1 min
Every year, either in the rainy or dry season or both, there are farmers who cultivate crops or rear livestock on a small scale as a business to cater for their family and sustain their livelihood. Generally, they are known as smallholder farmers as they manage less than 10 hectares of farmland for either crops or livestock or both and they are mainly family owned enterprises. Over the years, there have been several interventions to improve their productivity and efficiency for better outcomes. However, the results of these interventions have constantly fallen short to scale due to many factors.
Firstly, the risks of doing agribusiness are consistently changing and increasing from production, to post harvesting, to marketing risks amongst other risks. And to manage these risks requires some level of investment at the different stages of production, which ordinarily, a smallholder farmer cannot afford. Moreover, many smallholder farms are not attractive to be invested in. They have no record of production, expenses and incomes, no legal structures, no production plan and no sustainability, just a surviving mode. Many of the financial products developed do not have them in mind and are not applicable to them. So, they have limited access to investment or capital to scale their business.
Consequently, the current economic and environmental realities don't favour smallholder farming in many developing countries and this might not change soon. Worse still, a significant number of the population from these countries depend on smallholder farming as a main source of livelihood. Therefore, there is a need to find a solution to reduce the impact of loss of livelihood.
For smallholder farming to strive in this current reality, the government needs to subsidize the costs of doing business (especially the risks attached to agricultural production) through inputs-labour cost sharing and produce-offtaking models to derisk the produce flow and ensure a guarantee market at all times. Also, we need an accurate database of real farmers involved in smallholder farming for proper planning and execution.
In conclusion, we cannot achieve food security with our current structures in working with small holder farmers. We still need a long term plan of transitioning smallholder farming into a thriving business model that is sustainable and scalable. This can only be achieved through continuous working with them, developing and implementing the right infrastructure for data collection and analysis and developing policies that are adaptable to farmers' changing realities. Our farmers need to move from surviving to striving through government and private sector led interventions and afterwards thrive through a structured and long term plan. Today, let us decide to walk this talk as we journey ahead.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde
Consequently, the current economic and environmental realities don't favour smallholder farming in many developing countries and this might not change soon. Worse still, a significant number of the population from these countries depend on smallholder farming as a main source of livelihood. Therefore, there is a need to find a solution to reduce the impact of loss of livelihood.
For smallholder farming to strive in this current reality, the government needs to subsidize the costs of doing business (especially the risks attached to agricultural production) through inputs-labour cost sharing and produce-offtaking models to derisk the produce flow and ensure a guarantee market at all times. Also, we need an accurate database of real farmers involved in smallholder farming for proper planning and execution.
In conclusion, we cannot achieve food security with our current structures in working with small holder farmers. We still need a long term plan of transitioning smallholder farming into a thriving business model that is sustainable and scalable. This can only be achieved through continuous working with them, developing and implementing the right infrastructure for data collection and analysis and developing policies that are adaptable to farmers' changing realities. Our farmers need to move from surviving to striving through government and private sector led interventions and afterwards thrive through a structured and long term plan. Today, let us decide to walk this talk as we journey ahead.
Yours-in-Service
Babatunde
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