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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Wed, 12 Oct 2016 09:22:26 +0000
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My name is Dominic Glover. I’m a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS, Brighton, UK) (www.ids.ac.uk) and a member of the STEPS Centre (www.steps-centre.org), which investigates technical, social and ecological pathways towards sustainability. My work focuses on technology and technological change in small-scale agriculture in low- and middle-income countries. I have carried out research on rice cultivation systems and the commercialisation of transgenic crops in various countries, notably the Philippines, India, Nepal, and Madagascar. I’d like to thank the organisers for convening this e-conference.

My contribution relates to question 3.3.1 from the background document, ‘How important is the contribution of small farms to food security and nutrition?’. On this question, participants might be interested to look at a discussion that took place online, on the ResearchGate professional network, some months ago (I launched the discussion in July 2014 but the most recent contribution is dated 9 September 2016).

The discussion focused on the claim that smallholder farmers produce around 70 per cent of the world’s food, and whether there is a clear and reliable source for this statistic.

The question attracted more than 35 followers and more than 30 contributions but, as you will see, we did not really identify a reliable source for the claim. This raises questions about how such a ‘factoid’ comes into existence, as well as more technical issues such as how to define the question and key parameters such as ‘smallholders’, and how to gather and analyse the data needed to answer the question.

Despite not finding a source for the claim, a number of useful source documents and references were cited by the contributors, and it also became evident that quite a few international researchers are actively investigating this issue and related topics, or are interested in doing so.

I think that new contributions to the ResearchGate (RG) discussion would still be welcome (although I do not want to divert traffic away from the current e-conference!). Non-members of the RG network can view the discussion but you have to have an RG account in order to post messages there.

You can find the discussion at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Smallholder_farmers_produce_70_per_cent_of_the_worlds_food_Whats_the_source_for_this_number 

Dr. Dominic Glover
Research Fellow
Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex,
Brighton BN1 9RE,
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1273 915 878 | Internal:  x.5878 
Email: D.Glover (at) ids.ac.uk 
Skype: [log in to unmask] 
Twitter: domglov
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicglover
ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dominic_Glover

[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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