In 2009, the United Nations estimated that the urban share of the world’s population exceeded the rural share for the first time. By 2050, it is projected that urban inhabitants will account for about 70 percent of the global population, with nearly all the gain in developing countries. Between 15 and 20 percent of the increase is expected to result from continued rural to urban migration in those countries, despite the fact that many countries around the world have rules in place that attempt to slow such movement.
Today, despite the comparative advantage of cities, urban areas are more unequal in income and wealth than rural areas and hundreds of millions of the world’s urban poor live in sub-standard conditions. For example, Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, has grown by 75 percent to a population of 3.5 million in the last decade. An estimated 60 percent of those residents live in slums without adequate access to public services.
In 2010, I visited the Kibera slum in Nairobi, which houses at least 250,000 people within less than one square mile, nearly all living in shacks. The enclave has no running water, little electricity, and dirt roads strewn with garbage. As is often the case in such settings, many of the newer residents come from rural areas of Kenya that face chronic underdevelopment and overpopulation issues. A majority of these people come from farm families.
Globally, it is believed that at least half of the roughly 800 million food insecure people are smallholder farmers and their family members. According to FAO data, the average farm size in Kenya was a little over two acres in 2005. For such families, options to improve their earning power and well-being over the short-term (one to two years) are fairly limited. These include the following:
- cultivate more acres,
- produce more intensively on existing land base,
- produce more profitable crops on existing land base, or
- one or more family members move to the city and find jobs there.
To the extent that international agricultural development can make options one through three more attractive, it will reduce the economic pressure on smallholder families to migrate to the city.
Many smallholder farmers rely on manual labor to till their land, and can’t easily expand with their existing resources, even if there is uncultivated arable land that is both available and accessible. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is estimated that 65 percent of all farmers rely on manual labor, often using hand-made hoes, so providing them with better tools, or even access to animal or machine traction for cultivating their fields, would greatly enhance their earning power. A 2003 study from Western Kenya comparing different types of land preparation showed that hand power required 62 days per hectare, as opposed to the seven to ten days required for animal traction, depending on the animal type and equipment utilized.
Smallholder farmers in developing countries have limited access to improved inputs, such as hybrid seeds, commercial fertilizers, and pesticides that can help them generate better yields on the land they currently cultivate. For example, only a minority of farmers in sub-Saharan African countries have access to improved seed. However, a new study in the journal Food Security found that smallholder farmers in five African countries and Haiti purchase more than half of their seed through local markets and other informal sources, rather than using saved seed from previous harvests. These results suggest that significant yield improvements could be achieved if there were a concerted effort by developing country governments and their NGO/donor partners to introduce high-quality seed through such outlets.
If farmers want to produce more profitable crops on their land, they will need access to the seeds, other inputs, and knowledge of the appropriate practices to grow those crops. As importantly, they will also need some assurances that they can find an outlet to sell those new crops. Creating reliable supply chains will address this need for both farmers and end-users, which is why such activities are the focus of much of the new investment in Africa by companies involved in the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition launched by President Obama at an event for the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in May 2012. As of the end of 2014, there were 180 companies involved, committed to invest at least $10 billion on such efforts.
If these agricultural development investments can make it more attractive for smallholder farmers to stay on the farm, they won’t eliminate rural to urban migration, but they should greatly ease the pressure. If such a future can be realized, then such decisions will more often be made on the basis of concrete opportunities, rather than out of a desperate hope for something better.