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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Fri, 14 Oct 2016 12:28:15 +0000
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My name is Siera Vercillo and I am a Doctoral Candidate at the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, focusing my research on gender, smallholder agriculture and food security in northern Ghana. I have also worked for five years as an agriculture development consultant and project implementer in West Africa, mostly in Ghana and Sierra Leone.

My contribution is related to question 3.3.1 on 'How important is the contribution of small farms to food security and nutrition?':

I think it is important to clarify, as some have begun to do in this conference, about who we are talking about when we say smallholder. Do we mean someone working on a particular land size? Someone who grows for subsistence purposes first before commercial? Someone who uses a specific type of technology, has a specific amount of capital or level of market integration? There has been a lot of thinking done on this in the peasant farmer and agrarian change literature. Myself, I have asked qualitatively who the smallholder farmer is in the context where I am working and based on that participatory definition, moved forward with reference to quantitative classifications. I would be interested in knowing what people here think about that strategy.

I also think it is critical that policy and programs define who it is they want to target and incorporate evidence of class and gender based differences so that interventions are not leaving behind vulnerable populations, or as in many instances making the farming situation worse for particular kinds of smallholders. There is a lot of missing basic demographic data and evidence about who the smallholder actually is in contexts where I work. Worse, there are a lot of myths in aggregated, global statistics about who the smallholder is, which policy, programs and advocacy are founded upon. For example, recent advocacy and analysis has finally recognized important contributions women make to agriculture and food security, but there are many factoids quoted that do not have reliable sources. We need to continue to question whether women in Africa provide 60-80 percent of the labour in agriculture and grow the majority of the world's food, when evidence put this at less than 50%. Important statistics like women owning only a few percent of the world's land is also not really meaningful without understanding how much of that land is actually owned by men and which types of women or men are land owners.  

We should not deter efforts to recognize, represent and redistribute resources to smallholders, like women in agriculture, but just the opposite. We need to gather more evidence to better explain the intersections of who these smallholders are, what they are doing and the purpose or rationale, so that we can better understand who is being left behind in farming and why they are vulnerable to better address this.

Siera Vercillo
Doctoral Candidate
Environment, Health and Hazards lab
Geography Department, 
Western University
Canada
E-mail: sieravercillo (at) ewb.ca
+1-519-661-2111 x 82818
Personal website: http://mydevelopmentdiary.wordpress.com 
Recent Publication: Does the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition impose biotechnology on smallholder farmers in Africa?  Global Bioethics, 26(1), pp.1-13.

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/434322/ ].

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