What policy support do smallholders in high-income countries need to contribute to healthy, sustainable food systems? A scoping review

Global food systems face complex challenges and need to transform to meet increasing demand for food, sustainably. Smallholders are a significant population of food producers and need to be considered in this transformation. However, international policy advice and much of the existing research has focused only on smallholders in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) without considering what support smallholders in high-income countries (HICs) need, or currently receive.

A systematic scoping review was undertaken to identify peer-reviewed articles describing needs of, and public policies supporting, smallholders in HICs, from four databases. Fifty-six articles were included in the review. Needs and policy recommendations extracted from these articles were compared to a framework developed by thematically analysing three policy advice documents from FAO’s Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to isolate 13 specific policy recommendations.

The scoping review found support among HIC smallholders for ten of the 13 CFS recommendations but no support for developing a broad smallholder vision or policy, maintaining smallholder data systems or using public procurement to support smallholders. Eight additional needs were elicited from the data that were not identified in CFS advice.

This study highlights gaps between HIC smallholder needs, existing policies and international policy advice with implications for policy, namely, that policymakers should collaborate with smallholders to develop simple, targeted policies and focus on strengthening rural communities.