploration of oil) was a net exporter of food and agricultural products, deriving the bulk of her national income from agriculture. Those were the days of groundnut pyramids, cotton, rubber, cocoa, oil palm, grain and vegetable exports. These products came from the numerous small farms even as limited as they were in “modern farming inputs.” What went wrong, one might ask. Several things were amiss including the strong drive to modernize agriculture by employing large-scale production strategies with little or no regard for the prevailing institutional, cultural, environmental, socio-economic and other agricultural production considerations.
The African farmer is vulnerable to the vagaries of weather and is ill-prepared (and, therefore, caught off guard) when disasters come knocking. There are limited facilities and expertise for early warning devices. Conversely, in times of good harvests, producers have great difficulty in marketing excess crop and dairy products. The resulting glut results in depressed farm gate price and often producers are compelled to sell at significant losses. Post-harvest technologies, especially for preserving perishable foods are still being developed, the post-harvest losses are staggering. This could serve as disincentive to produce. Agricultural insurance scheme is almost non-existent for the smallholder. In times of losses, the farmer receives no compensation as every loss is borne by the farmer and his/her household.
Coming from the background of extreme poverty, the productivity of resource-limited farmers has declined steadily over the years. In many instances, land degradation has resulted in declining erosion and/or siltation, deforestation, overgrazing and desertification. The end result is food insecurity, which manifests in de-humanizing experiences (hunger, poverty, disease, etc). This scenario is aggravated by the increasing rate of land alienation to the economic and political elite who appropriate massive expanse of land for speculative purposes. This has resulted in the loss of land by majority of rural poor who are either forced to migrate out of the rural area and constitute themselves into a social menace in already congested cities, or become tenants to land merchants and land speculators. Many farmers and pastoralists who have lost access to land and/or livestock are increasingly converted to contract farmers for national multinational conglomerates.
Some past efforts geared at improving agricultural and food productivity have focused attention primarily on the injection of scientifically proven technologies that have led to substantial increase in crop and livestock production. Many of such introduced varieties have been found unsuitable because they are often not compatible with the agro-ecological conditions and farming systems of many African farming communities. Many of the introduced crop and livestock species required high-level inputs and management, which the poor farmer cannot provide. Where new varieties have been adopted and found to be well suited to the agro-climatic conditions, the resulting high yields have found limited market outlet. The resulting glut, coupled with the cheap imported foods from the West, African producers are faced with serious glut and depressed price and accompanying loss of income. Above scenario calls for a re-thinking and re-engineering of policies and programmes primarily targeted at the smallholder farmers of Africa . Even where the scientific investments can lead to improved productivity, unless the poor have secure property rights the benefits are often expropriated by the powerful once the often poor quality of land has been restored meaning that the poor not only loose from the technical improvements but they loose on the value of the labour equity that has gone into improving productivity.
To get the African farmer out of the woods and be launched into prosperity, the aforementioned constraints must be meticulously addressed. For the region, the starting point for improved food production and eradicating extreme poverty and hunger is a complete overhauling of the institutional and policy environment. Reforms must be embarked upon by African leaders and peoples with every sincerity of purpose.
For us, the first step is to undertake a comprehensive land reform such that every rural producer shall be guaranteed secure access to crop and grazing land in pursuant of legitimate livelihoods. This calls for a re-thinking and re-engineering of land use and land tenure regulations and policies which would facilitate access to and use of land. Since most African communities access land through customary arrangements, land policies must of necessity include customary land arrangements which can be easily supervised through existing traditional institutional arrangements. Land policy guidelines must of necessity be couched within the socio-cultural milieu of the African society. This way, customary land-users will have secure right.
Achieving food security will largely be determined by the willingness of African leaders to make a clean break from past business of government and imbibe the principles of good governance, transparency and accountability, rule of law, equity and fairness. It is this “business unusual” that will propel the engine of social and economic growth through the execution of people-oriented programs and institutional reforms. The thrust here is to provide enabling environment for enhancing the productivity and income of the rural poor. If corruption in the public and private sector can be halved by 2015, Africa would have moved some 60% towards attaining food self-sufficiency.
There is need to double development assistance (especially in the wake of the current global economic meltdown) channeled to fight hunger and poverty through community-based projects that target the real producers who often are the vulnerable groups in African countries. Application of aid should be through CBO’s and traditional institutions that are in tune with the local conditions and realities.
Small commercial farms, and not large-scale commercial farms is the answer to the current food crisis in Africa , at least in the foreseeable future
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Herment A. Mrema,
Executive Director,
Africa Rural Development Support Initiative (ARUDESI)
To me it will be a waste of time to debate on an obvious issue. Small scale farming in Africa is life, is culture, is political, is survival and is livelihood. Small scale farming in Africa has performed well and what we need to do more, is to make these small holder farms more productive and profitable. To do that we need to support our farmers to embrace the concept of farming is business, which means assuming higher affordable risks and the higher the risk assumed the higher the returns. In order to embark on commercial agriculture they need volumes and good quality. These farmers can achieve both if they are organized into farmer groups, embrace uniform best agricultural practices (into large farms) and they add as much value to their produce before they sell and move from marketing commodities into marketing complex products. Marketing complex products will avoid price fluctuations associated with selling commodities due to vagaries of demand and supply. This will be achieved through value addition up the chain while retaining ownership by the small scale farmer and it will be possible if these farmers are facilitated to access business facilitation tools such as skills, know how, appropriate technologies, inputs, social and working capital (credit), financial services, market and price information and enabling environment built on values of honesty, integrity, trust, integrated, holistics and comprehensive approaches. These farmers should be facilitated to access competitive markets for their products where the farmers are able to negotiate for prices (which cover all cost of production, processing, marketing including reasonable profits) instead of being price takers and the farmers should be paid/ or pay (for services received) on performance. To avoid the problems which lead to to the failure of cooperatives, sales proceeds should be channelled directly to farmers individual accounts as we have in a place a technology suitable to manage these kind of transactions. Farmer groups will also be facilitated to establish their own thrift and credit schemes (not SACCOS) which will be used mainly to finance their basic needs such as need for salt, sugar, paraffin, soap, etc. and later evolve into village banks. Managers, and service providers will be required to invest in the process of service provision and be paid after the transaction is completed and based on the value of service provided as it contribute to the generation of incomes.
