hopefully people start dropping in soon they're coming so there are people who are probably in the waiting room. So we'll give it a few minutes just to allow people to join before we get done. For the panelists if you want to you can see if you click on the list of participants you can see not only there's one set for the panelists and one set for the attendees and I often quite like to look at that because I recognize some familiar names popping up and things as well. So great we've got about 60. Sure so welcome everybody we'll we'll just give it a couple of minutes before we kick off but welcome to you all while we're waiting for people to join I'll just reinforce to the participants that you've got we've both got a chance under question and answer I mean you're welcome to answer to putting questions in either in either place and we'll try and make sure we get around to some of those questions as we move forward during the afternoon and it's great to see so many people joining today. Well Ken should we should we kick off? Sure okay great okay we'll look uh hello everybody um good afternoon or good morning or good evening depending on which part of the world you're in it's great to have you all joining us for this next session of the e-dialogue on what future for small scale farming. So on behalf of the Sustainable Development Solution Network Foresight for Food IFAD and APRA thank you all for joining us I'm Jim Woodhill and I'm the lead of the Foresight for Food Initiative that's working to strengthen foresight and scenario capacities for food system transformation. Ken. Yeah welcome I'm Ken Gillar I'm co-chair of SDSN's network on sustainable agriculture and food systems and I'm going to be a host today. So our network is specifically focused on SDG2 the zero hunger SDG with a strong interest and in rural households and small older farming. Jim. Great thanks thanks Ken. We'll do a little bit of a test and just see where we've got people dialing in from today so um we'll put up a quick question for you about where you're from you can see it popping up there and while you're filling that in let me give you a little bit more background to the e-dialogue series. We started off back in July with an opening session that was then followed by local perspectives and our last one at the end of October we discussed regional perspectives and had five really great sessions looking at the at the diversity of small-scale agriculture across different regions. Today we want to explore transition pathways that are needed for small-scale farming households to both meet their income and nutritional requirements on a sustainable and resilient basis. We'll have a final wrap-up session at the at the end of November. So against what's a wider background about transforming food systems this e-dialogue aims to take a deeper look at both the opportunities and constraints faced by small-scale farmers. We of course know that small-scale agriculture is really critical to the livelihoods of many rural households defeating the world into tackling poverty and malnutrition yet we also know that small-scale farmers are an incredibly diverse group of people operating with all sorts of different land sizes in different farm contexts in very different contexts and cultures. And we are also seeing farming households have an increasingly diverse range of income sources that complement their farming and we also know that many of the smallest farming households really struggle with making a living income from their from their farming activities. So what we'd like to do in today's discussion is unpack a little bit more where does the whole idea of commercialization of small-scale agriculture sit alongside a more nutrition-sensitive self-consumption approach to agricultural production and along the role of what one might think about as more productive forms of social protection and perhaps how can all of those mechanisms come together in supporting a transition of farming households to a more prosperous and nutritionally beneficial situation. So with that with that context I can go back and see how we're going with the poll have we got some answers there. Okay so quite a quite a nice diversity here obviously the right time of the day in Europe but a really good roll up from Africa and Asia as well a little bit less from the the Americas but thanks thanks very much for that poll it's nice to see this bringing people together from right across the across the world. Just to say that the outcomes of this e-dialogue will be fed into the IFAD rule development report for 2021 which is feeding into the global food system summit will also be trying to take these results into the global food security conference later this year and writing up the stories that we hear. The sessions have been recorded and are also being made available as podcasts for those who would like to listen to them afterwards. So with that Ken over to you. Oh thanks Jim, thanks for the introduction. So we're really thrilled to have a really knowledgeable and experienced panel today to share their thoughts from from all over the world. So we're looking for an informal discussion between the panelists around a number of questions that we've given them but we're going to start with just a quick opening perspective from each panelist followed by then answering questions from you in the audience or a discussion among the panelists and we're starting off really with this question though how do you see the roles of commercialization of self-consumption of food or social protection as integrated and complementary strategies for tackling poverty and poor nutrition that affects so many of these small-scale farming households. So first of all Mario over to you if you could introduce yourself maybe tell us where you are and give us a kickoff in terms of your own thoughts. Hi everyone my name is Mario Herredo and I am chief research scientist of agriculture and food at CSIRO which is the Australian National Research Agency. This is a topic very close to to my heart I think that it's a topic very seldomly discussed in the future of food activities and it's essential that we bring it to the fore. What role for a small hold is it's a particularly big question and it has many ramifications because small holders are in different trajectories of evolution in different parts of the world. In many cases they are incredibly important and provide the majority of of produce for urban and rural consumers while in other places we see larger transformations and some consolidation of farms in some places certainly it is in those places where they're still relevant. It's probably a question of time before we see a range of more pervasive drivers evolving into into their evolution for example in sub-Saharan Africa in many cases we have a lot of small holders because you still have a relatively low opportunity cost of labor and that creates a relatively small incentive for farmers to actually change or to engage in other avenues of work. Having said that most of the small holders that I that I've met in Africa have always had an off-farm income source and this is likely to to increase in the future simply because education is changing the game. Many of the sons and daughters of these farmers are very likely to engage in completely different activities so there are issues around succession in farming. So probably one of the key issues that we see as useful is the change of focus that has happened recently from producing kilocalories to a more nutrition based agenda presents unique opportunities for small holders. Why? Because relatively speaking smaller farms are very good for producing these nutrient bombs present in vegetables, in fruits and in especially in small livestock. So these are opportunities that we should actually think carefully and when you think about the cereals and the crops that you can actually mechanize are a lot easier to produce in other parts. So perhaps a nutrition sensitive agenda could be used as a way of improving the development opportunities for small holders. Obviously this will require as we've said some commercialization some opening markets of things that we know are deficient fruits and vegetables in many of the studies that have come up recently are deficient they're not enough and it's likely a demand and supply issue because a lot of people say well it's prices they're too expensive well but if supply ramps up enough well then the prices might actually come down sufficiently for a range of urban and rural consumers. So we need to we need to think about this nutrition angle as an opportunity. The other thing that I would say is probably there is a need for collective action as well. In many of the farms are really too small and we really need to think how producers can actually join together to create and to incentivize those those market forces. It won't happen in small villages it needs to do we need to have a more broader give a more broader opportunity for that market creation. What else did I want to say? I'm sure that I'm almost there in terms of you know in terms of social protection I think it is essential that one of the best ways of social protection would be for these small holder farmers to be able to consume a nutrient-rich produce from their farms and this is something that you know in many ways we should treat them as the custodians of the nutrients in many ways while the big staples might actually come from well-established market sources. Now when you when one last point Ken when you talk to many of these farmers in the field they're still reluctant to get rid of their of their bit of maize or of their bit of price for risk for risk issues they still want to maintain a little bit of the cereal there but there is certainly a real option to to think of reconfiguring some of these farming systems to produce a you know environmental social and nutrition goods for the benefits of of the farmers and the consumers thank you. Now thanks very much for kicking yourself Mario and I know several of the points that you've picked up I'm sure I'll come back with some of our other speakers as we go through but maybe let's go around and then we can come back to you with some questions so Kwame would you like to go next? Thank you Ken and greetings everyone so my name is Phyllis Kwame Yabua I'm an assistant professor of international development at Michigan State University and also a non-resident fellow of global food and agriculture with the Chicago Council and Global Affairs so and my my work mainly looks at issues at intercession of agriculture and food systems and transformation and then how that intersects with youth livelihoods so regarding the question about the role of those three processes that you have requested us to reflect on I think it's increasingly being organized as small holders are not a monolithic group and that the diversity and the complexity of needs that is both in space and in time requires a holistic approach to achieve any food security poverty alleviation and resilient objectives and on that with that particular understanding any attempt that integrates strategies like this is certainly a welcome approach to addressing the issues that small holders face because if you look at them even individually our commercialization self-consumption social protection all have the potential to help small holders address some of these various constraints that they face to achieving their food security and nutrition objectives so commercialization has a prospect of integrating farmers into markets to sell some of the surplus that they have an increased purchasing power which from a structured and promising perspective that money could be recycled into the rural economy which eventually creates a multiplier effect that expand employment opportunities in the all farm sector helps some of those absorb labor access labor from the farming and then allow those who are going to remain informed to be able to consolidate land and eventually be able to earn incomes that it's similar to what those in the all farm sector may also be earning in the context of self-consumption we know that with self-consumption small holders are going to be less susceptible to market forces to media food security needs we give them more greater control over their food security and social protection is also an important mechanism to address all the immediate nutrition needs and could also be an important safety net against shocks and a vehicle which I believe could be used to promote adoption of technologies I think Mario talked about the sometimes the reluctance to adopt certain technologies mainly because of the risk associated with that but if so social protection could be a mechanism that guarantees that look if your maize do not do well we have the safety net that will ensure that you are fit but but I think that it's the key had always been with the implementation on how these are implemented together and we also need to be also keeping in mind some of the underlying assumptions of these processes in relation to small holder farmers so so for example commercialization assumes that these farmers actually have surplus to sell and we know that a number of small holder farmers actually net bias of food because they are they are not able to produce enough and enough and those who are able to produce enough you know have the storage capacity that will last them through the lean season so they are not buying more food than they actually are able to sell self-consumption also will assume that they are producing the right mix of nutritious food both in quantity and in quality so which may not necessarily be the case and Mario talked about the emphasis on producing these grains instead of the vegetables and and I think and then with social protection then we also have to think about the issues of targeting as to do we the do we have a mechanism to clearly identify those that need it need help and then can we respond in a timely fashion so I think understanding some of these constraints with the household dynamics some of the constraints within the farm environment and also constrained that a phase before market after at the market level and after market is going to be critical to how we actually integrate all of that and I look forward to discussing these issues in depth with you all thank you. Oh great thanks Kwame and I see people are already dropping comments into the chat box so please please do go ahead and and out there you can actually make your comments open for everybody or just the panelists so I don't feel shy and communicate with everybody on the call here is you're working then in a slightly different mode I think so over to you. Yes thanks and so my name is Iris von der Veilern I'm the director for innovation and insights I'm working at IDH the sustainable trade initiative and I indeed have a bit of a different perspective than the two previous panelists and so my organization is working together with the private sector to improve the sustainability of smallholder failure chains and we're doing that in three ways so we're working together with the private and the public sector to convene these sectors the failure chains that we're working in so we're working both in cash crops as well as food crops and what we're doing with them is to convene them around sustainability and inclusivity agenda we co-fund innovations interventions on the ground and what's important in our organization is that we actually gather the evidence and the learnings out of that to to improve our interventions in the future so with this perspective of working together with the private sector I think you have put together right an interesting hypothesis of how commercialization self-consumption and social protection come together and if I look at this hypothesis from our experience I like to share with you a couple of things on what we see happening in working directly with the private sector so first of all with the private sector companies that we're we're working with so this is both in cocoa and coffee but we're also working in rice and maize and vegetables so it's quite a broad range of crops that we're active in so with those companies what we see is that they have a huge need to secure their supply and in securing their supply they have broadened their their their scope of looking at at their supplier base and what we see is that they increasingly look at farmers not only as suppliers but also as clients of some of the services that they're providing in working in the companies working with those small whole of farmers we see that they have an increased attention for what often is referred to in in our work to to living income so improving the the living conditions of farmers and there what we see is that they don't only look at a living income from cocoa or from coffee but there's increased awareness that those farms are very diversified as mario indicated right and that farmers need support for maybe their cash crop but also for those other crops that may serve more consumption purpose as well as they need support for off-farm activities and for managing risks so what we see is that an increased attention for how to also support farmers in managing risks whether that's through insurance for insurance products whether that's through different kind of buying agreements what we also see is that there's an increased attention for human-centered design so what mario highlighted right farmers are not a homogeneous group so there's an increased understanding that farmer segmentation and tailoring services and support to farmers is very helpful and what we see is that the private sector can't do this alone right I think the public sector has a very crucial role to play here both in making sure that there is for example infrastructure but also the right regulatory policy but also for example when we work with companies on nutrition what they can do is support farmers maybe with some inputs for for for for vegetables for example but we also see that there's a big role to play for the public sector in promoting nutritious diets right because we know it's not only a matter of availability of nutritious foods it's also very much a matter of habits right and what people are also culturally used to do so one last thing is that we're looking with those companies how to best improve farmer incomes and what we see often is that the size of the farm is very in the drivers that we're looking at so we're looking at price we're looking at land size we're looking at diversification yield cost of version so how to tweak those drivers who work with farmers to improve their incomes and then land size is often a dominant one so I think would be interesting in this conversation to to talk more about land conservation absolutely thanks very much Eryus I think you touched a huge number of issues again as the other speakers and you you're highlighting nutrition so