Gathering smallholder facts, based on global-focused studies.
Contact: Han Su (h.su@utwente.nl, han_su20@163.com), University of Twente, the Netherlands
https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/6dfa0079-e156-47a2-9089-0274119e9cb7
There is no standard international definition for smallholders. The smallholder definition is taken as context-dependent. Several definitions are popular among international studies.
- 2 ha threshold: Farms less than 2 ha. Example:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X
- SDG 2.3.2 definition: Overlap of two groups for each country: the land holdings with the smallest land size and account for 40% of total farmland in the country; the agriculture producers with the lowest annual economic revenue from agriculture activities and account for 40% of economic revenues from agricultural activities in the country
https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en?details=CA3043EN%2f
- 10 ha threshold
https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/nr/sustainability_pathways/docs/Factsheet_SMALLHOLDERS.pdf
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Farm VS plot (field, parcels): A farm may include several plots. Smallholders are often defined based on the farms, e.g. the total operated land by a holding. One farm can contain from 1 to more than 10 plots depending on the region. (FAOSTAT-Structural data from agricultural censuses provide the average number of a plot per farm for some countries).
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Farm size always refers to operated land.
https://www.fao.org/3/ca9548en/ca9548en.pdf
https://www.fao.org/3/i4913e/i4913e.pdf
- Small livestock producer: A slightly different definition based on livestock unit in SDG 2.3.2.
https://www.fao.org/documents/card/en?details=CA3043EN%2f
- Some other items often used as equivalent to (overlapped with) smallholders: family farms; Subsistence/low-input farming. Examples:
https://www.fao.org/3/i4040e/i4040e.pdf
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701855104#abstract
- In 2010, there are 276.9 million farms from 101 countries (excluding landless), operating 2.1 billion ha of land. Among these, 213.9 million farms (77.2%) are smaller than 2 ha, operated 0.12 billion ha of land (5.7%); 1.9 million farms (0.7%) are larger than 100 ha, operated 1.5 billion ha of land (71.4%).
FAOSTAT-Structural data from agricultural censuses
- 84% of farms are smallholders, operating 12% of the land. The largest 1% of farms operate 70% of global farmland
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X
- Smallholder produce 35% of global food (The below paper compare their estimations with other studies. Roughly, smallholders are estimated to produce 30% of global good across studies.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X
- Smallholders tend to plant more fruits, pulses, roots, and tubers, while larger farms plant more vegetables, nuts, and oil crops.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X2100067X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542519617300074
Whether smallholders have a higher yield than large-scale farms is controversial at the global scale and has been debated for decades. Smallholders may have higher yields while large-scale farms have higher output per labor. Recent studies tend to claim that smallholders have a higher yield. Here are some studies as examples:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0305750X85900543
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/10e4b760-0eaf-5ace-88f7-1ebf64811af4
- 61% harvested area of smallholders is subsistence and low-input farming system
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html
- 24-30% harvested area of smallholders is under irrigation
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html
- Smallholders have a higher portion of irrigated area globally, but a lower portion of irrigated area in water-scarce regions, partly because Asian smallholders account for a large part of global smallholders and they traditionally irrigate more than other regions.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00623-0
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html
- A higher portion of smallholders are in water-scarce areas compared to large-scale farms
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00623-0
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html (Another paper in preparation)
- 70-80% harvested area of smallholders is in water-scarce regions
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00623-0
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html
- Expansion of large-scale farms creates (worsen) water scarcity for local smallholders
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28077-2
- Smallholders only received 1.7% of climate finance
- Smaller farms have higher non-crop biodiversity at the farm and landscape scales than larger farms
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-021-00699-2
- Global dominated field size distribution
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.14492
- Dominated farm size map
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00631-0
- Number, area of farms
FAOSTAT-Structural data from agricultural censuses
- Gridded 5 arcmin datasets for simultaneously farm-size-specific and crop-specific harvested areas in 56 countries
https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4397/2022/essd-14-4397-2022.html