全球粮食安全与营养论坛 (FSN论坛)

SALSA - Small Farms, Small Food Businesses and Sustainable Food Security, is an EU-funded research project of the Horizon2020 program which run from April 2016 to March 2020 with the aim to provide a better understanding of the role of small farms and small food businesses in meeting the sustainable food and nutrition security challenge.

In the project, FAO was responsible for the communication and joint learning, setting up Communities of Practice at various levels as multi-stakeholder learning platforms to consult, validate and move forward the research and enrich the knowledge base on relevant questions.

SALSA pioneered a novel integrated multi-method approach in 30 regions across 19 countries in Europe and Africa using the most recent satellite technologies, field assessments, systematic review, participatory construction of knowledge, transdisciplinary theory building, and participatory foresight analysis.

One of the project's major outcomes is a series of 5 Policy Briefs with policy lessons and recommendations that especially target decision makers in the reference regions as well as the EU policy development, paying particular attention to the Europe-Africa dialogue.

The SALSA project experience demonstrates that agricultural and food systems research across continents, with research sites in both Europe and Africa, can result in valuable insights and learning in both directions. Lessons from Europe are valuable to African partners, as their countries are developing rapidly. An understanding of strengths and weaknesses of European agricultural policies (and their impacts on small farms) can improve decision making. European partners can learn from Africa about informal and community-based approaches to support food and nutrition security.

The SALSA research shows that policy interventions would benefit from being more territorially based and from taking into account the characteristics of regional food systems and as well as the different types of small farms that take part in them.

Small farms in Africa are estimated to undertake more than 70% of the agricultural activities on the continent, thereby helping ensure food, employment and rural livelihoods. Available data however indicate that there remain severe challenges related to food insecurity and nutrition. Producing enough food in Africa in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner will therefore require sustainable increases in productivity for all farm types. Two overriding policy recommendations of relevance to all regions studied:

• Introduce appropriate combinations of policy interventions to help small farms add value to their produce since they are more productive and profitable when they specialize in quality produce and processing. This may include support to those small farms that are mainly self-provisioning, but who have the ambition to commercialise.
• Foster and facilitate cooperation as the most enabling and empowering form of governance for small farms and small food businesses. This includes the introduction of appropriate frameworks for value chain strategies /contracts that promote greater coordination and the more equitable distribution of power and financial benefit between small farmers and other supply chain actors.

The Policy Briefs

• Overview
• Lessons from Africa
• Eastern Europe
• Northern Europe
• Southern Europe

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in partnership with the Global Data on Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN); Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR); the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) and the World Bank are inviting interested individuals to participate in the online discussion on ICTs and Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition currenlty held on the e-agriculture platform.

The proposed online debate on the e-Agriculture platform seeks to explore the interaction between use of ICTs in agriculture and issues around open data in agriculture and nutrition and its effective use, with a focus on establishing what benefits and possible losses, can accrue to farmers, especially small holder family farmers in developing countries, if technology and open data are used conjunctively. 

The smallholder farmers' dataportrait is a comprehensive, systematic and standardized data set on the profile of smallholder farmers across the world.

It generates an image on how small family farmers in developing and emerging countries live their lives. It is about putting in numbers, the constraints they face, and the choices they make so that policies can be informed by evidence to meet the challenge of agricultural development. Currently, the data portrait provides information for 14 countries.

More than 500 million family farms manage the majority of the world's agricultural land and produce most of the world's food. We need family farms to ensure global food security, to care for and protect the natural environment and to end poverty, undernourishment and malnutrition. Goals can be thoroughly achieved if public policies support family farms to become more productive and sustainable; in other words policies must support family farms to innovate within a system that recognizes their diversity and the complexity of the challenges faced.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2014: Innovation in family farming analyses family farms and the role of innovation in ensuring global food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. It argues that family farms must be supported to innovate in ways that promote sustainable intensification of production and improvements in rural livelihoods.

• Read the publication
• SOFA 2014 In Brief
• View the entire SOFA collection since 1947