Succession and agricultural land use
Author: John F Devlin - Published At: 2013-12-25 13:02 - (5611 Reads)
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The problem of succession is in part a problem of weak motivation by younger potential farmers, partly a problem of available land for farming, partly a problem of high priced land with prices being pushed up by demand from non-farming activities. I would anticipate that farmland will increasingly be purchased by holding companies and leased out to producers. This will begin to reproduce the problem of landlordism even in developed countries. What I mean by landlordism is that farming activity and land ownership will be split. Those who want to farm will have to lease land because they will not have the capital to buy land themselves. The financial returns to farming will flow primarily to the owners of the land rather than those farming the land. This process is beginning in North America and is the particular North American face of land grabbing. Land use for farming or residential housing, or vacation homes becomes increasingly a pricing issue. Many economists will see this as "efficient" but I see this as a decline in agricultural institutions. The land in farming will decline and on the land that remains in farming the family-owned farm will slowly be replaced by the family-tenant farm. The critical concern is thus not the supply of young people willing to farm... it is land management and the pattern of land ownership. Farmers who own land now see it as their retirement fund. They want to sell at a price set by the market. But in so doing they contribute to the conversion of farm land to non-farming uses. Keeping land in farming will have to become a real policy objective rather than a merely rhetorical one as it is now. To keep land in farming we will need public land banking... a form of cooperative land management which will keep the management of land outside the control of large private land corporations. This can be achieved by private land trusts, local governments or higher levels of government or combinations of these institutional arrangements. Conserving farm land should be seen as important as preserving parks and natural reserves. This is not something for-profit corporations have shown interest in doing. You cannot make money from a park.