How much of the world's food do smallholders produce?

By V. Ricciardi, Navin Ramankutty, Z. Mehrabi, Larissa Jarvis, Brenton Chookolingo. Global Food Security, 2018

450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The widely reported claim that smallholders produce 70–80% of the world’s food has been a linchpin of agricultural development policy despite limited empirical evidence. Recent empirical attempts to reinvestigate this number have lacked raw data on how much food smallholders produce, and have relied on model assumptions with unknown biases and with limited spatial and commodity coverage. We examine variations in crop production by farm size using a newly-compiled global sample of subnational level microdata and agricultural censuses covering more countries (n=55) and crop types (n=154) than assessed to date. We estimate that farms under 2ha globally produce 28–31% of total crop production and 30–34% of food supply on 24% of gross agricultural area. Farms under 2ha devote a greater proportion of their production to food, and account for greater crop diversity, while farms over 1000ha have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss.

Subfields: Food Science, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ba96179d7a028c3098df93fcafc1cb8c3a55707

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In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Pollution

Citations in the corpus

The future of farming: Who will produce our food? (2021, methodology): “The studies use different methods, however, both Ricciardi et al. (2018) and Herrero et al. (2017), and many other global agricultural production studies, rescale their national agricultural production numbers using the same FAOSTAT national agricultural statistics thereby forcing their numbers…”
The Future Challenges of Food and Agriculture: An Integrated Analysis of Trends and Solutions (2019, background): “Farms over 1000 ha have the most significant proportion of post-harvest losses [32].”
Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? (2021, methodology): “Because there are no international datasets showing food or agricultural production by farm size or farm type for numerous countries (Ricciardi et al., 2018), we rely on the assumption that food and agricultural production is proportional to agricultural area; another way of saying this is that yiel”