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Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium-scale farms
Abstract
This study assesses changes over the past decade in the farm size distributions of Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. Among all farms below 100 hectares in size, the share of land on small-scale holdings under five hectares has declined except in Kenya. Medium-scale farms (defined here as farm holdings between five and 100 hectares) account for a rising share of total farmland, especially in the 10 to 100 hectare range where the number of these farms is growing especially rapidly. Medium-scale farms control roughly 20% of total farmland in Kenya, 32% in Ghana, 39% in Tanzania, and over 50% in Zambia. The rapid rise of medium-scale holdings in most cases reflects increased interest in land by urban-based professionals or influential rural people. About half of these farmers obtained their land later in life, financed by non-farm income. The rise of medium-scale farms is affecting the region in diverse ways that are difficult to generalize. Many such farms are a source of dynamism, technical change and commercialization of African agriculture. However, medium-scale land acquisitions may exacerbate land scarcity in rural areas, which could have important effects given the projected 60% increase in rural Africa's population between 2015 and 2050. Medium-scale farmers tend to dominate farm lobby groups and influence agricultural policies and public expenditures to agriculture in their favor. Nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from six countries (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia) show that urban households own 5% to 35% of total agricultural land and that this share is rising in all countries where DHS surveys were repeated. This suggests a new and hitherto unrecognized channel by which medium-scale farmers may be altering the strength and location of agricultural growth and employment multipliers between rural and urban areas. Given current trends, medium-scale farms are likely to soon become the dominant scale of farming in many African countries. three anonymous reviewers.
... Interest in the relationship between farm size and productivity in Africa has been driven in recent years by rising doubts about the potential for smallholder-led agricultural growth in Africa (Collier and Dercon, 2014) and by the rising share of medium-scale farms in many African countries (Jayne et al., 2014(Jayne et al., , 2016. In light of such trends, major policy debates are arising over how the region's remaining prime agricultural land should be allocated, especially in the wake of rising land scarcity and land prices (Deininger, Savastano, and Xia, 2017;Holden and Bezu, 2016) and challenges associated with access to land for young people (Bezu and Holden, 2014). ...
... For instance, less than 1% of the farms contained in the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Survey on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) analyzed in the studies cited above cultivate more than 10 ha. Not much is known about the relationship between output per unit area and farm size beyond 5 ha (Jayne et al., 2016). Although a few recent studies have gone beyond 5 ha, the literature on IR beyond 5 ha is scanty. ...
... This study examines the relationship between farm size and farm productivity on farms cultivating between 5 and 70 ha in southern Ghana. The study is unique in that it covers the rapidly growing segment of "medium-scale" farms in Africa, which now accounts for a significant fraction of the total area cultivated in the region (Jayne et al., 2016). The study is useful in providing guidance on policy discussions about the pros and cons of promoting larger farm scales in Africa (e.g., Collier and Dercon, 2014). ...
We contribute to the inverse farm size-productivity puzzle (IR) literature by examining the relationship using a unique data set from southern Ghana that covers farms between 5 and 70 ha. The study uses an instrumental variable (IV) for land size to mitigate some effects of measurement error in land size. The inverse relationship between farm size and farm productivity is upheld when ordinary least squares estimators (OLS) are applied but becomes insignificant although still negative in the IV estimation. The results show that measurement error in land size attenuates the IR. While some studies found the IR to flatten and then become positive, this study finds that in Ghana, the IR only flattens.
... This is changing, as urban middle class started to buy agricultural land and started investing in agriculture, but they need an infrastructure of support services and the availability of good farm managers. A significant number of Kenyans has done so, using parcels of land in the medium-scale farming range (5 to 100 hectares; Jayne et al., 2016). Within the category of medium-size farmers we focused on this segment of urban-based, part-time telephone farmers, who give instructions via their mobile telephones (Mworia, 2016). ...
... This approach, however, has been contested by some who feel that the smallholder focus needs re-thinking. In Kenya, Jayne et al. (2016) find that the number of farms under 5 hectares has risen from 2.22 to 2.97 million between 1994 and 2006 while the number of farms over 5 hectares has declined. Land is becoming an increasingly constraining factor of production for a sizeable and growing proportion of Kenya's rural population leading to intensification and less sustainable and rewarding agriculture. ...
... Urban-based farming is a rapidly growing sector as urban-based households increasingly acquire agricultural land. Jayne et al. (2016) find that acquisition of land by the urban-based middle class has accelerated in Africa. In some countries the urban-based middle class already controls a significant amount of farmland with almost a quarter of farmland owned by urban households in Kenya, Zambia, Ghana and Tanzania. ...
Purpose
This article explores the potential of an emerging group of farmers in Kenya, namely the growing segment of urban-based medium-size farmers, often called “telephone farmers”. To what extent do they benefit from an emerging ecosystem to support them in operating their farms, and what does that mean for the Hidden middle of agricultural value chains, the actors between the farmers and consumers? Unlocking the potential production of telephone farmers will require more services from collectors, traders, transport firms, the storage facilities, wholesalers and processing units and retailers. Ultimately, optimized telephone farm production benefits the business of Hidden middle value chain actors, increases incomes and jobs and improves food security.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a survey and in-depth interviews a profile of the telephone farmers is given and their role as innovators is analyzed. The Latia Resource Centre (LRC) provides assistance to medium-size farmers, like the telephone farmers, helping them to prepare business plans and use modern technology and contributing to an emerging ecosystem providing support to all farmers.
Findings
The article analyzes the medium-size telephone farmers. It documents the contributions of this new agricultural actor to developing value chains and a dynamic ecosystem. The paper profiles the telephone farmers first and then identifies what they need and the support they receive. The emerging innovative ecosystem impacts agricultural productivity and production and hence the development of value chains. Small farmers gain access to opportunities offered by telephone farmers, working for them as outgrower or farm worker.
Research limitations/implications
The authors used a small sample of 51 farmers and covered only a two-year period.
Social implications
Small farmers are being helped through the emerging eco-system and farm labor acquire skills, which they can also you on another or their own farm.
Originality/value
Based on the analysis an even more effective ecosystem is suggested and policy recommendations are formulated before the conclusion is drawn that these medium-size farmers contribute to innovation diffusion, inclusive value chain development and food security and are becoming part of this expanding, innovative ecosystem. Following the debate on food security the results suggest to pay more attention to the development of telephone farmers given their role in developing agricultural value chains and innovative ecosystems.
... Another potential driver for mechanisation is the increased push for conservation agriculture whose minimal land disturbance practices can be accomplished by 2WTs more efficiently while reducing drudgery (Baudron et al., 2015). Other potential drivers include the rapid increase in medium-scale farms (5-100 ha) who are better resourced and the developing rural nonfarm sectors (Jayne et al., 2016). The emergence of medium-scale farms and burgeoning rural nonfarm sectors is absorbing labour in most places, leading to labour scarcity and rising opportunity cost for family farm labour (Jayne et al., 2016). ...
... Other potential drivers include the rapid increase in medium-scale farms (5-100 ha) who are better resourced and the developing rural nonfarm sectors (Jayne et al., 2016). The emergence of medium-scale farms and burgeoning rural nonfarm sectors is absorbing labour in most places, leading to labour scarcity and rising opportunity cost for family farm labour (Jayne et al., 2016). These changes offer great opportunities to leapfrog mechanisation. ...
Mechanisation is back among top development policy priorities for transforming African smallholder agriculture. Yet previous and ongoing efforts ubiquitously suffer from lack of scientific information on end‐user effective demand for different types of mechanical innovations to inform public investment or business development programmes. We assess smallholder farmers' willingness to pay (WTP) for two‐wheel tractor (2WT)‐based ripping, direct seeding and transportation using a random sample of 2800 smallholder households in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Applying the Becker–DeGroot–Marschak Mechanism (BDM) experimental auctions, we find that at least 50% of sample households in Zambia and Zimbabwe were willing to pay more than the prevailing market prices for ripping. In nominal terms, sample households in Zimbabwe were willing to pay more than those in Zambia for the different services. Empirical results suggest that wealth is the strongest driver of WTP for tillage and seeding 2WT services while labour availability and using animal draft power reduce it. These findings imply a need to (i) raise awareness and create demand for 2WT‐based services in an inclusive business manner that does not create perverse incentives and (ii) better target mechanisation to operations with comparative advantage, using approaches that bundle 2WT‐based and other mechanisation services with asset‐agnostic credit schemes or other interventions meant to overcome asset‐mediated barriers.
... At present, there is no clear theoretical definition of the concept of cultivated land use patterns in academic circles. Domestic and foreign scholars mostly focus on crop planting structure (Singh et al., 2011;Zhang et al., 2014;Balan et al., 2015;Mesgari and Jabalameli, 2018), farming methods (Dai et al., 2011;Balan et al., 2015;Jayne et al., 2016;Qiu and Wang, 2018), cultivated land use intensity Ye et al., 2020), and the number and structure of cultivated land (Fezzi and Bateman, 2011;Yin et al., 2017;Foski, 2019;Zhang et al., 2020;Zhu and Xu, 2020) to define cultivated land use patterns. At the same time, scholars at home and abroad have used methods, such as farmer surveys (Jayne et al., 2016), Gao et al. (2018), (Mastrangelo et al., 2019), landscape indices (Yin et al., 2017;Foski, 2019), and model construction (Singh et al., 2011;Mesgari and Jabalameli, 2018;Ye et al., 2020) to delineate cultivated land use patterns. ...
... Domestic and foreign scholars mostly focus on crop planting structure (Singh et al., 2011;Zhang et al., 2014;Balan et al., 2015;Mesgari and Jabalameli, 2018), farming methods (Dai et al., 2011;Balan et al., 2015;Jayne et al., 2016;Qiu and Wang, 2018), cultivated land use intensity Ye et al., 2020), and the number and structure of cultivated land (Fezzi and Bateman, 2011;Yin et al., 2017;Foski, 2019;Zhang et al., 2020;Zhu and Xu, 2020) to define cultivated land use patterns. At the same time, scholars at home and abroad have used methods, such as farmer surveys (Jayne et al., 2016), Gao et al. (2018), (Mastrangelo et al., 2019), landscape indices (Yin et al., 2017;Foski, 2019), and model construction (Singh et al., 2011;Mesgari and Jabalameli, 2018;Ye et al., 2020) to delineate cultivated land use patterns. The research scale of cultivated land use patterns has gradually advanced from the household scale to the regional scale. ...
The study of cultivated land use models is an important means to improve the benefit of cultivated land use and promote the sustainable use of cultivated land. The rational optimization of regional cultivated land use models based on the consideration of regional background conditions and development goals can provide a scientific basis for ensuring the sustainable use of cultivated land. This study constructed a three-dimensional research framework of "natural quality-utilization intensity-spatial layout" of cultivated land utilization pattern. Taking the county as a unit, the natural quality, spatial distribution and utilization intensity of cultivated land in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau were evaluated, and the types of cultivated land utilization models were determined. Based on the ecological protection and the regulation and control of agriculture and animal husbandry in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the optimization direction of cultivated land use patterns was discussed. The results show that the cultivated land use pattern divided by the “NUS” three-dimensional model can accurately reflect the characteristics of cultivated land use in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The existing cultivated land use pattern in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is basically consistent with its ecological protection and development direction zoning, but the problems of unreasonable expansion and excessive use intensity of cultivated land exist in the ecotone between some development areas and restricted areas. Therefore, the utilization and optimization of cultivated land in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau should be based on the premise of protecting ecological security and striving to solve the contradiction between agricultural development and ecological protection to realize the sustainable utilization of cultivated land.
