Empowering small farms: A key to food security
Throughout human history, agriculture served as the nation's foundation, with food security often determining the fates of the governments. With the worsening effects of climate change, agriculture will face more environmental pressure than ever. Unless society rethinks its ways of sustainability, food security will be more of a national security problem.
To ensure that the agricultural sector will meet the demands of the growing population while being heavily affected by climate change, experts are now looking to smallholder farmers as a viable solution. Smallholder farmers are farmers with just less than 2 hectares of land, yet they contribute around 30-34% of the world's food supply.
Through collaboration, more than 600 million smallholder farmers around the globe can actively take part in carbon sequestration. Modifying some of the farming techniques, such as soil tilling, can make agriculture achieve net zero emissions.
Working with small farms in achieving crop diversification will lead to healthier soil and added livelihood opportunities for smallholder farmers who are usually in developing countries.
In a fast-changing world and with the worsening effects of climate change, smallholder farmers are taking the brunt in the agricultural sector. Empowering smallholder farmers with technological innovations will help them be more resilient and ready to scale up what they are doing. An artificial intelligence-driven app helping farmers predict invasions of pests and a weather risk management service for small farms in India are just two of the blooming innovations helping farmers around the globe.
As planet Earth is a system where various elements interact, the key to ensuring sustainability in agriculture is collaboration. All of the ideas mentioned above would not even start without the cooperation between different groups.