Smallholder farmers produce the bulk of the world’s food with only minimal resources such as land and water. In fact small-scale food producers farm less than one quarter of the world’s farmland, a proportion that is declining. A new GRAIN report, Hungry for Land, investigates whether the shrinking size of land under small-scale farming poses a potential threat to the global production of food. The conclusion was clear, “we need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems”.
As a multitude of media articles tells us land is a hot commodity, one that is fought over and one that increasingly small-scale farmers are being evicted from. Be it for large-scale oil palm plantations, the creation of protected areas or the discovery of oil, insecure systems of land tenure and opaque policy…
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Old School Garden 
The statistics can be a bit misleading; how about all the backyard gardens? I love the idea of small farms, it’s amazing how much can be produced in a small space. We have a residential block we are renting, it’s big but still in town with neighbours just over the fence; and a lot of it is still lawn (and weeds!) But over summer it was amazing how much we produced, we shared with neighbours, friends and family. I get frustrated when I see the question asked ‘can we feed the world?’ It’s not a matter of having enough resources, it’s a matter of priorities and sharing of resources; a global change of attitudes is sorely needed! The contrast between the ‘developed’ societies’ wasteful consumer-driven life and the ‘undeveloped’ countries constant struggle to survive I find utterly disgraceful. I think the future of food security, if small farms continue to decline, is in the hands of us little backyard gardeners. I do see growing popularity of farmers markets which in principle support the small farmer; but I’ve seen how tough it’s been on the small grower over the last 10 to 15 years.
A lot of food for thought, so to speak!
Hi Beth- thanks so much for your thoughtful comment! I agree with much of waht you say. II think the big question is just what contribution gardeners/ backyard food growing can make to the overal need across the globe. More local food production systems need to be encouraged/ preserved- so reducing one wasteful aspect of big farm production, i.e. exporting (and the food miles that involves amongst other things). I have an open mind about GM as a way of increasing production, but am worried that we don’t fully understand its potential consequences- some of which may be unintended of course. The blog you referrred to is part of a project which tries to harness technological brekathroughs with more simple practices to ‘intensify’ yeilds. My gut instinct is supportive of this, but we need to be relativeyl sure that any GM or simolar developments are as safe as we can make them- this might mean more extensive, longer term testing, but of course the argument agianst this is that we need the breakthroughs NOW! Whatever we do, i’m sure that growign our own food is an important contrubution to ‘feeding the world’, and that’s why I promote it at schools, with households and in other ways- oh and of course it does taste so much better than shop bought stuff! ( I had my first picking of Broad Beans the other day- yummy!) 🙂
It sure does taste better Nigel! I’m not into GM, mainly because of the lack of choice involved; no labelling gives consumers no choice (and I think the right to choose is even more important given the lack of independent research) as well as the grower, I’ve read that they can be locked into contracts of having to re buy seed and not be able to collect their own each season, apparently Indian farmers had it so tough that some were committing suicide. Then there is the issue of contamination of other crops; there are guidelines to follow to help prevent that, but there have been some big storms that could easily have carried seed half way across Australia! One that comes to mind is the huge dust storm that spread from somewhere inland all the way to Sydney a couple of years or so ago.
I reckon we have the technology we need, eg – high production in small space, and the ability to distribute. Attitudes/priorities need to change, along with old systems of operating that either don’t serve or inhibit the ability to serve a plan that involves sharing the world’s abundance.
Thanks for sharing this info! It’s good to get the brain juices flowing 🙂
Great, thanks for that, Beth. Hope you’ve had a good weekend 😉