posts: 44468
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| 44468 | Smallholders produce one-third of the world’s food, less than half of what many headlines claim | smallholder-food-production | post | publish | <!-- wp:html --> <div class="blog-info"> <p>Our World in Data presents the data and research to make progress against the world’s largest problems.<br>This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entry on <strong><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Farm Size</a></strong>.</p> </div> <!-- /wp:html --> <!-- wp:owid/summary --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><strong> </strong>It is often claimed that smallholder farmers produce 70% or even 80% of the world’s food. This claim has even been made by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO).<br><br>It has been a linchpin for agricultural and development policies. But it is wrong. Recent studies suggest that this figure is too high: smallholder farmers produce around one-third of the world’s food, less than half of what these headlines claim.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>A key problem is that some use the terms ‘family farms’ and ‘smallholder farms’ interchangeably. <em>Family</em> farms <em>do</em> produce around 80% of the world’s food. These farms can be of any size, and should not be confused with smallholders.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- /wp:owid/summary --> <!-- wp-block-tombstone 44495 --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Most (84%) of the world’s 570 million farms are smallholdings; that is, farms less than two hectares in size.{ref}Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002703">The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide</a>. <em>World Development</em>, 87, 16-29.{/ref} Many smallholder farmers are some of the <a href="http://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty">poorest people</a> in the world. Tragically, and somewhat paradoxically, they are also those who often go hungry.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>A shift towards small-scale farming can be an important stage of a country’s development, especially if it has a large working age population. But, it’s gruelling work with poor returns: small farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2">Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms</a>. <em>Nature Sustainability</em>, 1-7.{/ref} Labor productivity is low. This is why countries move beyond a workforce of farmers: younger people get an education, <a href="http://ourworldindata.org/urbanization">move towards cities</a>, and try to secure a job with higher levels of productivity and income. A country cannot leave deep poverty behind when most of the population work as smallholder farmers.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has made incorrect claims about the world’s reliance on smallholder farmers in the past. One of its reports states that “small-scale farmers produce over 70% of the world’s food needs.”{ref}Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders’ agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.{/ref} In other reports it <a href="https://www.donorplatform.org/publication-agenda-2030/un-decade-of-family-farming-2019-2028-global-action-plan.html">has said</a> that smallholder and family farms (which raises issues of how these terms are defined) produce 70-80% of the world’s food.{ref}FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref} This would mean that small farms produce nearly all of the world’s food. This has become a zombie statistic: one that has been repeated by many other organizations despite there being no evidence to support it.{ref}The first UN report to make this claim seems to cite a 2009 report by the environmental activist organization, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETC_Group_(eco-justice)">ETC group</a>. It made the claim that ‘peasants’ grow at least 70% of the world's food. How they got to this figure is not clear.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The UN FAO has also built many policy reports around this claim. The UN FAO declared 2014 the ‘Year of Family Farming’ with a focus on developing agricultural policies and support mechanisms for smallholder farmers. It later launched the UN decade of family farming, which runs from 2019 to 2028. What the definition of a ‘family farm’ is, is not clear.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>One of the Sustainable Development Goals: Target 2.3 is to “Double the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers” by 2030. The Paris climate agreement includes important clauses on mitigation and adaptation support for small-scale farmers.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The National Geographic <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/photos-farms-agriculture-national-farmers-day">repeated it</a>. Even the multinational company, Bayer, used it to <a href="https://twitter.com/bayer/status/1053178962560589824">make similar claims</a>. Not only has it been repeated, its definition has also been stretched along the way. Sometimes it’s defined as smallholder farms; other times as ‘family farms’; sometimes as food or crop production; and other times as agricultural land.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><br><strong>References:</strong></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>ETC -group, 2009. Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises.<br></p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders’ agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.