How big is social agriculture globally?

In our initial discussion 'What is 'social agriculture', and why should we care? ', we identified examples of farmers and others engaged in 'social agriculture' across regions of Sub Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East, Southern and Eastern Asia. We now focus our attention on these global regions to estimate the number of people involved in social agriculture (notably leaving out Latin America as we found far fewer examples of social agriculture in action from our search — this may well be because our search was focused on English speaking sources only.

When looking at these regions, the first major observation is a Rest of World vs China split. China's social agriculture is well established and is predominantly based on technology platforms operating and designed for Chinese markets only (e.g. Pinduoduo and Douyin). In the rest of the world we see Facebook and WhatsApp dominate usage. Publicly available data on the use of social media among farmers, or any of the above mentioned platforms, is sparse. With this in mind we must draw on novel approaches to estimate the size of social agriculture across the regions identified. In particular,

In China we draw from China's Internet Network Information Centre's statistical reports (CNNIC). These include useful survey data on the occupational structure of Chinese internet users which split out 'Laborers engaged in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishery'.
In the Rest of the World, we use Facebook's advertising platform data on estimated audience size based on detailed targeting of users "interested in agriculture" as a proxy for the audience of those working in agriculture using social media.

We begin considering data from Facebook. Just how big is the audience we can reach who are "interested in agriculture"?

Facebook audience interested in Agriculture

We built a dataset from Facebook's Ad platform for a sample of all countries with a labor force of over 15% in agriculture outside Latin America, Europe and North America. Using this data we define a metric:

Facebook audience interested in Agriculture (FBinAg audience) := the estimated audience size for a country (or region) provided by Facebook Ad platform when creating a new advert, where the advert uses the following detailed targeting settings: (1) users must live in the country (or region) selected; (2) users must be above 18 years of age; and (3) users must have an interest in "Agriculture".

We use the FBinAg audience as a rough estimate of social agriculture in our sample of countries with a higher proportion of the labor force working in Ag (min 15%). Using previously collected data from Facebook's Ad platform, we were able to compare this figure from 2018 and 2021. We concede that this approach will inevitably represent an overestimate of the total number of individuals involved in social agriculture (discussed more below). Nevertheless, we believe it gives a good ball park indication of the size of social agriculture in the regions we've highlighted examples from.

In 2018 the FBinAg audience in selected countries stood at just over 100 million. In 2021 this figure ballooned to over 220 million. Even if we restrain these estimates by a generous correction factor (e.g. cutting figures in half) to account for over-estimation of the actual population active in social agriculture, the scale of this audience is vast.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT7UQ56M63aBJmwiIqLm3XIgbedu1D6cbI0leaoFCVbcJ6UiB92vUNfr1i79RQ6_9jxnjGiHa3iTxcF/pubchart?oid=2029380573&format=interactive

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT7UQ56M63aBJmwiIqLm3XIgbedu1D6cbI0leaoFCVbcJ6UiB92vUNfr1i79RQ6_9jxnjGiHa3iTxcF/pubchart?oid=546143646&format=interactive

[source: Facebook ad platform, World Bank, ILO, Learn.ink analysis](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT7UQ56M63aBJmwiIqLm3XIgbedu1D6cbI0leaoFCVbcJ6UiB92vUNfr1i79RQ6_9jxnjGiHa3iTxcF/pubchart?oid=1639300143&format=interactive)

source: Facebook ad platform, World Bank, ILO, Learn.ink analysis