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Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production [1]

['Leah H Samberg', 'Institute On The Environment', 'University Of Minnesota', 'Buford Ave', 'St Paul', 'Mn', 'James S Gerber', 'Navin Ramankutty', 'Liu Institute For Global Issues', 'Institute For Resources']

Date: 2022-11 

In recent years, the attention of global agriculture and development communities has turned toward the world’s smallest farms [1–3]. Evidence is mounting that smallholder and family farms are crucial to feeding the planet, and that successful policies aimed at poverty alleviation, food security, and protection of biodiversity and natural resources depend on the inclusion and participation of small farmers [4–6]. This shift aligns with increased global focus on the sustainable development goals (SDGs), as agricultural development has been identified as an essential component of the first goal of reducing poverty and hunger [2], and investments in small farms have been specifically identified by the United Nations as a way to address SDGs relating to poverty, nutrition, hunger, and environmental sustainability [3].

There is good reason for this focus; small farms, often cultivated by single families on very small plots of land, are the most prevalent form of agriculture in the world [6–8]. Agriculture remains one of the only global industries that relies largely on family scale labor and production [9], and small farms support many of the planet’s most vulnerable populations and coexist with some of its most diverse and threatened landscapes [10–13]. Crop and landscape diversity on small farms can regulate ecosystem processes and increase system resilience [14, 15], and small farms are seen in many systems to have greater crop productivity per unit area than large farms [15, 16].

A number of assessments have found that growth in smallholder agriculture can have strong impacts on poverty reduction [3, 9, 17]. The United Nations has stated that achieving poverty reduction goals requires policies that cater to the needs of smallholders [3], and last year the Gates Foundation pledged $2 billion for investment in agricultural technology innovations that will enhance the productivity of smallholder farmers, as part of a push to meet SDG targets [18].

Recent attempts to quantify the prevalence and contributions of small and family farms (these terms often used interchangeably) estimate that, at the global scale, there are more than 475 million farms that are less than two hectares in size, and that small farms control from 40% to more than 50% of global farmland and produce more than half of the world’s food [4, 7, 8, 19].

However, few studies are able to compare the impact on poverty of agricultural growth from large farms versus that from small farms [2]. A 2015 UN report explicitly stated that lack of attention to and investment in small farms has been ‘exacerbated by the poor quality of data on the number of smallholders, their contribution to total agricultural production and GDP, and their share in labor force participation’ [3].

Challenges of mapping small farms

Effective policies for agricultural innovation, land use, or poverty and hunger reduction require identification of groups of producers with similar production strategies, resources, and constraints [20, 21], and classifying and mapping global agricultural systems is essential to designing appropriate technologies and identifying environmental impacts of agriculture [22, 23]. However, despite the recent spotlight on small farms and increasing consensus on their importance, spatially explicit data on smallholder farmers are virtually absent. Global-scale assessments of smallholder farming, including the World Census of Agriculture collected by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), provide data at the national scale only [4, 6, 24]. There is also an absence of systematic and comparable data for all countries, including a wide variation among and within countries as to the terminology used to describe small farms, what thresholds are used to define farm size classes, and whether the smallest farms are even included [4, 24, 25]. In addition, there is a need for improved data on human populations and land-use practices, especially in the developing world [18, 21]. Over the past decade there have been numerous ongoing efforts to map global land use, including farming systems, that combine remotely sensed land cover data, crop production data, and spatial estimates of human population density [see: 10, 20, 26–29]. However, none of these previous large-scale approaches to mapping the human landscape incorporate household census data that can, for example, distinguish between farming and non-farming populations.

Mapping the concentration of farming households

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[1] Url: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta

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