This means embracing Product and Service Supply Value chains approaches being driven by sense of Farmer ownership as the driver of the chains. The cooperation, alliances, linkages, partnership of stakeholders within the chains will influence the market, price and demand which may cause a paradigm shift. The consumer demand for quality, food safety that could be traced to the source of origin and willingness to pay a premium price for the product is one of the forces which makes this initiative possible. Furthermore the technological explosion "the fall of the walls and the rise of windows" has provided affordable technologies and information which can make this initiative possible.
The corporate world has had its gains for too long, have exploited the small holders farmers for too long and its time for "CHANGE". Change that we believe in it and sure we can.
We need to capitalize the small scale farmers household with only $ 50 per month as a social capital in terms of a revolving loan and they will be able to access their basic needs which make them vulnerable to middlemen and traders who took away the little they sell at a price set by the middlemen. These farmers are forced to sell without adding value which does not justify them to bargain for a better price. Middle men who play significant roles in all businesses are important and they will be empowered to play different roles and functions such as providing goods and services now being demanded by farmers as their purchasing power is enhanced due to earnings from selling value added products in competitive markets.
We have simple solutions for these problems, the challenge is hidden agenda because of greedy, selfishness, lack of commitment, determination, lack of desire to develop as "we" instead we are only thinking for ourselves while we know very well that time has come that no single individual, family, household, village or nation can survive on their own. We need each other to face the challenges of the world so that we can prosper together equitably according to individual contribution to the process. .
More information on success stories is available on request.
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During the year 2008, GRET worked with several NGOs (on the behalf of Coordination SUD) on a position paper on these issues.
This paper underlines the benefits of family farms for employment, poverty reduction, hunger reduction, environment protection and rural development. It often refers to the efficiency of small farms and family labour while large agribusiness tend to develop at the expense of the population.
The same working group is now concluding a new position paper analyzing policies that promote family farms.
[read: In Defence of Family Famrms.pdf].
[lire: Défendre les agricultures familiales: lesquelles, pourquoi?.pdf]
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Ruchi Tripathi,
Head of UK Policy and Campaigns,
Concern Worldwide (UK)
Small and large farms: definitions, trends and patterns
I’d like to make a contribution under this section of the debate and add another dimension to the debate.
Let me confess that I am on the side of Steve Wiggins in this debate – due to a number of well known reasons that I wont repeat, and am glad that last time round when this debate was being played out during consultations for DFID’s agriculture policy 2005, Michael Lipton won the argument - that support to smallholder farmers is vital for poverty and hunger eradication.
I want to draw attention to a group of farmers who fall within the category of smallholder farmers but would most likely be missed out in this debate. I am referring to half of the world’s hungry - marginal farming families - who Concern defines as ‘Farming yet hungry’. These groups of farmers are often excluded because they fall between the categories of productive farmers and those living in rural areas facing absolute poverty.
The current food crisis has once again focused attention on food production, revived debates around re-investing in agricultural development and research. One of the key questions is what and who should be focus of this renewed interest in agriculture be.
Concern strongly believes that if we are to address poverty, hunger and malnutrition we must focus on the largest group of hungry people in the world – marginal farming families. Agricultural production will remain a key livelihoods activity for this group; they will also need to be supported through social protection, in addition to investments in provision of basic services and rural infrastructure. By strengthening the livelihoods options and capacity of this ‘farming yet hungry’ group, we will be giving them the options to decide about their future. There is a strong risk however, that in this debate between small Vs big, we forget to focus on this potentially viable group of farmers who need to be specifically targeted.
For further information see literature research commissioned by Concern, http://www.concern.net/site-links/resources/index.php
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Jeremy Keenan, School of Oriental and African Studies
A colleague at Reading forwarded to me the contribution on big-small farms from Roy Keijzer, saying that I might find the reference to Mali interesting. I cannot contribute much to the main debate, as it is not my field. However, with reference to the Mail Niger inland Delta scheme to which Roy Keijzer refers, I can make the following comment: While his remarks about its present state of development etc may well be valid, its colonial history are interesting, in that it was developed originally by the French to counter the British cotton-growing Gezira scheme. The Office du Niger scheme was probably one of the very worst forms of colonial development, at least as far as the local people were concerned. They were treated horrendously and suffered appallingly. The scheme was a large blot of shame on colonial development at that time. In fact, the Office du Niger project was one of the first classic social anthropological studies of the late Claude Meillassoux. Not surprisingly, the French did much to cover up his research and findings.
When dealing with such schemes/regions in their present day context, their previous exploitation (it was not development) should not be forgotten.
