Small-scale famers are the focus of Sustainable Development Goal 2.3's target to " ...double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers..." However, based on a recent review of the literature by EPAR, less than a fifth of articles gave an explicit definition of a smallholder or small-scale farmer. All of the articles which offered a definition, offered different definitions using a range of criteria. The purpose of this visualization is to allow users to construct their own definition of a smallholder and see the implications on household estimates and smallholder prevalence. The criteria used to create the definitions are drawn from the definitions offered by the literature.
The Data
The visualization above is created using nationally representative data from the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). This is a publicly available household panel survey dataset for seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The survey includes linked agricultural, livestock, household, and community level modules that provide information on a variety of topics including crops, farming practices, livestock, income sources, and socio-demographics. Specifically it displays cleaned data from one panel of the Tanzania National Panel Survey (Year 4, 2014-2015). The code used to generate the variables and estimates is available in a public GitHub repository. The estimates are available through EPAR's agricultural database. This visualization gives users the option to compare different definitions side by side. This visualization looks at the AGRA definitions in greater depth. To view the visualization in full screen click here.
By Terry Fletcher
Summarizing research by Didier Alia, Terry Fletcher, Pierre Biscaye, C. Leigh Anderson, and Travis Reynolds