<br><br>FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>A key problem is that organizations – including the UN FAO – often use the terms ‘small farms’ and ‘family farms’ interchangeably. But they cannot, and should not be. As we will see later, these definitions give us very different estimates.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>This confusion creates several problems. First, it creates a misunderstanding; one that might convince us that a world of smallholder farmers is what we need. If they produced nearly all of the world’s food, perhaps that is a future we would want to maintain. Second, it might make us concerned about the future of the global food system if countries move towards larger farms. As countries get richer, the average farm size <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-farm-size-vs-gdp">tends to increase</a>. If nearly all of the world’s food came from small farms, perhaps we should be worried about this development.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Is this concern justified? Researchers provide us with a better answer to this question of how much of the world’s food smallholders really produce.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":3} --> <h3>How much of the world’s food do smallholder farmers really produce?</h3> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:columns --> <div class="wp-block-columns"><!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Several studies have tried to answer this question. The most extensive and recent comes from the work of Vincent Ricciardi and colleagues.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912417301293">How much of the world's food do smallholders produce?</a>. <em>Global Food Security</em>, 17, 64-72.{/ref} They produced the first open dataset on global food production, mapped by farm size.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). An open-access dataset of crop production by farm size from agricultural censuses and surveys. <em>Data in brief</em>, 19, 1970-1988.{/ref} It covers 154 crop types across 55 countries. It not only covers the amount produced across different farm sizes, but also the <em>types</em> of crops and what they are used for – whether they are eaten as food, used as animal feed, or for other uses such as biofuels.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The chart shows their findings. This shows the <em>cumulative</em> total of three metrics – agricultural land; crop production; and food supply – with increasing farm size. So the top row of bars show the global total across farms less than one hectare; the second bar shows farms up to two hectares etc.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Smallholder farms are those that are less than two hectares.{ref}This is the universal standard for smallholder farms, but of course, two hectares is a somewhat arbitrary cut-off.{/ref} That’s the top two bars, which are shaded in blue.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Smallholder farmers produce 29% of the world’s crops, measured in kilocalories.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 28% to 31%.{/ref} Less than half of previous claims.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>They do so using around one-quarter (24%) of the world’s agricultural land. They account for a bit more crop production than land use because smaller farms tend to achieve higher yields.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2">Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms</a>. <em>Nature Sustainability</em>, 1-7.{/ref} This is very labor-intensive work; smaller farms get higher land productivity, but lower labor productivity.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>These farms account for an even greater share of the world’s food supply – one-third (32%) of it.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 30% to 34%.{/ref} This is because smaller farms tend to <a href="https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size#how-does-the-allocation-of-crops-vary-by-farm-size">allocate a larger share</a> of their crops towards food, rather than animal feed or biofuels.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>To get to the 70-80% figure that was previously reported, we would need to include farms all the way up to 100, or even 200 hectares. These results shown here are in line with other studies which agree that the figure of 70-80% is much too high.{ref}Herrero, M., Thornton, P. K., Power, B., Bogard, J. R., Remans, R., Fritz, S., ... & Havlík, P. (2017). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617300074">Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis</a>. <em>The Lancet Planetary Health</em>, 1(1), e33-e42.<br><br>Samberg, L. H., Gerber, J. S., Ramankutty, N., Herrero, M., & West, P. C. (2016). <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta">Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production</a>. <em>Environmental Research Letters</em>, 11(12), 124010.<br><br>Graeub, B. E., Chappell, M. J., Wittman, H., Ledermann, S., Kerr, R. B., & Gemmill-Herren, B. (2016). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15001217">The state of family farms in the world</a>. <em>World Development</em>, 87, 1-15.{/ref}</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>So while one-third of the world’s food is still a large share, it’s less than half of the widely-cited claim.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>The claim that <em>family </em>farms produce 70-80% of the world’s food <em>is</em> likely to be true. A recent study by Sarah Lowder, Marco Sanchez, and Raffaele Bertini agrees with the conclusion that small farms produce one-third of the world’s food.