The diversity of global farm structures shaped by day-to-day land-use decisions at vastly different scales is striking. While more than 85 percent of the world’s farms are smaller than 2 ha, more than half of global agricultural land is managed by farms exceeding 1 000 ha. The contributions of these diverse decision-makers to the global production of food and land-based ecosystem services also vary across country income groups and regions.
This chapter highlights the contribution of different farm sizes to the production of crops that supply a significant share of dietary energy globally. Key findings reveal that smallholder farmers, despite their limited land share and the multitude of constraints they face, remain vital contributors to global food supply: they produce a significant proportion of the dietary energy derived from crops, including from macronutrients such as fats and proteins, particularly in low-income regions. Meanwhile, medium- and large-scale farms produce more than half of the global food supply from crops. Although fewer in number, these farms dominate land use and thus bear a greater responsibility for addressing land degradation and sustainable management at the global level.
Policies to achieve the interconnected goals of ending poverty, achieving food security and improved nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture and land degradation neutrality, need to strike a balance between livelihoods and scale. This is easier said than done, as land-use decisions often entail trade-offs between people or places across spatio-temporal scales.95 The regional variation in farm size distribution and the associated challenges underscore the need for nuanced, context-specific policies that target sustainable land management as well as land degradation – through both local-level measures and landscape-scale planning.
Future research could benefit from exploring alternative farm classification systems that better capture the complexity of degradation patterns and their socioeconomic drivers. These might include classifications based on market orientation, tenure security, or frameworks aligned with the SDGs that consider both relative farm size and revenue. Such approaches could improve the targeting and effectiveness of policies addressing land degradation and sustainable agriculture.
The next chapter presents a global synthesis of the effectiveness of agri-environmental policies aimed at improving land conditions and provides a framework to guide differentiated policy and investment approaches for different farm size and land degradation profiles.
