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. All over the world, small farmers are being forced off
their land to make way for corporate agriculture and it's justified by the need
to 'feed the world'. 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.
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.
What is a 'family farm'? The FAO roughly define them as any
farm managed by an individual or a household. 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'. As would be, the sprawling Hacienda Luisita,
owned by the powerful Cojuanco family in the Philippines and epicentre of the
country's battle for agrarian reform since decades. 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.
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 for local communities’ needs.
Much of what the small family farmer produces doesn't enter into trade
statistics - but it does reach those who need it most: the rural and urban
poor.
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. 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.
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