{ref}Lowder, S. K., Sánchez, M. V., & Bertini, R. (2021). <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X">Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?</a>. <em>World Development</em>, <em>142</em>, 105455.{/ref} But they also estimate the share produced on family farms. The definition of a family farm is broad: it’s one that is operated by an individual or group of individuals, where most labor is supplied by the family. This means they can be of any size – many family farms are large. Orders of magnitude larger than our under-two-hectare smallholders.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>They find that family farms produce around 80% of the world’s food. To be clear: small farms produce one-third of the world’s food. Family farms – of any size – produce 80%. These terms should not be used interchangeably because they are very different.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>Increasing the productivity of smallholder farming is a crucial step in countries transitioning from poverty to middle-incomes. Raising the output and incomes of smallholder farmers should be an important focus, even if they produced very little of the world’s food. This is because most of the world’s farms are smallholders, and they are some of the poorest people in the world.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p>We should avoid the romanticization of a future where most still spend their time working the fields for small returns. That would be a future where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --></div> <!-- /wp:column --> <!-- wp:column --> <div class="wp-block-column"><!-- wp:image {"id":44469,"sizeSlug":"full","linkDestination":"none"} --> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img src="https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce.png" alt="" class="wp-image-44469"/></figure> <!-- /wp:image --></div> <!-- /wp:column --></div> <!-- /wp:columns --> <!-- wp:separator --> <hr class="wp-block-separator"/> <!-- /wp:separator --> <!-- wp:paragraph --> <p><strong>Acknowledgments:</strong> Many thanks to Navin Ramankutty and Max Roser for feedback and suggestions on this work.</p> <!-- /wp:paragraph --> <!-- wp:separator --> <hr class="wp-block-separator"/> <!-- /wp:separator --> <!-- wp:heading {"level":5} --> <h5>Explore more of our work on this topic:</h5> <!-- /wp:heading --> <!-- wp:owid/prominent-link {"title":"Farm Size","linkUrl":"ourworldindata.org/farm-size","className":"is-style-thin"} /--> | {
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2021-08-06 10:00:00 | 2024-02-16 14:22:51 | 1suQJtHnrIPA0zawZe1uCeM5rHZPOvUlZKq4fQnj41O0 | [
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Most of the world's farmers are smallholders. They are also often the poorest. How much of the world's food do they produce? | 2021-08-04 16:50:12 | 2021-08-06 10:48:47 | https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/smallholders-thumbnail.png | {} |
Our World in Data presents the data and research to make progress against the world’s largest problems. This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entry on **[Farm Size](https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size)**. <Callout title="Summary"/> Most (84%) of the world’s 570 million farms are smallholdings; that is, farms less than two hectares in size.{ref}Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). [The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002703). _World Development_, 87, 16-29.{/ref} Many smallholder farmers are some of the [poorest people](http://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty) in the world. Tragically, and somewhat paradoxically, they are also those who often go hungry. A shift towards small-scale farming can be an important stage of a country’s development, especially if it has a large working age population. But, it’s gruelling work with poor returns: small farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). [Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2). _Nature Sustainability_, 1-7.{/ref} Labor productivity is low. This is why countries move beyond a workforce of farmers: younger people get an education, [move towards cities](http://ourworldindata.org/urbanization), and try to secure a job with higher levels of productivity and income. A country cannot leave deep poverty behind when most of the population work as smallholder farmers. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has made incorrect claims about the world’s reliance on smallholder farmers in the past. One of its reports states that “small-scale farmers produce over 70% of the world’s food needs.”{ref}Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders’ agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.{/ref} In other reports it [has said](https://www.donorplatform.org/publication-agenda-2030/un-decade-of-family-farming-2019-2028-global-action-plan.html) that smallholder and family farms (which raises issues of how these terms are defined) produce 70-80% of the world’s food.{ref}FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref} This would mean that small farms produce nearly all of the world’s food. This has become a zombie statistic: one that has been repeated by many other organizations despite there being no evidence to support it.