Structural transformation or elite land capture? The growth of “emergent” farmers in Zambia
188 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Over the last decade, Zambia has witnessed a rapid increase in the number of medium-scale “emergent farms” cultivating 5–20ha of land. This study analyzes the factors underpinning this growth. We find that the growth of emergent farmers in Zambia is primarily attributable to land acquisition by salaried urbanites and by relatively privileged rural individuals. We found little evidence to support the hypothesis that the rise of emergent farmers primarily represents a process of successful accumulation by farmers who began farming with less than 5ha of land, a situation faced by more than 95% of farming households. We argue that these outcomes are the result of Zambia’s land administration and agricultural spending policies. Rising concentration of landholdings in Zambia raises serious questions about the potential of current agricultural growth to act as a vehicle for broad based economic growth and poverty reduction.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science, Urban Studies
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa7349be9f925cf92be53be39f0d46c785bd9b7c
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
In Urban Studies
Citations in the corpus
- Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium-scale farms (2016, background): “…in the number of medium-scale farms, defined here as farm holdings between 5 and 100 hectares, many of whom live in urban areas (Jayne et al. 2014; Sitko and Jayne, 2014).2 We contend that most analyses of African agriculture using population-based surveys may mask potentially major changes in…”
- Are medium‐scale farms driving agricultural transformation in sub‐Saharan Africa? (2019, background): “…“emergent” farmers, and at a minimum suggest the possibility that some of the national farmer unions have been captured by these interests (Sitko & Jayne, 2014).5 Because investor farmers tend to be more educated and have more extensive social connections with traditional and state…”
- Small farms and development in sub-Saharan Africa: Farming for food, for income or for lack of better options? (2021, background): “These investor farmers are urban professionals or rural elite households (Sitko & Jayne, 2014) who already control 20–50% of the total farmland in Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia.”
- Agricultural Land Conversion, Land Economic Value, and Sustainable Agriculture: A Case Study in East Java, Indonesia (2018, background): “Economically, land is the most efficient wealth-generating asset for farmers [1,2] and is also an important factor for economic growth [3].”