© File-photo-via-AFP.A farmer drives his combine harvester on a wheat field Aug. 11 2012 in Cassel northern France.
Small farmers, the UN says, grow 70% of the world's food but a new analysis of government data suggests the land which they control is shrinking every year as mega-farms and plantations squeeze them onto less than 25% of the world's available farmland, says international land-use group Grain. These mega-farms are less productive in terms of amount of food they produce per area of land, the report argues.
"Small farms have less than a quarter of the world's agricultural land - or less than 20% excluding China and India. Such farms are getting smaller all the time, and if this trend persists they might not be able to continue to feed the world," says the report which draws on government statistics and calls for a stop on land grabbing by corporations.
The report suggests that the single most important factor in the drive to push small farmers onto ever smaller parcels of land is the worldwide expansion of industrial commodity crop farms. "The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing," it says. The land area occupied by just four crops - soybean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane - has quadrupled over the past 50 years. Over 140 million hectares of fields and forests have been taken over by these plantations since the 1960s - roughly the same area as all the farmland in the EU.
Comment: How touching that the U.S. wants to help Europe become independent of Russian gas! The U.S. is happy to make a civil war that creates chaos in a country of 45 million people so as to cut Europe off from Russia and then peddle their own 'alternative' products. Of course the American and European taxpayers will have to foot the bill, as the gas will be much more expensive. Not to mention much more polluting. Not to mention that the U.S has no interest in Ukraine or its people, but only sees it usefull as a tool for emperial chess playing.