... We first segmented each composite into median objects using the Simple Non-Iterative Clustering (SNIC) segmentation algorithm that is available in GEE [24,41,73,74]. As an object-based processing technique, this segmentation algorithm creates pixel clusters from input information such as texture, color or pixel values, shape, and size, which is especially useful for mapping cropland [51,75,76]. The SNIC function is an improved version of the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) computer vision algorithm [73], making it well-equipped to run faster and more efficiently on the GEE platform. ...
... In this study, we used annual median composites because the lack of cloud-free observations prevented us from making seasonal composites, especially during the growing season, as is common in many agricultural regions [43,93]. As seasonal composites provide better separability between croplands and non-croplands [51,92], future studies could focus on integrating observations from other sensors, such as Sentinel-2 or PlanetScope, in order to create higher temporal resolution composites that can provide this seasonal contrast. The moderate spatial resolution of Landsat is too coarse in some instances to classify smallholder cropland, as the average size of crop fields in such systems is <0.64 ha [94], which underscores the value of integrating higher spatial resolution data into the composites. ...
Cropland expansion is expected to increase across sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries in the next thirty years to meet growing food needs across the continent. These land transformations will have cascading social and ecological impacts that can be monitored using novel Earth observation techniques that produce datasets complementary to national cropland surveys. In this study, we present a flexible Bayesian data synthesis workflow on Google Earth Engine (GEE) that can be used to fuse optical and synthetic aperture radar data and demonstrate its ability to track agricultural change at national scales. We adapted the previously developed Bayesian Updating of Land Cover (Unsupervised) algorithm (BULC-U) by integrating a shapelet and slope thresholding algorithm to identify the locations and dates of cropland expansion and implemented a tiling scheme to allow the processing of large volumes of imagery. We apply this approach to map annual cropland change from 2000 to 2015 for Zambia (750,000 km2), a country that is experiencing rapid growth in agricultural land. We applied our cropland mapping approach to a time series of unsupervised classifications developed from Landsat 5, 7, 8, Sentinel-1, and ALOS PALSAR within 1476 tiles covering Zambia. The annual cropland changes maps reveal active cropland expansion between 2000 to 2015 in Zambia, especially in the Southern, Central, and Eastern provinces. Our accuracy assessment estimates that we have identified 27.5% to 69.6% of the total cropland expansion from 2000 to 2015 in Zambia (commission errors between 6.1% to 37.6%), depending on the slope threshold. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of Bayesian data fusion and shapelet, slope-based thresholding to synthesize optical and synthetic aperture radar for monitoring agricultural changes in situations where training data are scarce. In addition, the annual cropland maps provide one of the first spatially continuous, annually incremented accounts of cropland growth in this region. Our flexible, cloud-based workflow using GEE enables multi-sensor, national-scale agricultural change monitoring at low cost for users.
... Following the IR stylised fact and the historical preponderance of SSFs in SSA, many development partners have focused on smallholder-led strategy as key for food security, agricultural development, and economic development in general, in the region (Mellor, 1995;Hazell et al., 2010). However, the recent growth in the share of cultivated farmland under MSFs and large-scale farms (LSFs) in many parts of Africa (Jayne et al., 2016;Jayne et al., 2019;Lowder, Sanchez and Bertini, 2019) has raised major concerns about the inclusivity, equity and productivity of agricultural growth. Unfortunately, most IR analyses for African settings have seldom used datasets that can confidently make conclusions about farms beyond 10ha . ...
... 3 In addition, urban-based households are now more involved in commercialised MSFs but these urban-based operators are typically excluded from currently existing nationally-representative farm surveys. Thus, an important and growing segment of the population of MSFs may be exempted without new surveys covering these operators (Jayne et al., 2016). For these reasons, an exhaustive listing and sampling of small-scale and MSF households within the study area was implemented prior to wave 1 data collection. ...
This paper conducts a panel analysis to investigate the relationship between farm size and productivity over a relatively wide range of farms (0-40ha) in Nigeria. We account for observed and unobserved household and farm-level heterogeneities suspected for commonly observed variables in the literature. We further account for the dynamic movement between small-scale and medium-scale farm operations and their productivity over time. Our findings show there is little difference in mean productivity across various farm size categories up to at least 40 hectares. However, there is substantial heterogeneity in within-group productivity. We also find a non-trivial percentage of farms grow or shrink in size with little observed change in productivity over time after accounting for exogenous factors including weather. We conclude that productivity does not depend on farm size, rather, non-size related factors are much more important drivers of productivity. The potential agricultural and developmental policy implications are explored.
... Medium-scale farms control roughly 20% of total farmland in Kenya, 32% in Ghana, 39% in Tanzania, and over 50% in Zambia. The number of such farms is also growing very rapidly, except in Kenya (Jayne et al., 2016). The rise of medium-scale farms is affecting the region in diverse ways that are difficult to generalize. ...
... The rise of medium-scale farms is affecting the region in diverse ways that are difficult to generalize. Many such farms are a source of dynamism, technical change, and commercialization of African agriculture (Jayne et al., 2016). However, medium-scale land acquisitions may exacerbate land scarcity in rural areas and constrain the rate of growth in the number of small-scale farm holdings. ...
The dwindling capture fisheries has triggered an increase in Kenya's annual fish demand deficit, currently estimated at 553,000 MT. With the adoption of sustainable policies, aquaculture can bridge and surpass this deficit. Kenya's fish farming environment is however characterized by its highly fragmented production farms, which limit the dynamism and technical change needed to commercialize aquaculture. The global trend in the commercialization of food production is through the consolidation of farmlands. For example, most farms in the United States of America were also once small, but because of the policy of land consolidation, the farmlands average 1,000 acres. Over the past decade, much of Sub-Saharan African nations are experiencing a rise of 5–100 hectares except in Kenya, where the laws have exacerbated the situation. Amid declining agricultural productivity, farm-level efficiency and food security problems, land fragmentation is emerging as a key policy question in Kenya and is the single largest bottleneck, to aquaculture growth in Busia. A paradigm shift in the aquaculture development policy will enable aggregated production of fish under a fragmented land tenure. This study discusses the need to remodel the current fragmented and uncoordinated cluster-based smallholder aquaculture development strategy by adopting a hybrid aquapark concept. In this concept, the aggregated smallholder aquaparks are established and managed through specialized management service provision units and linked to adjacent smallholder aquaculture production clusters with a community-based coordination and support framework. The study further gives the application and socioeconomic experiences of the pilot aquapark concept of aquaculture development in Busia County. The aquapark model coupled with the deliberate establishment of aquaculture-enabling infrastructure has enhanced the efficiency, profitability, and productivity of aquaculture production. The realization of smallholder community-owned large-scale fish farms through aquaparks offers a window for dynamism and technical change necessary for the commercialization of aquaculture under a fragmented land tenure system.
... Thus, if SSFs are able to procure inputs from or with these larger farms, they can potentially avoid low quality inputs (Ali et al., 2017), yielding higher productivity. This productivity-enhancing effect of interacting with MSFs may be complemented by knowledge transfers that occur if larger farms hire and 1 We find tha o 5-100 as was done in Jayne et al. (2016) over 95% of our medium-scale sample were between 5 and 50 hectares and thus have used 5-50 so our work is comparable to both the literature using 5-100 (e.g., Jayne et al., 2016) and those using 50 hectares as a cut-off for medium-scale farms (such as Anseeuw et al., 2016). train labour from the local community or offer direct training services to SSFs-resulting in positive learning effects. ...
... Thus, if SSFs are able to procure inputs from or with these larger farms, they can potentially avoid low quality inputs (Ali et al., 2017), yielding higher productivity. This productivity-enhancing effect of interacting with MSFs may be complemented by knowledge transfers that occur if larger farms hire and 1 We find tha o 5-100 as was done in Jayne et al. (2016) over 95% of our medium-scale sample were between 5 and 50 hectares and thus have used 5-50 so our work is comparable to both the literature using 5-100 (e.g., Jayne et al., 2016) and those using 50 hectares as a cut-off for medium-scale farms (such as Anseeuw et al., 2016). train labour from the local community or offer direct training services to SSFs-resulting in positive learning effects. ...
In spite of mounting evidence about the growth of medium‐scale farms (MSFs) across Africa, there is limited empirical evidence on their impact on neighbouring small‐scale farms (SSFs). We examine the relationships between MSFs and SSFs, with particular focus on the specific mechanisms driving potential spillover effects. First, we develop a theoretical model explaining two propagating mechanisms: learning effects (training) and cost effects (reduced transactions cost). An empirical application to data from Nigeria shows that SSFs with training from MSFs tend to use higher levels of modern inputs (have higher productivity), and receive higher prices and income. The results also show that purchasing inputs from MSFs reduces the costs of accessing modern inputs and is associated with higher inorganic fertiliser use by SSFs. Our results suggest that the benefits of receiving training and purchasing inputs from MSFs are particularly important for very small‐scale producers, operating less than 1 hectare of land. This implies that policies which promote the efficient operation of MSFs and encourage their interaction with SSFs can be an effective mechanism for improving the productivity and welfare of smallholder farms, hence reducing their vulnerability to extreme poverty.
... This scenario has several implications. First, it will further increase land scarcity for smallholders [31], leading to households with smaller landholdings as the disadvantaged population will sell land (to the emerging middle class) for immediate financial gain. Since farm size determines household food self-sufficiency [13], the latter scenario could spell an overall increase in food insecurity in rural parts of southern Africa. ...
Agricultural productivity impacts the environment and natural resources in various ways. The severity of these impacts has triggered the emergence of natural resource management and the related, highly criticized science of agroecology. Vegetable production has known environmental impacts. However, the extent of its participation in sustainable production has not been adequately explored. This review sought to explore the spaciotemporal position of vegetables in a suite of existing sustainable agricultural practices, explore regional variations and discover lessons that can guide the future of vegetable production. There are regional differences regarding sustainable production practices and the associated barriers to their adoption. Generally, sustainable agricultural practices with a societal history in a region tend to be successful, unlike when they are “new” innovations. The major barriers to sustainable agricultural practices in vegetable production are economy-related (total investment cost) and crop-related and are also related to the technology transmission approaches. Unfulfilled expectations and a lack of community participation in technology development are noted challenges, which have led to dis-adoption. A farmer-centered approach to technology promotion could help. Comparatively, southern Africa has the most challenges in the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. From the lessons learned from other regions, agroecology in vegetable cultivation is not unachievable in Africa. The projected challenges mean that sustainable vegetable production is inevitable.
... The majority of these small-holder farms are in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and they provide about 70% of food to the population in these two regions. Raising the income of small-holder farms in these regions is seen as vital to providing a market for domestically produced manufactures and services (Baumol, 1967;Jayne et al., 2016). Even when labor is believed to be in surplus in the rural sector, agricultural productivity growth is considered essential to prevent rising food prices and nominal wage costs from undermining industrial development (Lele & Mellor, 1981). ...
