SHA in developing countries is a typical subsistence agriculture, which normally is characterised by the "El dilema del ejidatario". This dilemma describes the typical problem SH do face. In years of good harvests, output prices are very low and do not suffice to buy neither machinery nor fertilizers, pesticides or quality seed. In years of low yields and relatively high output prices the harvested quantities are needed to feed the SH and his family. On the other hand, when the general economic situation of a developing country is bettering, the last economic sector to profit of it is agriculture. Therefore in times of better economic situation a high fluctuation to the cities can be observed, which opens possibilities to raise average size of farms and also the profitability of those remaining in agriculture. In Europe at least it arose that farms being managed based on pure economic aspects are more respecting environment, than those managed by "traditional" farmers. This is mostly due to higher education levels of farmers, which is the only basis for good performance. These farmers normally are not farming based on "recipes" purported by the fertilizer, pesticide and seed industry, but rather on their agricultural college or university based knowledge. Therefore one of the first steps must be to raise education levels of SH as well as permanent training and extension services.

Dear Tim,

This is a very interesting topic.

I do realise there are few more questions implied here that need further discussion before answering the general question addressed. However, I will focus on the part of "Sustainable intensification" and SHA.

What we are actually asking SH to do is to increase their technical efficiency, manage inputs sustainable, reduce any environmental pressures generated from the production system and simultaneously increase yields and income.

To reach sustainable intensification we need therefore to:

Improve technical efficiency of SHA

Improved seed varieties, improved fertilisers, efficient crop protection products, mechanical and automated production, better training and development of managerial skills

Sustainable input use

Improve efficiency of natural resource use (water, soil), of agrochemicals used in the production function, of energy and fuels used in order to reduce environmental pressures generated at a farm level.

Increase yield and income

Improved technical efficiency and improved efficiency of inputs used in the production function is positively correlated with increased yield and income at a farm level.

If we are then looking for the trade off between sustainability and intensification in SHA, especially in the case of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, it is required to investigate the potential of improving technical and input use efficiency.

The direction of improving technical efficiency depends on the goals and the weighting of sustainability and intensification.

i.e. In the case of improving intensification we are looking for a yield and income maximisation production function while in the case of sustainability we are seeking for reducing any environmental pressures generated from the inputs used.

In my opinion, "sustainable intensification" can be the answer for SHA future development. However, it is a need to define technical efficiency and input use efficiency before suggesting any improvement or policy strategies.

Agriculture is the human activity more connected to nature because the primary sector works directly in the ecosystems, modifying them in the deep and up to this point in the human history, his relationship with them it's been destructive. Since his appearance on earth, the genus "homo" and especially homo sapiens began and determined a deep alteration of the ecological balance in most of the ecosystems beginning from the impact on Paleolithic / Mesolithic megafauna. Since that time...homo begins to be out of nature system and the integration between humans and nature start to be a kind of war: where homo wins....nature loses. many thousands of years after separation "humans-nature", the man is very faraway from the natural system. Its production system, just because it is not integrated into the natural production system causes devastating impacts on the environment, on species and on ecosystems. An example can explain the difference between how the nature works and how the humans: in nature the waste concept doesn't exist but what is waste for an organism becomes resource for another; in this way energy and materials flows thru the food chain and the environment, in a very sustainable way with a high energy efficiency level. the same system can easily be applied for human needs: I think to the industrial symbiosis, for example, where different subjects share energy and materials withe the objective to enhance the local efficiency in the use of the raw materials and valorisation of waste. At the same time the waste production will decrease a lot (reuse and recover).

Another example is to take nature as a model both for technological needs and (as I said) for the production system: I think to a promising sector of study, the biomimicry that find how nature solved technological problems and transfer it in the human society: an example coul be a technology that provide health and hygiene in public place (hospital, public bathroom, schools, and so on) with a patterned film applied on doors, handle, toilette, etc. This palstic film is designed to mimic the sharks skin with its dermal denticles. Shark skin denticles are arranged in a distinct diamond pattern with tiny riblets and this "architecture" prevents the bacteria biofilm growth.

To conclude: in agriculture, the smallholders (not alone but with a systemic approach together with other stakeholders like retailers, transformation firms, university and researchers, consumers, restaurants, schools and educational operators....etc) could be the central axis of a new and sustainable production system integrating each other their products, their waste...

I worked in the last 3 years on the development of a new fruit juice coming out from the integration of 4 rural and local chains: grape, apple, peach and pear all together to obtain a healthy product, with local growing fruits and giving to the farmers (smallfarmers) new market opportunity. In this way the complexity is encouraged because of alternative use of the same raw materials: I grow grape to obtain wine (linear system - less sustainable) - I grow grape to obtain wine, grape juice, fruit juice, etc...(complex model - more sustainable because is the same model of the ecosystems)

SHA is here to stay and contributes 70-80% of food productionin developing countries. Attempting to clear out smallholders for more efficient plantation production (as is happing currenly in Honduras for oil palm estates) will result in strife and misery.

Sustainable intemsification is the way forward. It not only requires technical improvements (e.g. conservation agriculture services provided by specialist contractors) but also better linkages to markets to commercialize the producers. Eliminating or reducing destructive susbsistence agriculture would indeed be a logical outcome.

I think small holder agriculture will continue in times to come in the less developed world where populations are high.SHA should be looked upon, besides for food security, as ecological, economic and cultural entities for any policy to deal with SHA.The mosaic the SHA provides for the above sectors may be one good character for human civilization to be resilient; we have the responsibility to look beyond simply agriculture.

Thanks all... And whilst I have sympathy for all the answers, there remains the fundamental question: is income from a 2ha plot of land ever going to provide incomes that approach those we would see as desirable? Clearly, as Brian notes, SHA is here for the foreseeable future but in the long term? Income is related to yield and, beyond a point, yield is related to area; so growing income to economically desirable levels requires farmers to have more land, which implies consolidation of plots ...

Dear All,

Very interesting and challenging discussion and thank you Dr Benton for putting forward this issue.

Unfortunately much of the debates revolve around the economics of agricultural activities for which the very essence being economy of scale to mention only this.

I think one important and major benefit of SHA is its priceless contribution to biodiversity in the agricultural production arena and it is also a sink for unskilled labour. True that SHA often makes use of means and techniques that are obsolete because either of low skill or ignorance and/or limited resource available to acquire new techniques (or size does not justify the investment), but more importantly and for obvious reason research and development programs focused mostly on large scale production and the outcome is often out of phase or inadequate for SHA. Consequently improvement in small scale production holding has been left in oblivion again foster by economic reasoning as highlighted by Dr Krachler. One should not also forget the market trend for standard product which further contribute to the marginalization of SHA produce.

Awareness about sustainability, climate change etc.is realized by all stakeholders, there is need to seriously do some serious rethinking about intensive agriculture to the detriment of SHA. I humbly quote Dr Rao's writing "The mosaic SHA provides in agricultural sectors is one good character for human civilization to be resilient". Therefore initiative as reported by Dr Chiusano should be encouraged and authority should act accordingly.

One of the key factor, beyond the yield, is to differentiate the production

I grow grape only to obtain wine is not an example of efficiency: I can improve my income with an enlargement of my point of view on my grape....and start to look at it not only as a bottle of wine, but as a potential reach natural source of natural compounds from my grape pomace

If the humans keep on thinking in a mechanical way (only enhance yield)....what a bad future....

One of the key factor of the ecosystems resiliency is the connettance concept among different organisms....

Thanks Jean Paul for your appreciation on my point of view

I think the crucial aspect on this topic is how to empower smallholder farmers to collectively decide about their future. Often they are not isolated farmers as the big landowners of the northern-western world. Many of them do want to escape from their SHA reality, many others don't. Literature about the Green Revolution showed how a few wealthier farmers took advantage of the new technologies while a lot of poorer farmers abandoned their land and went to fill the slums in the cities. look for example

Yapa 1977 - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1977.tb01147.x/abstract

For me, the most important aspect is this: in SHA, behind suffering, hunger and hard labour, there is an overwhelming potential for innovation - technical AND socio-political and economical. We - as scientists - must discuss with smallholder farmers, understand their problems and fellings, help them expressin this potential for innovation and implementing it in a proper way. And connecting farmer's local knowledge with a more general scientific knowledge...

Smallholder agriculture will continue to be embraced in countries where agriculture is still at its subsistence level. Dr. Benton's thought is wonderful but everything he said could be true where the farmers involved are literate and the profession is taken as full-time job. Agriculture, in many of the developing countries is a part-time job. This is possibly the reason why Dr. Paul calls SHA a sink for unskilled labour. This should not be. Until every stakeholder sees agriculture, either smallholder or 'bigholder', the expected gains in the profession such as improved livelihood, enhanced ecosystem and biodiversity may be difficult to achieve.

There are so many factors in favor of SHA. Sustainability is one. Land tenure policy is another. In the developed world, mechanization was viable because of labor absorption by the industry that exported goods to developing countries. This may not hold true when all countries try to engage only 3% of their population in Agriculture. On the other hand, the Recent agricultural innovations that are increasing crop production on smallholder farming may also open another window of opportunity for the SHA to stay around.

Adding just my two cents to an exceedingly interesting discussion:

1. SHA is often defined (and operationally identified) on the basis of farm size, but this is an insufficient criterion. There are small farms with large amounts of capital per hectare, producing correspondingly more. There are also relatively larger farms with very low productivity, especially in semi arid regions (not to speak of pastoralists, who may own a relatively large flock grazing on commons over low productivity pasture, and yet be poor). Besides land quality and reproducible capital, another important factor is human capital: modernizing a small holding and getting a large increase in income out of it usually demands not only capital but sophisticated knowledge, organization and connections..

