The Rise of Large Farms in Land Abundant Countries: Do They Have a Future?
By K. Deininger, D. Byerlee. 2011
505 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Increased levels and volatility of food prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to broad-based development in the long term. Based on a historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the dominance of owner-operated farm structures and ways in which these may change with development. The amount of land that could potentially be available for expansion and the level of productivity in exploiting available land resources are used to establish a country-level typology. The authors highlight that an assessment of the advantages of large operations, together with information on endowments, can provide input into strategy formulation at the country level. A review of recent cases of land acquisition reinforces the importance of the policy framework in determining outcomes. It suggests that transparency and contract enforcement, recognition of local land rights and ways in which they can be exercised, attention to employment effects and technical viability, and mechanisms to re-allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs are key areas warranting the attention of policy makers.
Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c474d6955224314692d0eddbbcdfa79cd0f308e8
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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- New investment, old challenges. Land deals and the water constraint in African agriculture (2012, background): “Deininger and Byerlee (2011) observe that the largest-scale agricultural producers in Argentina own neither land nor farm machinery but are constituted by farm management companies that lease land from landowners and contract machinery services from specialist operators.”
- Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture (2019, background): “48 Harvesting Prosperity and Deininger and Byerlee (2012) point to size economies in acquiring information and accessing services for farm, financial, risk, and marketing management as factors favoring the growth of mega-farms in some developing and transition countries.”
- Institutional Innovation and Policy Support to Facilitate Small-Scale Farming Transformation in China (2016, background): “The notion of “small is beautiful” had been largely recognized after Chaianov (1966) discovered the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity (Lipton, 1993; Dyer, 1996; Deininger and Byerlee, 2012).”
- Labour Market Effects of Large-Scale Agricultural Investment: Conceptual Considerations and Estimated Employment Effects (2017, background): “…large farms have been largely negative, recent changes in the context conditions have given reason to believe that large farms may have a future (Deininger & Byerlee, 2012) andmay actually contribute to increasedwelfare and poverty reduction due to employment creation (Deininger & Xia, 2016;…”