now Makola over to you I think your speciality yes thank you well the need for poverty alleviation and nutrition are intertwined on the African continent and it can be a big engine for people to work their way out of a poverty trap however this means that commercialization is actually a critical component of improving people's livelihoods but it is not practical nor is it desirable to actually expect them to eat only what they produce because contexts are so different and it would certainly not be the most efficient way of producing more food to serve the nutritional needs of Africa's population so what about niche food production whether it be specific fruits and vegetables for on consumption but with potential for market linkages social protection is definitely an important aspect of poverty alleviation but only if structured properly to protect food security and nutrition and the needs to protect also productive capacity in times of need so social protection must be structured to put people back on their feet in from crisis and to get them started towards improving poverty so that they can still serve their nutrition need for me a good example of a structure for social protection that deals with both agriculture production as well as nutrition is the Ethiopia productive safety net program and with the COVID-19 pandemic it is actually very clear from information that is emerging that it has been protective on food security needs as well as farm household expenditure on agriculture inputs protecting the next harvest so it is important that all these things whether it's commercialization improving agriculture production and capacity to produce the next food the next meals are actually addressed and they deserve adequate investment but to be most effective we must consider how the different pieces actually fit together in the big picture to avoid negative trade-offs there must be enough investment so that small holder farmers as they go about trying to provide for their nutritional needs can actually also see openings for other livelihoods that they can get into and for that investments in the localities are required otherwise we stifle their creativity and they are not able to feed themselves nor to look to other ways of improving their livelihoods thank you okay well thanks very much now in color you've also been highlighting social protection issues and I think our next speaker Fabio this is really your speciality hello good morning good afternoon yeah everybody's talking about social protection now I'm glad to see that that was not the case like 20 years ago when I started my research on poverty and inequality but I think that for the social protection perspective I think the first thing we need to mention and it has been actually absent here that's actually increasing coverage of social protections is one of the SDG targets right so target 1.3 is basically to increase coverage of social protection particularly among the poor and the vulnerable so it's seen as a key strategy or a key component to decrease or to eradicate extreme poverty in the world by 2030 but social protection also has links with the second SDG and actually with more than the second but particularly with the second to fight hunger so one aspect that we need to look at is actually what's the coverage of social protection in rural areas and from what we know and actually we don't have much systematized data on that the coverage is quite low so there is room to improve social protection coverage in rural areas and not only social assistance but also social insurance so basically when we're discussing agriculture and small water farmers we are implicitly thinking about social assistance and social cash transfers so we don't think much around the social insurance component not only for the workers in rural areas of the workers in agriculture but also for the small water farmers themselves so I think that's one aspect that usually is missing on this discussion so having said that I can go back into the synergies and how social protection can be complementary to commercialization and also to increase food security and nutrition so basically we already have a huge part of the evidence so social protection I think has been the dimension that has been mostly evaluated recently with the whole randomized control tiles wave that we have seen in the past 20 years we have seen lots of evaluations coming out particularly in Latin America where I come from but also in Southern Africa I could mention here the transfer project and within the transfer project that was basically led by UNICEF but also the FAO component that was looking from protection to production that looked at the productive impacts of social protection so one of the key questions that came out of this research was basically whether social protection could for itself without being linked without being part of a strategy have productive effects so I think that they have this in Latin America and in Africa actually shows that even if it's not integrated social protection usually has an impact on both on agricultural production because people invest part of this regular income that they receive of course it depends a bit on the design so the transfer needs to be regular and here I would like to pinpoint that there is some evidence in coming out now from the GIVE Directly project for example in Southern Africa showing that actually there is not much difference around investment grants and large lump sums and the regular transfers in terms of these impacts so households that are receiving the cash transfers there are both increasing the consumption they're improving their food and food security and nutrition within certain limits because it's not like the only solution for that there are shortcomings for the type of impacts that we see but they are also investing in assets and investing in productions but one thing that's clear that's very interesting is even for cash transfer programs that are targeted towards label constrained households we found some productive impacts because people are able to hire labor to work in their lands even if it's a small land even it's just for self-consumption so social protection has many interesting impacts that have been clear documented but is this enough to eradicate poverty is this enough to ensure food security I don't think so but I'm saying that basically because usually we say that social protection if if well designed with if it's something that it's always conditional social protection but social protection even if not has this has these impacts but if we manage to put it within an integrity strategy it can have even higher impacts so the challenge here is actually to think what are the cash plans so what are the complementary programs that we need to have in order to make it more sustainable in the sense that it can have it can have more impacts in terms of the food security and increasing access to markets so basically like the theoretical framework of the of the theory of change around social protection is that it's going to have an impact at the household level by easing the credit or the liquidity constraints that the families have to make investments given this cash flow but the cash flow wouldn't be enough so there may be other constraints for the families that may be access to markets it may be that they don't have enough roads close to them it may be collective action that's missing that has already been cited here so the link is also is also not only from the social protection side from the agricultural intervention and rural development but also from the rural development side the agricultural intervention towards the target population of social protection and i'm saying that because usually the ministry of agriculture the mission of rural development do not see the poorest and the most vulnerable in rural areas as their target population so they shouldn't profit from their problems and here's another big challenge that we didn't mention yet but it's quite important is in the sense that these ministries think that they shouldn't design programs and policy and provide service to this population so what end up happening it end up happening is that the ministries that are taking care of social assistance of social protection and then that internally develop mean like substitute programs for the programs that these people should be having access in a in a broader cooperative strategy so just like to to finalize with these importance of having bare integration and cooperation across ministries and also having the means of agriculture adapting their service to this population yeah no it's nice he stressed this point that the social protection could be supportive for the other aspects of commercialization and nutrition as well so Clara last but not least would you like to introduce yourself and tell us more about your your enthusiasm your work of course thank you Ken for for us having here and Antoine for sharing your your perspectives I am Clara Colina program manager for master grids foundation rural and agricultural finance learning lab we are the learning partner for their 180 million dollars portfolio in financial inclusions for for rural sub-saharan Africa so in in our experience working with our partners in the portfolio commercialization and self-consumption of food production are definitely relevant livelihood strategies for some and probably a large part of the small holder households we work