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C. Devendra, International Livestock Research Institute
I have read with interest the ongoing exchange of emails concerning above, and cannot resist the opportunity to make a few comments.
Please permit me to present an Asian perspective.
1). Some of the comments made mainly from the " North " give the impression of poor understanding of what constitutes small farms. These probably stem from inadequate R and D efforts to appreciate the systems, infinite complexities needs and opportunities.
2). Even the very definition of what are small farms appears to be unclear if not poorly defined - going from the references to small farms or smallholders in the developing countries to " family farms " in the " North". probably because of this and the overwhelming reference to globalisation, many in the industrialised countries have mentioned that these small farms are likely to disappear in the future. An important recently published talked of “current trends in structural change imply the likely and probably accelerating exit of smallholder livestock producers in developing and developed countries". In Asia at any rate, this conclusion is unacceptable.
3). A definition that has been used in Asia is as follows: "Small farms have been defined as complex interrelationships between animals , crops and farming families , involving small land holdings and minimum resources of labour and capital , from which small farmers may or may not be able to derive a regular and adequate supply of food or an acceptable income and standard of living ".
4). In global terms, small farms in Asia account for an estimated 87 % of all farms below two hectares . Many of these are models of diversification and efficiency in NRM. While globalisation has undoubtedly have had effects- and there have been other crisis as well, many if not most have survived and are self reliant because of the low input systems, minimum external inputs , and resilience. In animal production, these farms currently contribute significant amounts of milk, ruminant meats, draught power, duck meat and eggs.
5). Two related issues that have not been addressed concern the links to poverty and type of small farms. Agric. growth in the past has significantly contributed to reducing poverty, but as ESCAP( 2008) has recently reported , waning agriculture has slowed the decline in poverty. Stimulating small farm productivity is thus important. Concerning type of farms in Asia, those in the irrigated areas are the richer due to benefits of the Green Revolution, while those
in the rainfed areas are poorer and were largely by-passed . For various reasons including poverty , future development needs to focus on the latter. Results from several countries in the region highlight increased production due to improved technology application.
6). Increasing the contribution from small farms in the future can benefit from increased investments in R and D on small farms , accelerated technology application and delivery systems, intensification and commercialisation, improved market access, rural infrastructure and cooperatives, backed by appropriate policy. Focusing on these and other issues is urgent in the light of the food crisis. Many of these issues will also apply to other parts of the developing world. Dr. Wiggins is correct in his assessment that given the right conditions, small farms can serve food production in the future.
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Wolfgang Bayer, Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
One thing that is missing in the contributions I saw thus far, are definitions of large farms or small farms. 25 years ago I was in Australia and found interesting statistics for Australian conditions of course. To gain an income from farming equal to average national income a beef farmer in the North needed 100 km² of land or 1000 head of beef cattle. A sugar cane farmer needed 50 ha and a farmer growing green pepper 1 ha . Things have surely changed in the mean time and Africa is not Australia, yet looking at income potential instead of at size might be a useful way of looking at farming.
Small farms (and smallholding) do have a very important role as safety net in times of crisis – and the size can range from little more than an allotment garden to a few hectares. This safety function in times of crisis was in the past very important in Europe e.g. during and after WW II, and was also important in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the communism (and the economy). And smallholder farming received very little research and development support, because the farm models that research worked for was not a small farm. For outsiders it is tedious to try to understand small holder farming, and it is also tedious to re-orient research (which holds far fewer benefits for agro-industrial companies than do large farms) to small holder farming. Definitely smallholder farms are not simply large farms at a scale of 1:100 or so, and therefore large farms ma not be able to provide many services for small holders. We also should look a small holder farms from another angle: in many African countries 60 or more %of the population still rely to a larger or smaller degree on agriculture for their livelihood. Definitely there is nothing romantic about it – smallholder farming can be very hard work, indeed. However, at present it is needed also for social security. What is needed as agricultural revolution in Africa is research and development that is pro smallholders that also takes into account the dynamics of smallholder farming, and this also has to take in institutional and regulatory systems, and at times even concepts such as varieties in plants and breeds in animals, because they may mean something different in smallholder agriculture than for large, so-called commercial farms.
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Colin Poulton, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Perhaps predictably, I find it hard to disagree with Steve’s arguments. There is a pro-smallholder and pro-science - even pro-GM! – position, drawing on a strong empirical record, that Paul completely misses in his attempt to slay the giants of romanticism. I will, therefore, confine myself to two main points:
The first augments Steve’s points about the comparative advantage of smallholder vs large-scale commercial agriculture. In low income economies, replacing labour with capital is often not efficient. This is true for many agricultural production tasks. Moreover, smallholder family labour is often better motivated and hence more efficient than the hired labour that large-scale farms have to rely on. In general, therefore, there are few economies of scale in agricultural production in Africa, although there may be in processing and marketing. That said, there are supply chains – most notably, export horticulture – where significant capital investments at farm level are unavoidable. There are also economies of scale in traceability and other aspects of quality assurance. In such supply chains, the advantages of large farm organisation may outweigh the labour benefits of smallholder production. In a recent review of commercial agriculture in Africa for the World Bank (http://go.worldbank.org/XSRUM2ZXM0), we found that large-scale production had outperformed smallholder systems in export horticulture, sugar and flue-cured tobacco, but that smallholder production systems had outperformed large-scale in cotton and cashew, with strong performance under both forms in tea. The current debate has been prompted by the high food prices observed in 2008. Notably, food crop production in Africa remains dominated by smallholders. The high costs of accessing and defending large landholdings in much of Africa may contribute to this. However, in a low income economy there are no obvious scale advantages in maize production and poor consumers are a long way from demanding the traceability and food safety assurance that could tip the balance in favour of large producers. Tellingly, where large farms do exist, they often choose to produce higher value crops than maize and other staples.
