Farming, the millennia-old practice fundamental to human survival, has degraded land to the point that today, 1.7 billion people live in areas where crop yields are falling. Without government intervention – and no, not short-term handouts that do nothing to address larger structural issues – the world could face a farmland deficit twice the size of India by 2050.

Subsidies only make the global farm structure more lopsided. The largest 1% of farms – those over 1,000 hectares – already control more than half of all farmland. 70% of government support worldwide is tied to production, rewarding high yields through intensive use of fertilisers, agrochemicals, and water. It also encourages producers to plant the same crop repeatedly on the same land, which harms soil health, and to clear forests to expand farmland, depleting soils and ecosystems. All the while, it expands big farm landholdings.

And because of their scale and influence, large-scale commercial farms that have exhausted soils and stripped forests hold the key to reversing the damage. Concentrated mainly in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, they produce more than half of global crop-derived nutrients and dominate key trade commodities (such as cereals, pulses, sugars, and oil crops).

At the other end of the spectrum, smallholders working on two acres or less make up 85% of the world’s 570 million farms but cultivate only 9% of the land, mostly across Asia and Africa. While smallholders are not blameless in land degradation, the disparity in land distribution means governments must focus their efforts on large farms. From fertiliser use and irrigation to tillage and land clearing, farm size determines both how land is managed and the capacity to act at scale.