Three quarters of the world s poorest people get their food and income from farming small plots of land, and most of these smallholder farmers are women.

The economy will have a simple structure in the coming years, with most economic activities focused in five sectors smallholder, or peasant, agriculture reconstruction port services and light manufacturing local small scale trade and public services, including health care and education.

Young plants can be grown from seeds.

In Africa, most food is produced by women smallholder farmers.

NEW YORK The G 8 s 20 billion initiative on smallholder agriculture, launched at the group s recent summit in L Aquila, Italy, is a potentially historic breakthrough in the fight against hunger and extreme poverty.

We should consider not only how to improve the ability of smallholder farmers to grow food we also must strengthen their ability to participate in markets, while improving the way those markets function.

If smallholders compete in the same markets as the large farms, they lose.

I say she because the majority of small scale farmers in Africa are women.

Investment in agriculture in Africa must focus on creating a dynamic smallholder sector.

In the other parts of the country a small population of Sami hunters, fishermen and small scale farmers lived.

As a country becomes more affluent and farming practices become more efficient, smallholdings may persist as a legacy of historical land ownership practices.

It should come as no wonder that smallholders and agricultural laborers represent a combined 70 of those who are unable to feed themselves today.

Moreover, large companies should use their global supply chains to empower their workforces and women smallholder farmers.

In third world countries, smallholdings are usually farms supporting a single family with a mixture of cash crops and subsistence farming.

In the past, agricultural development has prioritized large scale, capitalized forms of agriculture, neglecting smallholders who feed local communities.

New drought tolerant maize varieties, for example, are already benefiting more than two million smallholder farmers in Africa.

If smallholder farmers are to be given the opportunity to become viable businesses, it is essential that they be connected to markets.

Even if smallholders are able to produce a surplus, their lack of access to downstream activities, such as processing and marketing, prevents them from selling it easily.

He stressed the importance of microfinance and social capital formulation, which could alleviate risks to smallholders exposed to crop failure, business failure and land degradation.

Indeed, smallholder farmers are often extremely efficient producers per hectare, and can contribute to a country s economic growth and food security.

In Haiti, and in developing countries around the world, smallholder farmers can contribute to food security and economic growth just as they did in Vietnam.

Each link in the value chain, from the smallholder to the local trade agents and agro processors to regional and national markets, needs to be strengthened.

At the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), we believe that farming, regardless of size or scale, must be seen as a business, and smallholder farmers as small scale business owners rather than poor people who need handouts.

Third World usage In many Third World countries, a smallholding is a small plot of land with low rental value, used to grow crops.

But supporting that smallholder in launching a farming business that could generate a five fold increase in income amounts to poverty eradication.

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For example, Vietnam transformed itself from a food deficit country to the second largest rice exporter in the world by developing its smallholder farming sector.

The panellist from the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture said that agricultural smallholders were in fact private sector actors, not aid recipients.

Subsistence agriculture is self sufficiency farming in which the farmers focuses on growing enough food to feed themselves and their families.

One cornerstone of the project was smallholder farmers, meaning peasant farm families in Africa, Latin America, and Asia working farms of around one hectare (2.5 acres) or less.

Indeed, half of the world s smallholders are women, and we must keep in mind their punishing task of walking long lengths to get their produce to market.

There is growing recognition that these smallholder farmers and their rural communities are a major part of the solution to food insecurity and poverty but only if they have what they need to do their jobs.

If smallholder farmers have the basic infrastructure they need to get their goods to market, they will not only be able to feed themselves and their communities, but will contribute to wider food security.

There was the alienation of smallholders property, in what was known as the enclosure movement. And there were complaints about urban pollution and inhumane factory conditions in what William Blake called Britain s dark Satanic mills.

The rise in food prices is leading to a land grab, as powerful politicians sell foreign investors massive tracts of farmland, brushing aside the traditional land rights of poor smallholders.

those who work as cotton growers or cotton pickers.

Smallholders, by contrast, produce at a higher cost. They are often very productive by hectare, since they maximize the use of the soil, and achieve the best complementary use of plants and animals.

Juan Enriquez wants to grow energy

A treeplanting campaign in Indonesia.

ROME Recently, I was on a road in the Southern Choma District of Zambia to meet with Rosemary Pisani, a smallholder farmer and mother of eight who struggled to feed her children prior to joining a farmer s cooperative to raise goats.

Well it means growing an actual heart, let's say, or grow a piece of bone that can be put into the body.

Anthony Atala on growing new organs

In part, the decline was due to increased holdings of foreign public debt relative to private debt.

But such interventions inevitably translate into more holdings of US government securities.

The growing of apples started 300 years ago from China and it was 1912 when the city officially began to plant trees.