{ref}The first UN report to make this claim seems to cite a 2009 report by the environmental activist organization, [ETC group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETC_Group_(eco-justice)). It made the claim that ‘peasants’ grow at least 70% of the world's food. How they got to this figure is not clear. The UN FAO has also built many policy reports around this claim. The UN FAO declared 2014 the ‘Year of Family Farming’ with a focus on developing agricultural policies and support mechanisms for smallholder farmers. It later launched the UN decade of family farming, which runs from 2019 to 2028. What the definition of a ‘family farm’ is, is not clear. One of the Sustainable Development Goals: Target 2.3 is to “Double the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers” by 2030. The Paris climate agreement includes important clauses on mitigation and adaptation support for small-scale farmers. The National Geographic [repeated it](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/photos-farms-agriculture-national-farmers-day). Even the multinational company, Bayer, used it to [make similar claims](https://twitter.com/bayer/status/1053178962560589824). Not only has it been repeated, its definition has also been stretched along the way. Sometimes it’s defined as smallholder farms; other times as ‘family farms’; sometimes as food or crop production; and other times as agricultural land. **References:** ETC -group, 2009. Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises. Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders’ agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome. FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref} A key problem is that organizations – including the UN FAO – often use the terms ‘small farms’ and ‘family farms’ interchangeably. But they cannot, and should not be. As we will see later, these definitions give us very different estimates. This confusion creates several problems. First, it creates a misunderstanding; one that might convince us that a world of smallholder farmers is what we need. If they produced nearly all of the world’s food, perhaps that is a future we would want to maintain. Second, it might make us concerned about the future of the global food system if countries move towards larger farms. As countries get richer, the average farm size [tends to increase](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-farm-size-vs-gdp). If nearly all of the world’s food came from small farms, perhaps we should be worried about this development. Is this concern justified? Researchers provide us with a better answer to this question of how much of the world’s food smallholders really produce. ## How much of the world’s food do smallholder farmers really produce? Several studies have tried to answer this question. The most extensive and recent comes from the work of Vincent Ricciardi and colleagues.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). [How much of the world's food do smallholders produce?](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912417301293). _Global Food Security_, 17, 64-72.{/ref} They produced the first open dataset on global food production, mapped by farm size.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). An open-access dataset of crop production by farm size from agricultural censuses and surveys. _Data in brief_, 19, 1970-1988.{/ref} It covers 154 crop types across 55 countries. It not only covers the amount produced across different farm sizes, but also the _types_ of crops and what they are used for – whether they are eaten as food, used as animal feed, or for other uses such as biofuels. The chart shows their findings. This shows the _cumulative_ total of three metrics – agricultural land; crop production; and food supply – with increasing farm size. So the top row of bars show the global total across farms less than one hectare; the second bar shows farms up to two hectares etc. Smallholder farms are those that are less than two hectares.{ref}This is the universal standard for smallholder farms, but of course, two hectares is a somewhat arbitrary cut-off.{/ref} That’s the top two bars, which are shaded in blue. Smallholder farmers produce 29% of the world’s crops, measured in kilocalories.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 28% to 31%.{/ref} Less than half of previous claims. They do so using around one-quarter (24%) of the world’s agricultural land. They account for a bit more crop production than land use because smaller farms tend to achieve higher yields.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). [Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2). _Nature Sustainability_, 1-7.{/ref} This is very labor-intensive work; smaller farms get higher land productivity, but lower labor productivity. These farms account for an even greater share of the world’s food supply – one-third (32%) of it.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 30% to 34%.{/ref} This is because smaller farms tend to [allocate a larger share](https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size#how-does-the-allocation-of-crops-vary-by-farm-size) of their crops towards food, rather than animal feed or biofuels. To get to the 70-80% figure that was previously reported, we would need to include farms all the way up to 100, or even 200 hectares. These results shown here are in line with other studies which agree that the figure of 70-80% is much too high.{ref}Herrero, M., Thornton, P. K., Power, B., Bogard, J. R., Remans, R., Fritz, S., ... & Havlík, P. (2017). [Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617300074). _The Lancet Planetary Health_, 1(1), e33-e42. Samberg, L. H., Gerber, J. S., Ramankutty, N., Herrero, M., & West, P. C. (2016). [Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta). _Environmental Research Letters_, 11(12), 124010. Graeub, B. E., Chappell, M. J., Wittman, H., Ledermann, S., Kerr, R. B., & Gemmill-Herren, B. (2016). [The state of family farms in the world](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15001217). _World Development_, 87, 1-15.