The critical role of smallholders in ensuring food security

Abstract

The topic of food security covers aspects at all spatial levels from local to global, and from an interdisciplinary and systemic food systems perspective. We will focus, as our central theme in this chapter, on basic food security being the provision of essential food for survival. We are talking about essential food for a reasonably healthy life. One of the agricultural pathways towards sustainable food and nutrition security is through local production of nutritious food, activity in which smallholders play a crucial role. As food consumers, all rural and urban people in developing countries count heavily on the efficiency of their local smallholders to satisfy their food needs.