While traveling through Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda and various remote tropical islands in the Banda Sea/Indonesia I've been looking, listening and learning about people's farming techniques. And despite these different countries being worlds away in terms of culture and geography there's some strong silimilarities between Indonesia and Africa... The biggest one being that (by Australia standards) the farms feeding these countries are mostly all small.
When I say small I mean 10 acres and under, yeah, I know... That'd hardly even qualify as a hobby farm in Australia. Most of the farms seen in Indonesia are the size of a tennis court, the sea weed farms (as seen in the photo above) are around half that again.
"Smallholder sustainable agriculture is the most efficient and socially just way to increase productivity, resilience to climate change, household incomes, job creation, regeneration of land and other natural resources, and improvements in household food security."
I got back to Australia a few days ago where the small farmer is definitely a minority, growing food quietly in the shadow of large-scale, monoculture productions.... (which aren't all bad, but generally questionable in their sustainability).
I'm back in Melbourne where there are numerous small city farms, community/school gardens some of which I have had the pleasure of working with - and of course there's the occasional cranking home garden. These small farms play a couple of roles in our society, yes they do feed a small amount of people (some would argue an insignificant amount). However they also provide a reminder to people of where their food comes from, the earth - not the supermarket shelves.
The rise of people's social and environmental awareness is seeing more people taking part in growing food. In response to natural resources being plundered (think the Murray) more and more people are converting their lawn to food with the intention of easing the burden from these few resources. People are choosing to eat local produce over imported to cut back on food miles and going to farmers markets is now officially 'cool'. Bring it on I say.
So while we're eating your next meal or going food shopping, spare a thought for the small farmer - their role in feeding the world is bigger than you may have realised.