Output per acre and size of holding: The logic of peasant agriculture under semi‐feudalism

The Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity in Agriculture: Evidence from Maize Production in Northern China

“…On one hand, there is a positive relationship between farm size and productivity in new continental countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia (MacDonald, Hoppe, and Newton 2017;Sheng and Chancellor 2018), and some Latin American countries (Deininger and Byerlee 2012). On the other hand, an inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is widely observed in many Asian countries (Sen 1962(Sen , 1966(Sen , 1975Bardhan 1973;Lipton 1993;Dyer 1996;Heltberg 1998;Hayami 2001Hayami , 2009. Recently, more evidence for the inverse farm size-productivity relationship are also found in Sub-Saharan Africa (Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou 2010;Carletto, Savastano, and Zezza 2013;Larson et al 2014;Bevis and Barrett 2017;Desiere and Jolliffe 2018).…”

Farm size and productivity in Malawian smallholder agriculture

“…Imperfections in capital and land markets 142 THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES then prevent less efficient larger farms from being broken up into smaller operational holdings. Dyer [1996] argues that small farmers work harder primarily because they are poorer and (with their consequent higher marginal utility of income) are 'driven' to labour intensification through self exploitation. The inverse relationship then arises when richer peasants use power relations to extract surplus from poor peasants while using labour less intensively on their own holdings: 'it is thus misguided to treat the inverse relationship as a sign of relative efficiency rather than of distress' [Dyer, 1996:123].…”

Development by Dispossession: Terra Nullius and the Social‐Ecology of New Enclosures in Ethiopia

“…The Bretton Woods institutions, and the World Bank in particular, are today at the forefront of a thinly disguised narrative of terra nullius that is deployed to designate “underutilized” or “unproductive” spaces as ideal for large‐scale commercial development. Against an earlier consensus on the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity that had served as the “economic rationale for redistributive land reforms” (Dyer :103), the bank has increasingly placed its institutional weight behind large‐scale mechanized agriculture, albeit one in which foreign investors are regulated by a modest code of conduct (De Schutter ). A World Bank publication entitled Awakening Africa's Sleeping Giants posited the existence of a vast underused land reserve that could be “tapped to produce food, agricultural raw materials, and biofuels feedstocks, not only for Africa but also for other regions” (World Bank :175).…”