with but maybe not for all I think as some of you have been been raising here so one of the bigger could you make this the slide full screen oh yeah thank you so well under project thank you I'll give you a bit of a bit of the context of how we came about what this graphic you're seeing on the screen but one of the biggest steps forward that we've seen in the sector is reconceptualizing how we think about small holder farmers and more broadly rural households so in the past the understanding of rural clients when we started seven years ago with with master grad foundation we were talking about small holder farmers in terms of their land size what they produce what they sold in the market in the last few years would become a lot more sophisticated with a small holder data particularly thanks to some of the data being collected from the field from seek up for instance with the national representative surveys that have revealed that rural households have rich financial profiles and have a range of income sourcing everyone says to be a farmer but when you actually go and look what the income sources look like there's a diverse range of incomes from labor from entrepreneurship from selling surplus etc and this informs the choices they make and the livelihood strategies they pursue but even with these advances we were still talking the way we were understanding small holder households was largely static we were still characterizing small holder farmers based on a snapshot of what their life looked looked at a particular moment in time in reality however rural households like any households are dynamic and as they pursue goals as they face different challenges over the course of of their lives and that livelihood strategy that they pursue evolves so the graphic you see here tries to map map out this dynamism and differentiate between the different segments of small holder farmers and rural households that we're seeing in the in the in the field and how what transitions may look like as they pursue increased resilience and an increased agency so these transitions colleagues around four centers of gravity and so from left to right it would start with the first one farming as a business these are the small holder households that remain in primary production so as a small holder farmer invest in expanding their farm you could cut you could progress for the very vulnerable subsistence farmer that you find there on the on the on the bottom left the farmers that are primarily a growing crops for food consumption you could progress into becoming a bit of a more commercializing farmer intensifying production and eventually into a medium or large farm going one step to to the right some small holder households may shift away from primary agriculture production and pursue an entrepreneurship based livelihood strategy they may focus on agricultural services so they may become a veterinary service an aggregator a processor or go into non-agricultural services so transportation running a local shop setting a mobile agent and a stand etc eventually these may also evolve into medium and and large enterprises once that further to the right we find the rural labor so households may still be farming but and remain in rural areas but focus more their livelihood strategy on employment that supports what's going on in the rural ecosystem and this may be both agricultural and non-agricultural labor or both formal and informal and just towards the to those that were right-hand side facing enough push and pull factors farmers may migrate to urban areas and transition fully to non-rural livelihood activities so to the question and then you were asking before what strategy is the most effective really depends on what household we are talking about so for subsistence farmers if we if we focus on that number one there on the on the bottom left social protection is very relevant right until they're able to move to a more sustainable livelihood strategy that may or may not be around farm commercialization unless this rural pathway model can help us distinguish these households what their goals are what their aspirations are in life what are those enablers that they need to transition to the different livelihood strategies that they want to pursue and what are some of the those inhibitors that we need to work on so that so that they can improve their their overall livelihood you know okay thanks very much maybe we can go back to full screen of all the panelists so so we've had a whole range of different inputs and suggestions here and what I want to really get on the table I sense quite some focus in the in the group on Africa although not exclusively of course but in one of their previous discussions you know it was really brought up that in in South Asia particularly in India there is already a very large social protection program of cash payments to farmers and many of those farmers are really in what they call the ultra small small-scale farming so 40 percent of the households with less than 0.05 hectares now maybe Mario I mean I know in your Lancet paper on nutrition I mean you talk about small holders is is the farms below 50 hectares I think so I think you know let's get on the table that we're talking about such a different diverse group but for which types of these groups and I mean Clara alluded to it which types of these works do we really think commercialization maybe can play a role do you want me to to comment Ken yeah sure okay so so no just just a clarification in our paper we had under two hectares and those were the small all this and then we had from two to 2020 to 50 so we we we said that the medium-scale farmers were probably a better engine for for sustainable food production in our in a model but you know I'm I'm very interested in following some of the discussion from the other participants this is an area well where we have a lot of hunches I find of things that could be better and so on but I find in many cases the evidence the evidence lacking for example where how do we know is there enough evidence to a certain that being a rural laborer would be a better a better livelihood choice than being a smallholder farmer and what typically happens in these households is that you get perhaps a couple of the extended family taking roles within agriculture or not a and some others remain in the farm household but you know I would love to to know that also for example where they in the commercialization pathways that iris was mentioned in I would find very interesting if we could do something like you know some kind of a contract filing for vegetables to intend to incentivize at least a secure market for small oldest and so on because I think that those are the the key things that would actually diminish risk in the operation okay okay so I mean I've linked back to a question that's coming from Tengua who's actually asking are we proposing that or are you among you proposing that forming cooperatives is then one way of moving if you like towards an opportunity here and I think Maria as well I think you're highlighting as well that if you know a two hectare farm if we're talking about vegetables for instance and people have irrigation can be actually a very lucrative operation of course it's it's a lot to do with what's being produced and not just necessarily the size of the farm um iris or uh kawami do you want to come in on this that's the panelist if you want to wave at me uh please do at some point you think no you want to come in iris yes I'd like to add two things one one thing to the point of of mario and one thing to uh one of the the comments in the in the chat so I think what we increasingly see the mario is that companies are looking so companies know right that they're still facing so if we look at cash crops like coffee and cocoa they know that they're still working with farmers that that are far below the living income line and they have invested quite a bit in training in certification sometimes even in in inputs in in access to finance right but if we look at the data we know it's not enough so what we see is that there's increased interest to look in into new innovations like looking at their procurement their ways of procurement and I think what you're referring to is that contract farming is is a different way of the buyer supplier relationship and and as ideas we're looking indeed into contract farming but also uh block farms nucleus farms with block farm with contract farms but what we also see is that there is also a need for more radical change in those in the procurement relationship where also they look at the payment terms they look at uh costs plus margin contracts they look at what's called uh clean sheeting so looking at what is the at what's the value right created and who how is that value being distributed so I think there's lots more to do with the the companies that are front runners in innovating in the supplier buyer relationship yeah those those are fantastic options that we need more of that definitely so we're talking here again about about some of the crops which have maybe a better margin in terms of what the the farms can produce I remember that uh you're you're wearing the 70 and sir and a leader who's maybe lost some of his shine used to say though that small farms should produce high value products we should produce low value products the staple crops on large farms Carmen where do you see this fitting in with your work around commercialization and this new group of emergent farmers written since in Africa um can I think that um there is some value um in that if small farms could be tapped to produce some of those uh products so um for example you when you think about the issue of mechanization and products that are amenable to mechanization so things like maize are very amenable to to mechanization whereas when it comes to fruits and vegetables and horticulture they are not readily amenable to mechanization and those are things that I believe small holders could produce but the issue had always got got to do with the volume that they'll be able to produce whether that is enough to be able to supply what those bias will need and that is where I've seen some companies use these outgrow scheme as a way to be able to procure the volumes that they need um but I would also want to say that there is um we typically also think of these as small and medium as as dichotomy but but I think there is something it is more of a continuum and there is to understand some complementary relationship between between them and some of the studies that we have done um indicates that in areas where you even have small we have large we have medium scale um farms growing those areas um tend to have better access to market because because um bias come into those areas trying to procure products from these medium scale farm because of those large volumes and while they are there they also purchase goods from small scale farmers those medium scale farmers are also able to to buy tractors or other mechanized inputs and when those are not being used on their farms small scale farmers also benefit from that so I do not foresee the continent just having just small scale farmers or medium scale farmers there is a continuum between those two and we'll most likely have full security um being achieved by supporting both um sizes of farms so thanks very much and and I think yeah really interesting points about the interdependence I think of farms I mean it's great the chats and keep looking at the chat panelist I mean it's sort of exploring it's a bit hard to follow I wanted to pick up while we're on this commercialization thing just a couple of points that I picked up on there's one here from uh uh contact we're still from Cameroon how realistic is it to think the private sector particularly working in cash drop so this is really coming back to you here so I think would effectively support small older farmers knowing that that could reduce their dependency and put the private companies supply at risk would you see it like that so are the companies able to get to invest in the very smaller of the small farms I think that's really driving that yes so so I think um I was trying to answer it actually in the chat which is almost impossible so I admire you can moderate and read at the same time I'm not good enough um but I think what we see is that uh in some sectors the companies don't have a lot of choice right so it's either supporting farmers uh on on their farm and at times also right with their off farm activities so to make sure that they're able to invest in their farms uh while having the risk right because the risk is there that maybe some of the other crops or activities are more profitable more interesting for farmers so they may stop farming uh certain crops but I think the risk of nuts uh getting into action is even larger than the risk that farmers may deviate some of their time and investments uh to other crops so I would say that that's that's what we see and if you say uh what about really the smaller farmers we know that for for some crops right that they're mostly produced really by small small farmers and uh we do see some companies taking also creating plant bees right where they are setting up their own large farms starting to work with uh in in a nucleus farm and working with uh um contract farmers it's a bit what Kwame was saying about sort of nucleus farms I suppose I was driving a bet at this point that that we often see what they call this Pareto principle the 80 percent of of the 20 percent of the farmers produce 80 percent of the produce or 80 percent the produce is produced by 20 percent of the farmers and and I think very often we see it's even more skewed than the 10 percent of the farmers producing 90 percent of the of the projects but if it's you earlier were talking about the need for diversification I'd like to bring this over to Namakolo because we've heard about diversification I think in two different directions one is that the households do many different things in terms of crops but also Mario was pointing out that we have household members who are also doing different things so working away in the city and maybe coming back the connection but how does this link then to the inside here of producing a nutritious food basket do you think? So I think just quickly to say that I'm a senior research coordinator for the International Food Policy Research Institute specifically on the Agriculture for Nutrition and Health program I forgot to introduce myself when I first spoke but in terms of the issue of diversification of production and and linking that to consumption patterns and nutrition what we know for sure is that we from government programs and investments we've paid a lot more attention to staple foods and not so much to nutrient dense foods and so the value chain developments on nutrient dense foods has been extremely limited and the fact that the production would be more predominantly from small scale farmers who are scattered all over the country then you find the fact that the kind of investments that you require things like roads access to water and that kind of stuff has actually been very limited having said that in places where programs have promoted diversification to impact nutrition what we also find is that not enough attention has been paid to providing nutrition education and so the farmers will produce eggs but they will sell all the eggs to purchase sugar and other things so you might get small holder farmers now producing what looks like a diverse basket at least a more diverse nutrient basket for the household but in actual fact they are not benefiting as they should to that because they are looking at it as a cash producer and not necessarily for food to augment their nutritional needs so that aspect must be addressed otherwise the diversification work does not help the income from people coming from outside it's very clear it helps but again it falls under the same category of will you use the income to provide a more nutrient based basket for your household or will you use the additional income for other things and we have to always keep in mind that there are other needs other than just foods that people have thank you i think mario wanted to come in i just say i remember noikola you were also mentioning yourself that we shouldn't think about farmers or households rural households only consuming what they produce we need to have a market actually providing the additional foods for them as well for local markets for them to purchase food and i thought that was an important point that is often under the table mario you wanted to comment and then i wanted to pick on what nam cola was saying and make some comments on diversification probably another thing that we don't do often is to elevate the you know elevate the unit of analysis to the landscape when we talk about smallholder farmers that would that might be really important to pick a lot of the added benefits of of having diverse and small farms for example if you go to many of the locations where where where we've worked traditionally you see the big the really really big farms just monocrops and you know probably with less biodiversity less a you know protecting watersheds way less and so on but if you look at this very diverse landscapes with more trees with more a more probably more pollinating services and a range of further benefits that would be another case for a for adding a you know probably new sets of payments for for this for this smallholder farms i think that we we're talking here in this discussion very much about a productivity and nutrition side but but you know there's this other landscape dimension where we really need to need to think of well what is the arrangement of the of the landscape for producing the multiple benefits that we're trying to to achieve as a society dealing with climate change and dealing with with all these other things so can i can i respond again because i think it's a really interesting point right and i think this is also something that we're looking into so what are the opportunities for for payments for ecosystem services for smallholder farms right as they often have those far more diverse farming systems what would be needed both also at a regulatory level to to be able to make sure right those companies that are either offsetting or inserting their carbon footprints and and are willing or are obligated to pay for this how to get such payments to to smallholder farmers and it would be very interesting right to to also look into what then can be done for example with digital identities and i would be keen to for example understand from Fabio when you talk about social protection and digital identities could we for example create a link right between payment for ecosystem services digital identities and social protection great so Fabio we've got an entry point for you in the discussion i think which is a great timing i just wanted to say though is is you talk about this idea of digital identities and don't forget to unmute yourself um the we were talking earlier about this role of different household members and i was thinking a bit beyond you know to what extent there's some of this sort of we could solve social protection but maybe the broader social safety nets also rely on the diversity of household members and their linkages to the city or even the diaspora outside the country which we know is a major flow of money into countries but maybe you could you could respond a bit to Iris's question Fabio you're still on mute by the way yeah okay i have some noise behind me in the flat in the neighborhood so digital identity actually one of the i would say positive externalities of these large expansion of social cash transfers both in latin america and also in in africa sub-saharan africa and more limited in asia was the technology technological development that came with it with the adoption of social registries of this integrated database and innovative ways to pay the benefits which include the bankarization of access to financial products for many of the beneficiaries of cash transfers so in principle in fury that would allow the social protection program or the social assistance to be better linked with other programs so it can be on the on the health sector it can be on the education sector but it also could be on the more productive sector so like the ministry of agriculture the registry or potential registry for smallholder farmers or access to platforms to sell the products so all this could be linked with the digitalization or the identification of these beneficiaries whether this has been successful or not i think that the evidence is not out there yet because we still lack a little bit of coordination and coherence not only within the social protection sector as a whole but also between the social protection sector and the the other sector so i think that's actually an area of research it's an entry point to improve the coherence and the coordination across sector but it's still it's still a little bit incipient i think that the cobit 19 crisis and the response of the social protection response that governments has given gave a boost to that um so i hope that in the future governments will be able to explore more these technological innovations that would allow them to have access to these uncovered populations so we've been i'm coming to you clarin just now uh fabio we've been talking about this idea of targeting social protection and the like but what about this this idea of the the uh the ultra basic uh universal basic income i mean the banagé and the flow idea that we simply put in a foundation there across the world and give people the basic needs so that then they could build their livelihoods okay okay the ultra basic income or the basic income so again um i think there are two aspects to it i i think that um where it would be most needed it's less discussed so it's basically a discussion that's especially uh around the cobit 19 it came in developed countries and the high-income developing countries so like in brazil we are having this discussion now again in colombia in chili the discussion picked up but i don't see this discussion coming strongly in in sub-saharan africa for example um whether it would be a good idea possibly yes possibly it could replace some of the subsidies that we have and the fact that it's universal it would make the political economy of the subs of the subsidy reform easier to deal with because in most cases we have seen riots elsewhere in the world when you come up with the idea of taking off these uh the universal subsidies uh and then moving towards more targeted safety net programs you ended up having a political blockage in order to do that so i think that this discussion can actually move some of the virus around this this discussion but again the whole issue of improving coherence and making coordination would still be there and you'd need to register the people for them to have access to they would need to be paid so they would need to have access to to banks or to the hcms the id the digital id would be available and that could also be an entry point to link to more productive and then go through the definitions between them thanks very much and i think i think you're absolutely right i mean it's something that got picked up if you like in developed countries around the whole covid issue and yet it's really a discussion that probably needs to be played much more broadly claire sorry i'm coming to you now there's been a huge interest in your in your pathways diagram in in the chat and let's take some of those comments but for the remaining discussion we've got about 20 minutes max left i mean in a sense our challenge is to think about this whole idea of transformation what are the pathways to transformation sorry i've been challenged that all of the panelists to think in that way that anyway claire over to you yeah i just wanted to build a bit on on what fabio was saying we have building of the pathways um graphic that i shared before for the last six months we have been conducting human-centered design and and primary survey data in kenya to really go deep and and understand the profile of these different segments than you saw on on that graphic and interestingly i mean it doesn't come as a surprise but what we're seeing is like most of these households lack public social protection schemes for those subsistence farmers that primarily farm for food for family and consumption then the national insurance is is below 25 percent it increases a bit to 45 percent for those that are commercializing but it's still fairly uh fairly low and and and a lack of access across uh pathways interestingly what we've seen from our portfolio and increasing and and with covid especially is how private sector providers are coming in and trying to provide the resilience buffer that you would normally um ask from a public social protection scheme um so for instance we've seen uh providers trying to bundle insurance um agriculture but also life insurance um into inputs bundles such as ak africa we've seen other providers such as in copa which is a pay-as-you-go solar with with the covid crisis has actually been providing a living wage in the form of of a loan to be repaid from future from future sales and this loan includes health insurance hospital coverage for workers and families um 100 percent of a cover for for around 12 12 weeks um so we're seeing this uh some initiatives from the private sector that are trying to uh to build that resilience buffer and in the absence of of social protection I'm not sure who is that mentioned this before I think maybe it was it was Fabio uh or or Felix I can't remember but in the absence of social protection with a public or or private the flexible repayment schedule of loan products has been proved crucial within our portfolio to really take some of that pressure of of households in terms of financial uh stress so again we have multiple examples um within the massacre portfolio of flexible repayments that allow farmers to better manage these cash flows especially when when it's to purchase inputs whether that's to pay school fees or that is to make a to try to face a family emergency so it's encouraging to see a bit of a private sector in nobody ways of trying to to build that resilience okay so there are a couple of points I picked up from the from the chat I'd like to bring in I mean one is uh Dominic Lover's actually asking you know if we think about these farmers in these different sort of steps in a pathway are we not actually ignoring the fact that actually um self can self uh production self consumption can remain a very important part of their safety net even though they might be moving moving forward and there was another comment I don't I don't see it back now which was saying you know uh the fear if you like the people fleeing uh rural areas for the city and so this you know this whole idea of alternatives in terms of alternative employment which can be a complement and not necessarily a substitute as well so I mean I'm looking maybe at those who haven't had a chance to chat for a minute so Kwame or others if you if you want to come in on this or or Clara yeah absolutely I think those those two are very very valid uh points I think self-construction for the majority of this households that we are seeing even if they technically fall in a different pathway based on on one what they what they describe the main goal to be to either expand their farm or they consider farm of the business or they actually want to pursue labor as well as where the main income is is coming from over 90% of these households actually farm in some form or shape even if it's just for family consumption so they still they are still smallholder farmers even if they're pursuing multiple goals multiple goals at the same time in terms of the of the labor I think also Mario brought it uh earlier on this conversation that's a really tricky question in terms of whether the labor is actually better than than being a smallholder farmer and when we've tried to look at this data on on several indicators whether that's income and other socioeconomic indicators there's labor is spans a huge range in the in the resilience ladder right and there is very precarious labor that that is that is almost as you know as the livelihood is as as as bad as as a subsistence farmer right and so it definitely spans what we're seeing especially from a lot of funders including massacre foundation class you may all all know has shifted the strategy quite a bit into employment is how can we create vibrant rural ecosystems which actually which actually employ a a lot of this a a lot of this smallholder household and prevent the large inflow into urban cities that ultimately is unsustainable so this is where a lot of the activities spoken uh focusing on today how we can create this vibrant ecosystem that provide both agricultural but also non-agricultural services and attract a lot of the young people to work on this new industry while remaining in rural areas and while doing some farming on the side not easy yeah so so okay i'm going to give Klamy the the floor first and then Fabio and Marius yeah okay so so so Ken I I saw think that self-consumption is an important piece to meeting those full security needs but again it's important to pay attention to what these smallholder farmers are producing on their farm and whether whether they are producing the right mix of products that will ensure that they they meet the nutrition needs and I think one area of incentivize in this is through government policies you typically have these government policies where government is encouraging certain we have certain priority crops so so so for example we have the planting for food and jobs in Ghana which had five main priority crops so that rice, sogum and then it also includes vegetables right so with that as priority crops farmers it gives signal and encourage these farmers to be able to produce that because they're able to get the support when when when they do that but I also want to say that the fact that you have food in the house which is just food in the house does not mean that each person in the household is actually receiving the nutrition that is needed and so we need to also pay attention to some of the intra household dynamics that influences the allocation of food within within the within the household and I want to touch a little bit on also on the social protection with respect to the issue of targeting that often we have a number of these tends to be centralized and we go in you take you use mean test to to select the sample of those that you are going to support but the livelihood of these individuals tends to be very dynamic one shock could push other could push one household into a stream poverty who may not necessarily be part of the original sample and those people may not be able to receive benefits when it's needed so I think maybe a better approach to think about it is to decentralize these approaches and adopt some kind of a community-based targeting which could also be complemented with the mean based targeting those within the communities know the person who's whose farm just got burned or the person who is not able to sustain themselves and they will be able to respond in a more timely manner to those needs to prevent much of those households falling back into poverty thanks very much for having I think Fabio and Mario both wanted to speak Mario Fabio first okay thank you just two comments regarding how social protection that I put some of these issues that we discussed so in terms of guarantee markets for smallholder farmers you know to incentivize them to produce more vegetables and diversify their production so I was wondering here a little bit about the P4P initiative in southern Africa and also the PAA that was linked actually to the school feeding programs so I don't think that we have we managed to build much evidence around this and I think it's still worth trying to figure out how the provision of school feeding and the purchasing of school feeding from smallholder farmers in a diversified way so that you don't buy only cereal so most examples that we have actually based on staple crops not really like rich vegetables to provide to to the schools could serve so that's usually also classified as social protection the school feeding program so the how homegrown school feeding within a local catchment area of the schools could better or couldn't be an instrument to incentivize the production of these more diversified food especially vegetables and also improved food nutrition of the smallholder farmer families and not only of the school children the the other aspects that I would like to mention is the the whole idea of the targeting that Felix was mentioning but actually the social cash transfer pilots that we had in the early 2000s in sub-saharan Africa they started with the community-based targeting but here the idea was basically to target the ultra pool so the 10% poorest it's known in the literature as the 10% model so basically the idea that those who could not provide for themselves would get the cash transfer so it's a little bit different from the idea of being a flexible mechanism that could mend the the pitfalls or the shortcomings of approximate testing that's the model that's for example the World Bank has incentivized worldwide and also also in Africa where the community base just comes at the end to validate the people that had been selected by by the model but usually this model they are basically sort of predicting chronic poverty so they are not able to actually predict those who are more vulnerable that when there is a shock when there is a a drought or there is a flood they need the support and they they can't have it so I think that the 100 safety net program in Kenya is one of the few examples on how at least for natural shocks the social protection has been adapted to to do it but I I don't think that necessarily the community-based target would be able to respond to it it's one of the models but I don't think that at the scale that's needed when a shock happens it would be enough to to actually accommodate all the number of beneficiaries especially with the budget so you need to have a conditions funds government led not donor led to to to incorporate the new beneficiaries which would be a challenge for most countries I got mario and namakala wants to come in as well so mario I want to I want to go back to the intra household dynamics uh while well for example sons and daughters moving to to cities for better employment is a really a positive thing because it gives the extended family more resources more cash and a range of other things it is also probably a good a deterrent to to consolidation because then people will actually maintain the the small farms but probably as as less productive farms and not necessarily trying to make a living of them especially if the off-farm incomes become really important so this raises another another question which is which are the farmers that we really need to be targeting for development activities you know because you could argue that the farms that have a lot of the off-farm income I no longer the farms that will actually have heavy investments in improving food production and so on so a this this this is a an important empirical question that we need to solve to really spend the dollars wise the development and research dollars wisely and I guess the answer is mario see it depends yeah but anyway because it'll be different for different households in different places because maybe you can comment as well around you you had an answer in the chat which was very much about education and diets and things because obviously we can have food available it doesn't mean that people are necessarily still going to choose the correct diet does it but anyway yes so so that is actually a challenge in terms of not just small holder farmers and poor households but even as they become more affluent and have higher incomes we then continue in fact our aspirations are not always for a better diet and more healthy diet our aspirations are for mcdonald's and that kind of stuff and so we we have this almost like a complex situation that we need to deal with that while we are promoting diversification of production we need to include activities such as nutrition education and others that ensure that the additional diversification that we accrue actually has a positive impact on nutrition and health outcomes and that's an area that we often actually forget about but in addition to that I really like the model that clara shared because it gives provision for different entry points for different people to have different aspirations that is great so the idea of developing a rural vibrant ecosystem is great that what I would suggest is we also need a similar vibrant ecosystems for peri urban areas as well and that that's where government investment can actually help us is in creating an enabling environment for those vibrant ecosystems to actually develop and then of course from a nutrition perspective it must come with additional information to make make sure that the vibrance does also impact nutrition positively so I really think the model plus this vibrancy of an ecosystem being developed might be useful entry points for looking into towards developing food systems that can actually deliver for nutrition in our settings. Social protection great one of the problems with social protection from Fabio on the African continent is simply because it's been so dependent on donor funding that politicians are actually sometimes scared to promise anything because you promise social protection if it doesn't come you get riots but your fiscal environment is such that you are not able to provide so it's a double-aged sword in some situations thank you. Yeah thanks very much John Mopangwa is just challenging us that we're talking only about crop production but we know particularly in Africa smallholder farming is entwined with the role of livestock as well and which also have a very important role in human nutrition so something we should remember. Guys we're going to have to move towards winding up but I just want to throw one more bomb into the into the mix which is this whole issue of demography in Africa and the fact that we're dealing with a situation where population is is still exploding we're going to have double the number of people by 2050 four times as many people almost by the end of the century and that's going to put another huge pressure on the transformation of these systems. I think you know Namukala you you just introduced and and emphasised particularly the role of the of the public sector as well we've heard quite a bit about the the role of the private sector already what about this role of the increasing pressure in rural areas since any move not to speak for that or is that just too difficult I don't see any problems. The increasing what? The increasing population pressure Namukala the fact that the populations if you mentioned you're in Ethiopia I remember I used to think of the population as 80 million it's now 120 million I mean it's going so close to 120 millions they quote anywhere from 110 to 120 the population pressure in the rural area is there um I think the situation differs slightly depending on countries and their availability of arable lands um but that population pressure on the rural areas is also contributing to the migration to urban centres to look for livelihoods so it's a combination of things that are there that is one of the reasons why I like the idea of promoting development of these vibrant ecosystems in the rural setting in the very urban setting because that provides another attraction that people will have something else to do besides migrating to the urban centre but we're definitely not paying enough attention I really strongly believe that from a government if you look at African people they're very creative I mean the pandemic has taught us something in that while people were crying about PPEs coming from China a lot of African people developed small-scale enterprises and started producing things whether they were effective or not is a different issue but the point is there's a lot of creativity when people are given opportunities and entry points to do something they actually try so creating an enable an enabling environment for these vibrant ecosystems to develop to me is something that governments the public sector in particular needs to look into because the private sector can actually leverage that and and and roll things in their favour thank you thank you very much indeed I'm going to bring Jim you must be there still I'm going to invite you in to to wind up and Kwame first the last comment so I I think I'm I'm calling just was spot on with that I just want to also add that there are some challenges that these growing population poses like you talk about the issue with land scarcity but I also think that you know in addition to creating that ecosystem outside of the outside in the off-arm sector there is also it's also very important to also increase agricultural productivity from a structure transformation perspective because the off-arm sector growth depends largely on the agricultural sector so you could only get labor to exit from agriculture into the off-arm sector if agriculture is productive enough to generate the income that would demand food and that would demand off-arm goods and services and I'm I'm quick to point out that the premise for supporting smallholder farmers is not to keep people in smallholder farming but is to also help help free up labor and create a multiplier if it's in the off-arm sector that will create more jobs for they have to go hand in hand and I on the time we've got to close pretty soon so I'm going to hand over to Jim to just to summarize the whole of our discussion Ken thank you very much and thank you to our panelists what an unbelievably rich discussion full of fantastic insights I've been trying to sort of take some notes here my brain is sort of almost exploding a little bit but fantastic can you sort of fail to come to the last question which was do we need a fundamentally different narrative on how to improve small-scale farming households and I think in many ways our panelists have answered that very well in actually giving us a whole range of elements that need to need to come together and and just in even through this discussion have actually opened up that very different sort of narrative I guess two two big ideas sort of strike me from the discussion the first one of is maybe common sense but it's this need for a much more holistic perspective on the sort of issues we're talking about but aligned with that I think diversification has been a critical theme that has come through and I'll come back to that in a moment I mean alongside these things I think a few really interesting points the importance of understanding the sort of deeper structural changes that are happening in multiple dimensions and how they are actually flowing into what's happening for house farming households the incredible diversification that's going on in in farming households that we can no longer really separate farming households from wider economy and wider issues I think an interesting warning about self-consumption and recognizing that you know household needs to have a diversity of nutrition at the right times in the year and that you can't expect that to come from people's own plots necessarily so again a real integration in that I think a lot of emphasis on the importance of different sorts of social protection and particularly the critical role of social insurance but the whole social insurance the social protection needs to sit within a wider framework of complementary services whether it's infrastructure social mobilization education and so on so again you can't you can't split that that out around the diversification I think we've sort of covered maybe four areas one is that diversification of life household livelihoods is absolutely critical you can't manage to tackle small-scale agriculture issues only through farming secondly the need to dramatically diversify diversify different types of food production for nutritional requirements the need to diversify how we understand farming in terms of looking at other services whether it's in tackling climate change or tackling ecosystem services and and the need for a much more diversified set of support strategies to tackle the challenges still faced by farming households I think the discussions also come back to a really interesting point that we had from the Latin America discussion a couple of weeks ago was about the need to understand how wider societal challenges linked to the challenges of small-scale farmers and see them as a solution to society's wider problems rather than themselves being a being a problem so I think the whole discussion we've had around you know how how do you get a diversified diet from what small holders are producing how do you avoid mass migration rapidly to urban areas how do you provide ecosystem services how do you look at the role of farming in tackling the climate crisis all of these issues I think bring us a totally different perspective on how we can value what it is that the small scale farming community has to offer society at large I think within all that everybody has been highlighting the critical need to get a much more nuanced understanding about what's happening to who where and why and that that can perhaps enable us to have understanding of who's on a pathway towards sort of great prosperity and who's not and consequently who needs what sort of support in what sorts of areas and then I think you know we've really highlighted that we're lacking some of that nuanced understanding and I think illustrated by Clara about how important that sort of research is in in unpacking that and I think from my perspective all of that brings us back to thinking about the role of the food system summit and what we perhaps need to be doing in having far more detailed sort of small scale farming transition strategies at a national level that really try to unpack what's going on at a national level at a local level and what that means for a much more innovative set of of policies and mechanisms to support what has to be a fairly fundamental transition so thank you everybody very much thank you thank you Ken we'll be trying to wrap all of this up we'll be making this fabulous conversation into a podcast for others to to listen to and we look forward to an ongoing sort of engagement and dialogue around this Ken back to you well yeah just just very much to finish off thanks indeed to everybody on the panel who who contributed today really great inputs also to all of the different inputs we've had in the in the chats which will make available we're our last sessions on the 25th of November of this series where we'll be looking more at issues around policy and how we try and bring that together and if you've got suggestions for that then please do get in touch with us thanks very much again have a great day bye everybody thank you very much everybody bye