These farmers rely on cocoa for up to 60 to 90 per cent of their income. Certain labor-intensive cash-crops, such as cocoa production in Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire, rely heavily on small holders globally, as of 2008 90% of cocoa is grown by smallholders. Small-scale agriculture is often in tension with industrial agriculture, which finds efficiencies by increasing outputs, monoculture, consolidating land under big agricultural operations, and economies of scale. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries of the world alone, supporting almost two billion people. As the sustainable food and local food movements grow in affluent countries, some of these smallholdings are gaining increased economic viability. As a country becomes more affluent, smallholdings may not be self-sufficient, but may be valued for the rural lifestyle. Smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming. Definitions vary widely for what constitutes a smallholder or small-scale farm, including factors such as size, food production technique or technology, involvement of family in labor and economic impact. Ī smallholding or smallholder is a small farm operating under a small-scale agriculture model. In many contexts, women face unequal access to land, markets, knowledge, and other assets needed to maintain their farms. In many parts of Africa and other parts of the world, women are the primary smallholders.
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