{/ref} So while one-third of the world’s food is still a large share, it’s less than half of the widely-cited claim. The claim that _family _farms produce 70-80% of the world’s food _is_ likely to be true. A recent study by Sarah Lowder, Marco Sanchez, and Raffaele Bertini agrees with the conclusion that small farms produce one-third of the world’s food.{ref}Lowder, S. K., Sánchez, M. V., & Bertini, R. (2021). [Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X). _World Development_, _142_, 105455.{/ref} But they also estimate the share produced on family farms. The definition of a family farm is broad: it’s one that is operated by an individual or group of individuals, where most labor is supplied by the family. This means they can be of any size – many family farms are large. Orders of magnitude larger than our under-two-hectare smallholders. They find that family farms produce around 80% of the world’s food. To be clear: small farms produce one-third of the world’s food. Family farms – of any size – produce 80%. These terms should not be used interchangeably because they are very different. Increasing the productivity of smallholder farming is a crucial step in countries transitioning from poverty to middle-incomes. Raising the output and incomes of smallholder farmers should be an important focus, even if they produced very little of the world’s food. This is because most of the world’s farms are smallholders, and they are some of the poorest people in the world. We should avoid the romanticization of a future where most still spend their time working the fields for small returns. That would be a future where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty. <Image filename="How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce.png" alt=""/> **Acknowledgments:** Many thanks to Navin Ramankutty and Max Roser for feedback and suggestions on this work. #### Explore more of our work on this topic: ### Farm Size ourworldindata.org/farm-size | {
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"rendered": "\n<div class=\"blog-info\">\n<p>Our World in Data presents the data and research to make progress against the world\u2019s largest problems.<br>This blog post draws on data and research discussed in our entry on <strong><a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Farm Size</a></strong>.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\t<div class=\"wp-block-owid-summary\">\n\t\t<h2>Summary</h2>\n\t\t\n\n<p><strong>\u00a0</strong>It is often claimed that smallholder farmers produce 70% or even 80% of the world\u2019s food. This claim has even been made by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO).<br><br>It has been a linchpin for agricultural and development policies. But it is wrong. Recent studies suggest that this figure is too high: smallholder farmers produce around one-third of the world\u2019s food, less than half of what these headlines claim.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A key problem is that some use the terms \u2018family farms\u2019 and \u2018smallholder farms\u2019 interchangeably. <em>Family</em> farms <em>do</em> produce around 80% of the world\u2019s food. These farms can be of any size, and should not be confused with smallholders.</p>\n\n\n\t</div>\n\n\n<p>Most (84%) of the world\u2019s 570 million farms are smallholdings; that is, farms less than two hectares in size.{ref}Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016). <a href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002703\">The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide</a>. <em>World Development</em>, 87, 16-29.{/ref} Many smallholder farmers are some of the <a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty\">poorest people</a> in the world. Tragically, and somewhat paradoxically, they are also those who often go hungry.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A shift towards small-scale farming can be an important stage of a country\u2019s development, especially if it has a large working age population. But, it\u2019s gruelling work with poor returns: small farms can achieve good yields but need lots of human labor and input.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). <a href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2\">Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms</a>. <em>Nature Sustainability</em>, 1-7.{/ref} Labor productivity is low. This is why countries move beyond a workforce of farmers: younger people get an education, <a href=\"http://ourworldindata.org/urbanization\">move towards cities</a>, and try to secure a job with higher levels of productivity and income. A country cannot leave deep poverty behind when most of the population work as smallholder farmers.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has made incorrect claims about the world\u2019s reliance on smallholder farmers in the past. One of its reports states that \u201csmall-scale farmers produce over 70% of the world\u2019s food needs.\u201d{ref}Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders\u2019 agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.{/ref} In other reports it <a href=\"https://www.donorplatform.org/publication-agenda-2030/un-decade-of-family-farming-2019-2028-global-action-plan.html\">has said</a> that smallholder and family farms (which raises issues of how these terms are defined) produce 70-80% of the world\u2019s food.