Download or read book The relationship between farm size and efficiency in south african agriculture written by Johan Van Zyl and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1995 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Relationship Between Farm Size and Efficiency in South African Agriculture written by Colin Thirtle and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: November 1995 Commercial farms in South Africa could become significantly more efficient if they became smaller. The government could encourage that trend by removing policies and distortions that favor large over small farms. Drawing on international evidence, van Zyl, Binswanger, and Thirtle discuss the sources of economies of scale. Using representative farm-level survey data for South Africa's six major grain-producing areas and one irrigation area for the period 1975 - 90, they: * Describe the structure of South African agriculture, detailing the distribution of farm sizes and results from previous studies of farm-size efficiency. * Analyze the evidence on scale efficiency in the former homelands. * Analyze the relationship between farm size and efficiency in commercial farming and discuss how policy affects that relationship. Clearly policy has a crucial impact on the relationship between farm size and efficiency. They find that: * Farms in the former homelands seem to be scale-inefficient, which is unsurprising, given the historical lack of access to support services and infrastructure, policies that discriminate against farmers in the homelands, and the extremely fragmented and limited land-use rights of farmers there. * There is an inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency in the commercial farming areas for the range of farms analyzed, regardless what method is used. This inverse relationship seems to become stronger and more accentuated as policy distortions -- which tend to favor large farms over small ones -- are removed. * Large farms tend to use more capital-intensive methods of production, while smaller farms are more labor-intensive. And managerial ability seems to be better on larger farms. There is an inverse relationship between farm size and efficiency in South African agriculture despite South Africa's history of policies favoring relatively large mechanized farms. Clearly, efficiency gains could be significant if commercial farms became smaller. To encourage that trend, policies and distortions that favor large farms over small should be removed. This paper -- a product of the Office of the Director, Agriculture and Natural Resources Department -- is part of a larger effort in the department to design appropriate strategies for land reform.

Download or read book The Relationship between Farm Size and Efficiency in South African Agriculture written by Thirtle and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Is There a Farm Size Productivity Relationship in African Agriculture Evidence from Rwanda written by Daniel Ayalew Ali and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether the negative relationship between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and examines potential causes of the inverse productivity relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level data from Rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale crop production function and a strong negative relationship between farm size and output per hectare as well as intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications. The inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with family labor valued at shadow wages are used, but disappears if family labor is rather valued at village-level market wage rates. These findings imply that, in Rwanda, labor market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors, seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.

Download or read book Farming Systems and Poverty written by John A. Dixon and published by Food & Agriculture Org.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

Download or read book The Relationship Between Farm Size and Productivity in South African Commercial Agriculture written by Godfrey Ndala Tshilumbay and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Farm Size performance Relationship written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The report assesses the relationship between land size and performance in the developing world. Farm and plot performance data were gathered through an exhaustive review of mostly peer-reviewed publications over the last 22 years (1997-2018) in English, French and Spanish. Following the screening of the material, a selection of 472 papers was reviewed, creating a pool of over 1100 individual observations or cases. Both specific and general agricultural economics studies using land area as explaining variable in their performance estimates were explored. Three groups of indicators (i.e. gross output, net value and efficiency) were analysed according to area size in an effort to capture global indicators of performance, beyond the too often used partial indicators (e.g. yield or gross value per area). Analyses based on farm data show that there has been a revival of interest on the question particularly on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) agriculture, given the increased rate of specific literature publications. The review looked for evidence documenting the various possible relationships that could relate the size of an agricultural holding to its performance (i.e. direct, inverse and non-monotonic). The main explanations shaping the size-performance relationship were explored, namely: the contextual rural input market (i.e. labour, land, input, etc.) imperfections but also methodological shortcomings of the existing literature. On the one hand, inverse relationship (IR) is clearly the dominant type of interaction between cropped land area and agricultural performance using the most common performance indicator group used (gross output mainly populated by studies using yield or total value). However, the economic literature has clearly demonstrated that the use of this type of indicator of performance is generally ill-advised in assessing the farm size performance relationship. On the other hand, the less frequent but more global productivity indicator group of "efficiency" and "net values" do not report such a clear-cut relationship. As a matter of fact, cases using "efficiency" performance indicators are more likely to record a direct relationship than IR. Moreover, the emergence of non-monotonic relationships needs to be highlighted showing that the relationship may not be constant. Tests conducted on the existing material clearly associate a number of rural factor market imperfections with the prevalence of the IR. Hence, IR is more likely to be a symptom of imperfections and lack of opportunities for rural labour than an advantage of a given type of farms. In turn, methodological reasons explored also indicate that narrower ranges of farm size in a given study increase the reporting of IR, particularly in SSA and when analysing partial performance indicators. From being an established stylised "fact" in development economics, IR may not be taken for granted because of empirical complexities in accurately assessing it but also because there is evidence that such a relationship depends on the performance indicator analysed. Hence, IR may not necessarily be considered systematic, continuous, stable through time, irreversible or universal. From a broader development intervention perspective, and based on the review results, the recommended performance indicators (i.e. net value and efficiency) show that larger farms tend to be more performant than the smaller farms. However, this does not suggest the abandonment of smallholders by policy as there are both critical economic and social justifications for the direct improvement of the living conditions of a large share of the population in most of the developing world. It rather advocates a revisited and expanded development role for medium sized ones.

Download or read book The Role of Smallholder Farms in Food and Nutrition Security written by Sergio Gomez y Paloma and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book discusses the current role of smallholders in connection with food security and poverty reduction in developing countries. It addresses the opportunities they enjoy, and the constraints they face, by analysing the availability, access to and utilization of production factors. Due to the relevance of smallholder farms, enhancing their production capacities and economic and social resilience could produce positive impacts on food security and nutrition at a number of levels. In addition to the role of small farmers as food suppliers, the book considers their role as consumers and their level of nutrition security. It investigates the link between agriculture and nutrition in order to better understand how agriculture affects human health and dietary patterns. Given the importance of smallholdings, strategies to increase their productivity are essential to improving food and nutrition security, as well as food diversity.

