Supporting Smallholders for a World Without Hunger

By Leila Lemghalef Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 16 2015 (IPS) - Supporting small-scale farmers is no small-time feat, according to consultants at a conference on “Setting the Course for a World without Hunger – North-South Dialogue on the Role of the G7”.

Smallholders play a vital role in world food and nutrition security because they produce the majority of food in developing countries, and because unlike industrial scale monocultures, they rely on much less fossil energy inputs, and encourage biodiversity, reducing hunger, according to a report released last week.

“Smallholders have demonstrated over many generations their ability to provide healthy nutrition and maintain intact ecosystems.”

Yet, says the report, smallholders – especially women – are the least powerful competitors for land and other natural resources, and commercial interests easily beat them for good.

“To disregard those who – based on their cultures, traditional knowledge, social cohesion, perseverance and ingenuity – still provide more than 70% of food in developing countries is clearly both, unacceptable and unwise.”

The recently published document, the “Berlin Memorandum on Sustainable Livelihoods for Smallholders”, presents policy recommendations to the German G7 Presidency and other G7 nations on how to reorient their development policy on food security and agriculture.

The first element is ensuring smallholder rights, including the formal recognition and implementation of land tenure, water, and seed rights of smallholders, particularly women, as well as transparency and accountability at local levels.

The second element is promoting and integrating viable smallholder livelihoods and rural job opportunities, with an accent on the Millennium Development Goals.

According to the U.N., up to 80 per cent of the extremely poor and hungry live in rural areas.

The report reads: “Rural people do not have adequate infrastructure, administrative services, agricultural extension services and inclusion in research agendas. They face difficulties in benefitting from the formal market, let alone global trade. They rarely get decent rural jobs. The culture, vitality and social cohesion of rural communities and their socio-economic potential are weakened.”

The report states that failure to activate jobs and income opportunities to overcome poverty in rural areas “will increase the migration into the slums of rapidly growing urban areas with already existing job shortage and social problems. It is naive or irresponsible to assume that the creation of a sufficient number of decent jobs in urban areas for all rural migrants will be feasible in the short time frame available.”

The third element is strengthening the environmental pillar of sustainable development for smallholders.

A new approach is talked about here, one that is rooted in natural resource management and puts an end to the current trend on the global market, which operates on economies of scale.

The awaited successes of a new such approach are multifold: “It protects the rights and aspirations of all people… It establishes participatory and decentralised planning… It diversifies production systems based on agro-ecological principles… It better distributes the workload for farming families… It invites knowledge, practices and innovations of smallholder communities to contribute to improved natural resource management…”