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Moderated e-mail conference on small farms and food security

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My name is Harriet Gausi. I work in the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development at Lilongwe Agricultural Development Division in Malawi. I am currently a PhD in Agriculture Student at the University of New England, Australia.

Comment on Question 3.1.1: 
 
I have worked with communities at grass root level for over ten years and when we read in literature on land holding sizes, it looks like a mere statistic, but as one goes to the communities, it is when it becomes evident that this is real; it is not just as any other statistic. Most of the farmers that we work with own less than a hectare of land and others with no piece of land at all, and female-headed households are the most affected.
 
Having said this, I feel Message 70, from Onima V.T. from India, has answered question 3.1.1: defining of the land threshold to classify farms as small. The categories in Message 70 are clear, straight forward and encompassing (includes the 94% of farms worldwide that have up to 5 hectares, as indicated in the e-mail conference background document). If anything, maybe the big farmer category from message 70 could further be categorized as lower, medium and upper scale 'big farmer' to take into account that in some countries, 50 hectares could still be regarded as a small farm. If further classifications are included in this definition, such as crops grown, livestock kept, income from sale of crops/livestock, estate farming, irrigation farming, farm mechanization, etcetera, the definition will become complicated and leave out some 'small farms' that may not fall under any of these classifications.
 
Yes, the project should include the contribution of urban gardens and home gardens to food security and nutrition because these gardens play a role in food security and nutrition of the masses.

Harriet Gausi
Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development,
Lilongwe Agricultural Development Division,
P.O. Box, 259,
Lilongwe,
Malawi
E-mail: Harrietgausi (at) gmail.com

[Regarding the farm size categories described by Onima (70) to classify Indian holdings as marginal, small, semi-medium, medium and large: these are the same as those described by Jangid (66), except that Jangid used different units (hectares vs acres) and included two further sub-groups for each of the 5 categories. The classification provided by Mahesh Chander (56) differed slightly as it mentioned a threshold of 6 ha between medium and large farms. In further correspondence with Mahesh, he has indicated that at times slight variations in land size classification are followed by various agencies and federal states; that Onima (70) and Jangid (66) have rightly used the criteria followed by Ministry of Rural Development, which is appropriate in the context. Their classification, with the 10 ha threshold between medium and large, follows that of the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) approved for all government surveys - most of the official data are based on this classification only. The NSSO 2014 report on 'Key indicators of land and livestock holdings in India' is available at http://mospi.nic.in/mospi_new/upload/KI_70_18.1_19dec14.pdf (2.8 MB)...Moderator].

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] The last day for receiving messages is 23 October].

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