The DOI matches its Crossref record; 25 of the 25 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How much of the world's food do smallholders produce?
Open accessAbstract
The widely reported claim that smallholders produce 70–80% of the world’s food has been a linchpin of agricultural development policy despite limited empirical evidence. Recent empirical attempts to reinvestigate this number have lacked raw data on how much food smallholders produce, and have relied on model assumptions with unknown biases and with limited spatial and commodity coverage. We examine variations in crop production by farm size using a newly-compiled global sample of subnational level microdata and agricultural censuses covering more countries (n=55) and crop types (n=154) than assessed to date. We estimate that farms under 2ha globally produce 28–31% of total crop production and 30–34% of food supply on 24% of gross agricultural area. Farms under 2ha devote a greater proportion of their production to food, and account for greater crop diversity, while farms over 1000ha have the greatest proportion of post-harvest loss.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Randomization, Bootstrap and Monte Carlo Methods in Biology
Manly, B. F. J. (2018) · Chapman & Hall/CRC eBooks · doi:10.1201/9781315273075 · Cited by 4,194
The number, size, and distribution of farms, smallholder farms, and family farms worldwide
Lowder, S. K., Skoet, J., & Raney, T. (2016) · World Development · doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.041 · Cited by 2,012
Kummu, M., de Moel, H., Porkka, M., Siebert, S., Varis, O., & Ward, P. J. (2012) · Science of The Total Environment · doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2012.08.092 · Cited by 1,300
Horrigan, L., Lawrence, R. S., & Walker, P. (2002) · Environmental Health Perspectives · doi:10.1289/ehp.02110445 · Cited by 1,192
Randomization, Bootstrap and Monte Carlo Methods in Biology
Robinson, A. (2007) · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society · doi:10.1111/j.1467-985x.2007.00485_5.x · Cited by 1,014
HODGES, R. J., BUZBY, J. C., & BENNETT, B. (2011) · The Journal of Agricultural Science · doi:10.1017/s0021859610000936 · Cited by 777
Redefining agricultural yields: from tonnes to people nourished per hectare
Cassidy, E. S., West, P. C., Gerber, J. S., & Foley, J. A. (2013) · Environmental Research Letters · doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015 · Cited by 673
Abundance‐Based Similarity Indices and Their Estimation When There Are Unseen Species in Samples
Chao, A., Chazdon, R. L., Colwell, R. K., & Shen, T. (2006) · Biometrics · doi:10.1111/j.1541-0420.2005.00489.x · Cited by 652
Mapping global cropland and field size
Fritz, S., See, L., McCallum, I., You, L., Bun, A., Moltchanova, E., Duerauer, M., Albrecht, F., Schill, C., Perger, C., et al. (2015) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.12838 · Cited by 559
The state of family farms in the world
Graeub, B. E., Chappell, M. J., Wittman, H., Ledermann, S., Kerr, R. B., & Gemmill-Herren, B. (2016) · World Development · doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.05.012 · Cited by 543
Cited by
Food systems are responsible for a third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions
Crippa, M., Solazzo, E., Guizzardi, D., Monforti-Ferrario, F., Tubiello, F. N., & Leip, A. (2021) · Nature Food · doi:10.1038/s43016-021-00225-9 · Cited by 3,190
Landscapes that work for biodiversity and people
Kremen, C., & Merenlender, A. M. (2018) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.aau6020 · Cited by 1,125
Threats to global food security from emerging fungal and oomycete crop pathogens
Fones, H. N., Bebber, D. P., Chaloner, T. M., Kay, W. T., Steinberg, G., & Gurr, S. J. (2020) · Nature Food · doi:10.1038/s43016-020-0075-0 · Cited by 640
Downs, S. M., Ahmed, S., Fanzo, J., & Herforth, A. (2020) · Foods · doi:10.3390/foods9040532 · Cited by 466
Aldaco, R., Hoehn, D., Laso, J., Margallo, M., Ruiz-Salmón, J., Cristobal, J., Kahhat, R., Villanueva-Rey, P., Bala, A., Batlle-Bayer, L., et al. (2020) · Science of The Total Environment · doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.140524 · Cited by 298
Metadata
- Authors
- Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B.
- Venue
- Global Food Security
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2018-06
- Volume
- 17
- Pages
- 64-72
- ISSN
- 2211-9124 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2803901105
- Cited by
- 527
- References
- 25
- FWCI
- 99.72
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How much of the world's food do smallholders produce? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.gfs.2018.05.002
- The paper
- Ricciardi, V., Ramankutty, N., Mehrabi, Z., Jarvis, L., & Chookolingo, B. (2018). How much of the world's food do smallholders produce? Global Food Security. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2018.05.002
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
