Proposed Plenary Session on “Toward a Holistic Framework for Harmonizing Land Policies with Food
Security, Employment and Poverty Reduction Objectives”
Planning in the Dark: What Do We Know about Remaining Available Cropland in Sub-Saharan Africa,
Jordan Chamberlin T.S. Jayne, Derek Headey
Sub-Saharan Africa is typically regarded as land abundant, and previous efforts to estimate the true
extent of potentially available cropland (PAC) have largely affirmed this perception. Such efforts,
however, have largely focused on production potential and have underemphasized economic
profitability and other constraints to expansion. This paper re-estimates PAC for Africa in a more explicit
economic framework that emphasizes the returns to agricultural production under a variety of
assumptions using newly available geospatial data. Existing PAC estimates for Africa are shown to be
highly sensitive to assumptions about land productivity and market access, and are moderately
influenced by the use of alternative data sources. However, the following conclusions about remaining
PAC are relatively robust. Over 90 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s underutilized land resources are
concentrated in nine countries, many of which are fragile states. Land pressures among the other 45
Sub-Saharan Africa countries range from moderate to high. Moreover, almost a third of the region’s
surplus land is currently under forest cover; conversion of forests to cropland would entail major
environmental costs. The variations in land scarcity across countries are also found to apply on a more
disaggregated level: 1% of the region’s arable rural lands contain 17% of its rural population, while 20%
of its arable land holds 74% of its rural population.
Most of the continent’s unexploited land resources are located far from input and output markets,
limiting their economic attractiveness. In the long run, improvements in infrastructure and agricultural
productivity and the growth of hinterland towns will enhance the economic returns to cropland
expansion. In the short to medium term, however, the potential for profitable smallholder-based
cropland expansion in most African countries is likely to be much more limited than it is typically
perceived to be.
Africa’s rural population is expected to rise by 48 percent between 2015 and 2050. Over 330 million
young Africans will enter the job market between 2012 and 2025, 200 million of whom will come from
rural areas. The non-farm economy will be able to absorb at best only two-thirds of this rapidly growing
labor force. Hence, the availability of land for expansion of family farming – combined with the pattern
of public investments and enabling policies ‒ will determine whether a high proportion of young
Africans are gainfully employed in agriculture or join the ranks of the jobless, constituting political risks
for African leaders.
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Review of the Inverse Farm Size-Efficiency Relationship in Africa: Methodological Issues and Empirical
Evidence from Three Countries, Milu Muyanga, Chewe Nkonde, Godwin Debrah, T.S. Jayne
Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing a meteoric rise in medium-scale farms. In most countries analyzed to
date, the farmland controlled by holdings between 5 and 100 hectares exceeds the amount of land
controlled by small-scale farms. Many African countries have been experiencing sustained agricultural
growth over the past decade too – is it a coincidence?
Is the rise in medium-scale farms driving agricultural productivity growth? We explore this question by
revisiting the inverse farm size – productivity relationship (IR) hypothesis. Recent studies upholding the
IR hypothesis in Africa cover a relatively narrow range of farm sizes -- generally between 1 and 10
hectares (e.g., Carletto et al. 2011; Larson et al. 2012; Ali and Deininger 2014). However, findings from
such studies cannot address the most salient policy questions related to desired land allocation patterns
given the rapid rise of farms between 10 and 100 hectares. Tests of the IR hypothesis in Africa covering
a wide range of farm scales take on even greater policy importance in light of recent analysis
questioning the viability and even the objectives of promoting small-scale agriculture in Africa (e.g.,
Dercon and Gollin 2014; Collier and Dercon 2014).
Our paper makes two important contributions to this debate. First, we explore the IR hypothesis over a
much wider range of farm sizes by including a statistically representative sample of farms between 1 and
100 hectares. By doing so, our analysis can inform current policy discussions about how governments
should allocate unutilized/underutilized land consistent with their national policy objectives. Second,
while a number of studies have conventionally measured productivity as either crop yield and or the net
value of crop production per unit area of land, our study is based on a wider set of productivity
measures including the net value of total farm output per family labor unit, net output value per unit of
land, and total factor productivity. We then examine the consistency or sensitivity of our findings to this
broader and more nuanced set of measures. Our study also has the advantage of accounting for fixed
costs when computing the cost of production, which may produce results different from prior studies
that have typically ignored fixed production costs (and which therefore may have overstated the
productivity of farms with high fixed costs).