Most studies of agricultural transformation document the impact of agricultural income growth on macroeconomic indicators of development. Much less is known about the micro‐scale changes within the farming sector that signal a transformation precipitated by agricultural income growth. This study provides a comparative analysis of the patterns of micro‐level changes that occur among small‐holder farmers in Uganda and Malawi in Sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA), and Thailand and Vietnam in Southeast Asia (SEA). Our analysis provides several important insights on agricultural transformation in these two regions. First, agricultural income in all examined countries is vulnerable to changes in precipitation and temperature, an effect that is nonlinear and asymmetric. SSA countries are more vulnerable to these weather changes. Second, exogenous increases in agricultural income in previous years improve non‐farm income and trigger a change in labor allocation within the rural sector in SEA. However, this is the opposite in SSA where the increase in agricultural income reduces non‐farm income, indicating a substitution effect between farm and non‐farm sectors. These findings reveal clear agricultural transformation driven by agricultural income in SEA but no similar evidence in SSA. La plupart des études sur la transformation agricole documentent l'impact de la croissance des revenus agricoles sur les indicateurs macroéconomiques de développement. On en sait beaucoup moins sur les changements à petite échelle au sein du secteur agricole qui signalent une transformation précipitée par la croissance des revenus agricoles. Cette étude fournit une analyse comparative des modéles de micro‐changements qui se produisent chez les petits exploitants agricoles en Ouganda et au Malawi en Afrique subsaharienne (ASS), et en Thaїlande et au Vietnam en Asie du Sud‐Est (SEA). Notre analyse fournit plusieurs informations importantes sur la transformation agricole dans ces deux régions. Premiérement, le revenu agricole dans tous les pays examinés est vulnérable aux variations des précipitations et de la température, un effet non linéaire et asymétrique. Les pays d'ASS sont plus vulnérables à ces changements climatiques. Deuxiémement, les augmentations exogénes du revenu agricole au cours des années précédentes améliorent le revenu non agricole et déclenchent un changement dans la répartition de la main‐d'œuvre au sein du secteur rural en SEA. Cependant, c'est l'inverse en ASS où027;augmentation des revenus agricoles réduit les revenus non agricoles, indiquant un effet de substitution entre les secteurs agricole et non agricole. Ces résultats révélent une transformation agricole claire induite par le revenu agricole en SEA, mais aucune preuve similaire en ASS.
... This may be due to several reasons. First, in many cases, locally distorted implementation has resulted in an unequal distribution of land, as seen in an inherent contradiction in many developing countries [43,46]. Second, public land expropriation and land grabbing are the two largest sources of land tenure insecurity in Vietnam. ...
With over 14 million hectares allocated, Vietnam's forest and forestland allocation has been one of the largest natural resource decentralization programs in the developing world over the last three decades. Given this remarkable achievement, critics are concerned about the low rates of household tree planting investment and question the roles and effects of land institutions on investment. Using nested logit and ordered probit models, this study examined the effects of household perceptions of forestland tenure security on tree investment and the causal effects among 239 households in 11 communes in the Central Highlands. The findings suggested that, given the land titling in hand, household perceptions of potential land expropriation in the next five years did not thwart investments in both short-term acacia and long-term cashew horizons. The number of laborers, cost of plantations, off-farm and agricultural incomes, migrant status, soil condition, plot location, government subsidies, and a positive market outlook all played a significant role in this investment. Interestingly, we found that short-term tree planting had the reverse impact on decreasing land users' perceptions of land tenure security, possibly because each tree rotation shortens the 50-year land use period recorded in the Land Use Right Certificate. However, market prospects and government subsidies may significantly counteract the negative perception of LTS and encourage households to plant trees. The policy implication is that, in addition to strengthening LTS to ensure households' current and future land use rights, tree investment-incentivized policies should be implemented.
... This may be due to several reasons. First, in many cases, locally distorted implementation has resulted in an unequal distribution of land, as seen in an inherent contradiction in many developing countries [43,46]. Second, public land expropriation and land grabbing are the two largest sources of land tenure insecurity in Vietnam. ...
With over 14 million hectares allocated, Vietnam’s forest and forestland allocation has been one of the largest natural resource decentralization programs in the developing world over the last three decades. Given this remarkable achievement, critics are concerned about the low rates of household tree planting investment and question the roles and effects of land institutions on investment. Using nested logit and ordered probit models, this study examined the effects of household perceptions of forestland tenure security on tree investment and the causal effects among 239 households in 11 communes in the Central Highlands. The findings suggested that, given the land titling in hand, household perceptions of potential land expropriation in the next five years did not thwart investments in both short-term acacia and long-term cashew horizons. The number of laborers, cost of plantations, off-farm and agricultural incomes, migrant status, soil condition, plot location, government subsidies, and a positive market outlook all played a significant role in this investment. Interestingly, we found that short-term tree planting had the reverse impact on decreasing land users’ perceptions of land tenure security, possibly because each tree rotation shortens the 50-year land use period recorded in the Land Use Right Certificate. However, market prospects and government subsidies may significantly counteract the negative perception of LTS and encourage households to plant trees. The policy implication is that, in addition to strengthening LTS to ensure households’ current and future land use rights, tree investment-incentivized policies should be implemented.
... Zambian agriculture comprises mostly smallholder farmers (cultivating 20 hectares or less), with those cultivating between 0 and 5 hectares accounting for approximately 80% of all farmers, while those cultivating between>5 and 20 hectares represent approximately 16% of all farmers (Jayne et al. 2016). More than 1.5 million smallholder farmers produce approximately 80% of the maize crop (Chiona, Kalinda, and Tembo 2014), the staple crop that accounts for more than half of the per capita calorie consumption in Zambia (Harris et al. 2019). ...
Smallholder farmers in Africa are vulnerable to changing climatic conditions because of their dependence on rainfed agriculture. Their adaptation strategies, which are critical for food security, are oftentimes influenced by their risk-taking attitude. This study examines whether experiencing climatic shocks (defined here as drought events) shapes farmers’ risk aversion. The study addresses two crucial questions: 1) how do drought events alter risk preferences among smallholder farmers; and 2) how long does the impact last? Using a panel survey from Zambia and high spatial resolution climate data, we infer the average Arrow-Pratt and downside risk aversion coefficients from the moment of the distribution of crop production. We find that, on average, the sampled farmers are risk averse. Furthermore, farmers who experienced a drought in the previous year become more risk averse, while farmers who experienced recurring droughts within the previous three years become even more risk averse. We find that the effect of climatic shocks on risk preferences is short term, lasting only one year. These results have implications on adaptation to climate change.
... In recent years, land purchases took place through urban or foreign investments in quite a few African countries, which led to an increase in scale [42,43] and has exacerbated rural income inequality [44][45][46]. In addition, it generates little employment, and to the extent that it does, it is often low paid [43]. ...
The urbanisation in the Global South provides opportunities for improved rural livelihoods in the vicinity of cities, but these opportunities do not automatically occur. The literature shows that urban expansion leads to more intensive land use around cities and a shift of production towards high-value products. However, competition for land around growing cities can lead to increasing socioeconomic vulnerability in affected areas, particularly for those who have no or weak land ownership or tenancy rights. Urban expansion can also have negative ecological consequences such as the extinction of wetlands and deforestation. In the current literature, there are very few studies to be found that comprehensively and simultaneously analyse the effects of growing cities on food security, equity, and the ecological impacts on food systems in rural areas. To better map and understand the consequences of urban growth for agricultural dynamics, rural livelihoods, and the environment, a three-track research agenda is proposed: comparative field studies that analyse farmers’ decision-making processes under increased competition for factors of production due to urban sprawl; the role of urban–rural connectivity, city size, and urbanisation patterns in agricultural dynamics around the city; and studies that analyse the socioeconomic and environmental effects of urban sprawl on agricultural development opportunities around cities.
Keywords: urbanisation; rural livelihood; land use; water; migration; food system; rural–urban linkages
... Medium-scale contract farmers run full-time farming businesses to feed the growing cities in EA (Jayne et al., 2016;Neven et al., 2009;Ochieng et al., 2017). They cultivate medium-sized farms in peri-urban areas. ...
East Africa (EA), a region facing food shortages, has very little irrigation adoption compared to the rest of the world. Increasing irrigation has been shown to increase food cultivation, so governments and private organizations have been attempting to introduce irrigation products into the EA market. Despite this support, irrigation adoption rates remain low, meaning existing solutions do not meet the needs of medium-to-small scale farmers. Meeting these needs is challenging because the types of farmers in EA are diverse, and these differences have not yet been elucidated. This study sought to do so and to understand if new opportunities exist for irrigation products targeted at this range of farmers. We first conducted an interview-based market assessment to reveal which market segments exist and what each values in an irrigation system. Then, we conducted a technical and economic feasibility analysis to reveal which irrigation methods and energy sources are most promising for each segment. Four distinct market segments were found. The traditional smallholder would most value a system that uses photovoltaic (PV) and manual irrigation. The semi-commercial smallholder’s most promising system uses PV panels and butterfly sprinklers. Both the medium-scale contract farmer and the remote farm owner would value PV panel- and drip irrigation-based systems. These identified opportunities for innovation can guide irrigation designers as they develop new systems that directly serve farmers’ needs, with the aim to increase irrigation and food security in EA.
... The majority of these small-holder farms are in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and they provide about 70% of food to the population in these two regions. Raising the income of small-holder farms in these regions is seen as vital to providing a market for domestically produced manufactures and services (Baumol, 1967;Jayne et al., 2016). ...
Most studies of agricultural transformation document the impact of agricultural income growth on macroeconomic indicators of development. Much less is known about the micro-scale changes within the farming sector that signal a transformation precipitated by agricultural income growth. This study provides a comparative analysis of the patterns of micro-level changes that occur among smallholder farmers in Uganda and Malawi in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and Thailand and Vietnam in Southeast Asia (SEA). Our analysis provides several important insights on agricultural transformation in these two regions. First, agricultural income in all examined countries is vulnerable to changes in precipitation and temperature, an effect that is nonlinear and asymmetric. SSA countries are more vulnerable to these weather changes. Second, exogenous increases in agricultural income in previous years improve non-farm income and trigger a change in labor allocation within the rural sector in SEA. However, this is opposite in SSA where the increase in agricultural income reduces non-farm income, indicating a substitution effect between farm and non-farm sectors. These findings reveal clear agricultural transformation driven by agricultural income in SEA, but no similar evidence in SSA.
... Smallholder farming and small farmers are usually portrayed in a negative light. In the period of advanced technology development and the green revolution, small farms are characterized as anachronistic, inefficient, and backward (Jayne et al., 2016;Otsuka et al., 2016;Omotilewa et al., 2021). Most times, smallholder farmers have limited training and education, hence are usually restricted socially and culturally (Mahaman Dioula et al., 2013). ...
... Literature shows that landholding size continues to reduce with high land pressure and limited capacity to expand agricultural land to virgin land in Malawi [2,36]. With land pressure, land markets (sales and rental) are developing in Malawi as the main pathway through which households are accessing agricultural land [3,37]. ...
Compelling evidence in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) shows that Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has a positive impact on agricultural productivity. However, the uptake of CSA remains low, which is related to anthropogenic, or human-related, decisions about CSA and agricultural land use. This paper assesses households’ decisions to allocate agricultural land to CSA technologies across space and over time. We use the state-contingent theory, mixed methods, and mixed data sources. While agricultural land is increasing, forest land is decreasing across countries in SSA. The results show that household decisions to use CSA and the extent of agricultural land allocation to CSA remain low with a negative trend over time in SSA. Owned land and accessing land through rental markets are positively associated with allocating land to CSA technologies, particularly where land pressure is high. Regarding adaptation, experiencing rainfall shocks is significantly associated with anthropogenic land allocation to CSA technologies. The country policy assessment further supports the need to scale up CSA practices for adaptation, food security, and mitigation. Therefore, scaling up CSA in SSA will require that agriculture-related policies promote land tenure security and land markets while promoting climate-smart farming for food security, adaptation, and mitigation.
... In line with the need to build a strong farm ecosystem that has all three types of farmers, there is a need to develop a strong medium-scale sector. The fact is that this sector contributes little to agricultural output, despite it holding a significant part of total agricultural land, which is problematic (Jayne et al., 2016;van Dijk et al., 2022). Reasons for their inability to become productive can be found in their lack of appropriate business models and support (Leenstra, 2014;van Dijk et al., 2022). ...
Improving the livelihood of the many rural-based people living in developing economies calls for a rural transformation. Policymakers primarily focus on increasing agricultural productivity, i.e., fostering a green revolution. Although this is key to initiating rural transformation, evidence shows that high productivity alone does not necessarily attract investments in other parts of the value chain. These investments are vital to improving smallholder livelihoods through creating non-farm employment opportunities. Therefore, this policy brief calls for a more holistic approach to successfully initiate and support rural transformation. This approach seeks to build a farm ecosystem where smallholders, medium-scale, and large-scale farmers work symbiotically and thus send strong signals that can attract investors in other parts of the value chain. Such a system can guarantee consistency in quality, quantity, and stable prices. Specifically, this brief also argues that government efforts at improving the investment climate through the investment in rural infrastructure and especially through the building of agro-industrial parks and emphasizing building skills are a key part of solving the rural transformation puzzle.
... Smallholder farming and small farmers are usually portrayed in a negative light. In the period of advanced technology development and green revolution, small farms are characterized as anachronistic, inefficient, and backward (Jayne et al, 2016;Otsuka, Liu and Yamauchi, 2016;Omotilewa et al, 2021). Most times, smallholder farmers have limited training and education, hence are usually restricted socially and culturally (Mahaman Dioula et al., 2013). ...
Rabbit production is increasingly becoming a source of livelihood to many households in Nigeria. Unfortunately, a recent incidence of Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease (RHD), which is a virulent and rapidly spreading disease of rabbits adversely affected the Nigerian rabbit industry and caused significant economic loss to farmers. Hence, this study assessed the coping strategies adopted by rabbit farmers as response to the RHD outbreak in the study area. A snowball sampling technique was adopted for selecting 120 affected rabbit farmers from whom data utilized for the study were collected using structured questionnaire. The obtained data were analysed using descriptive statistics to describe the rabbit farmers based on their socioeconomic characteristics and the different coping strategies adopted; and Multivariate Probit (MVP) Regression Model to determine the factors influencing the rabbit farmersˈ adoption of coping strategies. The result from the MVP analysis revealed that age of the farmer, size of household, membership of cooperative, extension contacts, amount of credit accessed, income per rabbit production cycle, and income from other sources significantly influenced rabbit farmersˈ adoption of coping strategies. It is, therefore, recommended that the farmers should join farming cooperatives so that they can have access to useful resources and relevant information that can help them cope with the risks involved in the business. In addition, extension education and outreach should be frequently provided to the rabbit farmers to avail them of advisory services that can help with mitigating the impact of the risks involved in the business.
... In line with the need to build a strong farm ecosystem that has all three types of farmers, there is a need to develop a strong medium-scale sector. The fact is that this sector contributes little to agricultural output, despite it holding a significant part of total agricultural land, which is problematic (Jayne et al., 2016;van Dijk et al., 2022). Reasons for their inability to become productive can be found in their lack of appropriate business models and support (Leenstra, 2014;van Dijk et al., 2022). ...
Improving the livelihood of the many rural-based people living in developing economies calls for a rural transformation. Policymakers primarily focus on increasing agricultural productivity, i.e., fostering a green revolution. Although this is key to initiating rural transformation, evidence shows that high productivity alone does not necessarily attract investments in other parts of the value chain. These investments are vital to improving smallholder livelihoods through creating non-farm employment opportunities. Therefore, this policy brief calls for a more holistic approach to successfully initiate and support rural transformation. This approach seeks to build a farm ecosystem where smallholders, medium-scale, and large-scale farmers work symbiotically and thus send strong signals that can attract investors in other parts of the value chain. Such a system can guarantee consistency in quality, quantity, and stable prices. Specifically, this brief also argues that government efforts at improving the investment climate through the investment in rural infrastructure and especially through the building of agro-industrial parks and emphasizing building skills are a key part of solving the rural transformation puzzle.
... In line with the need to build a strong farm ecosystem that has all three types of farmers, there is a need to develop a strong medium-scale sector. The fact is that this sector contributes little to agricultural output, despite it holding a significant part of total agricultural land, which is problematic (Jayne et al., 2016;van Dijk et al., 2022). Reasons for their inability to become productive can be found in their lack of appropriate business models and support (Leenstra, 2014;van Dijk et al., 2022). ...
... As imagined by some young people, this would amount to farming at arm's length by a busy, town-based manager of multiple enterprises. In a sense these young people are aligning their futures with current discourses around 'telephone farmers' (Leenstra, 2014) and 'medium-scale farms' (Jayne et al., 2016(Jayne et al., , 2019. In Nigeria, the common reference to 'large-scale mechanized farming' by young people points in the same direction. ...
... The general consensus is that land-related changes are taking place relatively rapidly in many rural areas . Rental market participation is increasing (Chamberlin and Ricker-Gilbert, 2016;Muraoka et al., 2018), farm structure is changing, with medium-scale farms showing rapid expansion in many areas (Sitko and Chamberlin, 2015;Jayne et al., 2016), and title conversions are rapidly taking place . The relative decline in importance of customary institutions as a means of allocating land has been both decried and welcomed as part of a general process of change which has agriculture on a trajectory toward larger-scale, more capital-intensive and commercially oriented production. ...
... Specific policy emphasis is often placed on boosting the productivity of smallholder farmers who, in regions such as Africa, represent the largest share of agricultural producers and account for significant shares of output (Scoones and Thompson, 2011;Wiggins., 2010). This emphasis on smallholder productivity remains central to development policy even despite increasing recognition of the more nuanced role that agricultural policy plays in development (for example, Dorosh and Thurlow, 2018;Jayne et al., 2016;Collier and Dercon, 2014). ...
Efforts to increase smallholder access to improved varieties and quality seed is often central to agricultural development, economic growth and poverty reduction in low‐income countries. Yet many governments and development partners grow impatient with slow progress in their seed sectors. Uganda stands out for its recent policy innovations, regulatory reforms, and market experiments for seed, and for the extensive analysis of its experience. This paper reviews the changing landscape of Uganda’s seed system and assesses recent policy, regulatory, and institutional changes. We draw on a wide range of documents, studies, and statistics. The low uptake of improved varieties and quality seed in Uganda has encouraged innovation to overcome failures in the country’s seed market. These innovations include regulatory changes to allow the production of quality‐declared seed (QDS) by smallholder seed producers; labelling to allow text message verification of seed; and crowd‐sourcing information on seed quality by farmers. All have promise, but it remains to be seen just how effective they will be. In the meantime, vested interests may resist moves to a more innovative seed sector, instead preferring to maintain the incumbent approach designed to use seed to secure political support from smallholders. This is at variance with the spirit of the 2018 legislation and subsequent regulatory reforms. Uganda has a policy framework that could make a real difference to farmer access to better varieties and seed. Market innovations can help the vision to become reality. But the seed sector needs sufficient public investment to generate new varieties and foundation seed, and capacity to manage the seed market to the benefit of producers, dealers and farmers. Having come so far, it would be counter‐productive for political economy factors to displace the efforts of private provision which is far more sustainable in the medium and long run.
... The pace of these deals increased after 2011, supporting the argument that the recent LSLA phenomenon was in part driven by the 2008 global food crisis. The second type, the rise of domestic investor farms (those not exceeding 100 hectares landholding eachor medium-scale acquisitions), encompasses land acquisitions that have been under the radar in the development discourse but are shifting land distribution in Zambia from a more egalitarian broad-based farm structure to one that is highly concentrated (Jayne et al., 2014(Jayne et al., , 2016. These investments are partly a consequence of the increase in demand for land by the country's middle-class who see agriculture as a viable investment opportunity. ...
This chapter highlights the increase in large-scale land acquisitions across the globe and how it is intertwined with land tenure security. Land tenure security, or the lack thereof, plays a key role in the locational choice of investors. Land tenure security may mitigate the outcomes but is also affected by the acquisition of land. These effects are reflected in de facto displacements, the perception of weakened land tenure security, and changes in the land governance system. We shed light on these relationships between land acquisitions and land tenure security by first providing a global overview, and then delving deeper into the Zambian context. We find that for land acquisitions to be implemented economically, socially, and in an environmentally sustainable manner, strong land tenure security is crucial.
... However, many governments have adopted land and financial policies that implicitly encourage the rise of emergent MSFs. Given the documented rise in MSFs in many African countries (Jayne et al., 2014;Jayne et al., 2016), the APRA Nigeria Work Stream 1 (WS1) team developed a research agenda focused on understanding the potentially complex ways in which these farms affect the productivity and commercialisation potential of small-scale farms (SSFs). We investigated the characteristics of MSFs, the processes that produces them, their relative importance in the agricultural commercialisation process, the relationship between farm scale and productivity, and whether MSFs influence the behaviour and welfare of the millions of SSF households around them. ...
... The subjects of forest tenure reform and forest land claims include customary communities, collectives, and local forest users, but are sometimes driven by broader interests in conservation, rural development, climate mitigation and private-sector investments in forest areas. While underlining their critical roles in forest resource management, in many cases tenure reforms do not necessarily facilitate substantive changes nor produce its intended objectives, and even put some local groups rights at risk (Fisher and van der Muur, 2020;Jayne et al., 2016;Larson and Dahal, 2012;Myers et al., 2017). Several studies highlight governance-related challenges in complex social, political and legal settings Myers et al., 2018;Sahide et al., 2016). ...
As forest tenure reform is mainstreamed around the world, outcomes are increasingly determined by the institutions that are responsible for administering its operationalisation and translating policy into implementation. This global study examines state institutional contexts of tenure reform in Kenya, Uganda, Nepal, Indonesia, and Peru. Interviews were administered in 2016–2017 using a fixed questionnaire applied across all countries involving 26–32 respondents from state implementers of forest tenure reform in each country for a total of 145 respondents. Although our study engagement was tailored for specific country contexts, we identified generalisable forest tenure reform trends through comparative analysis. Findings situate the overall bridging role that state institutions play in forest tenure reform, which we describe as falling under three key overarching coordination functions, namely: coordination among implementers, coordination of objectives, and coordination of resources. These three categories provide insights not only for gauging the progress of a country's forest tenure reform, but also for evaluating how robust reforms have been, and where forest tenure reforms are headed in the future.
... In many historical contexts, the provision of land to new investors at a price below its opportunity cost has encouraged land expansion rather than land intensification and often left communities with few or any benefits (Deininger and Byerlee, 2012). In Africa, many of such new large land acquisitions are owned by salaried urban new investors that live outside the area or by relatively privileged citizens in rural areas, less frequently by a process of accumulation of small-scale farmers that began with less than five ha of land (Sitko and Jayne, 2014;Jayne et al., 2016); although there is some evidence that in areas where commercialization is more developed, small-scale farmers do incrementally increase their farm size Debonne et al. (2021). Even more, some evidence suggests that these investors are not as productive as small-scale farmers that transition into medium-scale farming (Omotilewa et al., 2021). ...