Paul argues that “allowing commercial organizations to replace peasant agriculture gradually would raise global food supply in the medium term”. However, as Prabhu Pingali and others have shown for East Asia, market forces will tend to produce farm consolidation only when real wages in an economy rise well above levels seen in most of Africa today. When this happens, replacing labour with capital will make increasing sense and increasingly large plots will be necessary to generate an income for the owner comparable to that which could be obtained in an (attainable) off-farm job.
My second point augments one of Paul’s points. We can point to plenty of evidence showing that, where smallholders are supported through public or private delivery of support services (accessible input supply, seasonal finance, technical advice etc), they can compete strongly with large-scale farms in low income economies. However, large-scale farms do possess an important advantage: they can access such support services themselves (e.g. direct contact with commercial banks), whereas smallholders are heavily dependent on services being brought close to their farmgate. As Steve notes (not altogether approvingly), large-scale farms can even lobby for public infrastructure provision, something that smallholders have rarely been able to do. The case for large-scale farms, therefore, looks stronger where states completely fail to provide or to encourage support services to smallholder producers. Without such service provision, smallholders are indeed more likely to be trapped in chronic poverty than to be drivers of agricultural growth. In recent years there have been encouraging commitments from African governments to increase their investment in the agricultural sectors of their countries. This is critical if smallholder production is to supply the ever-rising demand for food on the continent.
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Michael Loevinsohn, Applied Ecology Associates
I’d like to challenge one of Prof. Collier’s key points: small farmers are failing to keep up with the pace of change. “Innovation is hard to generate through peasant farming”, he writes. “Their mode of production is ill-suited to modern agricultural production in which scale is helpful”.
On the contrary, small farmers have shown time and again a capacity to rapidly evolve technologies and systems; in this their greater number and their closer interactions with their land, crops, animals and each other, relative to large farmers, are key advantages. This extends to achieving scale economies - where these are attractive - through cooperation. In a context of rapid change, small farmers' capacity to evolve is critical. However, it is far more often ignored or suppressed than supported and fed.
An illuminating case comes from the highlands of southern Rwanda, one of the most densely populated parts of the most densely populated country in Africa.
Soon after arriving in the late 1980’s, I took up an initiative to advance sustainable intensification of highland valley bottoms thru farmer-led experimentation. Farmer groups in 3 valleys tried out and modified technical options they or we suggested; they bore all risks, we provided initial seed and advice.
Within 2 seasons the valleys were transformed (photos). Rice, previously only grown 200 m lower, spread rapidly. Farmers identified varieties that tolerated cold and developed cropping patterns adapted to their economic orientation and the hydrology of their valleys. By the second season, all the groups had constructed sandbag-reinforced diversion dams and peripheral irrigation canals. Farmers who had never before seen a need to farm cooperatively were now electing coordinators to organize tasks that benefited all, like irrigation maintenance, and, when necessary, to enforce penalties. Appropriate scales of cooperation were quickly found for different tasks: larger for maintaining canals, smaller for managing a seedbed, still smaller for scaring off birds. “Traveling seminars” in which the groups showed and explained what they were trying were crucial for the evolution of these lumpy options.
How to maintain functional diversity was a constant topic of conversation. Rice was proving very productive (appreciated at home and with a ready market) but its spread threatened other elements. Sweet potato especially: growing it in the valley provided cuttings for the hillsides and made year-round cultivation possible – an enormous boost to food security. One solution was to grow rice in paddies then rebuild raised beds for sweet potato, beans and e.g. out-of-season maize for the market: tremendously labour-demanding but evidently feasible for farmers with a few hundred sq m of land.
Innovation was driven by necessity, which was hardly in short supply. But the context was less than supportive: markets functioned poorly, extension was demeaning and the state apparatus hostile to any autonomous initiative. Discussion in policy circles favoured scale and specialization – fewer people, growing one or a few crops, either in the valleys or on the hills.
This much of the story was recounted in Agricultural Systems (1994, attached). I left a year before the genocide broke out in 1994. I visited in 1996: despite upheaval and more than 4 years without support of any kind, the groups had survived and rice cultivation had spread up the valleys. It was more difficult to make out what had happened to other innovations.
A few months ago, a colleague visited the area. The groups are all still active, 20 years on, and he found rice dominant over many kilometres of valley (photo). It’s unclear to what extent farmers have been supported in this by public or private sector institutions (I know some are active in the area) and whether farmer innovation is being recognized. I’d love to find out more.
A final thought. New cultivation techniques for familiar crops may prove an important production frontier, particularly as climate change accelerates. The System of Rice Intensification and related approaches are notable examples. The wheel is still very much in spin but evidence suggests a potential for significant gains in production and water use efficiency along with an inescapable need for local innovation and adaptation around the basic principles. Supporting the innovative capacity the Rwandan groups demonstrated would seem essential if that potential is to be captured.
