Regina Frazer: Maize, potato, cassava, chicken, dove, pig and vegetable farmer in central Malawi (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

A Guardian blog post today argues that the world’s many small farmers are critical to solving the world’s food, and food price, crises.

The blog says, ‘We should celebrate one of the largest but least recognised groups in the world, who grow most of the food we eat.’

‘With the start of the food crisis in 2007 and the increasing number of hungry people in the world, the tide has started to turn. The blind promise that agribusiness would feed the world appeared to be a fiction, and more and more people, governments and institutions are recognising that there will be no solution to the current crisis without the participation of small-scale farmers.’

To read more about the importance of the world’s small-scale farmers, most of whom continue to mix crop growing with animal husbandry of some kind, read the 2009–2010 corporate report from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI): Back to the future: Revisiting mixed crop-livestock systems.

Read the whole article at the Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog: Why the International Day of Peasants’ Struggles is important, 18 April 2011.