Presentation by David Neven, Senior Economist at FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), for the Global Forum for innovations in agriculture (Abu Dhabi, 20-21 March 2017), an event to present solutions and inspire debate across all types of food production.
This paper is a case study of a network that combined participatory approaches to propose best suited knowledge management (KM) interventions for its member countries. A five-step exercise used existing elements of the alliance’s strategy, a KM survey and a face-to-face participatory validation of the analysis, to identify gaps in current KM approaches and to collectively point to immediate opportunities for improvement. The KM survey, also referred to as a scan, provided a neutral space for reflection.
The project Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) intends to assess the role of small farms and small food business in terms of food production and food security. One important first step in doing this is to test and develop methods and tools able to produce accurate and useful information about small farms.
It is clear that any definition of a small farm needs to be based on national and regional realities. Definitions involving only the criterion of farm size have universal appeal as they are relatively easy to apply and allow simple comparisons across countries and world regions. However, they don't capture all the complexities of farming. Definitions involving additional criteria to farm size are more meaningful, particularly those including indicators of the farm economic output, but data availability is often a limitation (Ruane, 2016).