Small farmers’ Food Production as heritage. Evidences from a Survey in Kenya

The main aim of this paper is to discuss how the small farmers’ food production can become heritage in a country like Kenya. Small farmers are commonly referred as small-scale farms based predominantly on family-labour and producing goods and services for both markets and subsistence. Land size is often used as a primary indicator to give a definition. The FAO and the WB generally adopt a threshold size of 2 hectares as a broad measure of a small farm. Small farmers constitute the dominant production model in Sub-Saharan rural areas, accounting for up to the 80-90% of all farms. They make up most of the active rural population and include more than half of all active African women. Our hypothesis is that if we understand which are the main characteristics of small farmers we will be able to give some indications about how food production can become heritage and more oriented to sustainability. In order to reach such aim and to discuss the hypothesis we organize our paper in three sections. The first one is the literature review; the second one is the presentation of a survey carried out in Kenya with questionnaires filled in by 100 small farmers. Last section is about conclusions. The main results concerns some characteristics of small farmers that are discussed with the support of maps using ArcGis.