H2020 SALSA Project: Small Farms, Small Food Businesses, and Sustainable Food Security
- Type Project
- Status Filled
- Execution 2016 -2020
- Assigned Budget 4.958.172,5 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing H2020
- Project website Proyecto SALSA
- SALSA goes beyond previous research by connecting its analysis of food availability—that is, increased food production—with an analysis of food access, especially for low-income groups, and the related issue of food systems resilience. The 30 regions reflect the diversity of smallholder farms and food systems in Europe and Africa.
- Progress and Practice-Related Impacts The SALSA team has developed and is testing an approach that helps overcome the limitations of official statistics on small farms and regional food systems. The resulting set of maps of smallholder farming in Europe is state-of-the-art. The empirical work implemented in SALSA is highlighting the co-evolution between small farms and their particular contexts. The SALSA team also engages with stakeholders and decision-makers to facilitate a dialogue that transcends classical boundaries in research, policy, and practice, which is expressed in numerous dissemination and engagement activities. However, it is too early to discuss the socioeconomic impact and broader societal implications of the project.
- Policy-related advances and impacts: A deep understanding of the role of smallholder farms in FNS across different regional situations is supporting decision-making in both the private and public sectors. The knowledge we are gaining from SALSA will help better tailor international cooperation and future research collaboration. Contributions to policymaking and the identification of new development models for the agri-food sector will primarily be made in subsequent work.
Small-scale agriculture is crucial for producing food and sustaining the livelihoods of millions of people around the world, especially in developing countries. But small farms are also very common throughout Europe, and here too they play an important role in providing quality food, income, and opportunities to people in rural areas. And yet, small farms—and the small businesses often associated with them—are very often under the radar of research and major agricultural policy debates in the European Union.
This project places European small-scale agriculture on the academic and policy agenda. Rural development theory has tended to view peasant farming as a relic of the past, inexorably giving way to industrial agriculture and urbanization. Historical processes in industrialized nations seemed to vindicate this view. In wealthy countries, small-scale family farming has largely been replaced by large-scale agriculture, which benefits from economies of scale and increases in productivity and efficiency. Large-scale agriculture is also intimately linked to the modern supply chain, organized around supermarkets, which today feed most of the population in Europe. As a result of this trend, small-scale farming has been marginalized from agricultural policy, both at the EU and national levels. This has had important consequences for small farms' access to finance and other means of support and, more generally, for their participation in key policy debates about their future. However, in many parts of Europe, small farms are neither anomalous nor irrelevant.
In every region, from the Scottish Highlands to the Greek Isles, small farms are a dynamic part of the food system, providing employment, opportunities, and food to thousands of people, effectively holding together the fabric of rural landscapes. Through SALSA, we shed light on and bring together the latest evidence and knowledge on European smallholder agriculture from an intergeographical and multidisciplinary perspective. SALSA provides evidence and knowledge to support better-informed and targeted public policies, as well as validated tools to guide decision-makers in enhancing the contribution of small farms and food businesses to sustainable food systems at the regional level. SALSA partners have studied 30 regions in Europe and Africa, using the latest remote sensing data and technologies, combined with social science research, participatory foresight, and transdisciplinary approaches, resulting in the mapping, assessment, and comparative analysis of food systems.
The overall objective of SALSA "Small Farms, Small Food Enterprises, and Sustainable Food Security" is to develop a better understanding of the current and potential contribution of small farms to Food and Nutrition Security (FNS). SALSA does this by assessing the role of small farms and small food enterprises in regional food systems, with food system outcomes being determinants of FNS.
SALSA will assess the role of small farms and small food businesses in providing a sustainable and secure supply of affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food. SALSA will identify mechanisms that, at different scales, can strengthen the role of small farms in food systems and thus support sustainable food and nutrition security (FNS).
By considering a gradient of 30 reference regions across Europe and Africa, we will gain a differentiated understanding of the role of small farms and small food businesses in very differently structured food systems and situations. SALSA will develop and implement a transdisciplinary and multi-scale approach that draws on and connects relevant theoretical and analytical frameworks within a food systems approach, utilizing qualitative, consultative, and quantitative methods.
