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.