Photo: Michael Loevinsohn: Dam building, Gatovu, 1989
Photo: Michael Loevinsohn: Gatovu, Butare Pref 1989
Photo: Michael Loevinsohn: Rice nr Butare 9-2008
Also, see linked file: Cooperation and Innovation by Farmer Groups: Scale in the Development of Rwandan Valley Farming Systems.pdf
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Andrew Dorward,
School of Oriental and Africa Studies (SOAS)
The large/ small farm debate has been long running and is not helped by simple conclusions that one or the other is best. The debate needs to consider small and large farms' relative efficiency and effectiveness in terms of the resources they use and the benefits they deliver in different and evolving contexts.
There is a large body of evidence that small farms tend to be more efficient in their use of labour and in their micro-environmental management, but less efficient in market transactions. With economic growth and development, labour becomes more expensive and labour input declines relative to (cheaper) capital. Input and output market and financial transactions become much more important, and supply chains become more complex. As a result economic growth and increasing commercialisation of agriculture tip the balance of productive efficiency and effectiveness from small to large farms.
We also need to look at small and large farms’ relative developmental contributions, which is not the same thing as relative productive efficiency and effectiveness: inefficient production is a drag on development, but efficient production is not a sufficient condition for development, we also need to consider contributions to wider processes of development. Core livelihood and economy wide relations mean that food security is not just a social security issue, it is central to essential poverty reduction and growth processes in many poor rural economies.
The large numbers of poor food insecure people in Africa locked into low productivity food staple production on small farms are a major drag on economic growth and poverty reduction, lowering labour and land productivity and leading to major rigidities that prevent diversification out of (low productivity) agriculture. Development strategy must address this in a joined up way that promotes food staple productivity with lower staple food prices so that the incomes of poor subsistence / food buying producers (50% of African farmers) are raised both through greater agricultural productivity and through lower food prices. Higher real incomes will then drive demand for non-staple goods and services (horticultural products, livestock products, petty trading, a range of rural services, etc) while higher land and labour productivity together with more stable and lower food prices also allow a supply response and movement of land and labour out of low productivity staple production.
Getting the matching / complementary stimulus / movement of both supply and demand in the movement out of agriculture has been the big development failure in many parts of Africa, but was the critical process that drove and facilitated growth in areas that have achieved poverty reduction and growth. Driving food prices down through large scale commercial agricultural production only delivers on the food supply side, it does not match this with increasing entitlements and incomes and productivity of poor people, nor embed this within the economies where poor people are concentrated.
We need an evolution out of small scale agriculture, the old paradox of investing in it so that we can get out of it. There is no romantic attraction to peasant agriculture here – all of us contributing to this debate have exercised our freedom to exit from peasant agriculture to a better livelihood (or have benefited from our forebears exit from peasant agriculture) – we are fortunate that we have a better option, that is not the case for most peasant farmers in Africa.
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Paul Wagstaff, Concern Worldwide
I wonder how many of these authors have ever tried to run a commercial farm in Africa? It is very, very, difficult to be a decent employer (and an honest citizen) and run a profitable commercial farm in much of Africa – smallholder farmers can out-compete you in every direction. Steve hits the nail on the head: “Why is this? The main obstacle to farming on a large scale is the same one that hit Soviet state farms: the management of labour. Small farms have the advantage that family labour is generally self-supervising, prepared to work long and diligently in ways that hired hands are not. When large farms try to minimise the labour problem by mechanising, not only do their costs of production rise, but keeping machinery operating well in rural areas remote from supplies of spares and skilled mechanics is not easy.
A commercial farm has to pay taxes, pay acceptable wages, buy insurance, provide social services to workers (the “social contract” in much of Africa is that the employer is expected to provide the social services that the state cannot provide), service bank loans, tax and insure tractors, provide water for surrounding villages, maintain the feeder roads, and keep government officials and village chiefs happy. As one of the few formal employers in the area a commercial farmer can expect to be “visited” by every official in the district on a regular basis: labour officers wanting to check contracts, tax inspectors going through the books for every month, health inspectors counting latrines, building inspectors re-checking building plans, forest officers disputing the ownership of the trees on your land. When you are making a loss labour laws make it almost impossible to reduce staff costs – have these authors ever tried dismissing anyone in Africa? Keeping all the officials happy is an endless job, which consumes both time and money.
Mechanisation is another headache. Traffic police set up ambushes for your tractors at critical times in the farming year; tractor drivers siphon-off fuel and plough for their friends and neighbours using your fuel. Equipment spares are hard to find – if you have to spend weeks going round different towns hunting for spares that’s the profits from the maize harvest finished, To keep everything under some kind of control you need to employ extra, essentially unproductive, staff, to run the checks and balances: security guards, clerks, storekeepers, stock-checkers, etc.
Smallholder farmers face none of these headaches. Smallholder farmers use family labour, which is not formally “costed”, they pay little or no taxes and are completely outside the formal labour market. Why have most commercial estates and plantations moved towards outgrower schemes and contract farming? Because smallholder farmers can produce for lower costs than commercial plantations. Shift the headaches and risks to the outgrowers!
Steve Wiggin’s comments on successful commercial farms are over-optimistic. There are successful large-scale farms in Africa, but generally for those relatively few crops where economies of scale exist in production; for example in flowers, horticulture, and sugar cane. When it comes to the main food crops and other export crops, there are few examples of large-scale farms outside of South Africa. Large commercial plantations are equally subject to price fluctuations. Admittedly they can raise capital from shareholders and banks, but they also have high overheads – and high gearing ratios. They operate on credit and they go out of business frequently. While I was in Zambia last year the government was pleading on the radio for investors to take over abandoned commercial farms, and the Kenyan newspapers have plenty of rose farms for sale.
