b. Average farm size per region 

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... it is one of the largest millers in the USA, trades its own grain, and processes and retails food. Hendrickson and Heffernan warn that in a food chain cluster, "the food product is passed along from stage to stage, but ownership never changes and neither does the location of the decision-making". The most recent comprehensive meta-study to estimate the number, size and distribution of farms worldwide, conducted for FAO by Lowder, Skoet, and Raney (2016), calculated that there are over 570 million farms in the world, of which the majority are small (84 percent of farms are less than 2 hectares in size) and family-run. The average farm size varies greatly between regions (Figure 7b). On the whole, the study found small farms (under 2 hectares) to control only 12 percent of agricultural land worldwide. This means that only 16 percent of farms occupy 88 percent of all farmland, as exemplified in Figure 8. But, whereas in most of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific (excluding China), the majority of farms are smaller than 2 hectares and the control over the land is more evenly distributed among the classes of farms (with few very large farms), in Latin America and the Caribbean, farms are on average larger and very large farms (over 1,000 hectares) control practically half of all agricultural land. The authors conclude there is a trend for the concentration of land in the hands of large-scale farms in higher-income countries, while simultaneously, average farm size is decreasing in most lower-income countries. They did not manage to corroborate the oft-cited claim that "small farms feed the world". This does not mean the claim should be rejected, but more studies are needed to prove the importance of small farms in the provision of domestic food needs. Most importantly, it is urgent to distinguish between the production of cash-crops . They find that Africa is the most targeted continent, with 42 percent of concluded deals, followed by Eastern Europe, while the top individual target countries are Indonesia, Ukraine, Russia, Papua New Guinea, and Brazil -these five countries represent 46 percent of the total area sold. Rather than giving use to abandoned agricultural land, the land deals actually target some of the best croplands, often in highly populated areas, which creates an unfair competition for land between foreign governments and corporations and local, poor communities. The UNCTAD report on agriculture (2013,(238)(239)(240)(241)(242)(243)) presents cases in Africa where farmers were removed from land that was leased to foreign investors, often at ridiculously low prices or even for free (in the most flagrant case, in Ethiopia, 700,000 indigenous people were being forced into villages to free up land for investors). The Land Matrix finds land acquisitions by foreign investors favour capital-intensive, low labour-intensive production methods: where crops have already been planted on acquired land, they are most often so-called cash crops: oil seeds (with oil palm being highly popular), corn, wheat, and sugar crops. The Land Matrix initiative warns most of these crops can also be used for energy purposes. The private sector is overwhelmingly the beneficiary of these land acquisitions (70 percent of buyers). GRAIN warns that the main investors in land are now from the financial sector, rather than countries or agri-business corporations. In particular, there has been a significant rise in farmland investments by pension funds, while another major player is the development finance institution, a less than transparent international actor that provides assistance in development, based on aid funds from wealthy countries that it invests for a profit (GRAIN 2016). ETC Group, a longtime corporate watch group in the global agro-industrial sector ...