Are small farms really more productive than large farms? Or is this shonky reasoning? Is productivity the only measure?
There’s never a good time to be poor but it’s especially tough right now with extortionate rises in the price of basic food stuffs. In the past year, the prices of grains and vegetable oils have nearly doubled, and the price of rice has jumped by about half. No wonder people are rioting in Egypt and Haiti.
The UN Food Summit in Rome reached a limited deal last week (the sticking point was the thorny issue of biofuels). In a small concession to public opinion, the world’s leaders even toned down the menu - that is they didn’t serve foie gras and lobster like in 2002. How considerate!
The presence of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe was politically contentious – after all, the man has presided over the collapse of the country’s agricultural industry and widespread famine. But George Monbiot, writing in today’s The Guardian, says that Mugabe was right on one thing: small farms are more productive than large farms. Monbiot, for the record, did not say that he supported Mugabe and was at pains to point out that Mugabe has actually done the opposite of “democratising” land ownership.
Monbiot’s argument was more nuanced than that and he cites some quite interesting research. He writes:
“Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.”
I would be interested to know whether the studies looked at the size of the farm overall or the amount of land under cultivation. The latter would be a better basis of comparison. I have travelled to a lot of developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and particularly to coffee growing regions. Small farms are of course socially very good but environmentally it’s less clear. A well-managed plot using a well-designed organic farming system such as permaculture, is both productive and kind on the earth. But subsistence farms, where land pressure is intense, have a terrible impact.
In many parts of the world, deforestation is intense because land pressure is so great. Small holders cut down trees because they need the land to grow food – I saw many farms in Uganda that had been carved out of the forest in the past 20 years for example. By contrast, medium and large farms vary in their impact on the environment. Some of them use very destructive farming practices indeed, and they tend to use more chemicals on average. However, in my experience they often incorporate pockets of natural forest as well – I’ve seen this everywhere from Uganda to Nicaragua.
On a bigger farm, not every square inch of land is under cultivation, which makes the farm less productive per hectare but is good from the point of view of conservation. In order to tackle climate change and preserve biodiversity, we need to save forest, even forest fragments, so this quite important. As for whether a small or a large farm is more productive per square metre under cultivation, I don’t know the answer but I would like to see that research.
Another thought – presumably, if small farms are more productive than big farms, then gardens are more productive still. Another reason to have a garden, if you were not already persuaded by this previous post.