Who are small-scale food producers in Italy? Comparisons among different approaches1

Abstract

The question “What is a small-scale producer?” keeps receiving different answers depending on the context in which is posed. Alternative ways of defining smallholders reflect heterogeneous historical and institutional eco-systemic contexts and depend upon what is the role of small-scale agriculture in the rural economy. This has become a pressing issue given the need to monitor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which refers to “small” farmers. Two important related issues are: 1) the adoption of a specific and robust definition of small-scale food producer (SSFP) and 2) the empirical implementation of this definition to determine the SSFPs. The calculations require suitable databases with microdata at the level of individual farms. Based on the 2020 agricultural census results, we identified the small food producers in Italy. We also proposed and compared other approaches to identify SSFPs, that are simpler than that proposed by the FAO and could also be calculated for other census years. Since revenues are not available for every farm – even the census did not collect this information – the standard indicator of production was used instead of revenues to identify SSFPs.