Agricultural intensification, through increased yields, and raising incomes, through enhanced labor productivity, are two dimensions prioritized for achieving sustainable agricultural development. Prioritizing these two outcomes leaves a third element of a trade-off space, labor intensity, as a hidden adjustment variable. In contexts where agriculture is the main source of livelihood for the majority of the population and when the prospects of labor absorption in the nonfarm sector are scarce, the density of agricultural employment offers a means to lift the population out of poverty, especially of those farm workers who are landless, unemployed or underemployed. In this article, we revise the classical relationships between land and labor productivity and labor intensity with farm size, using a standardized data set on 32 countries. We show that for all countries, labor productivity increases with farm size, while both land productivity and labor intensity decrease with farm size, with all these relationships being nonlinear. Technical efficiency, on the other hand, increases with farm size, with few exceptions. We further systematize the evidence on how, beyond the farm level, local contextual factors can be pivotal in choosing how to prioritize the different dimensions of the trade-off space. Our findings contribute to the pressing debates on the fate of small-scale farmers by showing the complexities of the trade-offs between land and labor productivity, and labor intensity, and call for contextualized decisions.
... While many smallholder farms are dependent on family labor, the enforcement of strict health directives, particularly the movement restrictions and lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus, may constrain labor mobility and availability for medium-scale farms that depend on hired external labor. The number of such farms (5 -100 hectares) is growing rapidly in some African countries accounting for a rising share of total farmland (Jayne et al. 2016). Cropped area and yields may reduce as a consequence of a reduced workforce for agricultural production due to lockdowns and movement restrictions (Ilesanmi, 2021). ...
Continued reliance on area expansion and encroaching onto forest land and marginal lands as the main strategies for agricultural growth in Africa is neither environmentally nor socially sustainable. Building African farming systems’ resilience to shocks and stressors for sustainable food and nutrition security and economic growth and transformation requires shifting from extensification to intensification. This should be driven by integrated management practices on farms. Components for building resilience and sustainability into Africa’s agricultural production systems including efficient use of nutrients and water; improved soil health; use of high-yielding, climate stress-tolerant seeds adapted to local climate change; crop diversification; and investments in risk mitigation and management strategies are discussed in this chapter.
... Land concentration has been increasing globally since the 1980s (142). In most low-and lower-middleincome countries, farm sizes overall have decreased between 1960 and 2010, but the opposite is true in high-income countries and in other countries such as Brazil, with farms increasingly polarized between small and large farms (140), and mediumscale farms are gaining ground in some parts of Africa (143). Yet, adequate data on land value and its distribution remain scarce (144), and land ownership is only one dimension of inequality. ...
Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits—"win–wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.
... Large-sized farmers hold more than 60 % of the total land area in Nepal. Similar patterns are observed in many other developing countries of Asia and Africa (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2013; Sugden et al., 2016;Government of India, 2016;Jayne et al., 2016;Anseeuw et al., 2016;Sitko and Chamberlin, 2016;Thapa et al., 2019). Some public programs, such as land consolidation, have been implemented to establish medium-sized or large-sized farm units by merging small-sized farmers' lands for the purpose of enhancing their economic scale, productivity and food security (Thapa and Niroula, 2008;Sugden et al., 2020). ...
Farm size and climatic perceptions are important economic and cognitive factors for farmers’ activities. However, little is known about how these factors are related to farmers’ responsiveness to climate change. This research addresses what matters for farmers’ responses to climate change, hypothesizing that farm size, climatic perceptions and the interplay between the two are key determinants. We conduct a questionnaire survey with 1000 farmers in Nepal, collecting data on their adaptation responses, farm size, climatic perceptions and sociodemographic information. With the data, the statistical analysis is conducted by employing an index to reflect the farmers’ effective adaptation responses. The results reveal that farmers take adaptations as the farm size becomes small, or when they have good climatic perceptions & social networks with other farmers. The results also show that small-sized farmers tend to adapt much more in response to their climatic perceptions than large-sized farmers. Overall, this research suggests that agriculture may be losing responsiveness to climate change, as large-sized farmers become dominant by holding a majority of land in developing countries. Thus, it is advisable to reconsider the tradeoff between productivity and responsiveness to climate change regarding farm size as well as how large-sized farmers can be induced to adapt through their cognition, policies, social networking and technology for food security.
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... Increasing land competition and marketization has been documented in >40 African countries and recent research points to farm sizes shrinking rapidly and land values surging in many rural areas (Jayne et al., 2016(Jayne et al., , 2014Wineman & Jayne, 2018). Factors accelerating land competition vary regionally and include local population growth, land grabs and investment by foreign corporations, increasing prevalence of midscale commercial and investment owners, and changing national policies pertaining to agriculture and land tenure (Hall, 2011;Hall et al., 2017;Smith et al., 2010). ...
In western Uganda, land inheritance has been the key means to bequeath livelihood opportunities to children, but land competition is increasing rapidly. Shrinking parcels and higher prices have made bequeathing land more difficult, especially for women, whose control over land has been customarily limited. We surveyed 50 rural women about their strategies and challenges investing in children’s future livelihoods. We present both quantitative and qualitative analysis of their responses. Over 80% believed it is better to invest in education rather than land, to help children secure remunerative off-farm jobs. Mothers wanted the majority of their children to leave the village to seek work elsewhere, equally for sons and daughters. Many also wished to provide a land-based safety net but worried this was no longer possible. Mothers’ assets affected both aspirations for and educational attainment of their children, highlighting potential for intensifying land competition to exacerbate inequality.
... However, non-agricultural sectors grew even more rapidly and, as a result, agriculture's share in GDP declined [1]. The share of the labor force in non-farm employment also increased since 2000 as SSA's rural labor force diversified away from subsistence farming [15]. This contributed to the region's rising labor productivity [16,17]. ...
Evidence of how resilience factors mitigate the adverse effects of shocks on individuals, households and communities is clearly established. However, such evidence at the macro level is limited, especially on the pace of structural transformation. This paper explores whether the growing incidence of terrorism, armed conflicts and natural disasters in SSA impeded the pace of structural transformation. We conceptualize the notion of macro-resilience and test whether resilience factors mitigate the adverse effects of shocks on two measures of structural transformation: agriculture’s share of GDP and of national employment. We find that structural transformation is impeded by armed conflict and terrorism-related shocks but not natural disasters and that resilience factors enhance the pace of agricultural transformation. This implies that, while agriculture is often destroyed in conflict-affected areas, the broader impacts are even more negative for other sectors of the economy. However, surprisingly, we find negative or insignificant interaction terms between the shock and resilience variables, implying no mitigative role of resilience capacities. This may suggest, in the case of conflicts and terrorism, the presence of major, debilitating effects which limit the mitigative capacity of resilience factors. We further explore the implications for future research and possible strategies to address the growing threats from shocks.
... The number of medium and large farms for example also sharply declined in north-western Bangladesh since 2005 (Misra, 2017). Similar observations have been made for in population dense and intensively cultivated landscapes in parts of South East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (Rigg et al., 2016;Jayne et al., 2016). ...
L’objet du chapitre 6 est de décrypter les relations entre dynamiques foncières, dynamiques productives et dynamiques des structures agraires. Il traite ainsi de l’incidence des droits et de leurs transferts sur les usages productifs de la terre puis, symétriquement, de l’influence des pratiques techniques et de leurs évolutions sur les droits et les transferts de droits, avant de se focaliser sur les rapports entre droits sur la terre, pratiques productives et structures agraires, puis sur le devenir de la ressource foncière dans les dynamiques d‘organisation des exploitations agricoles.
L’objet de ce chapitre est de mettre l’accent sur les relations entre trois grands champs de variables qui régissent le foncier agricole :
• Les dynamiques institutionnelles : changements des « règles du jeu foncier », i.e. du cadre institutionnel régulant l’accès au foncier et son usage.
• Les dynamiques des pratiques productives : changements des modes d'exploitation du milieu, des techniques de production et des investissement productifs.
• Les dynamiques des structures agraires : changements des structures foncières (de la distribution de la propriété foncière et de la base foncière de l’unité de production) et des structures d’exploitation (caractéristiques structurelles et organisationnelles qui différencient les exploitations agricoles dans leur logique, fonctionnement et performances).
This chapter takes as its starting point theorizing around nutrition and food system transitions thought to be increasingly occurring in urban Africa, and how this may be linked to a growing non-communicable disease burden. We focus specifically on the secondary city context by analysing household survey data gathered from six cities across Ghana, Kenya and Uganda during 2013–2015. We asked how diet composition and diversity, food sources and food security varied by socio-economic status, using expenditure and demographic data to create a proxy for household well-being. In this way, we investigate one of the claimed keystones affecting urban food systems and dietary health in sub-Saharan Africa—that of obesogenic urban food environments. Our findings indicate that the socio-economic status of a household was the most important factor influencing household dietary diversity and food security status, i.e. better-off households were more likely to feel food secure and eat from a greater variety of food groups. In addition, the number of income sources was additionally associated with higher dietary diversity. We also found that a household’s involvement in agriculture had only a small positive effect on food security in one city and was associated with a reduction in dietary diversity scores. Our findings emphasize the importance of supporting aggregated national and international statistics on agricultural production and trade with detailed local analyses that focus on actual household food access and consumption. We also see reasons to be cautious about making causal claims regarding consumption change and obesogenic urban environments as the major contributor to a rising obesity and non-communicable disease burden in Africa.
Reduced oil revenues since 2014 are stimulating tradable sectors in oil-exporting countries. I use an open economy model with internal and external trade costs to investigate the prospects for reverse Dutch disease in African countries with a comparative advantage in agriculture. While falling resource revenues lead factors of production to shift into agriculture, remote farmers can lose when trade costs make agricultural goods behave like non-tradables. Household survey data from Nigeria show a significant agricultural supply response that is correlated with exposure to international markets. Lowering trade costs and boosting agricultural productivity can help offset the lost income from oil.
We present an overview of the literature on agri-food value chains in low- and middle-income countries. Starting from farmers’ decision of whether to move away from subsistence agriculture to participate in agri-food value chains, we study the process whereby agricultural commodities make their way from the farm gate to the final consumer, documenting the procurement relationships that arise and the organization of markets at every step of the way. In each step, we take stock of the empirical evidence, critically assess the research so far, and offer a number of directions for future research. We further discuss the challenges and opportunities for global agri-food value chains.
We replicate and extend the analysis of Gale (1990) to provide insight into the role of economic conditions on farm distributions in the United States and abroad. Our underlying hypothesis is that the effects of the economic factors on the change in farm numbers remain the same (direction wise) for different times, farm sizes, and countries/regions. We investigate the role of economic conditions on the disappearing middle farms. We extend the analysis to include the time period 1960–2020 and more economic factors, estimate the models by farm size categories, using seemingly unrelated regression, and apply it to international settings (Brazil and the Eurozone). We find no evidence to support the disappearing middle farm hypothesis, despite a declining trend in the number of US midsize farms. The role of economic factors changes according to farm size and country. Economic factors (e.g., population, financial stress, and infrastructure) are important to explain the increase in small and midsize farm numbers in Brazil, and the decreasing small farm numbers in the Eurozone, showing opposite trends in farm numbers globally.
