Who grows our food? This seemingly simple question is getting harder to answer in a world where our food crosses borders to get to our plate.

As countries increasingly rely on food imports, the mention of distant countries on our food labels is commonplace. Today, only one in seven countries are food self-sufficient across key food groups. So to understand who farms our food, researchers like me need to take a global vantage point.

The contribution of small and industrial-scale farming to global food supply has attracted much attention and debate. Yet, my research shows we’ve been measuring the wrong thing – production and not consumption. Focusing only on national farming systems skews our perception of which farmers are feeding the world by ignoring the food – and farmers – that sustain our daily diets.

This approach also amplifies the assumption that industrial farming is the foundation of global security. But when we lift the lid on our globalised food system, the story is very different.

By studying production and trade patterns of 198 countries, I have found that it’s small-scale farms (typically smaller than 20 hectares), not huge industrial operations, that underpin our daily diets. My team’s research, published in Nature Food, reveals that small-scale farmers contribute a third of the food consumed in high-income nations such as the UK and the US.

This insight has been overlooked by previous studies that solely focused on food distribution from farmers within national borders. These small-scale farms are often unrecognisable from the mega-farms that have come to dominate rural landscapes in Europe, South America and the US.

Although concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and across Asia, small farms play a key role in exporting fruit, vegetables, pulses, and root and tuber crops, to western countries. A few key cases stand out.

Despite small-scale farms making up less than 1% of Australian farms they supply around 15% of their food needs. In Canada and Europe, small farms contribute nearly 20% to national food needs, mostly from overseas. They also make up the majority of the food supply in 46 of the countries we studied, meeting the bulk of food needs for 5 billion people every day.

Agri-food export of food crops such as lentils and sweet potatoes from small-scale farms comes at a cost to low- and middle-income countries where these farming systems are dominant. These nations end up importing vast amounts of cereals and oil crops from high-income nations, to compensate for food and nutrition insecurity created by cash cropping and contract farming.

These dynamics bear the signature of colonial extractivism in the global agri-food system. They also signal a growing consolidation of food supply chains in low- and middle-income countries due to imports from industrial farms, a dependency that is set to grow with increased appetite for meat and processed food in rapidly industrialising countries.

Fruit shipped around the world is often produced on relatively small-scale farms. Dusan Petkovic/Shutterstock

Small-scale farms play a crucial role in creating global food security. But farmers of small farms often find themselves facing insecure land tenure, climate risk, unequal terms of trade and international trade regimes.

This new research, also reported in the latest State of Food and Agriculture report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, shows that such risks are not only contained to domestic food systems but will cross borders. Food and land insecurity for small-scale farmers means food insecurity for us all. Cuts to overseas aid from high-income nations makes this more likely, as support for climate-resilient farming dries up.

Safeguarding production from smallholders relies not only on domestic efforts to protect farmer livelihoods but transboundary measures to secure their land, rights and access to markets, such as land titles, small loans and living wages.

Subsidies, trade agreements and corporate consolidation erode these pillars of smallholder security and threaten the healthiest food on our plates – fruit, vegetables and pulses. Shining a light on the farmers hidden in national supply chains is a first step to ensure agri-food finance and regulation delivers sustainable livelihoods for all food producers.

This new study highlights the key role small-scale farmers play in meeting current food needs and hints to their importance in a sustainable food future. A plant-rich dietary transition, as called for by scientists, will rely on fruit, vegetable and pulse production, disproportionality produced by smaller farms, farms which typically produce more diverse food types than large-scale farms, higher yields and greater biodiversity. Now that we know who grows our food, we must give farmers equal priority in national farming policy, within and beyond our borders.

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