2.Smallholders are abundant, but many if not most of them do not get the majority of their livelihood out of their farm. Escaping abject misery is usually a possibility only for those able to diversify their livelihood by entering the labor market or investing in some (farm or more usually off-farm) entrepreneurial activity (or by getting remittances from a former household member who lives in some richer area, possibly abroad). Escaping poverty on the basis of SHA, without considerable investment in reproducible and human capital, is usually impossible. That's why people move from SHA to cities and other occupations, and not the reverse.

3. Even if SHA households get some food from their farm, in most cases it is hardly enough to cover their food needs. Most produce just some basic foodstuffs like cereals or tubers, often less than they consume or need, and most must buy food in the market (with off farm income if they have some), or be undernourished. The connection between SHA and household food security is tenuous at best (food security is defined as having access to food, not as producing your own food).

4. Converting a subsistence or infra-subsistence farm into a viable family-based commercial farm that stays comfortably above the poverty line is achieved by a very scant minority of SHA families, even allowing for inter-generational mobility. A recent study of mine on Latin American smallholders (based on a large database of national censuses and surveys) started with the population of all SHA households existing in or about 1950, and estimated the number of their survivors and descendants living in 2010. The result is that 21.5% of this latter population of survivors and descendants were still poor smallholders (and were less than the number existing in 1950), 2% had been "promoted" to viable family farming, 61% were in urban areas within Latin America, about 3.5% were in other regions of the world, and about 12% were in rural households with no SHA that depended on other rural occupations. Most of those still in SHA households had also other secondary occupations to make ends meet. Those SHA households that by 1950 were under semi-feudal obligations have been emancipated through land reform, but their SHA livelihoods are still poor.

Bottom line: in about two generations, only 2% of poor SHA people passed to viable family farming in spite of large and prolonged efforts to that effect (land reforms, rural development programs, small irrigation projects,agricultural extension, concessional rural credit, and what not). A minority remain in SHA, mostly with more diversified livelihoods than their grandparents had by 1950. Most have abandoned SHA, or at least diversified their livelihoods. A version of my study, in Spanish, is available through Researchgate: Tendencias y Perspectivas de la Agricultura Familiar en América Latina (Trends and Prospects of Family Farming in Latin America). The same process is ongoing in other continents, though most likely with a lag as compared with Latin America.

Greetings,

The last questions, has a simple answer.

The SH production has serious implications about environment problems, because they have the technical assistance from commercial sellers of agro-chemical products. So, the soil and the health of the SH, are in risk.

The reproduction of this practice, become a small example of the traditional production, with chemical applied and monocultives.

I've also found this discussion very interesting. Just a couple of my own thoughts to add to the matter.

1) I think it is important to consider how we think of yields. SHA does not necessarily have low yields per area, and in many instances (at least in the pacific tropical regions that I study) SHA has comparable or higher yields per area than conventional industrial agriculture. However the yields per labor are virtually always much lower in SHA than conventional ag. The yields per area are a great thing from an environmental and global perspective. The yields per labor are not a static thing, and as many have already stated will depend critically on supply, demand, and our overall social emphasis on food. To me then how SHA will fare in the future depends more critically on our global values than it does any specific farming mechanism. Industrial agriculture is able to make food very cheap, but (to me) at massive environmental and social externalities that are ultimately born by the citizens. If we properly valued the environmental and social benefits of alternative agricultural schemes and could agree to pay for the higher costs of food then the entire equation would be very different. This all depends on our desires and values as a society. My personal opinion is that no, we will not shift away from the status quo and that SHA will continue to be a painful life of poverty, but that does not stop me form trying very hard to make the opportunities to make a decent standard of living by being a good steward of the earth.

2) While much of this discussion is focused on third world countries I think it is important to note that there is a revival of SHA in developed countries because of a developing market looking to break away from the industrially produced foods. Obviously the balance of costs and benefits are very different in developed countries, but I think that there is a growing recognition of the general benefits created by SHA in these situations. What I think is undeveloped though is a truly rigorous understanding of the overall lifecycle impacts of SHA and large scale agriculture. For instance the localvore food movement often touts that reduced shipping of food helps reduce the ennvironmental footprint of food, however some studies have shown that because the ways that local foods are moved they can often be more energy intensive than food from large scale agriculture produced far away. A better understanding of what a SHA dominated food system would look like in developed countries would be very interesting to me.

Let me add a short comment since the subject has been of concern to me for that past 40 years and stimulated my somewhat polemic book ‘Small Farmers Secure Food’; [downloadable version on this Research Gate site or google books, guttenberg, amazon etc]. The argument goes like this:

- up to half of the world’s food is produced by small farmers in poor countries, and they feed themselves and their families

- small farms have repeatedly provided the resilience for bad times that social welfare tries to provide in richer societies; witness the return to the farm of urban workers after financial crashes in various counties over the years

- international development is based on Western conceptions of development that use monetized measures and are unfamiliar with the social and security role played by small farmers outside wealthy or Western nations

- this leads some commentators to suggest larger farms and reskilling of farmers as part of moving out of poverty

- but in many cases, yields on small farms often exceed those possible on the same marginal environments by large farms, due to attention to detail on a small plot and the absolute need to nurture food from it

- if small farmers are encouraged to move off land in favour of large enterprises, they may languish in cities for a generation requiring the 30+% more food production that is common to cities to account for losses between farm and city

- therefore: assisting small farmers to improve their efficiency (defined in their terms, which are highly risk-averse) is the main role for development – I interpret one aspect of the popular ‘sustainable intensification’ to possibly be relevant here (but part of the relevance is, as ever, education of Western minds about other peoples’ worldviews and acknowledging the need for a long apprenticeship before a Western-influenced mind can appreciate the extremely complex social, technical and economic interactions that occur on small farms – in fact they are wonders of efficiency honed over centuries in many cases)

- despite that conclusion, the appeal made in the book is for greater awareness within influential development agencies where unconscious biases can force small farmers and food-deficit nations into worse situations.

However, there is an inevitability to human actions that leads me to both advocate and see the above argument more as a brake on the speed of change than an alternative.

A few thoughts of my own from experience living and working in Zambia. I suppose the first thing to highlight is that here one rarely hears the term small-holder, as many households have no Title Deeds. The more commonly used term is small-scale farmer. The precarity of access to land is certainly one factor that can explain why farmers don't invest capital in land that they don't own.

There is a commonly observed inverse relationship between farm size and productivity per hectare. This is often explained (and often empirically supported by evidence) that labour input provides returns to scale. So a highly productive small-scale farm is highly labour intensive. Is this bad ? I don't think so.

Labour intensivity should be seen as a good thing in countries where unemployment is a problem. There are ways and means of innovating to reduce the 'hard labour' aspect of toiling the soil (small rotavators, small irrigation pumps etc) which by no means imply that land needs to be consolidated, implying loss of 'ownership' and commercialisation in the western sense, where farm workers are dependent on short-term job contracts and subject to the impending loss of jobs through mechanisation.

Essential is to further increase productivity on small-scale farms and I would argue that this can be done through marginal increases in the input of the other factors of production which constrain labour productivity, such as access to organic fertilisers, bio-pesticides and bio-energy to power the devices alluded to above. All of these can be produced locally and sustainably through systems of local production and consumption which provide additional direct and indirect wealth creation opportunities for the small-holders themselves.

To achieve productivity under the alternative scenario, large-scale commercialisation requires (a) consolidation and removal of people from the land (b) large inputs of diesel, fertilisers, pesiticides, herbicides all produced elsewhere and from fossil fuels (c) consequent environmental degradation.

It is important to note that there is very little evidence for the long-term producitivity of commercial scale fossil fuel intensive agriculture any where in the world. Even less for the tropics. The main body of evidence that such systems can remain productive comes from a single field experiment in the UK at the Rothamstead agricultural research centre. I am not aware of any long-term (>100 year) studies conducted in the tropics where soils are just that little b it more complicated and susceptible to degradation.

A further point requires elaboration - which of the two systems is likely to be more resilient to climate change, peak oil and political/market instability ?

Some great answers and thoughts from many people. But, with respect, I don't think anyone has really grasped the core of the question. If, in the OECD countries, mean income (in PPP terms) is $30-$50k and generally governments in low and middle income countries see this as aspirational, how can that mesh with SHA (whatever its manifold advantages for yield per hectare, resilience, social structure, ecological benefit). Is, as some of my development colleagues suggest, supporting SHA in the longterm imposing a constraint towards poverty? If economic development happens and people look for OECD-like income, how will SHA transform? People will likely move to employment, increased urbanisation, lower rural labour, leading to consolidation of land holdings or ....? If in decades to come, people want more income than 2ha of land can supply, what will happen? I am not looking to impose a "western" solution, rather seeking equitable routes by which income growth to the poor can arise and thinking about the implications for landuse?

Hi Tim, to try to get to the knub of your core question, which rephrased seems to me to relate to what drives economic growth in developing nations rather than small-holder farming per se. I hope my answer highlights the role of increasing yield per hectare, reducing fossil fuel dependence and increasing the efficiency of the system whilst reducing negative externalities.

The conventional economists view on this (growth) is that undefined and assumed technological progress multiplies the factor inputs productivity (capital, undifferentiated labour) to give GDP, which is then allocated to the factors (labour and capital) according to their cost share / marginal productivity. It also assumes constant returns to scale. it would seem that most of this is wrong.

