The world’s food supplies are at risk because farmland is becoming rapidly concentrated in the hands of wealthy elites and corporations, a study has found.
The UN says that small farmers grow 70 percent of the world’s food, but a new analysis of government data suggests that the land which they control is shrinking every year, as megafarms and plantations squeeze them onto less than 25 percent of the world’s available farmland, according to international land use group Grain.
These megafarms are less efficient in terms of the amount of food they produce per area of land, the report says.
“Small farms have less than a quarter of the world’s agricultural land, or less than 20 percent excluding China and India. Such farms are getting smaller all the time and if this trend persists they might not be able to continue to feed the world,” said the report, which draws on government statistics and calls for a stop on land grabs by corporations.
The report suggests that the single most important factor in the drive to push small farmers onto ever smaller parcels of land is the worldwide expansion of industrial commodity-crop farms.
“The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing,” it says.
The land area occupied by soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane has quadrupled over the past 50 years, with more than 140 million hectares of fields and forests taken over by plantations of these four crops since the 1960s — approximately the same area as all the farmland in the EU.
“What we found was shocking,” Grain’s Henk Hobbelink said. “If small farmers continue to lose the very basis of their existence, the world will lose its capacity to feed itself. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems.”
Big farms have been getting bigger nearly everywhere, with rising numbers of small and medium-sized farmers going out of business in the past 20 years, the report’s authors write. Belgium, Finland, France, Germany and Norway have each lost about 70 percent of their farms since the 1970s, while Bulgaria, Estonia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have each lost more than 40 percent of their farms from 2003 to 2010. Poland alone lost almost 1 million farmers between 2005 and 2010.
“Within the EU as a whole, over 6 million farms disappeared between 2003 and 2010, bringing the total number of farms down to almost the same level as in 2000, before the inclusion of 12 new member states with their 8.7 million new farmers,” according to the report, which Grain released along with international peasant organization Via Campesina.
The concentration of land ownership is not occurring just in Europe, it can be seen on every continent. Argentina lost more than one-third of its farms in the two decades from 1988 to 2008. Between 1997 and 2007, Chile lost 15 percent of its farms, with the biggest ones doubling their average size, from 7,000 to 14,000 hectares per farm, while the US has lost 30 percent of its farms in the past 50 years. Across the pond in the UK, the number of very small farms has almost tripled, while the number of very large farms has more than quintupled.
In addition, most farms have been getting smaller over time due to factors such as population pressure and lack of access to land.
In India, the average size of a farm roughly halved from 1971 to 2006, while in China the average area of land cultivated per household fell by 25 percent between 1985 and 2000. In Africa, average farm size is also falling.
The report says land reform is urgently needed if enough food is to be grown to feed everyone.
“What we see happening in many countries ... is a kind of reverse agrarian reform, whether it’s through corporate land grabbing in Africa, the recent agribusiness-driven coup d’etat in Paraguay, the massive expansion of soybean plantations in Latin America, the opening up of Burma [Myanmar] to foreign investors, or the extension of the EU and its agricultural model eastward,” Hobbelink said.
“In all of these processes, control over land is being usurped from small producers and their families, with elites and corporate powers pushing people onto smaller and smaller land holdings, or off the land entirely into camps or cities,” he added.
The report says that the takeover of small farmers’ land is now accelerating, with nearly 60 percent of this land-use change occurring in the past 20 years. The report estimates that 90 percent of all farms worldwide are “small,” spread across 2.2 hectares on average.
The report also found that small farmers are often twice as productive as large farms and more environmentally sustainable.
“Although big farms generally consume more resources, control the best lands, receive most of the irrigation water and infrastructure ... they have lower technical efficiency and therefore lower overall productivity. Much of this has to do with low levels of employment used on big farms in order to maximize return on investment,” the report said.
“Our data [suggests] that if all farms in Kenya had the current productivity of the country’s small farms, Kenya’s agricultural production would double. In Central America and Ukraine, it would almost triple. In Hungary and Tajikistan it would increase by 30 percent. In Russia, it would be increased by a factor of six,” the report says.
“Beyond strict productivity measurements, small farms also are much better at producing and utilizing biodiversity, maintaining landscapes, contributing to local economies, providing work opportunities and promoting social cohesion, not to mention their real and potential contribution to reversing the climate crisis,” it concluded.
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