Download or read book Farm Size and Productivity written by Sara Savastano and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper proposes a new interpretation of the farm size-productivity relationship. Using two rounds of the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey, and drawing on earlier work on five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper shows that the relationship between farm size and productivity is neither monotonic nor univocal. Most previous studies that tested the inverse farm size-productivity relationship used ordinary least squares estimation, therefore reporting parameter estimates at the conditional mean of productivity. By expanding these important findings to consider the entire distribution of agricultural productivity, the analysis finds sign switches across the distribution, pointing to a "direct-inverse-direct" relationship. Less productive farmers exhibit an inverted U-shape relationship between land productivity and farm size, while more productive farmers show a U-shape relationship that reverses the relationship. In both cases, the relationship points toward a threshold value of farm size; however, the threshold is a minimum for the less productive farmers and a maximum for the more productive ones. To the left of the threshold, for very small farmers, the relationship between productivity and farm size is positive; for the range of middle farm size, the relationship is negative; and to the right of the threshold, the relationship is direct (positive) again. From a policy perspective, these findings imply that efficiency-enhancing and redistributive land reform should consider farm size in the proper context of the present and potential levels of agricultural productivity. The results and their policy implications underline the relevance of the most recent efforts of the international development community to collect more reliable georeferenced data on farm size and agricultural productivity.

Download or read book The Relationship Between Farm Size and the Technical Inefficiency of Production of Wheat Farmers in Eastern Orange Free State South Africa written by Sipho A. Ngwenya and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book South African Agriculture at the Crossroads written by Colin G. Thirtle and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2000 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the current state of South African agriculture and makes attempts at reform in context by looking at the past. It begins by explaining the historical process, which led to a dualistic agricultural sector, and the current policy process that attempts to resolve the inequalities and distortions. The policy discussion draws on the main part of the book, which is an empirical investigation of the measurement and explanation of efficiency and productivity change, which depend on technologies developed by R & D.

Download or read book Policy Distortions and Agricultural Performance in the South African Economy written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An evolving paradigm of agricultural mechanization development How much can Africa learn from Asia written by Diao, Xinshen, ed. and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.

Download or read book West African Agriculture and Climate Change written by Abdulai Jalloh and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first of three books in IFPRI's climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa -- Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo -- and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. West Africa's population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. West Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer. Through the use of hundreds of scenario maps, models, figures, and detailed analysis, the editors and contributors of West African Agriculture and Climate Change present plausible future scenarios that combine economic and biophysical characteristics to explore the possible consequences for agriculture, food security, and resources management to 2050. They also offer recommendations to national governments and regional economic agencies already dealing with the vulnerabilities of climate change and deviations in environment. Decisionmakers and researchers will find West African Agriculture and Climate Change a vital tool for shaping policy and studying the various and likely consequences of climate change.

Download or read book Handbook of Agricultural Economics written by Robert E. Evenson and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2007-06-28 with total page 847 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume 3 of this series of the Handbooks in Economics follows on from the previous two volumes by focusing on the fundamental concepts of agricultural economics. The first part of the volume examines the developments in human resources and technology mastery. The second part follows on by considering the processes and impact of invention and innovation in this field. The effects of market forces are examined in the third part, and the volume concludes by analysing the economics of our changing natural resources, including the past effects of climate change.Overall this volume forms a comprehensive and accessible survey of the field of agricultural economics and is recommended reading for anyone with an interest, either academic or professional, in this area. *Part of the renown Handbooks in Economics series*Contributors are leaders of their areas*International in scope and comprehensive in coverage

Download or read book Handbook of Research on In Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions written by Osabuohien, Evans and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Several studies have investigated the impetus and implications behind large-scale land acquisitions/deals at the global level; however, intranational factors within communities and societies have not received much attention from researchers. The Handbook of Research on In-Country Determinants and Implications of Foreign Land Acquisitions examines the economic, sociological, and environmental issues surrounding land transactions and the impact these deals may have on local households and communities. Focusing on international issues as well as domestic concerns, this publication is a useful reference for policymakers, academics, researchers, and advanced-level students in various disciplines.

Download or read book GM Food Systems and Their Economic Impact written by Tatjana Brankov and published by CABI. This book was released on 2018-11-09 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The development of transgenic crops is revolutionary, but what does it mean for food production, prices and the environment? This is the first book to examine the economic evidence in a methodical way. It initially describes the historical evolution of biotechnology and defines key terms, before moving on to explore transgenic technology and food regime concepts. The book analyzes genetically modified organism (GMO) policy as part of overall agrarian policy, considering neoregulation in the USA, the EU, Brazil, Russia, China, India, South Africa and Serbia; as well as discussing agricultural performance, support and trade relations. The effect of transgenic food production on world food prices is also examined, along with food security at global and regional levels, and the links between GMOs and world hunger. The environmental implications of transgenic technology are considered through analysis of pesticide and fertilizer usage and efficiency, and pesticide consumption in GMO and non-GMO producing countries. Finally, the book considers the entry of transgenic ingredients into the food chain and lists the products affected. Key features: - Detailed analysis of economic data. - Comparison of international trends, including BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and Serbia. - Evaluation of environmental and food security implications. - Glossary of important terms. This book will be valuable for agricultural economists, including students at Masters and PhD level. It will also be of interest to agricultural engineers, food technologists, nutritionists, industry representatives, policy makers, policy advisers and analysts and NGOs.