المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

The draft is strong in highlighting the need/demand for affordable and accessible financing for smallholders.  It  also presents well the difficulty in defining what constitutes a smallholder farmer and thus the difficulties in prescribing a ‘one-size’ fits all way forward.  From the perspective of P4P these are the following areas that could be enhanced:

• Gender is an important area to consider when discussing the future of smallholder development, yet references to gender are not made until page 54 and subsequent references are rather adhoc in nature.
• The synergies between different levels of stakeholders and partners could be tightened in order to highlight the need for greater cross sectoral cooperation.
• The focus on corporations supporting  smallholders in accessing markets is valuable, but there could be a stronger focus on the more accessible markets at country level such as local commodity exchanges.
• The geographical representation seems a little off balance at times.  For example,  section 1.3 ‘Diversity of situations’ uses the USA, Japan, Africa, China and the European Union as examples of how it’s difficult to define ‘how small is small’ but there is a noticeable absence of LAC from this section.