We will also test a new combination of data-driven methods and tools (including satellite technologies) to rigorously assess, in quantitative terms, the interrelationships between small farms, other small food enterprises, and FSN, paying particular attention to limiting and enabling factors. SALSA will use participatory methods at the regional level and establish a more comprehensive community of practice and a multi-stakeholder learning platform, based on FAO's TECA online learning and communication platform. Both the SALSA consortium and the joint learning and close cooperation have been designed with the EU-Africa dialogue in mind. Responding to the call, we will unravel the complex interrelationships between small farms, small food enterprises, and FSN, and reveal the role that small farms play in:
- The balance between the different dimensions of sustainability.
- Maintaining more diverse production systems.
- Supporting urban/rural balance in terms of labor.
- Facilitating territorial development in countries facing strong rural population growth.
Thirty reference regions, 25 of them in Europe and five in Africa. This is how exhaustive the four-year research on small farms by the SALSA (Small Farms, Small Food Businesses and Sustainable Food Security) project has been. Since 2016, the project consortium has been interviewing small farm owners, mapping entire areas, and identifying the characteristics of food systems by focusing on specific products.
All of this with one question in mind: What is the contribution of small farms to sustainable food and nutrition security across a wide range of food systems? This question had been pending for a long time, as assumptions often prevailed over actual data. "The knowledge gap before SALSA was enormous. We didn't know how many small farms there were, what and how much they produced, where the products went, who benefited, or even which small farms needed to continue existing," says Teresa Pinto Correia, SALSA coordinator and professor at the Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment and Development (MED) at the University of Évora in Portugal.
To fill these knowledge gaps, the project team tested three hypotheses: first, whether small farms are a relevant source of sustainable food production; second, whether small farms provide food and income for themselves and not just for commercial purposes; and finally, whether small farms are increasing the diversity of the overall food system and thus contributing to its resilience. Mapping Small Farms "We continued our research by focusing on the regional level, where many different types of farms coexist," explains Pinto Correia. "We asked what was happening in a particular territory and combined approaches from the social and hard sciences to arrive at accurate estimates of small farm distribution and production. We also provided a detailed understanding of the food system, as well as the role and conditions of small farms." SALSA classifies small farms into five subtypes: "part-time suppliers," who produce more for self-sufficiency than for the market (11% of the sample); "conventional strivers," who inherited farms, have low incomes, and rely heavily on the farm for household food consumption (32% of the sample); "conventional entrepreneurs," who organize themselves into conventional cooperatives for market integration (26% of the sample); "specialized enterprises," which earn the most income through specialized, high-value-added production (23% of the sample); and "diversified businesses," which are wealthy, new to agriculture, highly entrepreneurial, and have a diversified production and buyer base.
The contribution of small farms to the food system was also investigated. "We analyzed 109 regional food systems for individual key products and found that small farms partially contribute to the regional food system with food that never reaches the formal market. Then, from a food market perspective, small farms contribute to food availability in each region in two ways: a contribution to regional availability, i.e., for households and communities, and a greater diversity of food types and sources, resulting in greater resilience," notes Pinto Correia. One of the questions the project clarifies concerns whether or not small farms actually matter in the grand scheme of agriculture. And they do, as Pinto Correia points out. "We estimate that small farms could meet 100% of regional demand and generate surpluses in 44% of the 109 regional food systems analysed, particularly in Africa (71%), Southern Europe (46%) and Eastern Europe (36%). In Northern Europe, small farms could meet up to 20% of regional demand in 80% of the food systems analysed. This lower figure could be explained by the lower number of small farms studied in these regions."
Based on their findings, the project team has formulated a series of policy recommendations that will continue to be disseminated in the coming months. They identified the relevant governance mechanisms for achieving this level, as well as future pathways for stakeholders. This should help small farms thrive, evolve, and ultimately live up to their enormous potential.
- UNIVERSIDADE DE EVORA (UNIVERSIDADE DE EVORA)
Related projects
