AGRICULTURE NEWS - According to the UN, there are more than 570 million family farmers in the world, and they play a crucial role in ensuring global food security.
READ Keeping the farm in the family
The World Farmers’ Organisation (WFO), which serves on the international steering committee of the UN Decade for Family Farming, has reminded all participants in the project that ‘small’ and ‘family’ are not necessarily synonyms.
Family farms are a very diverse group, and this diversity must be taken into account when addressing the family farmers’ needs, the WFO says.
Medium-sized and smaller commercial farmers, which make up the majority of the commercial farming sector in South Africa, as well as the EU and US, are more often than not also family-owned businesses.
These family farms face a host of unique challenges to which small-scale family farms, the type of farm that dominates the farming sector in much of Africa and India for example, are not exposed.