This study synthesizes findings across three countries: Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia (other countries are in
the process of being analyzed and will be included in a future version of this paper). This study adds to
the growing literature on the IR hypothesis in SSA with a focus on a much wider range of farm sizes that
are of major interest and relevance in Africa. The study has three specific objectives. First, we assess
the relationship between farm size and productivity using rich data sets collected on medium-scale
farms (ranging from 5 to 100 hectares) to be analytically compatible with that collected on small-scale
farms through LSMS/ISA-type surveys. We specifically use three measures of productivity accounting
for both variable and fixed costs: net value of total crop production per unit of area planted (land
productivity), net value of crop production per adult labor unit (labor productivity) and cost of
production per metric ton of maize produced (cost effectiveness). Finally, we use econometric
techniques to explore the reasons for potential differences in measures of production efficiency within
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and between farm-size categories and consider the broader implications of these findings for
agricultural and land policies.
Are land policies contributing to or detracting from the achievement of food security, employment,
and poverty reduction objectives? T.S. Jayne, Jordan Chamberlin, Milu Muyanga, Munguzwe
Hichaambwa
Following Bruce Johnston and John Mellor’s pioneering work starting in the 1960s, it has been widely
accepted that “bi-modal” and “unimodal” patterns of landholdings in developing countries would
produce very different multiplier/employment effects, and thereby lead to differential rates of
economic transformation and poverty reduction. In general, a more equitable pattern of farmland
holdings and other productive assets was believed to produce not only higher rates of agricultural
growth (e.g., Vollrath, 2007) but also greater employment effects in the non-farm economy and faster
progress in reducing poverty (Ravallion and Datt, 2002). This paper explores the validity of these
stylized facts about Asia in a number of African countries.
This study uses longitudinal micro data to assess the relationship between landholding inequality,
patterns of employment and structural transformation, and changes in the distribution of income
(including various measures of income poverty). We also test the relationship between lagged non-farm
and farm income growth at the local level and household labor productivity in agriculture and non-farm
employment. Alternative measures of land concentration at the district level are consistently negatively
associated with farm labor productivity among households within that district in two of the three
countries examined. Other factors constant, households in districts at the 10th percentile of landholding
inequality had 24% higher net farm revenues per adult member than households in districts at the 90th
percentile of landholding inequality. We also find that agricultural and non-farm growth affect each
other in different ways. Preliminary findings indicate that lagged district-level farm income growth has a
significant positive effect on non-farm labor productivity among households located within that district,
whereas lagged district-level non-farm income growth has little effect on the farm labor productivity of
households located within the district.
While these findings are preliminary, they may hold important implications for African governments’
land policies. Many countries are experiencing increasing competition over their remaining land
reserves. African governments are seeking guidance over the rules governing how that remaining land
should be allocated. The cross-country review of African evidence of the “inverse farm size-efficiency
hypothesis” in the companion presentation in this session indicates that small farms are generally more
efficient users of farm land, while larger farms obtain much higher levels of net farm revenue per unit of
family labor. Because of their small scale, very few smallholder households will be very far from the
poverty line unless they also reply on non-farm activities for a significant part of their livelihoods. But
there are at least two findings from this study that governments may consider when setting land policy
frameworks for allocating remaining arable land. If less concentrated landholding and farm structures
contribute to agricultural labor productivity growth, and agricultural labor productivity growth
contributes to non-farm job creation and expansion (as suggested by our preliminary findings), this
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would appear to uphold Johnston and Mellor’s immensely important findings from Asia that a more
unimodal agricultural systems with relatively low levels of land concentration may promote economic
transformation and growth linkages more effectively than more concentrated forms of land ownership.
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