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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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Tue, 18 Oct 2016 08:37:20 +0000
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My name is Dele Raheem. I am a Food Scientist and currently a Visiting Researcher at the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland in Finland. Many thanks to the participants for their inputs on the contribution of small farms to food and nutrition security globally.

The global demand by consumers for local and traditional foods has to be responded to, which requires that small farms will need to be supported in several ways to meet this demand and in effect help to reduce food insecurity. By taking advantage of innovative technology that helps in diversifying the crops and their processing locally will help sustainability. 

I can see a parallel in the message from Lee-Ann Sutherland (message 49), about the Scottish crofts in relation to boundaries of food systems, which was also captured by Häkkilä (2002) when he wrote about the farms of northern Finland: 
"In Finland, farm originally denoted a homestead with at least one hectare of field (in official statistics from the 1969 agricultural census onwards). A growing percentage of farms has gradually become uncultivated, although the farm register still quotes them as independent farms. As a result, since 1990 official agricultural statistics have used two different concepts: farm and active farm. The introduction of the new term has not influenced the definition of the old one; rather, the new one complements it. An active farm is a farm with more than one hectare of arable land that practices agriculture or other entrepreneurial activity (SVT 1996: 7). Forest is an integral part of the Finnish farm and nearly all farms, active or not, have a forest holding, which is often considerably larger than the fields, up to tenfold in the north (Häkkilä 1991: 42). In the year 1998, all Finnish farms had an average of 16.3 hectares of arable land and 44.3 hectares of forest land, whereas the figures for Lapland were 7.8 hectares and 81.8 hectares, respectively. To solve the problems of the crofters and, later, those of other landless workers, the state became increasingly involved in rural settlement following the independence of Finland in 1917" 

There has been on-going discussion on how to resuscitate the farms in northern Finland (as in other remote and circumpolar regions) and probably link it to tourism which is the main source of revenue in the region. One way will be to encourage small scale processing through value addition at the local farms and generate income by marketing these products to visitors.
 
Dr Dele Raheem
Visiting Researcher 
Arctic Centre, 
University of Lapland 
96101 Rovaniemi
Finland
Email: draheem (at) gmail.com

Reference:
- Häkkilä, Matti (2002). Farms of northern Finland. Fennia 180: 1-2, pp. 199-211. http://www.helsinki.fi/maantiede/geofi/fennia/demo/pages/hakkila.htm 

[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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