The reviewed book is a collection of studies of rural villages in Tanzania over periods of 20 years or more. Many of the villages changed dramatically in that period, and many of the villagers were able to improve their lives. However, the ways that assets in rural areas are treated in both Household Budget Surveys and GDP figures does not fully reflect these changes, leading, all too easily, to underestimations of the potentials for improvement in villages such as these in rural Africa.
A critical, yet underexplored, dimension of food systems is how consumer food preferences and beliefs interact with the food environment. We present a consumer-centered approach to identifying options for improving diets. The Value Chains for Nutrition (VCN) mixed-methods multi-disciplinary analytical approach was applied in rural Ghana. Data from in-depth consumer interviews, structured vendor interviews, and (secondary) household consumption surveys were analyzed to assess consumer diet patterns, related norms and preferences, and supply and demand characteristics of a set of empirically defined high-potential nutritious foods. Mapping results onto a supply–demand typology, we identify promising interventions to support increased availability, access, and affordability of these foods. Consumption data suggested that diets among Ghanaians were deficient in key micronutrients and calories. Fresh nutritious fruits and vegetables tended to be grown for home consumption rather than sale due to transportation challenges and seasonality of demand, especially near rural markets. Seasonal availability (fruits and vegetables) and affordability (animal foods) severely limited consumption of many nutritious foods. A set of supply, demand, and value chain interventions to enhance availability and affordability of nutritious foods are presented. Critical to success is to consider the set of interventions along each value chain required for impact.
Agriculture is critical for Africa's future, as most of the population still relies on rural work and struggles to keep pace with the booming population. The sustained growth of the African agricultural sector is necessary to ensure employment and livelihoods, especially for youth. While urban areas continue to attract young people from the countryside, the manufacturing industry and service sectors do not seem to offer productive employment. Agriculture and agri-based industrialisation are now attracting renewed policy interest, while African youth tend to show increasing disaffection from this sector due to myriad challenges that remain unsolved over years. For the agricultural sector to be inclusive, youth need to ensure land access. There is also a need to address challenges related to uncertain titles, demographic pressure and land grabbing, lack of capital due to the underdeveloped financial sector, and unskilled human capital. This chapter discussed these issues and inter-relationships based on an extensive literature review.
Forest cover has been steadily declining in sub-Saharan Africa, with the area under forest falling from about 734 million hectares in 1990 to about 635 million hectares in 2018, a loss of 98.7 million hectares (based on FAOSTAT data). The rate of forest loss is also accelerating over time, as the average annual decline in forest area was 0.45% in the 1990s, 0.50% in the 2000s, and 0.60% from 2010 to 2018. Somewhat under the radar, medium-scale farms (between 5–100 ha) have emerged as an important category within the agricultural landscape of sub-Saharan Africa. In most African countries, medium-scale farms account for more land under cultivation than large-scale farms, and they have been rapidly growing in numbers. Medium-scale farms account for over 10% of farms in Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia, and hold an even larger share of total cultivated land: 41% in Ghana, 26% in Nigeria, 47% in Tanzania, and 34% in Zambia. Moreover, the shares of land cultivated and crop production value that are attributed to medium-scale farms have been increasing over time, particularly in land-abundant settings.
Medium-scale farms may cause or influence deforestation through both direct and indirect avenues. They can directly cause deforestation by accessing land that had not been previously used—notably, forestland. This forested land can be obtained through several processes: allocation by customary authorities, purchase from other landowners, long-term lease, or transfer of rights by government. Medium-scale farms can also indirectly influence deforestation by contributing to land scarcity, specifically if heightened land scarcity caused (at least partly) by medium-scale farm growth is what spurs smaller farms to revert to carving out forestland. Given the dearth of attention paid to medium-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa, it is no surprise that few analysts have considered the link between the growth of medium-scale farms and patterns of deforestation. New approaches are needed to understand the links between medium-scale farm growth and deforestation. Because population-based household surveys tend to under-sample relatively large family farms and are therefore not a reliable source of information on medium-scale farms, farm-household surveys can employ stratified sampling or apply a census approach for larger farms. It is also important for these surveys to capture the agricultural ventures of urban-based or otherwise nonresident domestic investors.
Several new questions also urgently merit attention in future research on this as-yet overlooked topic. (1) What are the direct and/or indirect links between medium-scale farms and deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa? (2) How does this link vary across different agro-ecologies, commodities, population densities, or land tenure systems? (3) What conditions mitigate the impact of medium-scale farms on deforestation? (4) What policy options would be most effective at limiting deforestation among medium-scale farms or attenuating the indirect link between medium-scale farm growth and deforestation by others? (5) Do the potential policy options differ when this issue is framed, not in terms of deforestation, but in terms of native forest restoration or agroforestry?
We review the literature on the distribution of farm sizes in sub-Saharan Africa, trends over time, drivers of change in farm structure, and effects on agricultural transformation and present new evidence for seven countries. While it is widely viewed that African agriculture is dominated by small-scale farms, we show that medium-scale farms of 5 to 100 hectares are a nontrivial—and rapidly expanding—force that is influencing the nature and pace of food systems transformation in Africa. The increased prevalence of medium-scale holdings is associated with farm labor productivity growth and underappreciated benefits to smallholder farmers. However, the rise of African investor farmers is also contributing to the commodification of land, escalating land prices, and restricted land access for most local people. A better understanding of these trends and linkages, which requires new data collection activities, could help resolve long-standing policy debates and support strategies that accelerate agricultural transformation.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 14 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
The term “feminization of agriculture” is used to describe changing labor markets that pull men out of agriculture, increasing women's roles. However, simplified understandings of this feminization persist as myths in the literature, limiting our understanding of the broader changes that affect food security. Through a review of literature, this paper analyses four myths: 1) feminization of agriculture is the predominant global trend in global agriculture; 2) women left behind are passive victims and not farmers; 3) feminization is bad for agriculture; and 4) women farmers all face similar challenges. The paper unravels each myth, reveals the complexity of gendered power dynamics in feminization trends, and discusses the implications of these for global food security.
Cropland expansion is a common strategy for boosting agricultural production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) even though it often leads to economic, environmental, and social trade-offs. Ensuring sustainable cropland use and their management is critical for improving food security and preserving ecosystem services. To develop policies and approaches that support sustainable cropland management at national and sub-national scales, there is a need to understand the spatial distribution of cropland expansion (/loss), and any resultant changes in cropland productivity. This is especially important in SSA countries such as Malawi, where spatially explicit assessments of changes in cropland area and cropland productivity are lacking. To address this gap in Malawi, we used multi-source satellite data and socio-economic data, combined with satellite image classification and trend analysis, firstly to quantify spatial changes in cropland area and productivity, and secondly to evaluate potentially available cropland for future expansion. We found evidence of unsustainable cropland use in Malawi, which was demonstrated by: (a) rapid cropland expansion between 2010 and 2019 (increase 8.5% of land area), characterized by an expansion of crop farming into upland areas which indicate increased land scarcity in Malawi; (b) limited potential for future expansion, as approximately only 5% of the total land remained as potentially available cropland (corresponding to 4671 000 ha); and (c) an overall reduction in cropland productivity and a prevalence of increase in soil erosion. Our findings underscore the urgent need for taking measures to promote sustainable cropland use, including by protecting current cropland from further degradation (e.g. Southern Malawi) and improving cropland use planning (e.g. Northern Malawi).
We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the literature that tries to explain this stagnation through the lens of particular constraints to technology adoption. Ultimately, none of these constraints alone can explain these trends. New research highlights pervasive heterogeneity in the gross and net returns to agricultural technologies across Africa. We argue that this heterogeneity makes the adoption process more challenging, limits the scope of many innovations, and contributes to the stagnation in technology use. We conclude with directions for policy and what we feel are still important, unanswered research questions.
The future wellbeing of billions of rural people is interconnected with transforming food systems for equity, nutrition, environmental sustainability, and resilience. This article tackles three blind spots in the understanding of rural poverty and vulnerability: the narrow focus on extreme poverty and hunger that hides a much wider set of inequalities and vulnerabilities, insufficient recognition of the diversity of rural households, and an inadequate appreciation of the impact of rapid structural changes in markets, the physical environment, and the political economic context. A better understanding of these areas is necessary for imagining a new policy landscape that can align progress on rural poverty alleviation with a wider transformation of food systems. The article provides a framework for assessing the dynamics of rural wellbeing and food systems change. It looks at the viability of small-scale farming and the diversification of livelihood options needed to overcome rural poverty and inequality. The analysis suggests that the future prosperity of rural areas will depend on policy reforms to address market failures in the food system, which currently work against equity, good nutrition and sustainability. Investments will also be needed to enable rural economies to capture greater value from the food system, particularly in the midstream of food distribution, processing and services. The likely future scale and nature of rural poverty and inequality is such that improved social protection and humanitarian relief schemes that support those in crisis or being left behind will still be essential.
Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation – labor allocation and labor productivity – in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating their labor. These measures are similar to national accounts-based measures that are typically used to characterize structural change. However, because agricultural workers supply far fewer hours of labor per year than do workers in other sectors in all of the countries analyzed, productivity gaps shrink by half, on average, when expressed on a per-hour basis. Underlying the productivity gaps that are prominently reflected in national accounts data are large employment gaps, which call into question the productivity gains that laborers can achieve through structural transformation. Furthermore, agriculture’s continued relevance to structural change in Sub-Saharan Africa is highlighted by the strong linkages observed between rural non-farm activities and primary agricultural production.
While scholars long recognized the importance of land markets as a key driver of rural non-farm development and transformation in rural areas, evidence on the extent of their operation and the nature of participants remains limited. We use household data from 6 countries to show that there is great potential for such markets to increase productivity and equalize factor ratios. While rental markets transfer land to land-poor and labor-rich producers, their operation and thus impact may be constrained by policy restrictions. Their functioning may also be constrained by ill-defined or insecure rights that may arise from failure to fully compensate existing rights in cases of expropriation, a failure to implement more broadly land policies or to do so in a gender sensitive manner. Methodological and substantive conclusions are derived.
We use nationally representative household-level panel survey data in two neighboring countries in Southern Africa—Zambia and Malawi—to characterize the current status of rural land rental market participation by smallholder farmers, and their subsequent welfare impacts. Rural rental market participation is much higher in densely-populated Malawi than in lower-density Zambia, reflecting the role of land scarcity in driving rental market development. Consistent with previous literature, we find evidence that rental markets contribute to efficiency gains within the smallholder sector by facilitating the transfer of land from less-able to more-able producers, on average, in both countries. Furthermore, we find that rental markets serve to re-allocate land from relatively land-rich to land-poor households. We examine the impacts of participation on a number of welfare outcomes and find evidence for generally positive returns to renting in land in both countries, on average. However, our analysis also indicates that the returns to renting in land vary strongly with scale of production: tenants who produce more have larger returns to renting in, and many of the smaller producers who rent in do so at an economic loss. The impacts of renting out (i.e., participating in markets as landlords) are decidedly more mixed, with overall negative returns to landlords in Malawi and negligible returns to landlords in Zambia. The findings in this article highlight the need for researchers and policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa to stay attuned to how land rental market participation and its impacts evolve in the near future.
