New Directions for Smallholder Agriculture

The majority of the poor and hungry people in the world live on small farms and struggle to subsist on too little land with low input - low yield technologies. At the same time, many other smallholders are successfully intensifying and succeeding as farm businesses, often in combination with diversification into off-farm sources of income. This book examines the growing divergence between subsistence and business oriented small farms, and discusses how this divergence has been impacted by population growth, trends in farm size distribution, urbanization, off-farm income diversification, and the globalization of agricultural value chains. It finds that policy makers need to differentiate more sharply between different types of small farms than they did in the past, both in terms of their potential contributions towards achieving national economic growth, poverty alleviation, and food security goals, and the types of assistance they need. The book distinguishes between smallholders that are business oriented, subsistence oriented, and at various stages of transition to the non-farm economy, and discusses strategies appropriate for assisting each type. The book draws on a wealth of recent experience at IFAD and elsewhere to help identify best practice approaches.

Peter B. R. Hazell, Professorial Research Associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Atiqur Rahman, Consultant, International Fund for Agricultural Development

Peter Hazell trained as an agriculturalist in the UK before completing his PhD in agricultural economics at Cornell University. He had a long career as a research economist at the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), including serving as director of the environment and production technology division and the development strategy and governance division. He has been Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and a Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His extensive and widely cited publications include works on new methods of using mathematical programming to solve farm and agricultural sector planning problems; the impact of technological change on growth and poverty reduction; the appropriate role of agricultural insurance in developing countries; and agriculture’s growth linkages to the rural non-farm economy. He has worked throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central America.

Atiqur Rahman has held various managerial, research, and teaching positions at IFAD and previously worked at the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies. He was a visiting Professor at the University of California, Riverside and an Adjunct Professor at John Cabot University, Rome. He was the lead co-coordinator and researcher of the IFAD 2001 Rural Poverty Report. He has published widely.