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social agenda front, we noted the importance of the links between small-scale
farmers and the land itself as well as the cultural aspects of small communities,
which are very closely interlinked. On gender we noted that women can
sometimes gain increased independence and autonomy from finding work, for
example on a plantation, that they would not find within their own household.
But it was difficult to know whether there was much improvement from shifting
from small-scale to large-scale production systems. Ultimately, it all depends
on the context. On the environmental front we found evidence that large-scale
plantations often have really quite damaging environmental impacts, whether
for biodiversity (emphasis on monocultures); environmental pollution through
poor management of fertilizer, insecticide and other wastes; destruction of
forests for palm oil plantations; soil erosion, etcetera. Certainly when looking at
jobs per hectare or income and revenue per hectare, small-scale farming seems
to be superior.
It is important to examine the production scale and think through
how the discourse around small and large-scale farming is used by different
interests to try and assert the superiority of a particular strategy or model. It
is quite disturbing that there are still a lot of people in government in many
countries that continue to think that the only modern agriculture is large-scale
agriculture. People need to be brought to look at the evidence of the efficiency
and productivity of, for example, cotton production in many parts of Africa or
small-scale livestock systems that are far superior than large-scale systems (in
terms of the incomes generated and in terms of the productivity of the land) and
be persuaded to change their minds. It is important to state that we do not need
to say small is beautiful and best, large is bad and horrid. Usually there is some
sort of joint activity that allows the best of both scales to be exploited. There are
many shared ventures that take advantage of some of the economies of scale
from the up and downstream activities of larger units and there is a range of
different models that one can look at here (see Cotula et al., 2009).
Who are the Actors
One of the things that we wanted to do was to look at the different actors involved
in international land deals and to set out a series of recommendations for those
different groups (see HLPE, 2011a: 37). Next to the United Nations (UN) and
the World Bank there are a series of actors like donor governments, finance,
lenders, insurance, investors, host government agencies and others. The next
section will elaborate on the recommendations from the report for each these
actors or groups. Each of these groups are in themselves quite diverse. It is not
a set of monolithic investors or monolithic host governments, there is instead a
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