Should African Rural Development Strategies Depend on Smallholder Farms? An Exploration of the Inverse-Productivity Hypothesis

By D. F. Larson, K. Otsuka, Tomoya Matsumoto, Talip Kilic. 2012

207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases. This paper explores a research design conundrum that encourages researchers who study the relationship between productivity and scale to use surveys with a narrow geographic reach, when policy would be better served with studies based on wide and heterogeneous settings. Using a model of endogenous technology choice, the authors explore the relationship between maize yields and scale using alternative data. Since rich descriptions of the decision environments that farmers face are needed to identify the applied technologies that generate the data, improvements in the location specificity of the data should reduce the likelihood of identification errors and biased estimates. However, the analysis finds that the inverse productivity hypothesis holds up well across a broad platform of data, despite obvious shortcomings with some components. It also finds surprising consistency in the estimated scale elasticities.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca03e1d614bcffcaadf821bda2b9eadb371bc709

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

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Citations in the corpus

Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium-scale farms (2016, background): “The IR literature generally shows that small farms are more efficient per unit land in Asia and Africa (e.g., Lipton, 2009; Larson et al., 2012; Carletto et al., 2013).15 However, the IR literature generally compares farms of a limited farm size range, generally between 1 and 10 hectares and to our…”
The Effect of Land Access on Youth Employment and Migration Decisions: Evidence from Rural Ethiopia (2018, unknown): “Further, as farms intensify agricultural production to overcome land constraints (Ali and Deininger 2015; Barrett et al. 2010; Bellemare 2013; Carletto et al. 2013; Headey et al. 2014; Larson et al. 2014; Sheahan and Barrett 2014), labor-saving technologies may substitute for youth farm labor (Busto”
Is There a Farm Size–Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture? Evidence from Rwanda (2014, methodology): “Farm household survey data from four counties (Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda) also point towards a negative relationship between farm size and output (Larson et al. 2012).”
Investigating the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Uganda (2015, background): “The majority of female-managed plots in Sub-Saharan Africa are located within maleheaded households, the typical structure of which is fundamentally different from the typical structure of female-headed households.”
The Number, Size, and Distribution of Farms, Smallholder Farms, and Family Farms Worldwide (2016, background): “…body of literature on land productivity by farm size has shown a phenomenon referred to as the inverse land productivity relationship, i.e. that in a number of countries smaller farms have higher crop yields than do larger ones (Barrett, Bellemare, & Hou, 2010; FAO, 2014b; Larson et al., 2014).”
The roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in the context of population growth and land use intensification in Africa (2014, background): “, 2008), Malawi (Lunduka et al., 2008) and Uganda (Deininger and Mpuga, 2008) indicate that informal land rental markets reallocate land from land-rich to land-poor households.”
On the Structural Transformation of Rural Africa (2017, background): “Nonetheless, the best available evidence from SSA still indicates a strong inverse relationship between farm size and crop yields (Barrett, Bellemare and Hou 2010; Carletto, Savastano and Zezza 2013; Larson et al. 2014; Bevis and Barrett 2016).”
The Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity in Agriculture: Evidence from Maize Production in Northern China (2019, unknown): “This phenomenon is also found in Sub-Saharan Africa (Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou 2010; Carletto, Savastano, and Zezza 2013; Larson et al. 2014; Desiere and Jolliffe 2018).”
Is rainfed agriculture really a pathway from poverty (2014, result): “This is consistent with recent work by Larson et al. (2012) for Mozambique, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Zambia, which shows an inverse relationship between farm size and yield, reflecting variation in soil fertility, declining levels of labour, and sparse use of chemical fertilizer as farm size…”