Can smallholders double their productivity and incomes by 2030?

This paper assesses past trends in agricultural land and labour productivity, as a test whether it is feasible to meet the SDG target 2.3, namely doubling productivity and incomes of smallholders within a 15-year time span, if history were to serve as a guide. The target implies agricultural productivity would need to increase by 4.6% per year on average during 2015-2030. Available country-level data on land productivity (1961-2012) and labour productivity (1980-2012) for 140 countries shows that past trends fall well short of the desired pace of productivity growth. No consistent long-term time series are available to assess productivity growth by size of land holding. As a proxy, we group the countries by the ratio of total agricultural land and number of workers in agriculture. We find that in countries with lower average farm size average productivity growth has been higher, but still falls short of the target pace.