Small farms, which account for about 90% of the world’s 570 million farms, are particularly vulnerable to changes in seasonal climate. From Iran to Kenya to Guatemala to Australia to USA and beyond, many of the world’s smallholder farmers are poor and food insecure; even one lost season can push them from struggling to failing. Climate change plays a key role as a catalyzer in amplifying preexisting resource problems and will influence the quality and quantity of food we produce and our ability to distribute it equitably.
Areas addressed in the current body of food security literature are not evenly spread across the globe. Some regions are overrepresented despite having high food security (bright green), whereas many food-insecure areas are underrepresented (bright pink) and need more attention. Regions with low food security that are well represented by current research practices (gray) likely have preexisting infrastructure to support academic research, like in eastern and western Africa. Credit: Cooper et al., 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gfs.2020.100392, CC BY 4.0