Agricultural Policies

Paper

The Family Farm in a Globalizing World. The Role of Crop Science in Alleviating Poverty

International Food Policy Research Institute, 2020 Discussion Paper 40, Washington, June(2005)

Family farms are operated units that derive most labor and enterprise from the farm family. They have proved resilient, even in the rich world, and small family farms dominate agriculture in East and South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet these are areas of concentrated poverty: in 2004, they contained over 92 percent of the world’s 1.1 billion “dollarpoor” (households consuming less than one U.S. dollar’s worth of a world average consumption bundle, per person per day, at 1993 purchasing-power-parity values). Kickstarting the reduction of mass dollar poverty normally requires accelerated growth of staples output on family farms. Whether this is feasible and sufficient depends on national political and economic incentives and institutions to create and apply appropriate crop science, land and water access, and open markets in the context of appropriate state-led provision of public and merit goods. Many Asian and Latin American countries have gone a long way on this path, but they still have far to go. Much of Africa has hardly started. Progress is made possible by new science and by a crucial demographic shift—but is handicapped by rich-world policies towards agriculture, trade, and science.

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