permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Want to double world food production? Return the land to small farmers!
https://theecologist.org/2014/nov/22/want-double-world-food-production-return-land-small-farmers?fbclid=IwAR1Ua8RLmFSnyLlUrBzzzPUxnLL0b_GtLLyuuL1PTqQrKGDyfR_P6mKnYWQ

Want to double world food production? Return the land to small farmers!
GRAIN
<https://theecologist.org/profile/grain>
| 22nd November 2014
[image: A typical small farm in Russia of the kind that provides much of
the nation's food. Photo: Vmenkov CC.]
All over the world, small farmers are being forced off their land to make
way for corporate agriculture, writes GRAIN - and it's justified by the
need to 'feed the world'. But it's the small farmers that are the most
productive, and the more their land is grabbed, the more global hunger
increases. We must give them their land back!

The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming
<http://www.fao.org/family-farming-2014/en/>. As part of the celebrations,
the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released its annual '*State
of Food and Agriculture <http://www.fao.org/publications/sofa/2014/en/>*',
which this year is dedicated to family farming.

Family farmers, FAO say, manage 70-80% of the world's farmland and produce
80% of the world's food.

But on the ground - whether in Kenya, Brazil, China or Spain - rural people
are being marginalised and threatened, displaced, beaten and even killed by
a variety of powerful actors who want their land.

A recent comprehensive survey <http://www.grain.org/e/4929> by GRAIN,
examining data from around the world, finds that while small farmers feed
the world, they are doing so with just 24% of the world's farmland - or 17%
if you leave out China and India. GRAIN's report also shows that this
meagre share is shrinking fast.

How, then, can FAO claim that family farms occupy 70 to 80% of the world's
farmland? In the same 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.

*Just what is a 'family farm'*

The confusion 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. (They admit there is no precise definition. Various countries,
like Mali, have their own.)

Thus, 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'.

What about sprawling Hacienda Luisita, owned by the powerful Cojuanco
family in the Philippines and epicentre of the country's battle for
agrarian reform since decades. Is that a family farm?

Looking at ownership to determine what is and is not a family farm masks
all the inequities, injustices and struggles that peasants and other small
scale food producers across the world are mired in.

It allows FAO to paint a rosy picture and conveniently ignore perhaps the
most crucial factor affecting the capacity of small farmers to produce
food: lack of access to land. Instead, the FAO focuses its message on how
family farmers should innovate and be more productive.

*Small farmers are ever more squeezed in*

Small food producers' access to land is shrinking due a range of forces.
One is that 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, rapeseed and sugar cane. And this trend is
accelerating.

In the next few decades, experts predict that the global area planted to
oil palm will double
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901108001196>, while
the soybean area will grow by a third
<http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/ap106e/ap106e.pdf>. These crops don't feed
people. They are 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, to 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 beautiful - and productive*

The paradox, however, and one of the reasons why despite having so little
land, small producers are feeding the planet, is that small farms are often
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.

Another reason why small farms are the feeding the planet is because they
prioritise food production. They tend to focus on local and national
markets and their own families. In fact, much of what they produce doesn't
enter into trade statistics - but it does reach those who need it 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 simply
not be able to carry on.

The data show that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands
is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every
day.

According to one UN study <http://tinyurl.com/nmxyf87>, 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 utilise biodiversity, maintain ecosystems and local economies,
while multiplying and strengthening meaningful work opportunities and
social cohesion in rural areas.

Agrarian reforms can and should be the springboard to moving in this
direction.

*To double global food production, we must support the small farmers*

Experts and development agencies are constantly saying that we need to
double food production in the coming decades. To achieve that, they usually
recommend a combination of trade and investment liberalisation plus new
technologies.

But this 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 agricultural policies to support them.

The message is clear. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of
small farmers and make the struggle for genuine and comprehensive agrarian
reform central to the fight for better food systems worldwide.

FAO's lip service to family farming just confuses the matter and avoids
putting the real issues on the table.