Despite their potential benefits, smallholder farmers are most affected by food insecurity and extreme poverty.
Evidence shows that family farming, when adequately supported by public policies and investments, has the ability to effectively contribute to food insecurity and poverty reduction, biodiversity conservation, local economic development, and food resilience in times of crisis. It is estimated that globally there are around 570 million family farms, which occupy 70 to 80% of agricultural land and are responsible for producing 80% of food. These farms/properties have economic, environmental, social, and cultural functions. Viable solutions include strategies that promote investment in agricultural policies and the organization of family farmers.Īlthough there is no universal consensus on the definition of family farming, given its enormous diversity around the world, the Global Action Plan of the United Nations Decade for Family Farming-2019–2028 uses family farming to refer to all models of family-based production-agricultural, forestry, fishing, pastoral, or aquacultural-including peasants, indigenous peoples, traditional communities, fishers, mountain farmers, forest users, and herders. The main problems stem from the lack of investment in family farming and inefficient logistics, which can negatively impact the quality of school meals. In general, the most critical problems emerge from the most fragile point, which is family farming, particularly in the production and support of food, and are influenced by the network of actors, markets, and governments involved. We summarized the main conclusions in six categories: local food production, marketing, and logistics channels, legislation, financial costs, communication and coordination, and quality of school menus. We used PRISMA to guide the review process, and we chose not to limit the year or design of the study because it was important to include the largest amount of existing evidence on the topic. Out of 338 studies identified, 37 were considered relevant. We selected studies from Web of Science, Medline/PubMed, and Scopus and evaluated their methodological quality.
The goal of this review was to identify the problems that school feeding programs face in acquiring food from family farms. Family farming is strengthening its strategic role in school nutrition, but coordinating between school feeding programs and the agricultural sector has proven to be challenging.
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