This paper considers a range of issues relating to the
current status and future trends affecting smallholder
agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, including the likely
transitions that lie ahead for this sector. Smallholder
agriculture has long been the dominant economic
activity for people in the sub-Saharan region, and it
will remain enormously important for the foreseeable
future. The sector is highly heterogeneous and includes
farms that are quite commercial in orientation as well as
those that are rooted in quasi-subsistence livelihoods.
This heterogeneity is often ignored in discussions of
the importance of smallholder agriculture. Too often,
these discussions argue that the sheer size of the sector
implies that it must play a key role in growth and poverty
reduction. The evidence here is mixed, however. The
size of the sector does not, by itself, serve as evidence
that public investment should focus on smallholder
agriculture. Much more evidence is needed about the
relative social benefits – measured appropriately – of
investing in smallholder agriculture in comparison to
other possible investments.
Discussions about the future of smallholder agriculture
also tend to take a static view; but vast changes lie
ahead, emanating from shifts in technology, markets,
climate and the global environment. These forces can
produce dramatic changes in the structure of agriculture
over relatively short periods of time. The changes in
structure will almost certainly not involve any major
shift away from family-based production units, which
dominate farming worldwide – a fact that economists
understand as the result of incentive and information
problems that arise in agriculture. But it would not be
implausible for larger family farms to emerge in some
parts of sub-Saharan Africa, relying on mechanization
and taking advantage of emerging market opportunities.
Smallholders may be displaced by the growth of urban
middle-class populations and the concomitant rise
of supermarkets and commercial supply chains; they
may also be displaced by continued growth in exportoriented
agriculture.
Policies have an important role to play in shaping the
conditions under which smallholder systems evolve. The
emergence of larger farms is not intrinsically bad; but in
some cases in the rest of the world, consolidation has
occurred through direct expropriation of smallholders or
through parallel processes resulting in the alienation of
their land rights. Smallholders may require protection via
policy in this process, as well as effective social safety
nets that secure their well-being.