{ref}FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref} This would mean that small farms produce nearly all of the world\u2019s food. This has become a zombie statistic: one that has been repeated by many other organizations despite there being no evidence to support it.{ref}The first UN report to make this claim seems to cite a 2009 report by the environmental activist organization, <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETC_Group_(eco-justice)\">ETC group</a>. It made the claim that \u2018peasants\u2019 grow at least 70% of the world’s food. How they got to this figure is not clear.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The UN FAO has also built many policy reports around this claim. The UN FAO declared 2014 the \u2018Year of Family Farming\u2019 with a focus on developing agricultural policies and support mechanisms for smallholder farmers. It later launched the UN decade of family farming, which runs from 2019 to 2028. What the definition of a \u2018family farm\u2019 is, is not clear.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the Sustainable Development Goals: Target 2.3 is to \u201cDouble the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers\u201d by 2030. The Paris climate agreement includes important clauses on mitigation and adaptation support for small-scale farmers.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The National Geographic <a href=\"https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/photos-farms-agriculture-national-farmers-day\">repeated it</a>. Even the multinational company, Bayer, used it to <a href=\"https://twitter.com/bayer/status/1053178962560589824\">make similar claims</a>. Not only has it been repeated, its definition has also been stretched along the way. Sometimes it\u2019s defined as smallholder farms; other times as \u2018family farms\u2019; sometimes as food or crop production; and other times as agricultural land.</p>\n\n\n\n<p><br><strong>References:</strong></p>\n\n\n\n<p>ETC -group, 2009. Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises.<br></p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wolfenson, K. D. M. (2013). Coping with the food and agriculture challenge: smallholders\u2019 agenda. Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Rome.<br><br>FAO, 2014. The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in Family Farming Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>A key problem is that organizations \u2013 including the UN FAO \u2013 often use the terms \u2018small farms\u2019 and \u2018family farms\u2019 interchangeably. But they cannot, and should not be. As we will see later, these definitions give us very different estimates.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>This confusion creates several problems. First, it creates a misunderstanding; one that might convince us that a world of smallholder farmers is what we need. If they produced nearly all of the world\u2019s food, perhaps that is a future we would want to maintain. Second, it might make us concerned about the future of the global food system if countries move towards larger farms. As countries get richer, the average farm size <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-farm-size-vs-gdp\">tends to increase</a>. If nearly all of the world\u2019s food came from small farms, perhaps we should be worried about this development.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is this concern justified? Researchers provide us with a better answer to this question of how much of the world\u2019s food smallholders really produce.</p>\n\n\n\n<h3>How much of the world\u2019s food do smallholder farmers really produce?</h3>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<p>Several studies have tried to answer this question. The most extensive and recent comes from the work of Vincent Ricciardi and colleagues.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). <a href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912417301293\">How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce?</a>. <em>Global Food Security</em>, 17, 64-72.{/ref} They produced the first open dataset on global food production, mapped by farm size.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). An open-access dataset of crop production by farm size from agricultural censuses and surveys. <em>Data in brief</em>, 19, 1970-1988.{/ref} It covers 154 crop types across 55 countries. It not only covers the amount produced across different farm sizes, but also the <em>types</em> of crops and what they are used for \u2013 whether they are eaten as food, used as animal feed, or for other uses such as biofuels.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The chart shows their findings. This shows the <em>cumulative</em> total of three metrics \u2013 agricultural land; crop production; and food supply \u2013 with increasing farm size. So the top row of bars show the global total across farms less than one hectare; the second bar shows farms up to two hectares etc.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Smallholder farms are those that are less than two hectares.{ref}This is the universal standard for smallholder farms, but of course, two hectares is a somewhat arbitrary cut-off.{/ref} That\u2019s the top two bars, which are shaded in blue.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Smallholder farmers produce 29% of the world\u2019s crops, measured in kilocalories.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 28% to 31%.{/ref} Less than half of previous claims.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>They do so using around one-quarter (24%) of the world\u2019s agricultural land. They account for a bit more crop production than land use because smaller farms tend to achieve higher yields.{ref}Ricciardi, V., Mehrabi, Z., Wittman, H., James, D., & Ramankutty, N. (2021). <a href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2\">Higher yields and more biodiversity on smaller farms</a>. <em>Nature Sustainability</em>, 1-7.{/ref} This is very labor-intensive work; smaller farms get higher land productivity, but lower labor productivity.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>These farms account for an even greater share of the world\u2019s food supply \u2013 one-third (32%) of it.{ref}The authors provide confidence intervals of 30% to 34%.{/ref} This is because smaller farms tend to <a href=\"https://ourworldindata.org/farm-size#how-does-the-allocation-of-crops-vary-by-farm-size\">allocate a larger share</a> of their crops towards food, rather than animal feed or biofuels.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>To get to the 70-80% figure that was previously reported, we would need to include farms all the way up to 100, or even 200 hectares. These results shown here are in line with other studies which agree that the figure of 70-80% is much too high.{ref}Herrero, M., Thornton, P. K., Power, B., Bogard, J. R., Remans, R., Fritz, S., … & Havl\u00edk, P. (2017). <a href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617300074\">Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis</a>. <em>The Lancet Planetary Health</em>, 1(1), e33-e42.<br><br>Samberg, L. H., Gerber, J. S., Ramankutty, N., Herrero, M., & West, P. C. (2016). <a href=\"https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/12/124010/meta\">Subnational distribution of average farm size and smallholder contributions to global food production</a>. <em>Environmental Research Letters</em>, 11(12), 124010.<br><br>Graeub, B. E., Chappell, M. J., Wittman, H., Ledermann, S., Kerr, R. B., & Gemmill-Herren, B. (2016). <a href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15001217\">The state of family farms in the world</a>. <em>World Development</em>, 87, 1-15.{/ref}</p>\n\n\n\n<p>So while one-third of the world\u2019s food is still a large share, it\u2019s less than half of the widely-cited claim.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>The claim that <em>family </em>farms produce 70-80% of the world\u2019s food <em>is</em> likely to be true. A recent study by Sarah Lowder, Marco Sanchez, and Raffaele Bertini agrees with the conclusion that small farms produce one-third of the world\u2019s food.{ref}Lowder, S. K., S\u00e1nchez, M. V., & Bertini, R. (2021). <a href=\"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X\">Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated?</a>. <em>World Development</em>, <em>142</em>, 105455.{/ref} But they also estimate the share produced on family farms. The definition of a family farm is broad: it\u2019s one that is operated by an individual or group of individuals, where most labor is supplied by the family. This means they can be of any size \u2013 many family farms are large. Orders of magnitude larger than our under-two-hectare smallholders.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>They find that family farms produce around 80% of the world\u2019s food. To be clear: small farms produce one-third of the world\u2019s food. Family farms \u2013 of any size \u2013 produce 80%. These terms should not be used interchangeably because they are very different.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>Increasing the productivity of smallholder farming is a crucial step in countries transitioning from poverty to middle-incomes. Raising the output and incomes of smallholder farmers should be an important focus, even if they produced very little of the world\u2019s food. This is because most of the world\u2019s farms are smallholders, and they are some of the poorest people in the world.</p>\n\n\n\n<p>We should avoid the romanticization of a future where most still spend their time working the fields for small returns. That would be a future where hundreds of millions continue to live in poverty.</p>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1939\" height=\"1001\" src=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-44469\" srcset=\"https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce.png 1939w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce-400x206.png 400w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce-800x413.png 800w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce-150x77.png 150w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce-768x396.png 768w, https://owid.cloud/app/uploads/2021/08/How-much-of-the-worlds-food-do-smallholders-produce-1536x793.png 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1939px) 100vw, 1939px\" /></figure>\n</div>\n</div>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"/>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Acknowledgments:</strong> Many thanks to Navin Ramankutty and Max Roser for feedback and suggestions on this work.</p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"/>\n\n\n\n<h5>Explore more of our work on this topic:</h5>\n\n\n <block type=\"prominent-link\" style=\"is-style-thin\">\n <link-url>http://ourworldindata.org/farm-size</link-url>\n <title>Farm Size</title>\n <content></content>\n <figure></figure>\n </block>",
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