Both authors noted the issue of government support for commercial farmers, particularly the politically well-connected. Steve: “Government is expected to support the large farms with roads, irrigation, and power supplies. Research stations are encouraged to devote their attention to the issues that concern the large farms”. This is the BIG factor. The success of the large scale farming sector in Zimbabwe was due to the massive government support it received: rural infrastructure, research, extension services, electricity, etc. Commercial farmers who lost their land in Zimbabwe were offered land by the Mozambique government, hoping that they could revolutionise Mozambiquan agriculture. A recent report found that most Zimbabwean commercial farmers who moved to Mozambique failed because the state was unable to provide the level of support that commercial farming needed.
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Josien Kapma, "St Ulrich Group" / "PTD-Forum"
These are some notes from when we discussed the big farms / small farms issue in our email group. Our group is known as "St Ulrich Group" or "PTD-Forum". We are a community of practice of agricultural development practitioners. Please note that this is NOT necessarily a group statement, just some notes from an email thread of several people in the group.
It was a link to the IDS debate which inspired us to discuss this. Therefore we thought it only fair to share with you some of the issues we touched.
See disucssion: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PTD-forum/
Sharing a perception of rural Portugal 2009..
As soon as alternative livelihoods become available, a majority of subsistence and small farmers opt out and change for jobs and a more 'commercial' lifestyle. "Their memory of rural life is 100 times drearier than our picture of it." Why can't we listen and accept their preferences?
And the question:
While many agree large-scale farming has some advantages, large farms are criticized for inequality. Why not put some energy in trying out fair and equal organizations for large-scale agriculture?
To which many respond ... acknowledging the pull to larger farms:
(In UK since 1945 “contraction” in larger farms) ... helped to develop an efficient farming sector. Globalization of competition and access encourages larger farms.
But emphasizing the need for small(er) farms:
- The out-flux from agriculture is only possible when transitioning from an agrarian to industrialized system. Often there are no real alternatives in Africa.
- Small farms provide a safety net and an informal market.
- Link to the IAASTD study http://www.agassessment.org/ or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-0B4Z-7A4s
- Reference to the outcomes of an discussion by and with farmers on how they
themselves see the future of food and small scale producers. http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/14503IIED.pdf
- Social arguments for retaining family farms and rural skills; diversity arguments for smaller units that can try out new enterprises and new ways of working; part-time farmers whose quality of life is enhanced by involvement in farming.
- The realization that globalization of production has its drawbacks - such as high food miles, cutthroat competition that only benefits the retailers, and endangered local food security.
- General mistrust of large companies: Expropriating small farmers, as sometimes happened, is not fair and probably not the way to fight poverty.
- Large farms can be just speculating and/or with unsustainable agricultural practices. (quote: “In Asian countries they (investors) could invest in the industrial sector more profitably. But in poor African countries this possibility is too risky. As long as land and agricultural labour is easily available, and perhaps even subsidies can be got from donor countries, expropriating small farmers and investing in large farms is simply one of the best investment possibilities! (this) ... is not a way to develop a country!”
- Scaling up will make farmers too much depending on technologies provided by the multinationals. Just think of GMOs. Whose interest is served with these technologies.
- Every nation should have the freedom to safeguard it's own food supply and I don't know how well this interest is served in the hands of large-scale companies.
- Economies of scale are limited. There is an optimum somewhere. If you go beyond that scale, the results (technical, economical, social) are eventually declining.
- Yes, farming is becoming increasingly complex. But it is shortsighted to think that "complex" means "can only be dealt with by large companies".
- While there is a clear trend to upscaling, there is an entire segment of dairy farmers in Holland who want to keep risk manageable and labour family based. They are confident that there is a place for them in the system.
And other issues:
- Let there be diversity in farm size!
- What is large, what is small? Is it defined by area, family or hired labour, own investment or bank loans? An Australian ranch with 1000s of hectares may only use family labour & capital. An intensive smallholding of 1 ha horticulture might need as much as a million $ investment or may employ 50 people to harvest.
- Large or small: it is situation- and site-specific.
- The number of 'decent jobs' is very important, perhaps more so than farm size. Labour-intensive agriculture keeps money in the rural area.
- A good and agile conglomeration of organised smallholders could be getting the same economies of scale as large farms, and more. How to equip and modernise the cooperative model?
- Similarly, what are fair and just systems for large farms?
This seems to be a conclusion supported by many of us: "Smallholder farms (size depending on the location) all over the world are important for the rural economy and are there to stay."
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Access to Technology
Smallholder farmers in Africa fall behind not because they are inefficient but as a result of ill suited agricultural policies. Both technology development and dissemination processes are lopsided in favour of large farmers. For instance, more than 90 percent of Tanzanian farmers do not have access to cultivation tools and use hand hoing for crop production just because only less than one percent farmers have access to bank loans to buy agricultural tools (National Sample Census of Agriculture 2002-2003). With improved access to affordable, socially appropraite, contemporary agricultural technology, smallholders not only can significantly improve productivity but also utilize more available cultivable land for food production. On average, farmers in Tanzania own 2.3 ha of cultivable land and national statistics show that in 1993/94 they were able to put less than a ha under cultivation. Though cropping intensity has significanly improved in the last decade, it is still less than 100 percent. Land use efficiency can significanly be improved with investment in technology development and dissemination.
