Impact Of Agricultural Market Reforms On Smallholder Farmers In ...

agricultural work. Other less common sources of income are sales from livestock or poultry (one
third of the households), remittances (29 percent of the households) and wages or salaries from
non-agricultural work (18 percent of the households). In terms of the share of each income
source to total household income revenues, crop sales contribute the most, providing about 40
percent of total household income. Although about 37 percent of households derive wages from
working in agriculture, the contribution of these wages to their total income is very small (about 5
percent). Other important activities that contribute to total income are non-farm self-employment
(22 percent) and wages from non-farm work (17 percent).
These income statistics are broken down by region, gender, farm size and expenditure quintiles in
Tables 5.6 through 5.8. The numbers indicate that crop and animal sales are more important in the
North and the Center, both in terms of the percent of households that sell and the contribution of
these sales to total income. This is an expected result as livestock production and farm size are
larger in the North and Center than in the South. Wages from agricultural labor are more common
amongst the poorest and smallest farm households. There seems to be wide disparities between
agricultural wages and wages in the service sector so that farmers that derive additional income
from agricultural work seem to be economically worse off than those that work in other sectors of
the economy. Surprisingly, households with larger farm sizes also seem to derive a larger share
of their income from wages outside the agricultural sector. As expected, crop sales increase with
farm size as larger farms tend to have more surplus production over and above their household
consumption needs than smaller farms. On the other hand, sales of livestock and poultry
contribute a larger share of the income of poorer farmers than richer ones.
5.1.3 Land use
This section describes the basic characteristics of the Malawian smallholder farm including farm
size and land ownership.
Farm size
We define farm size as the area of land cultivated by the smallholder farming household.
Table 5.9 disaggregates farm size and other farm characteristics by region. Smallholder farms are
segmented as each household has an average of 3 plots of about 0.46 ha each. Total average farm
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