This view excludes (or limits the role of) natural resources (and specifically available energy, exergy) to a marginal role. It also just assumes that all technologies are equal (golf ball, cure for cancer, new plant genetics etc) because they are undefined, and also assumes that this technology will just keep on growing at past observed rates (~3% per annum), like manna from heaven.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Empirical evidence and theoretical work (done by myself and colleagues, Prof. Robert Ayres, Reiner Kuemmel, Ditmar Lindenberger and others) reveals that historically 'cheap' energy (exergy) inputs and the efficiency of use of natural resources are critical. It also shows that the rate of efficiency growth has stagnated in western economies. Fuels are getting more expensive on the whole and technolgical advance in efficiency has stagnated.

For growth, it is the rate of growth of this technical efficiency (and the total supply) of energy input use that exerts a major influence to determine observed growth rates. The developed world stagnation has resulted in borrowing from the future (credit) on the basis of assumed future growth rates (using the old economic model, with highlighted flaws above) as a mechanism for growth. This is not sustainable, because if the growth does not come, the credit can't be repaid....

So where am I going. First, as growth rates stagnate in western Europe and bubble elsewhere (US) on the basis of short-term reduced energy prices, it is no longer possible to assume, when energy costs start to rise again, that average income in developed nations will either grow or remain as high as they are presently. Will your grandchildren be as rich as you...possibly not. Bob Ayres wrote a great article on this.

Secondly, I have not yet mentioned the cost of externalities in the old model (climate change, eutrophication etc) because they do not exist. This ecological economic approach outlined above indicates that increased productivity with reduced input use (resilience) and lower externalities both social and environmental (i.e. efficiency) offers significant potential for sustained growth and resultant improved income generation.

A further failure of the old model is to assume that capital and energy can substitute to the limit for labour, and that all are independent of each other (i.e. mechanise to the limit, substitute labour for energy slaves - capital and 'cheap' fossil fuels).

The new model i describe indicates that at a given stage of development there is an optimal mix of capital, labour and energy (defined by the available technology). It could be that increased productivity in small-holder farming (through innovation and implementation of appropriate productivity enhacing technology) may represent a stage towards releasing labour from the land towards alternative income generating activities. It could also be that the large-scale commercial plantations are just a stage in a learning process towards a more (scarce factor / abundant factor) efficient smaller scale but aggregated and networked approach to agriculture. The limit to growth is largely determined by the limits to efficient uses of the appropriate combination of factors (capital, labour, energy) under a given technological regime MINUS externalities, and in this context small-scale farming certainly has a role to play in increasing wealth, in combination with an appropriate mix of innovative eco-intensive large scale commercial farming.

Many issues could be raised, for brevity’s sake I will limit myself to three points.

1. Permit me to be the first to do what academics always like to do, which is think about whether Prof. Benton’s question is the right one; is it a smart question, well framed? My purpose is not to criticise Prof. Benton for posing his question in the way he has, but I think it’s appropriate to recognise that the question frames the issues at stake in particular ways, and partially determines the kinds of answers that can be given.

The proposition that the cash income from 2 ha. could be increased to US $30,000-50,000 looks immediately doubtful. But is it appropriate to use dollar (PPP) income as a basic measure of a desirable goal for small-scale farming? To my mind, cash income is too crude an indicator. As other posters have mentioned already, SHA can provide various building blocks of a livelihood, including various ones that are not readily denominated in cash terms. These include, most obviously, food and other products for direct consumption, but also a stock of wealth, a reserve to fall back on, collateral, adaptability in the face of market forces and agro-ecological change, membership of and status in a community, identity, the opportunity to participate in a cultural life, and so on.

Several of these depend heavily, of course, on security of tenure in land, providing both the incentive and the opportunity to invest in agricultural improvement, upgrading skills, and so on.

2. Public debates about rural poverty and development often seem to take it for granted that rural life is revolting, dirty and miserable, a fate from which anyone in their right mind would choose to escape. But for all its undoubted challenges, difficulties and risks, small-scale agriculture with secure land tenure also has various positive and dignified attributes, such as autonomy and independence – the opportunity to be master (or mistress) of one’s fate. How many factory workers and inhabitants of urban slums can say the same?

What, then, do we mean by development and the ‘good life’? Is it something that can only be measured in dollar terms? Amartya Sen proposed that we should think about development as the expansion of human freedoms, that is, the opportunity to exercise choices about how to live. When we do so, it is not necessary to assume that small-scale agriculture with a low or modest cash income would necessarily be unattractive to everyone.

Ryan Galt has presented very interesting research showing that many small-scale community-supported producers in the USA tolerate very low cash incomes (many very far below US $30,000) because they prioritise other values rather than money: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecge.12015/abstract

I like to remind myself about what happens when affluent urbanites reach a certain level of wealth and comfort, have children, or arrive at retirement age. Many of them choose to relocate to rural areas where the air is fresher, the communities smaller and apparently safer, the surroundings more peaceful and calm. Quite often they choose to engage in very small-scale food production or animal husbandry. Granted, that is not at all the same thing as subsistence agriculture. I insist that no-one accuses me of romanticising the rural life. However, I also urge that we look at this evidence and think carefully about what human beings find positive and negative about farming and rural life, and not resort to the knee-jerk assumption that SHA is necessarily and perpetually a miserable existence that should be eliminated for the sake of humanity.

3. Can the cash incomes of small-scale producers be increased? Undoubtedly so. As everyone knows, food policy across much of the world has been geared towards maintaining low prices for urban consumers, to feed factory workers and avoid urban unrest. All very well for consumers, not so good for producers. These policies could be changed to raise the incomes of producers. Other posters have already mentioned that small-scale farming has persistently been shown to have higher land productivity than large-scale operations. Where small-scale farmers have access to input and output markets, market information, extension support, and so on, they are able to produce flexibly for consumption and sale, including high-value cash crops. On balance, I believe the evidence supports the view that, in many situations, it would be possible for a smallholding of 2 ha. to provide a dignified, decent, healthy livelihood for its users. Whether that would amount to a cash income of US $30,000-50,000 is another question but not, for me, the most important or interesting one.

Finally, I suspect that if more rural households had secure title to land, as well as opportunities to make a decent living in other ways if they so chose, we might well find that a measure of land consolidation would occur anyway, though not necessarily to the level of large, industrial-scale operations.

Dear Dr Benton, as usual you triggered a very interesting debate on "burning" topics.

You said:

"If economic development happens and people look for OECD-like income, how will SHA transform?"

What if we reformulate the question as "How to transform SHA to make development happen and , eventually, reach OECD-like income?"

as far as we know, in the south of the world many development operations which overlooked SHA have partly or totally failed. In the North (it is a very good point that highlighted by Noa Lincoln), OECD and the EU produced a lot of reports about rural poverty, probably as a consequence of a more successful development. Poverty means not only income, but access to public services, relationship networks

see for instance http://ec.europa.eu/social/BlobServlet?docId=2087&langId=en

Further you said: " People will likely move to employment, increased urbanisation, lower rural labour, leading to consolidation of land holdings or ....? "

In my personal experience, what you say is exactly what people in the South try to do to improve their livelihoods income and security. Therefore, if we sustain SHA we will probably make farmers communities free to decide how to improve their condition.

Finally, I would say that probably rural poverty , low income, insecurity, etc. are far from being limited to SHA, both in the South and in the North of the World.

Have a nice day, Ambrogio

Ambrogio Constanzo asks: 'What if we reformulate the question as "How to transform SHA to make development happen and , eventually, reach OECD-like income?" '

This question assumes that SHA can be deliberately transformed in such a way. But I am somewhat skeptical in that regard. After half a century of sustained efforts by national governments and international agencies to improve the lot of subsistence or infra-subsistence smallholders, aiming a transforming their farms into viable family-based commercial farms, the rate of success is dismally low or vanishing, The vast majority of poor SHA households (or their descendants) either remain as poor SHA, or escape their sad fate by moving into other sources of livelihood. The proportion achieving the transformation of SHA into something better that is still SHA and is still providing the bulk of the household livelihood is vanishingly small.

This is not meant as a proposal that "we" should strive for some other goal, for instance that "we" should not favor SHA but Big Farm Businesses, or whatever other purpose of the kind. I am in fact not proposing that "we" do anything in particular. In fact, I do not know who are actually referred by the "we" pronoun in sentences such as "We should promote SHA": Does it refer to researchgate subscribers, governments, development experts, transnational corporations, all or none of the above, or what? Does "we" include everybody, or just some selected souls that share our views? What about the rest? Nor do I know why on earth it is thought what whatever collective of people is included in "we" or "us" will be able to agree on a set of goals, or achieve a modicum of success in a (possibly utopical) endeavor upon which they may not even agree to begin with.

As a member of a community called RESEARCHgate (and not ACTIONgate, POLICYgate, WISHFUL-THINKINGgate or suchlike), I more modestly purport to study what has been actually happening, and sometimes dare to risk a hypothesis about what is likely to happen in the coming years (a hypothesis which should be based on past and current facts, and be readily refutable by future facts). These hypotheses are not an exercise in wishful thinking: they assume that the various relevant actors would pursue an array of (often conflicting) goals through (often misguided) policies, and that the end result will be the joint, and possibly unexpected or undesired, outcome of a multifarious process where many divergent and possibly opposite forces are at play. That's the way history usually happens, I surmise, and I guess it is the way history will keep happening, no matter whether "we" like it or not. As a researcher, I'd like to take a look and try to understand what's going on.

Just to say that "we" is "we researchers involved in topics such as food security, agricultural development", sorry if I did not make it explicit.

I think we all agree that "WE" "purport to study what has been actually happening, and sometimes dare to risk a hypothesis about what is likely to happen in the coming years (a hypothesis which should be based on past and current facts, and be readily refutable by future facts" as said by Dr Maletta.

I am a member of a community called "RESEARCHgate" and not ACTIONgate -by the way in Researchgate there is an interesting 'ACTION_RESEARCH topic'- and I think it is THE place to share our hypotheses and also our views, of course based on facts and studies.

The hypothesis I mentioned in my first contribution in this debate is that in SHA there is an overwhelming potential for agroecological innovation that has been overlooked by research and by policies. Since research (I mainly talk about the agronomic one) has started to explore this innovation potential, and to evolve research methods and frameworks to strenghten this innovation potential, i think (and this is no more than my VIEW) that this could help smallholders to decide about their future. Collaborative research between researchers and farmers is a transformation of agriculture, see

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-007-9072-2#page-1

and

http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/5194.pdf

just as examples

There is no easy solution. It will likely take a combination of different measures to resolve the issue:

1. Improving (and in cases where values are acceptable, maintaining) yields so that production is maximised for each unit of land farmed

2. Joint venture farming, where individual units are not viable or where combined production increases efficiency and strengthen market negotiations

3. But governments will have to ascribe greater value to the sector and create the enabling environments for the Small farmers: including tax free status for equipment and supplies, as well as increasing access to markets by gradually decreasing imports of food where suitable local alternatives exist..

With all honesty to the question raised by the Prof and the trend of discussions it has generated, I think that SHA agriculture is the bedrock of economic development in a typical developing nation, Nigeria as an example. It supplies food and empolyment for a large proportion of the populace. Several studies have affirmed the higher productivity of these methods over commercial or and large scale farming. The SHA farmers are recognized by there ability to minimize waste and produce at a higher rate than large scale farm holdings. Commercial large scale agriculture ,may therefore not be a substitute for SHA if the goal of economic development in these countries is of paramount interest. However after having mentioned this, I think we have to look more into the direction of empowering these farmers and making them into cooperatives to enhance there bargaining power and give them better returns to there farming activities.

I think you really have to distinguish small scale agriculture in different countries in terms of the role it plays in the lives of the poor. Questions of "productivity" meaning either yield per hectare or monetary returns per hectare (economic development as it is called) make little sense in detachment from these issues. In particular in East and Southern Africa a typical pattern is for large commercial farms to have been established in the past and to be the site of high input commercial agriculture while as well, many African families have a small holding that is owned under some kind of traditional tenure and has been generally used to provide food for the family. This food supplement is vital in the context of a mixed livelihood strategy given the fact that wages in the cash economy and jobs in the cash economy are insufficient for the rural poor to buy a diverse and nutritious diet. What really needs to be done here is not consolidation or commercialisation but "feed the farmers first" - the strategy has to be about increasing the yield of these small holdings using methods that do not depend on unreliable inputs of cash from the commercial economy. In other words, basically low input organic or permaculture strategies creating a diversity of food supplies. The best example is "The Chikukwa Project" which has been going for twenty years. In other parts of the world, small holding farmers (the rural poor) are renting their land from landlords and need to make a cash income to hang onto this land. Again, an emphasis on feeding the farmers first makes sense (MASIPAG) but what is also necessary is higher wages for rural workers and lower costs for land tenancy, so that they are not working extremely hard to produce insufficient crops to pay for their food needs, along with their other needs for a cash income to maintain their land holding. This is necessarily a political project which is one of the reasons why moves for land reform have been so common in such countries (for example colonial Vietnam, India, the Phillipines, Venezuela, Brazil). The problem with this land reform when implemented has been that small holder farmers soon get into debt and sell their land. The whole cycle repeats. This is why community tenure such as in parts of Africa and the Pacific really makes sense as a start to deal with rural poverty. Then small farmers cannot actually sell their land when they go into debt. Alongside this has to be a strategy that starts with what farmers can achieve by using their own resources to produce enough food for the family, accompanied by the production of a surplus that can be exchanged for cash. Rural consolidation to gain agricultural food production efficiency is just an excuse for a land grab by the rich and the middle class of these rural areas. It does not really solve the problems of the rural poor and is likely to have minimal impact on food productivity per hectare, taken as a whole in the national arena. In any case, where and to the extent that this consolidation has taken place, the key issues are the amount of money that poor families are paid for farm and other rural employment, an intensely political issue. It is not a matter of productivity per se but of access.

My opinion and my answer are YES. Because I think that really “smallholding is not a VERY hard labour and typically low yielding” . I think we need change about the way of measure the routine work and the real yielding of this kind of agriculture production, as you say “Making a smallholding high-yielding won’t provide income levels that the western world would see as economically desirable or viable”. Perhaps (I´m sure) we need change the western world point of view. There are a lot of multiples services that smallholding produces to the local and global community, and we do not pay for them, i.e. ecological services (then, from this point of view, smallholding is more profitable that classic (economic) measures say). By other hand, if we do a good and exhaustive analysis of work-routine, we can find that the smallholding labour is “not more hard” than other kind of agriculture tasks from other agriculture types (i.e. industrial agriculture-crops-animal production). Of course, smallholding needs technical help, but in a feed-back frame, understanding that the technical advances must be adapted to the smallholding scale and to the other services that produces: environmental ones. If we want, I think that the smallholder must be future, because it “ produce food for the producers” (it`s an income) and from the market (execedents), in a good quality condition and promotes a very important item “food safety and sovereignty”. By other hand, several studies point out that the smallholders are more “happy” with their jobs, than others from other type of job produces a “better” development of communities in different aspects (i.e. poverty rates…) (Brock and Barham, Renewable Agriculture and Food system, 24 (1) 25-37, 2008/ Albrech, Rural Sociology, 63 (1) 1998.

Summarized: I think that smallholding must be encourage, because they can play, and (in my opinion) play an important role in rural sustainability, most part in relationship with social aspects like fixed population. And, I think that is (or may be) and optimal example of precision agriculture. And of course, it is compatible with other types of agriculture like industrial one. But in any way, for me it is important the fact that we must change the western world point of view.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to answer the query and contribute to the discussions - some really interesting thoughts above.

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development recently published a set of commentaries on research priorities for food systems over the next 5 years. One of the commentaries considers this issue. "Crop Diversification: A Potential Strategy To Mitigate Food Insecurity by Smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa" by Ezekiel Mugendi Njeru (at Sant' Anna School of Advanced Studies and Kenyatta University) is freely available and can be commented on at http://www.agdevjournal.com/volume-3-issue-4/358-crop-diversification-sub-saharan-africa.html. You can also search for "smallholders" to see some additional papers we've published on this topic.

An adaptive approach still provides a fundamental framework for the implementation and adaptation of land management and polices over time as more information is collected. A crucial issue then could be developing landscape planning (e.g., restoration) that might accommodate for surprises and for variation of land-use pattern as humans will change land-use, and especially land management, to adjust to climate change. In this respect, new conceptual frameworks for the design of landscape sustainability are emerging to establish how landscape condition can be made sustainable in face of unpredictable disturbance and change (e.g., Olsson et al., 2004; Folke et al., 2005; Musacchio, 2009; Opdam et al., 2009; Ostrom, 2009; Benayas and Bullock 2012; Zurlini et al., 2013; Jones et al., 2013).

Strategies to this end could involve the design and management of landscape elements and structure to create less contagious and more heterogeneous rural landscapes enhancing biodiversity-oriented connectivity. In this respect, smallholder farming systems are crucial for rural sustainability. This can imply the strategic placement of managed and semi-natural ecosystems in landscapes to reduce stress intensity, so the services of natural ecosystems (e.g., commodities, water availability, pollination, reduced land erosion, soil formation) can be even enhanced (Jones et al., 2013). Land separation and land sharing are examples of such strategies (Benayas and Bullock, 2012). The first involves restoring or creating non-farmland habitat in agricultural landscapes through, for example, woodlands, natural grasslands, hedgerows, wetlands, and meadows on arable lands (Benayas and Bullock, 2012), or riparian habitats (Jones et al., 2010) to benefit wildlife and specific services. Land sharing involves the adoption of biodiversity-based agricultural practices, learning from traditional farming practices, transformation of conventional agriculture into organic agriculture and of „„simple‟‟ crops and pastures into agro-forestry systems. Some existing smallholder farming systems already have high water-, nutrient-, and energy-use efficiencies and conserve resources and biodiversity without losing yield (Kiers et al., 2008).

A key aspect is to implement monitoring programs to evolve iteratively as new information emerges and research and managing questions change. This helps evaluate how environmental targets and ecosystem services respond to specific landscape pattern designs, and whether or not certain landscape patterns at multiple scales result in synergies and trade-offs among different types of ecosystem services.

Crop diversification, contract/cooperative farming incorporating value addition, marketing may help.My paper on medicinal aromatic plants highlights crop-diversification:

E.V.S.Prakasa Rao. 2009. Medicinal and aromatic plants for crop diversification and

their agronomic implications. Indian J. Agron. 54(2), 215-220.

It seems quite remarkable that in the three weeks since this question was posed, no one has seen fit to mention the Via Campesina -- the world's largest social organization with a presence in more than one hundred countries and with and Research AND Action program that has contributed to raising output and small scale farmer well-bing in demonstrable ways (see articles in Journal of Peasant Studies by Martinez Torres and Rosset, 2010, 2014). Here in Mexico, it is remarkable that in spite of growth GMO corn imports that the peasant sector manages to contribute enough real corn production (Native varieties that we use for human consumption) to assure supplies of high-quality grain for diets of people who care about their health and well-being. Although this does not make them rich, this achievement in quite notable because it happens in spite of substantial government expenditures to discourage this type of rural production (Barkin, Journal of Peasant Studies 2002).

I've just accomplished a two year study about smallholders agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique) and what are known as Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). The aim was to verify which (if any) GAP farmers were using to cope with their major problems: good quality seed availability, poor crop yields, pest infestation both in field and during storage, livestock diseases and poor livestock production among others. I have to say that I have crossed many simple practices which, thanks to their simplicity, are easily accepted by farmers and integrated into their farm management. In a context where the use of pesticides for example is often uncontrolled and unsustainable, the spread of practices which make use of locally available plants for pest control is greatly important. What is paramount important is that a lot of work is required to spread agricultural knowledge among smallholders. The handbook 'Family faming in Africa. Overview of Good Agricultural Practices in Sub-Saharan Africa' sums up the results of the study and can be dowloaded for free.

Some experiences, knowledge, and practices might be obtained from Asian SHA countries, such as China and Japan.

This is perfectly possible when you have a different approach for intensification. This is to say, making nature work for you by helping ecosystem produce more services you need to yield food and other produce smallholders need to improve income and nutritional level. This is the agroecological method of production: no chemical inputs, but local resources used to maximise ecosystems´ function. In Brazil, government came up with a national programme supporting smallholders to convert their traditional system of production into agroecological system. Technical and financial support, and also scientific effort from Embrapa (Brazilian agricultural research institution) to feed agroecological practitioner with useful information. Also many NGOs have longstanding work in this field with successful cases spread from the tradicional Northeast to modernised South if you want. In the Northeast, the ASA coordinates many single local NGOs and deserves to be visited.

Http://www.icrisat.org/

Future of smallholder agriculture crucially depends on its productivity increase both to make the smallholder farms a viable business entity and to contribute to the resource saving to contribute to the ecological sustainability. Higher productivity is also important to attract the youth in agriculture who are both moving away due to poor returns and due to unattractive nature of agricultural operations. It is also disheartening to see that at this crucial juncture, the public sector extension is deteriorating in most of the developing world. Revival of extension services through reforming them and making agriculture attractive to youth are important immediate steps to revive smallholder agriculture both for poverty reduction and ecological sustainability.

Sharing lessons in this context is important.

https://www.agriskmanagementforum.org/blog/what-makes-difference-extension-program-implementation-lessons-india

I'm astonished someone from a development agency should so strongly support amalgamation of small holdings. The inevitable result is migration of people escaping rural poverty who end up adding to those suffering urban poverty.

No easy answers - the combination of ever shrinking areas of small holdings and high unemployment amongst urban poor lead to the tragedy that was Rwanda.

There are some good programmes outlined above. Such programmes need to be adapted for local conditions and they need to be implemented now if we are to avoid serious social disruption, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Wendell Berry's book Life is a miracle has the most apt answer to this question. SHA and its benefits to rural communities, agro ecology and culture cannot be explained by the standards that modern science currently goes by. We have to shift our standards to really grasp its contribution to the humanity at large. Standards that value culture, history, mystery and reverence rather than reductionism and predictability. Much of the world has farmed this way for centuries and raised generations of families and communities through it. I always wonder how a farming system which is a couple of centuries old can judge, let alone criticize, a system of farming that is much older. The complexities of farming can only be understood through actual experience, as a south American philospher (whose name slips my mind) said " the essence can be understood only through experience". Having been a small holder farmer myself sometime ago I can vouch for this. Researchers and other outsiders can study small scale farming for years but will never come close to understanding it unless they pull out their footwear and plunge a foot into the water logged clay and start planting the rice seedlings and then care for it. Then they will know what it means to farm and to be a farmer, and it will be a soul fulfilling realization.

From my experience working with smallholders in Indonesia and Laos, I find that farm family members use off farm work to supplement their farm income as their countries develop economically. Sometimes this is the best pathway out of poverty as they maintain their small farms whilst improving their livelihoods. However if the country needs to produce more food, it can be difficult to motivate farmers to intensify as their energies and time are going into off farm work. So this is where larger corporate farms can fill the supply gap and enable exports, whilst smaller farms supply the domestic market. Expecting smallholders to intensify, control diseases and market their produce for export can be unrealistic as we found with shrimp production in Indonesia (paper about this being drafted at present!). Likewise in Laos, we are finding there is a limit to how much beef can be produced by smallholders due to diseases, reproductive inefficiencies and lack of nutrition. Even if we improve productivity, the sales will not meet the increasing demand for meat from neighbouring Vietnam, China and Thailand. Hence these countries resort to importing beef from Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. Smallholder farmers will do what they can based on their goals and motivations and stage in life.

The presence and continued existence of Smallholder agriculture (SHA) is inevitable due to the varied characteristics of land and the environment as an agricultural resource. A viable proposition is to enhance the very viable contributions of SHA, ecology not excepted, through the injection of technological dynamism to make it science-based and sustainable.

The time after a farmer passes away or after the death of a farm authority, his property including his farm divided into equal pieces and then goes to his children, Therefore a huge farm divided into small pieces of farms that each has a different owner with different aims. This is one the most important reason that increase agriculture containing a lot of smallholders. In my opinion this law should be modified in a way that farms do not split and became small.

Some useful replies that perhaps need to be read as situation specific. The general issue of neglect of the continuing importance of small farms in global food is not far advanced from a couple of years ago, as polemicized in: 'Small Farmers Secure Food'. The text of the book is now accessible free of charge at google books (or cheaply at Amazon Kindle), or such sites as:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Prof_Dr_John_Lindsay_Falvey/publications/?ch=reg&cp=re214_x_p2&pli=1&loginT=aiyJdYoWy9wDolgwhMubD0xqxE697cIiGCGzd4j-sG8,

http://self.gutenberg.org/eBooks/WPLBN0002169846-Small-Farmers-Secure-Food-by-Lindsay-Falvey.aspx?&Words=falvey

This is very important question to address the limitations of smallholder farming, and the toiling masses of the rural community. Smallholder farming is subsistence oriented in most countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world. The cultivable land size per capita is shrinking from time to time, that is from less than one hectare to less than half a hectare in several African and Asian countries. Such fragmented land size is not suitable for mechanized agriculture. In addition, most smallholder farmers are resource poor to purchase agricultural inputs and apply improved agricultural practices. The practice is exploitative type of agriculture- mining the soil for crop production and animal husbandry. Everything is harvested including crop residues, practically nothing is returned back to the soil. So unless small-scale agriculture is intensified, there would be more expansions to bring more lands under cultivation that are marginal and unsuitable for agriculture. This may lead to environmental degradation and ecological imbalance. If the current trend is not reversed, the sustainable development we aspire might be impracticable.

In agricultural areas that are typically high yielding, but have already been broken into small landholdings, it is possible to achieve environmental goals and agricultural goals provided the ownership views this as a lifestyle supplemented by a more reliable income from off-farm. In my locale (West Gippsland, Victoria) this is becoming the more typical farm - off farm income, agriculture and horticulture on the land, achieving environmental benefits through tree corridors, revegetation and river rehabilitation. The contribution to the community made by these families is something to be recognised and should be seen as new generation farming.

I think the focus of this type of enterprise should focus on water use. I have seen in different regions, such as the exploitation and development of family agriculture leads to neglect appropriate ways to extract water and disposing of sewage. I believe that states should assist smallholder sectors, providing them with the water and sewer, as the best way to ensure sustainable development.

Best of luck!

Thanks all for interesting debate.

SHA is generally underestimated. It provides a direct linkage between ecosystem services and livelihood support, it maintains cultural identity bonds, it has greater chances to preserve regulatory functions of the landscape and a high adaptability to climate change. Yes, a lot of this has to de with water. Those who argue about its low productivity should take into consideration its low input requirements. Do you really see a mechanised industrial agricultural future for Africa in an age which is beyond peak oil? Oil was found around Lake Turkana beginning of last year. As expected, this has no influence on fuel prices paid by SHA farmers in Kenya; how can they embark onto mechanised agriculture? If not for easier mechanisation, why should they abandon SHA?

This is not to say that SHA is without problems; it desperately needs to become smarter (crop4drop or $4drop) also because the still crazy population growth rate (while soil fertility declines) is turning SHA into µSHA! The truth is that current SHA is not sustainable without improvement, at the same time doing away with it altogether is not the best solution. Solutions may also be in enhanced productivity, in higher value added products, in produce preservation and/or marketing. Do we really need to loose SHA to achieve these?

If you want a little more, in the following I briefly describe case-studies illustrating positive solutions and reflections from Kenya...

"Water-food security linkages in Africa and the future of farming in Kenya"

http://www.dagliano.unimi.it/20130612/waterkenya/

Recently a colleague of mine attended an IFOAM gathering in Bangkok. What follows is a summary of his report. This seems to succinctly put this discussion into context.

* FAO reports that in 2009 there were an estimated 1.02 billion undernourished people. This is largely because of higher food prices, lower incomes and increasing unemployment - not lower yields.

* 80% of the world's hungry live in rural areas

* 50% of the world's hungry are small farmers

* 20% are the landless who are dependent on farm work

* 70% of the world's food is produced by small holder farmers

* 80% of the food in developing nations comes from small holder farmers.

* The agribusiness food chain only produces 30% of the world's food

It is important to increase the production of small holder farmers at local level to ensure adequate food security for the world! If these farmers adopted organic growing practices it would lead to significant increases in yields.

In a report on 114 projects across Africa covering 2 million hectares and 1.9 million farmers the average crop yield was a 116% increase for all African projects and 128% for East African projects. The report also notes that since the introduction of of conventional agriculture the production per person is 10% lower now than in the 1960's

In a more recent study by FAO of over 50 studies found that in the majority of cases organic systems are more profitable than non-organic systems

Other presentations showed how organic mixed cropping had the potential to increase the nutritive value and yields in India. Food as "prada" was another interesting presentation on an Indian view of the relationship between food and wellbeing.

Alan has presented interesting information about the role of smallholder agriculture. But I do not agree on the approach that organic agriculture is more profitable than use of inorganic inputs. Yes, multiple cropping such as mixed or inter-cropping of cereals with legumes, crop rotations and other practices have been verified through research in that they can improve soil quality, crop yield, income and nutritional quality of the rural communities. However, organic agriculture alone can not feed the increasing world population. Instead, the integration of organic and inorganic inputs along with high yielding crop varieties and improved agronomic practices may sustain soil health, crop yield and incomes of smallholder farmers in the long-term, and protect the environment.

Hi everyone,

This question rise another question for me. When we talk about smallholders, what exactly is the size of the the smallholder's farm? Does it differ among different countries?

Amir, this information may help you about the size of smallholder farms. Smallholder farm, which is also known as family farm, has been defined in different ways. But the most familiar measure is farm size. Several sources define small farms as those with less than 2 ha of crop land. Some define small farms as those depending on household members for most of the labor or those with a subsistence orientation, in which the primary aim of the farm is to produce the majority of the consumption of staple foods for the household (Hazell et al.2007). And others describe small farms as those with limited resources including land, capital, skills and labor. According to the World Bank’s Rural Development Strategy, smallholders are defined as those with a low asset base, operating less than 2 ha of cropland (World Bank, 2003), and an FAO study defines smallholders as farmers with limited resource endowments, relative to other farmers in the sector (Dixon et al 2003).The study of IFAD (2009) defines small farms as those with less than 2 ha of land area and those depending on household members for most of the labor. To conclude, all the definitions mentioned above are revolving around two central points, that are farm size (< 2 ha) and labor source (family). If you read the literatures mentioned in this summary you may get further information.

The person wanting to eliminate SHA clearly understands costs but not values. Unfortunately the externalised cost system has been practiced for so long that many people think that it is the proper evaluation of a system. We now have the situation where GHG emissions are becoming the only criterion for production while ignoring the knock-on effects of people moving into cities etc. Unfortunately I see very little to convince me that those in policy making/implementation have really taken on board the need for a holistic evaluation of all agricultural systems.

David Steane

The resilience of smallholder agriculture has been proved through time. It's important to note that it's the form of agriculture management that garantee success and risk management. That's why smallholder agriculture still present in all the world. The future of this kind of agriculture is then clear. It will be the dominant form of agriculture in the world. But, the problem is how every body, included the governants, must take into account the reality that smallholder agriculture will be the main food provider to the humanity. Then, we have to do our best to encourage the persons involved in this activity by helping them enjoy their life, exit from poverty, especially chronic poverty. If not, they will be oblige to destroy our environment (ecology, biodiversity, ...) in order to produce food for us, a non sustainable practice.

Small holder (SH) agriculture is the life blood of food security in South Asia and Sub-Saharan-Africa where more than 50% of the population is engaged with various agriculture and fisheries activities to sustain their livelihood and food. These regions (South Asia and Sub-Saharan-Africa) are most malnourished and depend on rain for food production (rain fed agriculture). Furthermore, these regions are the most vulnerable to climate change (due to droughts, floods, rise of temperature) which is projected to cause the most catastrophic impacts on food and water security (based on global assessment in 12 food insecure regions) and thus on livelihoods. People in South Asia and Sub-Saharan-Africa are poor and have limited financial resources. The local workforce does not have the skills or technology to adapt to climate change efficiently and effectively. In order to balance between the food production and environment preservation, there is a need of some innovative and smart agriculture and aquaculture in a changing climate that would allow growing food without much impact on the environment (low carbon emissions). However, such innovation will require support for education, research and extension programme from developed countries to targeted regions/countries so that an environmentally friendly food production outcome can be achieved.

Hope you're doing well

Talking about smallholders, we may mean people who struggle their efforts to feed the majority in Africa for example and earn about 15% of its products as the middle businessman earn about 50% of the business. Although these people (Smallholders) remain the downside of the all process. They fight against all nature of effect of the climate change, they suffer from malnutrition due to limited knowledge on food processing and food utilization, but they steadily remain the main food producer to feed the majority including those living in the cities like MAPUTO etc.

The policy makers they do not act to underpin the rural producers, but they continue looking for the best way to tax them. I think all of us must join efforts to gives hands to those feeding the majority in Africa.

SHA has been considered as the main sources of gene for breeding programs which have developed high yielding varieties even in the developed countries. Low yield of the SHA is a narrow vision if we compare it with sole crops yield. In the SHA productivity must be evaluated as a system. Interactions are so many and few of them are deepleting natural resources.

Sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture is possible, as has been demostrated in several cases when the system is considered as the "production unit" and not the individual crops within it. Breeders, Agronomist and other scientist working together to develop improved and higly productive cropping systems, will make the difference. The strategy to promote and introduce monocrop systems in Subsaharan African to increase productivity with high yielding varieties and high use of fertilizers, will seriously affect the soil fertility, as it is being deepleted dramatically, and the production of food for the next generations will be seriously affected.

Why breeders have been ignoring breeding for multiple croppying systems?. This systems are complex but not complicated and also more sustainable. Therefore we have to use complex thinking to approach their improvement. One example: In the Caribbean Region of Colombia,the national cassava program, farmers organizations and technical assistants significantly improved productivity of the cassava/maize x yam intercropping, introducing maize hybrid, and improved yam and cassava varieties. It was also recently found in that region that farmers applying this innoavation, significantly improved their livelihood (income, education level of childrensandwell being among others).

Hi colleagues….

Talking about SHA, I think we should view it in a wider perspective. SHA is predominant employment and engage with majority of farmers in developing countries. From economic-sustainability point of view, SHA farmers are direct producers and in the same time are direct consumers also. In most case, what they able to produce are economically cannot fulfill to what they really need to consume, therefore they remain as the poor. So…, anyhow we have to find a way to sustain SHA, because sustaining SHA means sustaining the biggest portion of human life in earth. What we need to do is that to make them economically sustainable.

From environmental- sustainability point of view, SHA is mostly locally done by local resources, less external energy input, less machinery and less fossil fuel; and the products of SHA is mainly supplied for local needs, and the biomass-wastes are also locally recycled or reused. Therefore, in my opinion, SHA sounds much more environmentally-sustainable compared to that of big commercial agriculture.

From social-sustainability point of view, SHA is mostly involving local-community engagement and cooperation, they work together to share and to fulfill their need as much as they can. So, SHA relatively engages much more social participation compared than that of industrial/commercial agriculture. Local innovation and local wisdom which closely correlated with their local environment always involve in their works.

So…, in my opinion…, sustainable SHA will gain good effect in ecological sustainability.

What do you think about it….?

Dear All,

Very interesting discussion by all contributors to SHA. To add on to what has already been said, I think one of the main "limitation" of SHA is our turn of mind (prejudice??), whereby SHA is often associated if not attributed to poor condition, developing economy, limited resources, marginal etc..

Referring to the different inputs so far, most if not all recognized the benefit of SHA in the bigger picture. It is unfortunately that once "development' set in SHA tend to regress, then we need to upgrade SHA that will ensure its survival. In fact in many developed countries private initiatives are already taking advantage of the weaknesses of SHA to produce the so called health food. So SHA should be "empowered" for its sustainability and survival. For comparison, farming versus ICT is not very attractive to youngsters mostly because of the classical image that we have of agriculture!

hi colleagues,

I am in the fortunate position to live for half a century in two worlds and observe as a professional how smallholder farms develop in Europe and Africa. With stints in the mid-west and west of the USA as well as Asia and Southern America to complete the picture. First, I must contradict those that equal smallholder farm with family farm. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the EC/EU set out to support the family farm (versus peasant and /or industrial farming). To do so the smallholder (peasant) farm had to give away to larger holdings by incorporating the farmland of the neighbours by purchase or lease to achieve economies of scale. This follows from an economic imperative as productivity and income grows faster in non-agricultural enterprises and sectors. The CAP policy was effective in terms of increasing agricultural output. As a consequence Europe became a net farm produce exporter, achieved parity of farm family income with the rest of the economy as well as food security. At a price of course. And yes, the farming family owns a Mercedes, a second car and shows all signs of urban wealth that often surprised my non-European students. This rural and agricultural metamorphosis was achieved within two decades. The power of policy! Currently less than 2% of the population is farming (in NL and adjacent Germany). The output in terms of farm produce and export revenue has increased nonetheless.

When I looked around here in Namibia, or Botswana and Zambia, I see numerous, contiguous smallholdings. However, the family income is only for a minor part from farming (20-25% or so). Most of the cash and total family income results from off-farm employment, seasonally or daily, and from pensioners. Similarly, in the mountainous areas in southern Europe (article attached) and historically in the Alps (> 50 years ago). Although these smallholder areas look to the casual observer as farming areas because crops and livestock are dominating the scene, the "farms" are in effect retirement homes and nurseries. Residential land and food is cheap. Demographic data bear this out. Over- representation of the old, the young and the fertile females. Mirrored by the under-representation of adult and middle-aged males.

Now look to the USA. For example, family (dairy) farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin, industrial crop farming in California. In the latter, the land owner/manager employs labourers as in industry. Consequently, in the west no scenic homesteads, no pleasing farmlands with hedgerows or trees, just crop (e.g. broccoli) till the horizon and crews of farm hands lost in the distance.

Yes, smallholder/peasant farms will disappear over ttme. The question is how to manage the transformation.

Hi colleague!

I have grown up in a small holding. From my experience of >20 years, I small holding farming is much more sustainable and diversified. I can just cite an example of growing local rice in the coastal area. The farmers in the area grow local rice which is tall in nature. If diversity of rice is quite high. More than >100 types rice in cultivation. Another point is that, we want to grow a number of different crops in our land. I think it is also profitable. In most cases the small holding farming is organic in nature. Thus it is labour intensive. The question is how long we can continue this farming. Well, the answer is simple, as long as we can provide labour. The agricultural labour is migrating to other activities. So, the future is bright provided realization of importance of small holder farming.

Dear All,

Small holding agriculture is a common practice in the mountainous regions and it is one of the major sources of livelihood for the poor hill people. In the Himalayan region, above 70% working population is engaged in this practice as the terrain does not permit for the large holdings. Simultaneously, small holding agriculture in the Himalayan region is characterised by the high agro-biodiversity as there are more than 12 crops grown together at a given time and space and it maintains the food security and ecology. Small holding agriculture is synonymous of high agro-biodiversity therefore it has greater impact on ecology and food security.

Dear Tim and Friends, Small holding famers play crucial role in sustaining food security ranging from household, community, local, regional, national and perhaps global levels. However, they are facing many challenges e.g. poor knowledge on good farming practices, lack of capital for buying production inputs, limited land ownership, and now they are being most vulnerable group to climate change. To overcome this constraint, we may promote sustainable agriculture particularly towards organic agriculture as this can help maintain ecological balance.Sustainable intensification is sound concept but we need to ensure that all farming activities are carried out in environmentally friendly manner.Putting small land holdings into one piece of land may be possible in principle but in practice it is difficult as people may prefer to have individual or family land ownership. Because small landholders perceive land is life.

I find it interesting that anybody would still say something as extreme as "The existence of SHA implies a life of labour and poverty and I will think my job done when it is extinct”. Smallholder agriculture allows integrated farming approaches combining plant crops with animal farming, crop rotation, and recycling schemes. In the developping world access to cheap energy for transport, heating, fertilising has led to more and more specialised farming strategies, but it does not mean that it is efficient in the long run and/or sustainable. In countries like Germany and Belgium, Smallholder pig farms have all but seized to exist, because of the horrendous demands that need to be met to obtain a slaughtering licence. On average, a pig farmer now makes 10-20 Euro profit on an average pig, which means one has to have thousands of them to make a living. At such level of farming, it is impossible to also take care of a greenhouse, power it with the heat from composting the pig manure, recycling the composted manure to feed tomatos in the greenhouse, and grow your own pig food on your own land. It is not so much about hard work, but it has a lot to do with knowledge that has been lost, as well as economical and poilitical circumstances that currently discourage SHA practices. Even if you had the skills to run a sustainable SH farm, you would never get a foot on the ground, because you wouldn't be allowed to slaughter your own pigs and sell the meat directly (and I don't want to know what it would cost to get a slaughtering licence and what equipment you would have to have in place to get approval). We need good demonstration projects to show that it works, and then try to initiate political change.

High Everyone

I found the question Interesting. We must always remember Smallholders farmers are currently feeding the world as the rich economies also purchase good food (with minimum of chemicals). Thus, mean that sustainability must continue to play important decision for agricultural development and consider Smallholders as the majority producing within limited inputs but feeding the majority including those people living in the developed world economy. We need political chances rather than philosophical changes. Smallholders like in Mozambique (my country) need access to improved seed and technologies only. Improved seed can help to improve productivity and technologies will help to minimize the effect of climate change, which is reality here, specially in the coastal areas. The droughts here continue to be more and more affecting smallholders. So people living under agricultural activities need sound technology, of course they are already adapting, other wise they could disappear.

thank you for raising this important question, and the description somewhat change my opinion on the issue. the case in Indonesia, there are still about 20 millions small holding agriculture with less than 0.5ha each. we recognize that it not sufficient to support family welfare, therefore most of these smallholding farmers are also doing something else to meet ends. solutions to promote large farming systems that can feed the country are dilematic, not to say would create another social problems. so, we are now in a process looking for the kind of intensification interventions that would be suitable for this, and any good ideas are welcome.

Anyone see this recent report....what do you think of it? Some of their back calculations are skewed to make smallholder agriculture more impactful than it is (for instance they donʻt count any agriculture not directly consumed by people such as grain for livestock, or I think donʻt even count processed food ingredients though Iʻm less sure about that), but still some of the hard facts are interesting and enlightening (to me).

http://www.grain.org/article/entries/4929-hungry-for-land-small-farmers-feed-the-world-with-less-than-a-quarter-of-all-farmland

Hidayat, thanks for sharing this information about 20 million smallholders. Having been working with smallholders both in India and Sub Saharan Africa, I feel there is a clear need for context specific and resource base specific interventions we can make the small farms viable. There is future for small farms but how that will shape up depend on what enterprises we help them engage in. It varies from country to country and region to region with in the country.

On the one extreme, the smallholder farmers of India who are currently with in the 5-10 KM radius of outskirts of cities and growing towns have stopped cultivation and have already exchanged their land to urban developers and they are already found an investment opportunity by placing the money gained from selling their land in fixed deposit which earns them 12-14 percent interest and this is prudent investment given the farming conditions. These small farms will soon be history. On the other extreme a small holder farmer in Mulanje in southern tip of Malawi faces different set of challenges and opportunities. She can grow high quality pineapples ( agroecology allows it) but the value chains are poorly developed to get eh fruits to even to Blantyre the closest big city. In the middle take the typical smallholder in Parana State in Brazil ( he must have stopped farming activities for few days now - World Cup??) has 10-15 hectares of land and grows mostly high value crops and lives a decent life equivalent to a middle income household in Brazil.

All these farmers have to be dealt with differently with policies, programs, market development and extension services and of course right type of institutions. Thus context specific solutions are needed. But there is no capacity to develop such solutions at the local levels. The closest we come to this is developing national strategy for the countries to show how to develop their smallholder sector through available data ( again controversial in quality and source etc.,) and some proven analytically techniques that will help policy makers to see evidence needed for policy making. But the real challenge is to take the broad policy guidelines to next level to address the challenges farmers face in their situation. We have a long way to go on this decentralize capacity development. This can not be done by external expert. Countries need to invest in such capacity - and the extension systems need to be given serious revamping with social entrepreneurship focus.

Hi everyone

In order to empower smallholder i think large commercial farmers must invest on small holder as to diversify agricultural products. Exchange of knowledge, skills and resources can help them to contribute to poverty elliavation and job creation for many of the young stars currently unemployed, as to support themselves, intermediate families and the broader community of dependents they supply with goods and services. Land ownership is one the main factors leading to the disappearance of small scale-farmers, if farmers can be given a full control of the land i think they may have a large impact on implementing their farming activities that will remain productive and sustainable for a number of years.

An observation to add to this conversation. I am currently sitting in the Yakima Valley of Eastern Washington (Washington State, USA). It is cherry season. We are surrounded by apple, apricot, cherry orchards, grape vineyards, market vegetable fields (definitely larger than what we would call a 'garden'), asparagus, tomatoes, chilies, peppers, melons, egg plan and so on. What we are seeing is a hugely labour intensive harvesting processes: Everything is thinned and or picked by hand. Who does this? The minimum wage labour from mostly the Hispanic and Filipino community people who have left the farming cultures of their homelands. Here they have found intensive agriculture, some of it organic. What this means is that the majority of these people are living hand to mouth relying on seasonal employment of different kinds. I admit they drive their own vehicles to the fields to pick (whereas in Africa that doesn't happen often). But in perspective - what you have is landless people working very hard for the profit of others and without the lifestyle that farming would give them if they worked that hard for themselves. In my own mind, and from my own life experience separating people from the land is a serious social and ecological mistake. Agri business OR small holder is a false dichotomy. Making commercial AND small holder farming viable with improved appropriate technology, mechanisation and policy would better serve a 'sustainability' agenda.

I partially agree with Karen, sustainability is a complex and multiple variate discipline that cut across different disciplines. The fact is that most African countries are resource poor, low development of new innovations and lack of specialized experts, small holdings have little chance to improve in the future due to the fact that resources like fertilizers, herbicides etc. will be more costly Therefore, small holdings need to focus on greater reliance of the farm internal inputs such as biological interactions that results from mixed farming, hedgerow or inter cropping, weeding and cut at early stage of growth or allow livestock to graze on it depending on the type of crops being grown. In these way, health issues associated with synthetic chemicals can significantly decrease and safety of workers as well.

Maria hit some of the points I would like to make on this. I have to humbly disagree with your colleague Tim who believes SHA has to be extinct and is a life of labour and poverty. Depends on the form and where. Many smallholder farmers are proud and glad to be independent and I dont think "progress" or "development" should just be defined by Western standards. I agree that SHA should not be labour and poverty but thats distinct from saying that it should be extinct. Food security will definitely go out the window for many if we run down that path also. The average figures may look good as they often do in place like say the US but then the actual reality is a far different thing. Particularly since consolidation of farms and agribusiness have not exactly been winners for the same people we say we are trying to help and are honestly only one part of the solution to a very complex problem. Brazil still struggles with the right balance between commercial and smallholder and it is due to smallholder farming and sound distribution that 70% of what the average Brazilian eats is made in Brazil.

We also should not just focus on subsistence as the only food nutrition issue. The other end of that change of development is malnutrition of the other kind including obesity, hypertension etc. What is the shift we need - relative to where we are? The countries will be exchanging one kind of development issue for another and be dealing with the health care costs that are such a problem in Europe and the US currently.

Also SHA is a relative concept. What is small in some places in huge in others i.e. Brazil.

I think we have to think more broadly to what all of the issues are and what the viable solutions will be. Lets not make the cure worse than the disease.

So I would suggest that we focus instead on some of the really big issues:

- How to increase productivity and also improve access and distribution? Can some of Brazils successes on food availability through social protection be useful in other countries where prices, access, transportation etc cannot just be left to the whims of the market and supply v demand?

- What affordable technologies can reduce some of the labour intensity and allow time for other things including productive activities?

- How can value-added products be added to the SHA value chain without replacing food? Food crops alone isnt viable and cash crops alone isnt viable either. Remember the Kenyan farmers whose flowers never made it to Europe during the Iceland volcanic eruption. Changing one kind of vulnerability and replacing it with another and moreover eroding the structures to fall back on them has been problematic for the same SHA.

- How can we do this so that we are also sustainable and how can those help farmers i.e. energy/food value chains etc?

More I could say but would stop here.

Although small holder farmers could play a very important role in providing food security they have it very difficult to compete against industrial large scale agriculture, which is ecologically damaging, but cheap in production costs. I think that many SHF will continue, but often just because the labour market cannot absorb them. It is a pitty as they play a crucial role in food production.

For the past months I have wondered how it is possible for young people to be hungry on fallow land. Eberhard, I agree with your reasoning, but I don't see SHA being sustained in rural SA. With unprecedented effects of climate change, a stagnant economy and an increasingly unequal society, I find it hard to see how people will in SHA systems will be able to hold out. In one town we recently found that youth in that area have such a negative and apathetic view of agriculture that they are indeed hungry on fallow land. The study was small and needs to be expanded upon, but I don't know that results elsewhere in towns similar in socio-economic status would be much different.

A larger issue that emerges from the analysis of the various facets of agricultural transformation in the Asian context is whether it is possible to sustain smallholder dynamism, which was instrumental in driving agricultural growth in Asia in the GR era (Viswanathan, et al., 2012). It is important to ponder ways and means by which the smallholder sector in Asia can overcome the multiple challenges facing agriculture. One argument is that the future of smallholders may not lie in farming alone. Rather, it calls for measures to stimulate rural non-farm sectors and create more employment opportunities while investing in the provision of public goods (Wiggins et al 2010).

It may be observed that agricultural development policies and programmes as well as technological and institutional developments in Asia have so far heavily focused on planning from macro-perspectives without understanding the importance of micro environments and the socio-ecological systems that shape smallholder livelihoods. Hence, a major challenge that all the five countries have is evolving new policies, investing in R&D, and implementing technological and institutional development strategies for agriculture from the perspective of regional “agro-socio-eco-systems”. That said, evolving policies and strategic interventions may be difficult because there is a clear lack of empirical understanding about the micro-level implications of many of the challenges discussed. Cross-country empirical investigations become critical in the context of trade reforms and growing market uncertainties on the one hand and climate change-induced risks on the other.

The future strength and dynamism of smallholder agriculture will be undermined by the large-scale retreat of young people from the farming sector. Given this, there is a need for revisiting this issue to understand local policy responses and interventions made by the state and other development agencies to address this issue. In the absence of any such interventions, it needs to be examined what type of incentive structures and profitable farm enterprises would help prevent the large-scale exodus of youngsters from agriculture. Alongside, attention has to be paid to

the various challenges faced by women and the elderly in farm

management. A critical aspect should be the development of gender-

specific and elderly-specific technological innovations and institutional

support mechanisms so that their hardships are minimised

and they are adequately rewarded for their contributions.

The time is ripe to establish in what ways Genetically Modified (GM) technology in food and commercial crop production could lead to sustainable livelihoods and increased welfare gains for farmers, especially in regions with poor resource endowments. The need for wellfounded

research on the social effects of GM crops stems from that some parts of India that adopted Bt cotton when it was introduced in 2001 have been in the throes of an agrarian crisis, even leading to farmers’ suicides. It is also important to consider how public sector R&D institutions of the GR era can be revamped to sustain smallholder dynamism through a GM revolution. This would enable achieving a smooth rural transformation without disruptive consequences (http://www.epw.in/journal/2012/04/review-rural-affairs-review-issues-specials/agrarian-transition-and-emerging?0=ip_login_no_cache%3Dc367a5e17323f851c3b86a65b77c87fd).

Smallholders are characterized by family-focused motives such as favoring the stability of the farm household system, using mainly family labour for production and using part of the produce for family consumption. These farms account for an even greater share of the world's food supply one-third (32%) of it. This is because smaller farms tend to allocate a larger share of their crops towards food, rather than animal feed or bio-fuels. Agricultural ecology is important because it can help us better understand the processes used to produce our food, and lead to better and more sustainable farming practices. Agriculture directly depends on the broader environment and uses about a 3rd of the world's land surface. The strength and occurrence of extreme events will rise by the global warming i.e. water deficient condition, flood, tornado that would greatly harm the water balance and agriculture production in upcoming years. The farmland does not get appropriate time to recuperate from the ongoing crop season, leaving little scope for harvest after each cycle. Also, one cannot practice effective cultivation methods such as inter-cropping, livestock farming, and commercial plantation, unless they hold a reasonably large piece of land. They include polyculture, crop reduction, crop rotation, food cycling, biological pest control and/or biodiversity promotion and use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, mechanical cultivation, and other techniques. Agriculture and its surrounding environment affect each other in a variety of ways. Ecologically considerate agricultural practices benefit the environment, but intensive agriculture can negatively impact surrounding ecosystems and the environment on a larger scale.

I think that smallholder agriculture is an integral part of global food security and rural economic development, and it is essential to the conservation of biodiversity and other ecosystem services. Sustainable intensification of smallholder agriculture is essential for achieving the goals of food security, economic growth, and conservation. To this end, there is a need for policies that support local farmers and promote ecologically sound agricultural practices. Such policies should prioritize access to resources and markets, improved access to technologies, and investment in rural infrastructure. Furthermore, the development of agricultural value chains needs to be supported, especially for smallholder farmers. Such efforts need to be complemented with investments in the protection of natural resources, including soil and water conservation, and the promotion of agroforestry systems. Finally, policies should also be put in place to ensure the equitable distribution of benefits to smallholder farmers and the communities they live in. With such an integrated approach, smallholder agriculture can be sustainably intensified, providing economic growth and food security while also conserving natural resources and protecting the environment.

The farmland does not get appropriate time to recuperate from the ongoing crop season, leaving little scope for harvest after each cycle. Also, one cannot practice effective cultivation methods such as inter-cropping, livestock farming, and commercial plantation, unless they hold a reasonably large piece of land. Smallholder farmers are the main food producers in developing countries, increased smallholder agricultural production means more food enters the marketplace, leading to lower food prices and better diets. Smallholder farmers have continued to use low levels of quality inputs such as seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. This state of affairs is a result of limited availability and access to production inputs such as: fertilizers, irrigation, pesticides and herbicides. Agriculture contributes to a number larger of environmental issues that cause environmental degradation including: climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, dead zones, genetic engineering, irrigation problems, pollutants, soil degradation, and waste. Medicine and ecology are linked to agriculture in various ways, not always directly. Small and fragmented land holdings, Seeds, Manures, Fertilizers’ and Biocides, Irrigation, Lack of mechanization, Soil erosion, Agricultural Marketing and Scarcity of capital are among the major problems faced by Indian Agriculture. They offer smallholders the opportunity to increase their incomes, diversify sources of revenue and smooth out the seasonality of agricultural incomes by engaging in non-agricultural activities. They offer smallholders the opportunity to increase their incomes, diversify sources of revenue and smooth out the seasonality of agricultural incomes by engaging in non-agricultural activities. By preserving biodiversity, open space and trees, and by reducing land degradation, small farms provide valuable ecosystem services to the larger society. If we are concerned about food production, small farms are more productive. If our concern is efficiency, they are more efficient. Small farmers contribute 51 per cent of agricultural output with 46 per cent of operated land, and a much higher share in high-value crops. However, small farmers are less literate and from marginalized communities. Agriculture often comes at the expense of ecology, since forests or grasslands must be altered if farms and ranches are to be established, making it difficult to preserve species. Pesticides, fertilizers and other toxic farm chemicals can poison fresh water, marine ecosystems, air and soil. They also can remain in the environment for generations. Many pesticides are suspected of disrupting the hormonal systems of people and wildlife. Fertilizer run-off impacts waterways and coral reefs. In addition to its effects on climate, the expansion of agriculture has caused massive losses in biodiversity around the world: natural habitats have been converted to farms and pastures, pesticides and fertilizers have polluted the environment, and soils have been degraded.