Since mobility out of farming in Africa has been low, much of the land is now held by aging farmers despite the large cohort of potential new entrants. Constraints to intergenerational transfer of land are very costly when land is scarce and young people have difficulty acquiring holdings to start farming on their own. In the absence of old-age pensions and with poorly developed rental markets, elderly farmers may retain control over holdings that would be more efficiently managed by younger, more innovative, energetic farmers (see Box 2).

# **Box 2: Age and Gender Dimensions of Land Ownership in Kenya**

Data from Kenya provide an interesting reading on the demographic aspects of land ownership. In a large national sample drawn from participants in the Kenya Agricultural Productivity and Agribusiness Project, the average age of primary farmers (i.e., those whose primary economic occupation is farming, and who in most cases are the decision makers on the farm) is late 50s—roughly the same as in the U.S., despite the sharply divergent underlying age distributions of Kenyan and American rural societies. The finding confirms that young people have great difficulty establishing themselves as farm operators.

The age of Kenyan farmers in this sample also has an interesting gender dimension. Men who identify themselves as primary farmers usually farm as their first occupation and have a spouse working in the household and on the farm, but not earning significant outside wages. Women who identify themselves as primary farmers either have an adult male in the household contributing wage earnings to the household income or do not. The latter (i.e., single women managing farms) are on average about ten years older than other farmers, and their earnings are the lowest. Women who are primary farmers with earning adult males in their households do very well in farming; in most cases, better than men.

Elderly women farmers probably retain control of land because the cost of holding it is low in the absence of land tax, and they have no other way to feed themselves in their declining years. The data suggest that both elderly women and land-hungry young farmers could be made better off by a program that eased intergenerational transfer.

_Source_ : Torkelsson 2012.

When factor endowments and characteristics of technology and markets imply larger optimal farm sizes than what is observed, constraints on capital and land markets impose a high burden of inefficiency on rural people. Although smallholders may not have the skills or appetite for risk to manage as much as 100 hectares, many could probably handle five to ten hectares if they had access to machinery to work it, particularly if public investments were made in the infrastructure needed to allow more profitable farming. And the incentives for young people to remain in school and acquire basic numeracy and literacy skills would increase if intermediatesized farms were among the options possible and were known to require such basic skills for successful operation.

These data on productivity, education, and farm size highlight the policy challenge for African leaders. Agriculture represents the sector of most immediate opportunity to realize gains in growth and to create employment for young people. The farming that can accomplish this must shift rapidly from low productivity and status to technical dynamism with recognized opportunity. The labor force that can best implement this transition is one that knows traditional 19