The State of Family Farms in the World

By Benjamin E. Graeub, M. Chappell, Hannah Wittman, S. Ledermann, R. Kerr, B. Gemmill-Herren. 2016

485 citations recorded by the source corpus.

2014 was the United Nations’ International Year of Family Farming, yet the importance of family farming for global food security is still surprisingly poorly documented. In a review of agricultural census data, we find that globally family farms constitute over 98% of all farms, and work on 53% of agricultural land. Across distinct contexts, family farming plays a critical role for global food production. We present two examples of policy approaches toward family farmers—Brazil and Malawi—to provide insight into some of the complexities and challenges behind the global numbers.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05e9d66828f7551e5b0198f7ada405fd134f1702

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Citations in the corpus

• ‘Feeding 9 billion people’: global food security debates and the productionist trap (2017, background): “…for around 70–80 per cent (FAO 2014; United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP] 2011) of global food production and 98 per cent of all farms (Graeub et al. 2016), and that smallholders are among the first victims of food insecurity, peasant movements consider ‘family farming’ as the…”