80% of world’s food produced by family farmers, UN research finds

Despite renewed interest in industrial agriculture by investment banks and sovereign wealth funds, more than 80% of the world’s food is still produced by family farmers, according to new UN research.

More than 500m family farms manage between 70% and 80% of the world’s agricultural land The State of Food and Agriculture 2014 reported. Some analysts, however, worry that family farms are under increasing pressure from speculators, as prices for land rise due to a growing world population.

Speculative capital is moving into agriculture, threatening family farmers, said Devlin Kuyek, a researcher with the international organisation GRAIN. “It’s a structural change, you have companies who weren’t investing in agriculture now jumping in: Hedge funds, pension funds, different elites and governments,” Kuyek told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Only 1% of the world’s farms are larger than 50 hectares, but this small group controls 65% of the world’s agricultural land, the FAO report said.

Farms smaller than one hectare account for 72% of all farms, but control only 8% of agricultural land.

“The highly skewed pattern of farm sizes at the global level largely reflects the dominance of very large farms in high-income and upper-middle-income countries and in countries where extensive livestock grazing is a dominant part of the agricultural system,” the report said.

“Land is somewhat more evenly distributed in the low and lower-middle-income countries.”

Small and medium-sized farms tend to have higher crop yields per hectare than larger operations, the report said “because they manage resources and use labour more intensively”.

Analysts worry that large agribusiness firms could undermine productivity trends on smaller farms.

“A lot of the new players, including hedge funds, don’t have much of a track record on agriculture,” Kuyek said. They are more interested in buying land from small farmers and then flipping it to other investors when prices rise.

Unsurprisingly, wealthy countries have higher yields per hectare than poor countries, as they have better access to capital and technology and use labour more productively.

Global food production needs to grow by 60% before 2050 to meet the anticipated demand from an expected population of 9bn, FAO director general José Graziano da Silva said last month.

The UN has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming.