Resurgent interest in agriculture raises issues about agrarian structure and the balance between large and small farms that have thus far been addressed mainly from a smallholder angle. We identify economic and policy factors that contributed to episodes of large farm growth, their impact, and ways in which these may have changed recently. An analysis of recent land demand from large investors suggests that greater clarity in the definition of property rights, attention to employment effects and technical viability, and mechanisms to re-allocate land from unsuccessful ventures to more productive entrepreneurs will be critical to facilitate better developmental outcomes.

The role of intensification in minimizing cropland and slowing deforestation is often disputed. We make a broad distinction between technology-induced and market-induced intensification. We find evidence at the local level that technical progress in a few cases may induce land expansion although much depends on where the technical change occurs (near the forest frontier or away from it) and the type of market (local or global). At a global level, technology-driven intensification is strongly land saving although deforestation in specific regions is likely to continue to occur. Market-driven intensification, however, is often a major cause of land expansion and deforestation especially for export commodities in times of high prices. Beyond land saving, the type of intensification matters a lot for environmental outcomes. Finally, technology-driven intensification by itself is unlikely to arrest deforestation unless accompanied by stronger governance of natural resources

New estimates of the impacts of germplasm improvement in the major staple crops between 1965 and 2004 on global land-cover change are presented, based on simulations carried out using a global economic model (Global Trade Analysis Project Agro-Ecological Zone), a multicommodity, multiregional computable general equilibrium model linked to a global spatially explicit database on land use. We estimate the impact of removing the gains in cereal productivity attributed to the widespread adoption of improved varieties in developing countries. Here, several different effects—higher yields, lower prices, higher land rents, and trade effects—have been incorporated in a single model of the impact of Green Revolution research (and subsequent advances in yields from crop germplasm improvement) on land-cover change. Our results generally support the Borlaug hypothesis that increases in cereal yields as a result of widespread adoption of improved crop germplasm have saved natural ecosystems from being converted to agriculture. However, this relationship is complex, and the net effect is of a much smaller magnitude than Borlaug proposed. We estimate that the total crop area in 2004 would have been between 17.9 and 26.7 million hectares larger in a world that had not benefited from crop germplasm improvement since 1965. Of these hectares, 12.0–17.7 million would have been in developing countries, displacing pastures and resulting in an estimated 2 million hectares of additional deforestation. However, the negative impacts of higher food prices on poverty and hunger under this scenario would likely have dwarfed the welfare effects of agricultural expansion.