Fewer farms, older hands

Farms are declining across the world, and farmers are ageing. The average age of a farmer in the world is 55 years, closer to the retirement age. At the same time, there seems to be less interest among the youth to take up farming. Going by data with the International Labour Organization, in 1991 agriculture accounted for 43 per cent of global employment. By 2023, it reduced to 26 per cent. According to Census 2011, every day 2,000 farmers in India give up farming. Arnold Puech Pays d’Alissac, president of the World Farmers’ Organisation, has a warning, rather an alarm call: “A lot of people will be out of the job, I expect, retired, very soon.”

Farming is a foundational economic activity. It is also unique in many ways. Its base—the land—is a finite resource, with multiple competing uses. Farming critically depends on the climate, which is changing, thereby disrupting crop cycles. It has limits to growth, even as demand for food is rising. It remains labour-intensive and labour-centric, and fewer people are inclined to enter the profession. In short, our food production system is facing unprecedented challenges.

At the core of this challenge is the availability of land. Do we have plenty of land to divert for farming? Rather, do we need to have more farms to meet food demand? Currently, a third of the planet’s land is used for cultivation and this share has expanded over thousands of years. Hannah Ritchie, deputy editor and science outreach lead at Our World in Data, who has analysed global agricultural land data, states, “This expansion of agricultural land has now come to an end. After millennia, we have passed the peak, and in recent years global agricultural land use has declined.” She calls this “a historic moment in humanity’s relationship to the planet.”

So, what might the future landscape of farms around the world look like? There is a dearth of reliable data on the number of farms globally, and little by way of definitive projections. Zia Mehrabi of the Better Planet Laboratory, University of Colorado, US, is the first to attempt such a calculation. He tracked the number and size of farms year-on-year from the 1960s and projected trends through to 2100. His findings, published in Nature Sustainability, forecast that the number of farms worldwide “will drop from 616 million in 2020 to 272 million in 2100”. The main reason, he notes: “As a country’s economy grows, more people migrate to urban areas, leaving fewer people in rural areas to tend the land.”

The decline in farms is expected to continue till the end of this century, particularly in high-income, upper-middle-income and lower middle-income groups. In low-income countries, the number of farms is projected to increase until around 2070, after which it too will decline. However, during this time, the average farm size will double. “If global agricultural area is kept constant, the global average farm size will increase by around 10 per cent by 2050, then double by the end of the century,” the study says.

Is this trend a threat to our food security? “Currently, we have around 600 million farms feeding the world, and they are carrying 8 billion people on their shoulders,” says Mehrabi. “By the end of the century, we’ll likely have half the number of farmers feeding even more people. We really need to think about how we can have the education and support systems in place to support those farmers,” he adds. But he also raises other concerns—ones that point to potential loss of biodiversity and disruptions in food supply. An earlier study of his found that “the world’s smallest farms make up just 25 per cent of the world’s agricultural land but harvest one-third of the world’s food.” Despite ongoing consolidation of farms and gains in productivity, such a steep decline in the total number of farms is likely to impact food supply.