Medium-scale farms have become a major force in Malawi’s agricultural sector. Malawi’s most recent official agricultural survey indicates that these account for over a quarter of all land under cultivation in Malawi. This study explores the causes and multifaceted consequences of the rising importance of medium-scale farms in Malawi. We identify the characteristics and pathways of entry into farming based on surveys of 300 medium-scale farmers undertaken in 2014 in the districts of Mchinji, Kasungu and Lilongwe. The area of land acquired by medium-scale farmers in these three districts is found to have almost doubled between 2000 and 2015. Just over half of the medium-scale farmers represent cases of successful expansion out of small-scale farming status; the other significant proportion of medium-scale farmers are found to be urban-based professionals, entrepreneurs and/or civil servants who acquired land, some very recently, and started farming in mid-life. We also find that a significant portion of the land acquired by medium-scale farmers was utilized by others prior to acquisition, that most of the acquired land was under customary tenure, and that the current owners were often successful in transferring the ownership structure of the acquired land to a long-term leaseholding with a title deed. The study finds that, instead of just strong endogenous growth of small-scale famers as a route for the emergence of medium-scale farms, significant farm consolidation is occurring through land acquisitions, often by urban-based people. The effects of farmland acquisitions by domestic investors on the country’s primary development goals, such as food security, poverty reduction and employment, are not yet clear, though some trends appear to be emerging. We consider future research questions that may more fully shed light on the implications of policies that would continue to promote land acquisitions by medium-scale farms.
Numerous sources provide evidence of trends and patterns in average farm size and farmland distribution worldwide, but they often lack documentation, are in some cases out of date, and do not provide comprehensive global and comparative regional estimates. This article uses agricultural census data (provided at the country level in Web Appendix) to show that there are more than 570 million farms worldwide, most of which are small and family-operated. It shows that small farms (less than 2 ha) operate about 12% and family farms about 75% of the world’s agricultural land. It shows that average farm size decreased in most low- and lower-middle-income countries for which data are available from 1960 to 2000, whereas average farm sizes increased from 1960 to 2000 in some upper-middle-income countries and in nearly all high-income countries for which we have information.
Structured Abstract: Purpose: To understand how the unfolding diet transformation in East and Southern Africa is likely to influence the evolution of employment within its agrifood system and between that system and the rest of the economy. To briefly consider implications for education and skill acquisition. Design/methodology/approach: We link changing diets to employment structure. We then use alternative projections of diet change over 15-and 30-year intervals to develop scenarios on changes in employment structure. Findings: As long as incomes in ESA continue to rise at levels near those of the past decade, the transformation of their economies is likely to advance dramatically. Key features will be: sharp decline in the share of the workforce engaged in farming even as absolute numbers rise modestly, sharp increase in the share engaged in non-farm segments of the agrifood system, and an even sharper increase in the share engaged outside the agrifood system. Within the agrifood system, food preparation away from home is likely to grow most rapidly, followed by food manufacturing, and finally by marketing, transport, and other agrifood system services. Resource booms in Mozambique and (potentially) Tanzania are the main factor that may change this pattern. Research Implications: Clarifying policy implications requires renewed research given the rapid changes in Africa over the past 15 years. Program Implications: Improved quality of education at primary and secondary levels must be the main focus of efforts to build the skills needed to facilitate transformation.
The food security debate has focused largely on the farm sector and on trade. Relatively neglected or ‘hidden’ from mainstream
debate are the middle segments (processing, logistics, wholesale) of agrifood value chains in developing countries—and yet
this ‘midstream’ forms 30–40 per cent of the value added and costs in food value chains. The productivity of the midstream
is as important as farm yields for food security in poor countries. The article shows that over the past several decades the
middle segments have transformed quickly and surprisingly—with a huge volume expansion, a proliferation of small and medium
enterprises (SMEs), but also concentrating and multinationalizing (in some places and products), with technology change characterized
by capital-led intensification, and with the incipient emergence of branding and labelling and packaging, of new organizational
arrangements in procurement and marketing interfaces with farmers and retailers, and of private standards and contracts. Economic
policies of market and foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization, commercial and business climate regulations, hard and
soft infrastructure investment, and food safety laws, have paved the path to the expansion and shaped the transformation of
the important midstream segment of food value chains.
In sub-Saharan Africa, property relationships around land and access to natural resources vary across localities, districts, and farming regions. These differences produce patterned variations in relationships between individuals, communities, and the state. This book captures these patterns in an analysis of structure and variation in rural land tenure regimes. In most farming areas, state authority is deeply embedded in land regimes, drawing farmers, ethnic insiders and outsiders, lineages, villages, and communities into direct and indirect relationships with political authorities at different levels of the state apparatus. The analysis shows how property institutions – institutions that define political authority and hierarchy around land – shape dynamics of great interest to scholars of politics, including the dynamics of land-related competition and conflict, territorial conflict, patron-client relations, electoral cleavage and mobilization, ethnic politics, rural rebellion, and the localization and “nationalization” of political competition.
There is growing interest by development scholars to revisit the inverse farm size-productivity (IR) hypothesis to guide policy on land and agricultural development strategies. However, it is remarkable that existing empirical studies, particularly in sub Saharan Africa (SSA), have been derived from data with few farms outside the zero to ten-hectare range, yet their findings have been extrapolated beyond this range. Moreover, the definition of productivity has mainly been limited to yield or other land productivity measures to explore this highly contested hypothesis. Using data from Zambia, this study addresses these shortcomings and explores the reasons for potential differences in productivity within and between farm size categories, so as to provide practical guidance for relevant policy formulation. Results from our carefully constructed measures of productivity -- accounting for all production costs including less commonly considered costs such as family labor and fixed costs -- reveal that the farm size-productivity relationship is not uniform across the four measures of productivity. While relatively large farms (medium-scale farms) enjoy labor productivity efficiency, they do not exhibit a superior efficiency advantage over small farms when other productivity measures are considered. With a multiple set of considerations to be made in setting land and agricultural policy, these findings indicate that prioritizing unutilized land for medium- over small-scale farms on efficiency grounds are unwarranted.
Recent global policy attention to "land grabs" by international investors, while very important, has diverted attention away from two other processes that may be even more fundamentally affecting Africa's economic development trajectory: (i) the pace of land acquisitions by medium-scale African investors, who now control more land than large-scale foreign investors in each of the three countries examined in this study (Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia); and (ii) the overall impact of land transactions on the viability of African governments' agricultural strategies, which for the most part remain predicated on smallholder-led development and will require the expansion of cropland by smallholder households. In Zambia and Ghana, the total farmland controlled by holdings between 5 and 100 hectares now exceeds the amount of land held by smallholder farms under 5 hectares. Farmland holdings in all three countries have become substantially more concentrated since the mid-1900s. The rapid rise in the number of farms in the 5 to 100 hectare category represents a relatively hidden but revolutionary change in farm structure, reflecting increased investment in land by relatively wealthy urban-based individuals. Only in Ghana has the rise of medium-scale farms been significantly associated with successful graduation of small-scale farmers into medium-scale stature. Continued rapid alienation of land to medium- and large-scale investors is likely to exacerbate localized land scarcity, restrict the potential of smallholder-led development, and put unrealistic pressure on the non-farm economy to absorb Africa's rapidly rising labor force.
Agricultural Distortions Working Paper 56, December 2007 This is a product of a research project on Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, under the leadership of Kym Anderson of the World Bank's Development Research Group. It appears as Ch. 1 in Anderson, K. and W.A. Masters (eds.) Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Africa, Washington DC: World Bank, forthcoming December 2008. Revised versions of the country case studies (Agricultural Distortions Working Paper Nos. 36-47 and 50-55) also appear as chapters in that volume. The authors are grateful for the distortions estimates provided by authors of the focus country case studies, for assistance with spreadsheets by, and for funding from World Bank Trust Funds provided by the governments of Ireland, the Netherlands (BNPP) and the United Kingdom (DfID). This Working Paper series is designed to promptly disseminate the findings of work in progress for comment before they are finalized. The views expressed are the authors' alone and not necessarily those of the World Bank and its Executive Directors, nor the countries they represent, nor of the institutions providing funds for this research project.
This study uses panel data from 1,142 Kenya smallholder households over four survey periods to examine the determinants of participation in land rental markets and to quantify the impact of renting land on households' income and poverty status. Overall, the study finds that land rental markets in Kenya promote farm productivity and significantly raise the incomes of land-constrained farm households. However, these percentage increases in the incomes of renters are often not large in absolute terms, and hence participation in rental markets alone is not sufficient to meaningfully affect rural poverty rates.
This study examines current land access and livelihood choices of rural youth in Southern Ethiopia. We found that youth in rural south have limited access to agricultural land because of land scarcity and land market restrictions. We hypothesize that this forces the youth to abandon agriculture in search of other livelihoods. Our study shows that only 9% of the rural youth plan to pursue agriculture as their livelihood. We also found a sharp increase in youth outmigration in the past six years. Our econometric analyses confirm that lack of land access is forcing the youth away from an agricultural livelihood.
Over the last decade, Zambia has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of medium-scale “emergent farms” cultivating 5–20 ha of land. This study analyzes the factors underpinning this growth. We find that the growth of emergent farmers in Zambia is primarily attributable to land acquisition by salaried urbanites and by relatively privileged rural individuals. We found little evidence to support the hypothesis that the rise of emergent farmers primarily represents a process of successful accumulation by farmers who began farming with less than 5 ha of land, a situation faced by more than 95% of farming households. We argue that these outcomes are the result of Zambia’s land administration and agricultural spending policies. Rising concentration of landholdings in Zambia raises serious questions about the potential of current agricultural growth to act as a vehicle for broad based economic growth and poverty reduction.
Sub-Saharan Africa is typically regarded as land abundant, and previous efforts to estimate the true extent of potentially available cropland (PAC) have largely affirmed this perception. Such efforts, however, have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic profitability and other constraints to expansion. This paper re-estimates PAC for Africa in a more explicit economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of assumptions, using recent geospatial data. Existing PAC estimates for Africa are shown to be highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access, and are moderately influenced by the use of alternative data sources. The region’s underutilized land resources are concentrated in relatively few countries, many of which are fragile states. Between one-half and two-thirds of the region’s surplus land is currently under forest cover; conversion of forests to cropland would entail major environmental costs. Most of the continent’s unexploited land resources are located far from input and output markets, limiting their economic attractiveness. In the long run, improvements in infrastructure and agricultural productivity and the growth of hinterland towns will enhance the economic returns to cropland expansion. In the short to medium term, however, the potential for profitable smallholder-based cropland expansion in most African countries is likely to be much more limited than it is typically perceived to be.
The agricultural economics literature provides various estimates of the number of farms and small farms in the world. This paper is an effort to provide a more complete and up to date as well as carefully documented estimate of the total number of farms in the world, as well as by region and level of income. It uses data from numerous rounds of the World Census of Agriculture, the only dataset available which allows the user to gain a complete picture of the total number of farms globally and at the country level. The paper provides estimates of the number of family farms, the number of farms by size as well as the distibution of farmland by farm size. These estimates find that: there are at least 570 million farms worldwide, of which more than 500 million can be considered family farms. Most of the world’s farms are very small, with more than 475 million farms being less than 2 hectares in size. Although the vast majority of the world’s farms are smaller than 2 hectares, they operate only a small share of the world’s farmland. Farmland distribution would seem quite unequal at the global level, but it is less so in low- and lower-middle-income countries as well as in some regional groups. These estimates have serious limitations and the collection of more up-to-date agricultural census data, including data on farmland distribution is essential to our having a more representative picture of the number of farms, the number of family farms and farm size as well as farmland distribution worldwide.
