Double Food Production: Return Land to Small Farmers
Around the world, small farmers are being forced off their land to make way for corporate agriculture. Yet, the more land is taken away from small farmers, the more global hunger increases.
The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization released its annual ‘State of Food and Agriculture’, which was dedicated to family farming.
Family farmers manage 70 to 80% of the world’s farmland and produce 80% of the world’s food. Yet family farmers from around the globe are being marginalized, threatened, displaced, beaten, and even killed by powerful people who want their land.
A survey by GRAIN, examining data from around the world, finds that while small farmers feed the world, they are doing so with only 24% of the world’s farmland, or 17% if you leave China and India out. The report also shows that this small share is shrinking rapidly.
How, then, can FAO claim that family farms occupy 70 to 80% of the world’s farmland? In the report, FAO claims that only 1% of all farms in the world are larger than 50 hectares, and that these few farms control 65% of the world’s farmland, a figure much more in line with GRAIN’s findings.
What is family farming?
The confusion about family farming stems from the way FAO deal with the concept of family farming, which they roughly define as any farm managed by an individual or a household.
This means a huge industrial soya bean farm in rural Argentina, whose family owners live in Buenos Aires, is included in FAO’s count of ‘family farms’.
Looking at ownership to determine what is and is not a family farm masks all the inequities, injustices and struggles that small scale food producers across the world are mired in.
This outlook allows FAO to paint a more positive picture, conveniently ignoring the most crucial factor affecting the capacity of small farmers to produce food: lack of access to land.
Small farmers
Small food producers have very little access to land and it is shrinking rapidly. Because of population pressure, farms are getting divided up amongst family members. Another is the vertiginous expansion of monoculture plantations.
In the last 50 years, a staggering 140 million hectares – the size of almost all the farmland in India – has been taken over by four industrial crops: soya bean, oil palm, grapeseed, and sugar cane. This is a trend that is accelerating.
In the next few decades, experts predict that the global area planted to oil palm will double, while the soybean area will grow by a third. These crops don’t feed people. They are only grown to feed the agro-industrial complex.
Other pressures pushing small food producers off their land include the runaway plague of large-scale land grabs by corporate interests. In the last few years alone, according to the World Bank, some 60 million hectares of fertile farmland have been leased, on a long-term basis, a foreign investors and local elites, mostly in the global South.
While some of this is for energy production, a big part of it is to produce food commodities for the global market, instead of family farming.
Small is better
The paradox, however, and one of the reasons why despite have so little land, small producers are feeding the planet, is that small farms are actually more productive than large ones.
If the yields achieved by Kenya;s small farmers were matched by the country’s large-scale operations, the country’s agricultural output would double. In Central America, the region’s food production would triple. If Russia’s big farms were as productive as its small ones, output would increase by a factor of six.
Small farms are feeding the planet because they prioritize food production. They focus on local and national markets and their own families. The food they produce goes to those who need it the most: the rural and urban poor.
If the current processes of land concentration continue, then no matter how hard-working, efficient and productive they are, small farmers will not have the ability to carry on.
The data shows that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry each day.
According to one UN study, active policies supporting small producers and agro-ecological farming methods could double global food production in a decade and enable small farmers to continue to produce and utilize biodiversity, maintain ecosystems and local economies, while multiplying and strengthening meaningful work opportunities and social cohesion in rural areas.
Agrarian reforms are necessary for the health of our world.
If we want to double global food production, we must support small farmers.
Experts and development agencies are always saying that we must double our food production in the coming decades. In order to achieve that, we must empower small farmers.
Experts usually say that in order to double food production, we must use trade and investment liberalization with new technologies. Yet this technique will only empower corporate interests and create more inequality. The real solution is to turn control and resources over to small producers themselves and enact agriculture policies to support and protect them.
We urgently need to put land back in the hands of small family farmers and make the struggle for genuine and comprehensive agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems worldwide.
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