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Farm Size and Income Distribution of Latin American Agriculture: New Perspectives on an Old Issue
Chapter highlights:
- Latin America exhibits the highest levels of land inequality in the developing world with an average Gini of 0.84. However, there exists a high degree of heterogeneity in patterns of land concentration.
- The contribution of the agricultural sector in total income inequality ranges from 11% to 48%, with poor households relying on own-farm income and richer households diversifying into waged-farm income.
- Small farms employ large shares of workers but only a small proportion of total land, and concurrently, all countries share the same positive relationship between output-per-worker and farm size.
- A significant positive relationship is found between household income and farm size suggesting that labor productivity gains in larger farms might explain higher incomes and part of agricultural inequality.
- Analysis challenges common approach of promoting small holder agriculture based on inverse farm size-productivity relationship. Agricultural inequality must not be reduced to only land inequality.
- The region does not have easily accessible, high-quality agricultural census data, data which is essential to understand the livelihoods of significant and largely vulnerable populations.