The agricultural world is undergoing a historic change: the number of farms coming down sharply while size is increasing. Does it imply consolidation of farming in a few hands?
Protestors during the 2024 Farm Protests at the Shambu Border in north India. photo: Dhruval Parekh / CSE The vocation of agriculture is undergoing a civilisational change. Settled agriculture is a purely human-initiated vocation catering to food needs, though just over 12,000 years old. When started, it was just a need-based activity. It has evolved into a multi-trillion dollar vocation, with 600 million farms currently feeding over 8 billion humans on the planet. The change that this sector has been undergoing since the 1980s is going to peak in the next 30 years. What is this change?
The world will no more see the creation of farms. Instead, a consolidation of farms will set in. For a country like India (and for most of the poor and developing countries in Asia, Africa and North America), this is a change that we never imagined, and thus, never prepared for the consequences. For instance, the number of operational farm holdings in India has been increasing continuously since 1970-1971. India had 71 million landholdings in 1971. According to the latest Agriculture Census 2015-2016, these have fragmented into 146.5 million holdings. This is why India’s agri-policy focuses on the consequence of lowering yield due to the small size of lands that have to feed over a billion people. This explains the unilateral focus on increasing productivity, at any cost and consequence. This is going to move in the diametrically opposite direction, if the global trend is translated into the Indian scenario.
Recently, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder conducted a first-of-its-kind study. The study published in the journal Nature Sustainability analysed the number and size of farms in 180 countries from 1969-2013. They used the trends in this period to forecast the situation in 2100. The study forecast that the number of farms in the world will dip by half in 2100 but the size of farms would double by this time. In the US and Western Europe, this trend has been well settled since decades. “Early 20th century agriculture was labour intensive, and it took place on many small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half the U.S. population lived. Agricultural production in the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a smaller number of large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U.S. population lives,” says the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture. The number of farms in the US has been continuously declining since 1982; in 2007, the country had 2.20 million farms that dipped to 2 million in 2022. The average farm size, however, increased from 440 acres in the 1970s to 446 acres in 2022.
The University of Colorado Boulder study forecasts that farm creation will stop and consolidation will set in by 2050 in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean. Sub-Saharan Africa will witness the change towards the end of the 21st century. In these regions, agriculture remains the dominant employer, with the majority of farmers being small by landholding measure. Even if the farm number remains unchanged, the study concluded, less and less people will own land and farm.
What does this mean for us? There are three key consequences to this change. First, the future trend will result in consolidation of farming into a few hands, most probably big corporations or a few powerful individuals. Second, big farms mean monoculture and the diversity of crops would shrink. This will mean the nutrition diversity will slim down, impacting overall food and nutrition security. Third, the food production will also be impacted. Currently, small farms accounting for one-fourth of the world’s agricultural land produce one-third of food. In case of big farmers /corporations owning and farming the most, the sector will be more susceptible to various risks. “If you’re investing in today’s food systems with around 600 million farms in the world, your portfolio is pretty diverse. If there’s damage to one farm, it’s likely the impact to your portfolio will be averaged out with the success of another. But if you decrease the number of farms and increase their size, the effect of that shock on your portfolio is going to increase. You’re carrying more risk,” Zia Mehrabi, the lead author of the study, was quoted as saying in a newspaper.
Agriculture still has a significant share in the economy of poor and developing countries. In countries like India, agriculture’s capacity to reduce poverty (and also hunger) has been much more than any other sectors like services and industry. If the sector gets consolidated with less and less farmers, what would happen to this? Will non-farm sectors ever be capable of absorbing millions moving out of agriculture? The larger question this trend raises: whether our food security will also be now controlled by a few producers?
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