A large and increasing proportion of agricultural growth in Africa must come from continuous gains in land productivity in areas of high population density and hence with already relatively high yields. What that requires is analogous to the green revolution in Asia. Several features differentiate the African situation. Those include greater diversity in cropping pattern including a historically larger and more widespread tropical commodity export sector. The physical infrastructure in rural Africa is far inferior to that of most Asian countries. While the greater diversity of agriculture calls for a larger and more diverse institutional structure the reality is that the research systems, the ancillary education systems to spread innovation and the rural financial systems are generally greatly inferior to those of Asia at the beginning of the green revolution. Ethiopia’s record of a steady six to seven percent growth for agriculture and nearly halving of rural poverty demonstrates that with the right policies and investments a very poor country starting with poor physical and institutional infrastructure can bring a major contribution from agriculture growth to increased GDP and reduced poverty. As in Asia, the bulk of accelerated agricultural growth will come from small commercial farmers. They have sufficient farm income to reach or exceed the poverty level. Those are farms with, depending on the country, as little as 0.75 hectares to a few tens of hectares of land. They comprise up to half the rural population and produce on the order of 70–80 percent of agricultural output. They are in general not poor. The poor have inadequate land to reach the poverty level, initially with much underemployment, and with substantial non-farm employment. The primary driver of poverty reduction is the small commercial farmer spending on the order of half of increased income on nontradable, employment intensive goods and services from the rural non-farm sector.
Rapid growth of emerging economies, growing interest in biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels and recent volatility in commodity prices have led to a marked increase in the pace and scale of foreign and national investment in land-based enterprises in the global South. Emerging evidence of the negative social and environmental effects of these large-scale land transfers and growing concern from civil society have placed ‘global land grabs’ firmly on the map of global land-use change and public discourse.
Yet what are the processes involved in these large-scale land transfers? Based on a review of policy documents, interviews with government officials from diverse sectors and discussions with customary leaders and affected communities, this paper provides a comparative analysis of legal and institutional frameworks and actual practices associated with large-scale land acquisitions in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.
Results suggest that in many cases it is not a global ‘land grab’ driven only by the private sector but also a supply-driven process in which governments and local (customary) entities alike are playing an active role – often bolstered by an unwavering faith in the role of foreign private sector investment to drive national and local economic development and by new opportunities for extracting rents from the land alienation process. Results also suggest that customary rights are seldom adequately protected in the context of land negotiations despite widespread legal recognition of these rights. Furthermore, results are strikingly similar within the four countries despite a wide variety of legal and institutional frameworks for protecting customary rights and regulating large-scale land acquisition. This raises an analytical challenge that we discuss in the final section as a means of distilling implications for governance.
Urbanization and economic development have made global agriculture increasingly differentiated. Many hinterland farms remain largely self-sufficient, while farms closer to markets become increasingly specialized and linked to agribusinesses. Both semi-subsistence and commercialized farms remain family operations, with the few successful investor-owned farms found mainly for livestock and crops processed on site such as sugar, tea and oil palm. Meanwhile, demographic transition drives rapid change in farm sizes, with less land available per family until non-farm opportunities expand enough to absorb all new workers. Asia as a whole has now passed this turning point so its average farm sizes can rise, while in Africa average farm sizes will continue to fall for many years, posing special challenges in both hinterland and commercialized areas.
Agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains low and is falling farther behind other regions of the world. Although agricultural output growth in the region has accelerated since the 1990s, this has been primarily due to resource expansion rather than to higher productivity. Yet there is evidence that agricultural productivity growth has improved in some countries. Enhanced productivity is correlated with investments in agricultural research, wider adoption of new technologies, and policy reforms that have strengthened economic incentives to farmers. Many of the technological improvements have come from the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centers. Benefits from the CGIAR in SSA are estimated to be over $6 for each $1 invested. Returns to national agricultural research are also robust, at least for large countries. But overall investment in agricultural research has remained low, and increases in research capacity will likely be necessary to significantly accelerate agricultural growth in the region. Other constraints to agricultural productivity include government policies that reduce earnings in the farm sector, the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus, and armed conflict within and between countries.
As suggested by Engel's Law, this paper finds a strong and robust negative correlation between GDP per capita and the share of the labour force employed in agriculture. We exploit this relationship to project rates of exit from agriculture by 2015 for different regions of the world plus China and India. The results show that Asian countries have or soon will reach a tipping point in their agricultural transformation when the absolute size of the agricultural workforce will begin to decline and large numbers of agricultural workers can be expected to leave agriculture by 2015. China alone may have to accommodate an exit of between 50 and 70 million workers between 2000 and 2015, equivalent to 5-7 million per year. India is still adding to the size of its agricultural workforce, but this will change if the country continues to grow at the GDP growth rates attained in the 1990s. In that case India is projected to pass its tipping point and lose 6 million agricultural by 2015. This is equivalent to 386,000 workers per year.
Almost a decade after the rise in land demand triggered by the 2007/08 commodity price boom, most potential target countries still lack access to relevant information on a routine basis. This has reduced their ability to effectively regulate, monitor, and attract responsible investors rather than speculators in their effort to increase agricultural productivity and have benefits accrue to the host communities. The example of Ethiopia shows how building on existing data collection efforts allows to address this challenge and help formulate policies that guide the path forward. Using the 2013/14 nationally representative smallholder and commercial farm surveys, we find that (i) for most crops commercial farms’ yields are higher than smallholders’, with a peak in the 10–20-ha bracket; (ii) commercial farms create few permanent jobs (with just one permanent job per 20 ha) and use only 55% of the land transferred to them; and (iii) after a peak in 2008, formation of new commercial farms is down to the pre-2007 levels. These findings imply that having reliable data on commercial farms, collected on regular intervals, could generate feedback loops for policy formulation and also provide vital information to assess and take regulatory actions aimed at improving the performance and attracting higher levels of investment to the sector.
Although land plays a crucially important role in economic development and structural transformation, the causes and consequences of the evolution of farming land have received scant attention in recent decades. In this article, I document global and regional changes in aggregate agricultural land use, per capita land use, and average farm sizes. The spatial distribution of global farming land has changed dramatically, with developed countries substantially reducing their share of global agricultural land, and land-abundant developing countries substantially increasing their share. In per capita terms, we see a rather different pattern, with average farm sizes increasing in rich and more commercialized agricultural systems, and generally declining or staying constant in poorer and less commercialized systems. These outcomes are the result of complex processes that are not always well understood. I conclude the article by suggesting new, or neglected, areas of research that would facilitate a better understanding of these critically important developments.
While the Asian food economy has been experiencing significant transitions, it is widely believed that little transformation has occurred in farm land operation. However, the recent rapid emergence of middle and large-size farms in many regions of China is striking, as is the increase in size of operational units. The overall goal of this article is to understand small-scale farm transformation in China based on a unique dataset surveyed in Northeast and North China. The results show that the institutional innovation through establishing land transfer service centers to promote land rental markets and reduce transaction costs, policy support to speed up land consolidation, and farm mechanization services are major driving forces in the recent evolution of China's farm operations. The article concludes with policy implications on small-scale farming transformation in China and the rest of world and identifies research issues for further study.
Since the 2008 world food crisis a surge of land grabbing swept Africa, Asia and Latin America and even some regions of Europe and North America. Investors have uprooted rural communities for massive agricultural, biofuels, mining, industrial and urbanisation projects. 'Water grabbing' and 'green grabbing' have further exacerbated social tensions. Early analyses of land grabbing focused on foreign actors, the biofuels boom and Africa, and pointed to catastrophic consequences for the rural poor. Subsequently scholars carried out local case studies in diverse world regions. The contributors to this volume advance the discussion to a new stage, critically scrutinizing alarmist claims of the first wave of research, probing the historical antecedents of today's land grabbing, examining large-scale land acquisitions in light of international human rights and investment law, and considering anew longstanding questions in agrarian political economy about forms of dispossession and accumulation and grassroots resistance. Readers of this collection will learn about the impacts of land and water grabbing; the relevance of key theorists, including Marx, Polanyi and Harvey; the realities of China's involvement in Africa; how contemporary land grabbing differs from earlier plantation agriculture; and how social movements-and rural people in general-are responding to this new threat. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
This article utilizes available spatial data to quantify the amount of customary land in Zambia and to examine the prospects for agricultural commercialization in those areas, in terms of population densities, market access conditions, and agro-ecological suitability. We find that approximately 51–54 percent of Zambia’s land remains under customary tenure and, by implication, available for smallholder utilization. However, populations are clustered in 5 percent of the customary land with reasonably good market access conditions. Good market access conditions are generally located in regions with high levels of rainfall variability due to historical infrastructure investments. High density, market accessible regions are witnessing a rapid increase in land commodification, land alienation, and declining fallow rates. Land and economic development policies must be attentive to the changing dynamics in customary land areas in order to ensure the future viability of the smallholder farming sector.
The past decade has seen several African countries increasing their agricultural growth, a trend largely underpinned by increases in land area cultivated instead of productivity increases. Meanwhile, scholars debate whether Africa should pursue a strategy of large-scale or smallholder farms, paying little attention to a special group of smallholder farmers who have transitioned to become medium- and large-scale farmers. This study, therefore, begins to analyze this group of farmers, using qualitative data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in Ghana. We analyze their characteristics, ingredients of farm-size expansion, and commercialization. Numerous insights are gained and hypotheses formulated for future research. One important insight is that with the right attitude, exposure, and discipline, it is possible for smallholder farmers to increase their farm size and commercialize regardless of initial farm enterprise choice. However, to transition, initial farm size and farming system appear critical, with farmers in areas of low population density and flat topography more likely to acquire larger farming land. The transition, however, occurs gradually over 20 to 30 years, with mean annual land acquisition rates ranging from 0.3 to 24.3 acres per year. In the transition process, large- and medium-scale farmers are found to increase their use of modern farm inputs (such as fertilizer and high-yielding seed varieties) and agricultural technologies (such as tractors and processing machinery) and appear more productive than smallholder farmers. Additional quantitative analyses using representative survey data are, however, needed to substantiate the observed qualitative patterns and to further understand the trajectories of farm size expansion and the implications for agricultural productivity and commercialization.
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Land reforms are laws that are intended, and likely, to cut poverty by raising the poor’s share of land rights. That raises questions about property rights as old as moral philosophy, and issues of efficiency and fairness that dominate policy from Bolivia to Nepal. Classic reforms directly transfer land from rich to poor. However, much else has been marketed as land reform: the restriction of tenancy, but also its de-restriction; collectivisation, but also de-collectivisation; land consolidation, but also land division.
In 1955-2000, genuine land reform affected over a billion people, and almost as many hectares. Is land reform still alive, for example in Bolivia, South Africa and Nepal? Or is it dead and, if so, is this because it has succeeded, or because it has failed? There has been massive research on land reform and this book builds on some surprising findings.
Small farms’ share in land is rising in most of Asia and Africa.
This is not driven (as widely claimed) by growth in rural population or farm productivity, but by the relative efficiency of small farms, and in some cases by land reform.
Whether land reform helps the poor depends not only on land transfers, but at least as much on its effects through employment, non-farm activity, GDP growth and distribution, as well as the village status and power of the poor.
Avoidance, evasion and even distortion of land reform laws sometimes advance their main aims.
Liberalisation and its accompaniments (such as supermarkets) can be powerful friends or fatal foes of small farms and land reform.
This book will be of great interest to students, researchers and consultants working on agriculture, farm organisation, rural development and poverty reduction, with special emphasis on developing countries.