The Journal of African Economies has just published its November issue, which is a special issue on impact evaluation.
Here is the table of contents. Here is the introductory essay by Marcel Fafchamps and Andrew Zeitlin, who write:
Two features are evident from the collection of papers presented here. First, as illustrated by the diversity of topics covered in this volume, evaluation methods can be applied to a broad range of policy questions. Such questions range from microeconomic and localized policies, such as in health and education, to policies with potential for general equilibrium and market-wide effects, such as migration and entrepreneurship.
The Inverse Farm Size–Productivity Relationship: “Proof” that Smallholders Can Feed the World?
I spent the last week in Montreal for the McGill Global Food Security Conference, where I had been asked to present some of the work I have been doing on food prices.
The conference was very interesting, and it allowed me to finally meet colleagues whom I only knew through their work, meet new colleagues, and interact with a number of students interested in food policy.
At some point, however, one of the presenters mentioned the inverse relationship between farm size (i.e., the amount of land a farmer cultivates) and productivity (i.e., the amount of output per unit of land a farmer can get, or that farmer’s yield), an empirical regularity in the developing world which constitutes an old puzzle in development economics and on which I have done some work a few years ago. The following figure is an example of such a relationship for rice farms in Madagascar — the y-axis measures the logarithm of a plot’s yield in kilograms of rice for one hundredth of a hectare, and the x-axis measures a plot’s size in hundredths of a hectare.
What that presenter said was that the existence of an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is proof that smallholders can feed the world. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth.