A common claim is that smallholder farmers produce 80% of the world's food. UN FAO has repeated this.
This is not correct.
Smallholders produce around one-third of the world's food.
My latest @OurWorldInData article looks at the numbers: ourworldindata.org/smallholder-fo…
A key problem here is that people start using 'small farms' and 'family farms' interchangeably.
But these are different. Family farms can be any size: some are huge.
Unfortunately the use of these terms interchangeably creates a bit of a messy trail in the literature.
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Smallholder farms (less than 2 hectares) produce around one-third of the world's food.
Family farms (which has a very broad definition) produce around 80% of the world's food.
These are not the same. And policies focused on these groups will not be the same.
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Most of the world's farmers are smallholders. Often they are among the poorest in the world.
Raising smallholder incomes and productivity is key for development. We should start by being clear on how much food they actually produce.
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Many thanks to @NRamankutty and his colleagues for their work on this. Check out their paper here: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
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I have also published a page on farm size which brings together the data on farm size distributions across the world. Hope it is helpful!
ourworldindata.org/farm-size
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