Do peasants feed the world?
There is a common claim that peasants feed the majority of people in the world but is it correct?
There is an oft-repeated claim that peasants/small farmers1 feed 70-80% of the world’s people. It’s a common argument made by proponents of agroecology, food sovereignty and peasant agriculture. Last year, Hannah Ritchie, of Our World in Data, published a blog critiquing this figure. Instead, she argued that small farmers supply around 29% of the world’s food, on around 24% of the world’s land. I’ve spent some time trying to work out who’s correct.
Hannah Ritchie bases her argument on a definition of smallholder farmer as 2ha or less, which she states is the universal standard. She makes this assertion without any discussion of varying categorisations used to designate what a small farm is. Although she does admit this classification is arbitrary. In reality, a small farm is defined in academic (and official government) literature in various ways. For example, this paper in the journal Land Use Policy explores several ways we might categorise a small farm. They state, ‘there is no universally accepted definition of a small farm’. The paper highlights categorisations which includes structural size, herd size, labour force, market participation, and farmland area. EUROSTAT and FAO use 5ha or less, as do other publications. I presume Ritchie uses 2ha because the paper she references does so but why does she suggest this is the universally accepted standard? In fact, the paper she utilises notes that the threshold for defining a small farm varies. The truth is the classification used changes based on geographical context and research purpose. Ritchie’s claim that 2ha is the universal standard is thus misleading.
If we use 5ha, as EUROSTAT and UN FAO do (sometimes up to 10ha even), we find that small farms produce 46% of the world’s food, as measured by kilocalories, and according to the data set that Hannah Ritchie uses, which is a paper by Ricciardi et al. Why 5ha and not 10ha (or 20ha), is for another discussion. All this is a clear example though of the inherently politicised nature of data and statistics, countering naive ideas of positivism.
Peasants feed the world
Let’s move onto the claim that 70-80% of the world’s food is produced by peasants.
Most references I have found lead back to the 2009 report by the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group). Sometimes via a 2017 version. But that one references the 2009 version. That 2009 report doesn’t provide strong evidence.
The reference provided as “evidence” for this claim goes back to a 2008 report (report is in German, I’ve used Adobe translate into English) by Uwe Hoering, of the Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst (EED), The Church/Evangelical Development Service. It states that small farms cultivate 80% of the world’s agricultural land. The report gives no evidence or workings out. It also directly contradicts other claims made by those in the world of agroecology (e.g that peasant produce 70% of the world’ food on 30% of the land). The 2009 ETC Group report doesn’t come close to justifying its own claims. My guess it that in the global south this is likely very true, in the global north, much less so. But the figure is presented as global, not as geographically specific. Part of the confusion stems from conflation of the terms “family farm”, “small farm”, and “peasant”. This is a mistake made in the 2017 report by ETC Group. I’ll explore these distinctions in more detail in another post.
As far I can tell, this figure, which has been touted by all sorts of organisations, including UN FAO, doesn’t have a strong basis. Unless someone can point me elsewhere or find something to evidence it? If not then we need to stop using it. Ironically, the data provided by Hannah Ritchie in her blog article is actually really supportive of small farms, as outlined above, and it’s backed up by peer-review. We find that 59% of the world’s food is provided by farms of less than 20 hectares, on less than half the world’ agricultural land. This suggests small farms can indeed feed the world, despite capitalist propaganda.
Peasants (expansively defined to include all small farmers and pastoralists) do indeed feed the world. We’re looking at more than half of the world’s calories for human consumption being provided by peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk. That’s impressive. Although we must also accept the fact that larger farms also provide a substantial amount of food. And if the growing trend of land grabs continues (as well as small farm attrition for other reasons), this proportion from larger farms is likely increasing. We can argue that peasants feed the world, but let’s do so with solid data and clear arguments. And more importantly, work on new strategies for increasing that proportion.
Quick postscript: I’ve had a couple of comments on social media that have rightly highlighted that the data in the graph, extrapolated by Ritchie from the Ricciardi et al paper, only includes crops for human food, but doesn’t include say livestock products. Globally animal products are an important source of nutrition. This number would need to include the food produced by hundreds of millions of pastoralists across the globe, as well as the animal products produced on small mixed farms. The paper/graph was about smallholders and crop production, but the ETC reports use the term peasant. But as the graph is focusing on calories, and as livestock products tend to make up less of a diet in calories (but a lot in nutrition), would it lead to a huge increase in %? Part of the problem with the debate is the conflation in the use of terms that occurs, which I continued in this piece, in order to keep its aim narrow and focused. I will look to explore this in the future and tease some of these terms apart (“small farmer”, “family farmer”, “peasant”, and “pastoralist”). An obvious point here that can be missed when we fetishise statistics and data is that data does not speak for itself.
For the purposes of simplicity I’m gunna use these interchangeably and unproblematically for this piece