By the way, how many farmers are there in Africa?

The United States has 2 million farms. The European Union, 10 million. And Africa? We don't know exactly. To this seemingly simple question, so crucial for the implementation and monitoring of policies implemented on the continent, there is no clear answer. The benchmark figure is that published by the FAO in 2014: 51 million farms in the 42 sub-Saharan African countries that conducted an agricultural census.[1].

But the UN institution itself highlighted at the time the fragility of this estimate – the last inventory of Nigeria dates back to 1960, for example. In a more recent paper[2], based on household surveys, researchers estimate the number of farms at 77 million for 43 countries located south of the Sahara. According to another study[3], there are said to be "more than 100 million family farms" in 47 countries in the sub-region, a figure which excludes "large-scale commercial (capitalist) farms and plantations." In other words, twice as many as the FAO indicates: dizzying statistics...

Yet these figures only concern the number of farms. The number of people working in agriculture is much higher, since one must add to the head of the farm the members of the household who participate in field work and agricultural workers. This represents a total of 232 million people in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture database.[4]. An estimate that should again be considered with caution.

A key point: this number continues to increase, while since the mid-2000s it has been decreasing in the rest of the world, with the exception of South Asia (graph). And it is expected to increase further in the medium term, due to the continent's demographic boom. The decline in the share of the African workforce employed in agriculture should therefore not be misleading, even if it is underestimated.[5] : the lives of a growing number of Africans, in the coming years, will depend directly or indirectly on agricultural activity and related policies.

[1] FAO (2014), The State of Food and Agriculture 2014.

[2] Lowder, SK, Bertini, R., Karfakis, P. and Croppenstedt (2016), Transformation in the size and distribution of farmland operated by households and other farms in selected countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Invited paper presented at the 5th International Conference of the African Association of Agricultural Economists, September 23-26, 2016, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

[3] Moyo, S. (2016), Family farming in sub-Saharan Africa: its contribution to agriculture, food security and rural development, International Policy Center for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) Working Paper No.150, November, 2016.

[4] USDA ERS, International Agricultural Productivity, www.ers.usda.gov

[5] According to the World Bank, the share of the labor force working in agriculture, fishing and forestry in sub-Saharan Africa fell from 67,100 people in 1991 to 57,100 people in 2017. In several countries in the sub-region, the decline is significantly steeper when jobs are expressed in full-time equivalents [Yeboah, FK and Jayne, TS (2017), Africa's Evolving Employment Trend: Implications for Economic Transformation, Volume 14 Issue 1, Africagrowth Agenda Journal, 2017 Africagrowth Institute].