Small But Efficient
Back in 1960s, T.W. Schultz argued that small farmers in Indian Sub-Continent are small but efficient. They allocate their resources efficiently given their economic and social constraints. The argument is still valid. Productivity measured in terms of output per unit of land per year is still higher at small farms than large commercial farms. A IWMI report on water use efficiency in Pakistan showed small farmers used 33 percent less water than their neighbouring large farmers to produce same or even more wheat (personal communication with Dr. Zafar Altaf, Ex. Chairman, BOG, IWMI). In general, most of the developing countries depict u-shaped productivity curve. High priductivity at small farms, low and flat curve at large farms and again rising at the very large commercial/industrial farms. However, smallholders use less external inputs and energy and are considered more environment friendly.
A recent research study by Sauer and Mendoza (2007) found corroborative results and confirm that small farmers in traditional development settings are "poor-but-allocatively efficient" in Eastern Amazone.
Food Production for Whom?
More than half of the world’s hungry are identified as food poor small farmers who produce very little marketable surplus, if any. In South Asia and Africa where most of the world’s poor live, small farmers make more than 80 percent or even more of the rural population. Historical evidence suggests that the modern agriculture models followed by US and EU resulted in huge reduction in percentage of population engaged in food production. Any such effort to produce more by displacing small farmers in developing countries would create a kind of social, political and economic chaos that would increase not only the number of food insecure people but also erode the capacity of these countries to import.
Access to Market
Unfortunately, smallholder farmers face unfavourable market conditions in both the markets where they sell their output and buy inputs for farming. The available evidence shows, however, that where organized smallholders enjoy more power in markets.
The OXFAM Experience
Oxfam in its pursuit to link more than two million smallholder farmers in Honduras, Ethiopia, Tanzania and India to private sector and markets have found that if smallholders are organized, private sector more responsive, and government policies more supportive, conditions can be created where smallholders can effectively be linked to economic growth process.
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Sam Moyo, African Institute for Agrarian Studies
Transforming African agriculture through small producers or reinventing large scale farming
The so-called food ‘crisis’ in Africa reflects an ongoing global, agrarian crisis, underlain by the contradictions of the capitalist accumulation system, and the mis-governance of financial, energy and food markets. It reflects the failures of neoliberalism, rather than the weaknesses of small farmers in relation to large capitalist farming. Africa’s mal-integration into ‘global’ agricultural markets, characterized by imperial trade protectionism and subsidies, buttressed by ineffective aid systems, reinforces its regressive structures of domestic agricultural production and consumption, which are subordinated by the oligopolistic global agro-industrial complex.
Africa’s agrarian question tends to be framed in narrow behavioural terms, asking which type of “farmer” — small, ‘subsistence’ and traditional versus the larger, ‘commercial’ and ‘modernised’ farmer — is more capable of leading agricultural transformation, rather than looking at wider systemic factors.
Despite often being preferred by policy-makers, large farms have not lead to substantial increase in agricultural production, particularly for domestic markets, as was expected. Often with absentee ownership, and profits transferred from farming to other activities, they have failed when commodity prices have crashed (See Mafeje, 2003). In contrast, it has been the ‘middle’ and small peasants who have contributed most to exported agricultural production in Africa, while poor peasants have been the most resilient in maintaining food production, even under SAPs and global commodity crises.
Land tenure debates have usually focused on tenure security, rather than the more pressing matter of land distribution in a continent where land concentration is growing, and increasingly the poor lack access to land, particularly women and other marginalized social groups. Recent acquisitions of large tracts of land by external agents are testimony to this on going phenomenon.
While it is true that much small farming uses low productivity technology, this does not reflect so much the choice or ignorance of peasants, but rather a response to a debilitating world economic context. Deflation of economies under structural adjustment policies, particularly restrictions on public spending have undermined economic growth in general, and small farming in particular. Farmers have not been given the necessary support.
Private capital has not, and will not, make up the deficit unless compelled to do so by state intervention (see Patnaik, P. 2008) and popular pressure. Even the recent philanthropic initiatives are too embedded into financial, technological and commodity monopolies, to ensure the consistent mass generation of relevant technologies at fair cost for small producers. Instead, a ‘western’ agricultural technological and markets path dependence, submerges local knowledge and technologies, through the unequal extraction of surpluses (through pricing and market monopolies in food and inputs). Now large foreign commercial farms pursue a ‘final push’ to ‘universalize’ the commodification and alienation of land, at the expense of popular food sovereignty.
Reversing the systemic sources of agrarian de-accumulation and reduced state capacities required to regulate the increasingly monopolistic agrarian capital, unequal agrarian trade relations and the distorted food aid systems, is critical to the growth of small farmer production. Most agricultural development initiatives in Africa over the last three decades, have been atomistic, incoherent and misplaced. They tend to pick “magic bullets” (now “large commercial farms”) founded on promoting accumulation from above, rather than below, to enhance the participation of the majority of small African producers, including the landless, and land short, and the unemployed. Improving the quality of labour and retains from production by small farmers is critical to sustained agricultural transformation and human development.
Future land reform policies in Africa should not promote the alienation of land and land tenure reforms, which favour agribusiness export production, including new exports such as agro-fuel, timber, tourism and mining enterprises. This will only further undermine the needs of existing social networks of poor and middle peasant households, and generate wider land conflicts and violence.
