Role of Small farming in food security and sustainability: a case study for Tuscany (IT)

The debate on the size of farming, and its relevance for policy purposes, has come back to the fore in recent years. The “International Year of Family Farming and Smallholder Farming”, held by FAO in 2014, aimed to raise the profile of family and smallholder farming worldwide”. During EXPO 2015, a debate followed on structural developments in agriculture and the implications for the competitiveness and sustainability of the agri-food sector and rural areas. Despite a declining number of agricultural holdings and a gradual increase in average farm size, the agricultural sector is largely composed by farms with less than 5 ha of agricultural land and a standard output below 4 000 euro per year. Beyond economic size and value of production, other criteria (e.g. labour units and family involvement can be adopted), alone or in combination, to define size of farming. Academic literature provides a mixed picture on weather a declining number of farms, and a gradual increase in size should be welcomed or contrasted. Oppositional arguments contrasting smaller and larger farm structures with respect to sustainability and food and nutrition security, are nourished by the lack of sufficient or unambiguous scientific evidence. A first line of thought stresses the distinctiveness of smaller farms in delivering food security and sustainability (Rabinowicz, 2014) and the capacity of small farms to mobilize resources additional to those procured through market exchange (van der Ploeg, 2013). A second line of thought considers size as a nonrelevant criterion to assess the performance on food security and sustainability (OECD, 2005), supporting the view on steering behaviours oriented towards improved sustainability, regardless of size. Dualistic debates often focus on some aspects of sustainability and neglect others (Kirwan et al. 2017) or overlook the importance of complementarity between complex agro-food systems and territoriality, as local context largely affects what structural change is desirable at territorial level (Darnhofer et al. 2010). This contribution presents the conceptual and analytical framework adopted in a research project named SALSA, “Small farms, small food businesses and sustainable food and nutrition security (FNS)”, and provides an illustration on one of the 35 reference regions selected. The analysis considers Lucca province in Tuscany and aims at generating preliminary insights in relation to the role of small farms in food and nutrition security.