Authors: Dionisio Ortiz-Miranda a,*, Olga Moreno-P´erez a, Laura Arnalte-Mur a, Pedro Cerrada-Serra a, Victor Martinez-Gomez a, Barbara Adolph b, Joanes Atela c, Sylvester Ayambila d, Isaurinda Baptista e, Raluca Barbu f, Hilde Bjørkhaug g, Marta Czekaj h, Dominic Ducketti, Arlindo Fortes e, Francesca Galli j, Giannis Goussios k, Paola Andrea Hernandez ´ l, Pavlos Karanikolas k, Kennedy Machila m, Elpiniki Oikonomopoulou k, Paolo Prosperi n,o, María Rivera l, Łukasz Satoła h, Monika Szafranska ´ h, Talis Tisenkopfs p, Charles Tonui c, Richard Yeboah
Recent literature has increasingly recognized the need to confront future food challenges to achieve sustainable food and nutrition security (FAO, 2017). In this context, special attention has also been paid to both the role of small farmers in contributing to food security, and the factors that are impeding the realisation of greater productive capacity (HLPE, 2013; Davidova and Bailey, 2014; Woodhill et al., 2020). Small-scale farming is the livelihood of the majority of the rural poor, so their future dynamics are intrinsically bound-up with food insecurity. Therefore, as Woodhill et al. (2020: 7) claim, “more nuanced and up-to-date understanding of small-scale agriculture and family farming is urgently needed” to drive the necessary transformation of small-scale agriculture in other to “realise the SDGs, and to achieve healthier, more equitable and environmentally sustainable food systems”. In other words: Which role can small farms play in the future of the food systems if food security is not necessarily guaranteed? What could their future be within a sector experiencing major internal restructuring and external challenges?
In addressing these questions, we focus also on small food businesses (SFB) which are closely related to small farms (SF) (Hernandez ´ et al., 2021). In many cases the farm becomes a food business when it carries out on-farm processing or direct selling to consumers, i.e. when the business is developed by the farm itself (or is a farm spin-off). In other cases SFB are strongly connected with small farms, so very often they are interdependent……