African Institute for Agrarian Studies
19 Bodle Ave, Eastlea
PO Box CY3396, Causeway
Harare, Zimbabwe
Tel: +263 4 86 22 79/ +263 4 86 17 98
Mobile: + 263 11 221 675; +263 912 274 351
e-mail: sammoyo@ecoweb.co.zw; sam_moyo@yahoo.com
Alternate address:
96B Domboshawa Road
Borrowdale, Harare
Zimbabwe
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Peter Hazell, member of Farm Africa’s Board of Trustees
The Future of Small Farms
Few symbols of economic inefficiency are as potent or enduring as the small farm. Consider the East Anglia wheat farmer in his combine harvester, single-handedly cutting a swathe through his 5,000-acre farm versus the hoe and sickle efforts of his small maize-growing family counterparts in Malawi or Ethiopia. Karl Marx viewed small farms as self-exploiting, and the view that small farms are not commercially viable and even an impediment to development continues to be widely held, with development experts like Paul Collier arguing it is wiser to promote large-scale operations.
Yet such a position ignores the enormous diversity of small-farm situations around the world, and hence fails to take into account the substantial prospects for small-farm development in many developing countries. Nor does it suggest how a rapid disappearance of small farms could be managed without leading to a much larger number of people becoming trapped in rural poverty and urban ghettos.
There are about 450 million farmers worldwide who farm less than 2 hectares of land. 90% of these small farms live in Asia and Africa where they account for over 80% of total farms and 40% or more of total agricultural output. Small farms provide the largest source of rural employment and account for the largest share of the rural poor in most developing countries.
Small farms offer important economic and social advantages for countries in the early stages of their economic transformation into industrial economies:
- They achieve higher land productivity and use more labour and less capital per acre, all of which align more efficiently with the resource endowments of poor countries.
- They help contain poverty by providing an affordable home platform from which poor households can diversify their livelihoods.
- They help prevent premature urban migration and the explosive growth of large cities.
- They ensure a degree of food security in rural areas where high transport and marketing costs can drive up food prices, while at the national level their higher land productivity has the potential to help poor countries attain greater self-sufficiency in staple foods.
These advantages slowly disappear as countries develop and labour becomes more costly relative to land and capital, leading to a natural transition toward larger farms and an exodus of small farm workers to towns and nonfarm jobs. But that transition does not normally begin until countries have grown out of low-income status, and it typically takes several generations to unfold. A common misdiagnosis stems from overlooking this broader economic context for determining the economics of farm size.
For most low-income countries, the problem is not that small farms are inherently unviable in today’s marketplace, but that they face an increasingly tilted playing field that, if left unchecked, could lead to their premature demise.
Among the more powerful forces working against the small farmer is the shift toward consumer-driven markets as part of market liberalization and globalization. The small farmer is increasingly being asked to compete in markets that demand much more in terms of quality and food safety; that increasingly come under the sway of supermarkets, processors and large export traders; and that reflect far more international competition. As small farms struggle to diversify into higher-value products, they must increasingly meet the requirements of these demanding markets, both at home and overseas. These changes offer new opportunities and pose serious threats to small farmers.
In developing countries, small farmers also face unfair competition from rich country farmers in many of their export and domestic markets, and they no longer have adequate support in terms of basic services and farm inputs.
Context is very important when thinking about appropriate interventions to assist small farms. In countries with dynamic and growing national economies and rising per capita incomes, small farmers have many new opportunities to diversify into higher-value products or nonfarm sources of income, or to exit farming entirely. These kinds of opportunities are much more restricted in poor, slow growing countries, especially in Africa. Here the best growth potential lies with food staples (cereals, roots and tubers, and traditional livestock products). The demand for these products is projected to double by 2020 and food staple markets are easier for small farms to access and are less demanding in terms of their quality requirements.
If most small farmers are to have a viable future, then there is need for a concerted effort by governments, NGOs and the private sector to create a more equitable and enabling economic environment for their development. This must include provision of better infrastructure and assistance in forming effective marketing organizations, targeted agricultural research and extension, revamping financial systems to meet small farm credit needs, improved risk management policies, tenure security and efficient land markets. These interventions are not only possible but could unleash significant benefits in the form of pro-poor agricultural growth. The alternative will be rapid increases in rural poverty and waves of migrants to urban areas that will overwhelm available job opportunities, urban infrastructure and support services.
Farm Africa is successfully demonstrating how many of Africa’s small farms can be developed into viable businesses.
Professor Hazell is a member of Farm Africa’s Board of Trustees.
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Background Materials
Postion 1: The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis
Paul Collier
Position 2: Response to P. Collier's essay
Steve Wiggins
Further reading
News Items
The Times, April 15, 2008, Paul Collier
Food shortages: think big
The Financial Times, April 30, 2008, Matin Wolf
Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture
The Chicago Tribune, January 4, 2009, George McGovern and Marshall Matz
Agriculture's next big challenge
New Scientist, 04 December 2008 Debora Mackenzie
Rich countries carry out '21st century land grab'
The Guardian, 22 November 2008, Julian Borger
Rich countries launch great land grab to safeguard food supply
The Guardian, 22 November 2008, Sue Branford
Food crisis leading to an unsustainable land grab
The Guardian,
22 November 2008, Article History
Biggest deals
Financial Times,
November 18 2008, Javier Blas
Land leased to secure crops for South Korea
Research
International Food Policy Research Institute,
June 26-29, 2005, Research Workshop
The Future of Small Farms
International Food Policy Research Institute, May 2007, Vision 2020 Discussion Paper The future of small farms for poverty reduction and growth
International Food Policy Research Institute, June 2005, Vision 2020 Discussion Paper The Family Famrm in a Globalizing World
