Africa: World’s Small Family Farmers Produce a Third of the World’s Food
The world’s smallholder farmers produce around a third of the world’s food, according to detailed new research by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Five of every six farms in the world consist of less than two hectares, operate only around 12 percent of all agricultural land, and produce roughly 35 percent of the world’s food, according to a study published in World Development.
Smallholders’ contributions to food supply varies enormously between countries, with the share as high as 80 percent in China and in the low single-digits for Brazil and Nigeria. The analysis highlights the importance of improved and harmonized data to obtain a more granular and accurate picture of agricultural activities for policy makers.
“It is imperative that we avoid the use of the terms family farms and small farms interchangeably; the majority of family farms are small, but some are larger and even very large,” said Marco Sánchez, Deputy Director of FAO’s Agrifood Economics Division and co-author of the article with Sarah Lowder and Raffaele Bertini, who were with FAO during the research.
In 2014, a flagship report from FAO calculated that nine out of 10 of the world’s 570 million farms were family farms and produced around 80 percent of the world’s food. The new research – “Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?” -aims to clarify the prevalence of farm sizes.
The updated estimates are that there are more than 608 million family farms around the world, occupying between 70 and 80 percent of the world’s farmland and producing around 80 percent of the world’s food in value terms. The new research teases out estimates of farm size: around 70 percent of all farms, operating on just 7 percent of all agricultural land, are less than one hectare, while another 14 percent of farms, controlling 4 percent of the land, are between one and two hectares, and another 10 percent of all farms, with 6 percent of the land, are between two and five hectares.
Meanwhile, the largest one percent of farms in the world – greater than 50 hectares – operate more than 70 percent of the world’s farmland, with nearly 40 percent of agricultural land found on farms larger than 1000 hectares.
