Spatiotemporal Analysis of Size and Equity in Ownership Dynamics of Agricultural Landholdings in India Vis-à-Vis the World

Abstract

The increasing threat to sustainable agriculture is a major concern of planners worldwide. Human population growth together with increasing food requirements and competition for land use is leading to land scarcity for agricultural purposes. Farm size influences the extent of the adoption of mechanization and modern methods of farm management practices, which in turn results in increased productivity, production efficiency and agricultural income. We studied changes in macroeconomic factors such as dependency on agriculture, growth of the sector, the pattern of landholdings and tenure rights across major agriculturally important countries, as well as the priority of agriculture for the national economy (i.e., the share of agriculture in the national income) and its relationship to changes in farm size. The data on the percentage of area under farming, population growth, size of the agricultural workforce and other social dimensions from 24 countries of different geographical sizes were analysed. We used parameters such as the extent of changes in cropland, family-owned land, the agricultural workforce and their productivity, number of holdings and their distribution, women-headed holdings and finally total and per capita agricultural income, and measured the changes over time and space. The published data from national and international sources were used to establish the relationship between farm size and farm efficiency measured through the selected parameters. The results clearly establish that the size of farm holdings had an inverse relationship with the population dependent on agriculture, share of agriculture in national income and tenure rights. Australia had the largest average agricultural landholding (3243 ha), while India and Bangladesh had the lowest (1.3 and 0.3 ha, respectively). The inequality in the distribution of farmland ownership was greater in developed countries than in developing countries. Female farmland ownership was less than 20% in most developing countries and the relationship between the number of farm households and farm outcomes was found to have weakened over time. India, a developing as well as an agriculturally important country, was subjected to detailed analysis to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of the size, distribution and ownership patterns of agricultural landholding.