IFAD organisied an International Conference on “New Directions for Smallholder Agriculture” on 24-25 January 2011 in Rome, Italy to discuss the future of some 500 million smallholders. In much of Africa and South Asia, small farms still account for the largest share of agricultural output.
Smallholders have proved remarkably persistent; the area operated in small farms in the developing world appears to be rising, and the average farm sizes continue to decline in large parts of the developing world. Most of the smallholders and their dependents, some two billion of them,  live in poverty, are more fragmented than before, and have limited capacity to link up to market opportunities. (...)

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