Gaining perspective: How will rural-urban migration affect farm size?

Thank you Seth for your comments on my blog concerning farm size and population. I will deal with the issues you raise in the order in which you have placed them.

The population of Ethiopia. I am not assuming any figure for the future population of Ethiopia but depending upon the work of the expert demographers of the UN. I would suggest that you re-visit the most recent projections for Sub-Saharan Africa put out by the UN. These demographers are not looking at past patterns of growth but at current realities. If, as in much of Africa including Ethiopia, women are giving birth to an average of five children in their lifetime and the child death rate is falling substantially, then the population is bound to double in a generation and that is the situation which we face on this continent. I imagine that at the time of the Ethiopian hunger of the 1980's when the population was 40 million there were those who were reluctant to believe that it would have doubled to the 80 million which the country supports to-day. In my own country of Malawi which is much more densely populated than Ethiopia and which currently struggles to support 15 million people, we have to face the fact that the UN demographers state that we will be 30 million in less than 30 years.

You mention a possible decline in fertility rates to 2.2 as urbanisation increases. If you study the population pyramids of Sub-Saharan countries you will see that even if the impossible happened and all the women in Africa agreed to have only 2 children the population would still double in a generation because in most countries there are twice as many girls and young women in the cohort of 1 to 20 year olds as there are women in the cohort of 20 to 40 year olds. I am not therefore making assumptions about population growth but accepting the facts as presented by those whose profession it is.

With reference to "forcible clearing" this is simply a response to those who aim to replace small scale farms with larger ones in a situation in which all the facts point to a rapid increase in the rural population of the majority of African countries for many years to come. The trend of the past 50 years of rapid population growth has been towards the splitting of larger farms into smaller units. Demographic facts would indicate that as rural populations double in the coming years then those who want to see larger farms in densely populated countries will have to resort to "forcible clearing" in order to achieve their objective. The numbers of people leaving the countryside for the cities and other countries to whom you refer simply are not doing so in sufficient numbers to counteract the rapid rise in rural populations. As you rightly state "this process has been going on for decades now" and yet the growth in the number of small farming families has continued unabated and shows every sign of continuing so to do.
"Forcible clearing" is of course going on now where multinational corporations take over huge swathes of land for large scale agriculture and displace the local population.

You refer to my comment on the exceptional situation of Nigeria's ratio of urban to rural people. One can obviously quibble about the meaning of exceptional but on a continent in which the overall average level of urbanisation is 36% then countries with over 50% become unusual. There is more to it than that. It is the 50% urban figure of Nigeria and the 60% for South Africa which push up the total figure for Sub-Saharan Africa into the mid 30's. If one looks at the next five most populated countries in Africa with more than a quarter of the continent's total people, the percentage of the urban population in these is 28% which makes Nigeria appear more exceptional. Whether this is derived from oil wealth is a matter of opinion but I must say that the people of the Niger Delta would be more than delighted if the wealth had been allowed to stay there rather than moving out to the rest of the country. Having worked in Nigeria a number of times since I first went there in 1952 I believe that its pattern of urbanisation would have been quite different in the absence of oil money.

We are entirely agreed on the need to modernise African economies so as to provide opportunities for productive work outside of small scale agriculture. This will not only provide more remunerative returns to labour but also stimulate the market for agricultural produce and so benefit the farming sector. The challenge remains that this is not happening nearly fast enough to keep up with rural population growth and so the rural areas are forced to go on providing a base for all those hundreds of millions who cannot as yet be absorbed into the modern sector.