Across the developing world, small-scale agriculture is an important contributor to poverty reduction, rural development, and food security. Small farmers are also a key determinant of environmental outcomes, including land and water management, biodiversity conservation, and climate change, in some of the world’s most threatened ecosystems.
Yet support for smallholder agriculture has declined sharply in the past three decades, as measured in terms of both national policies and overseas development assistance. Small farmers have increasingly competed for land, resources, and overall support with larger-scale commercial agriculture. Recent volatility in global food markets, increased demand for bioenergy crops, and climate change have added further pressure on these farmers and the rural communities that depend upon them.
In the future, our ability to feed ourselves and to reduce global poverty will depend more than ever on protection of the environment. There are many opportunities to work directly with small farmers on synergistic approaches to economic development, food security, ecosystem management, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. But this will require a paradigm shift that explicitly targets small farmers, focuses on sustainable practices, and involves not just technical interventions (like seeds and inputs) but critical issues of planning, policy, and governance.
Smallholder Agriculture and the Environment in a Changing Global Context, a new policy brief written by Jonathan Cook of WWF’s Macroeconomics Program Office, examines these issues in greater detail. It also offers some insights from a recent WWF project on agricultural development in Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, which was supported by the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida).