Want To Double World Food Production? Return The Land To Small Farmers!

Want to double

world food production?

Return the land

to small farmers !

GRAIN

| 22nd November 2014

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.

As part of the celebrations, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released its annual 'State of Food and Agriculture',
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 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 o
f 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, while the soybean area
will grow by a third.

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, 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.

https://theecologist.org/2014/nov/2...ZrRzngq1-nUH3hfY4edrEL2XG5dJeTlh-ScmwtmeSAtwA