
Policy highlights:
- The vast majority of farms worldwide are family farms. Most are small and together they occupy only a small proportion of the total farmland. Of the 570 million farms, 475 million are less than 2 hectares in size and account for just 12% of all the land used for farming.
- Small and medium-sized farms have started to show their potential for solving global challenges, such as food security, poverty and biodiversity loss.
- There is a growing consensus on the need to invest in family farming as part of the solution to a more sustainable development paradigm.
- However, more needs to be known about how to integrate family farming into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically regarding the concrete implications and specificities of family farming.