Book Description

Smallholder farmers are commonly thought of as farmers who manage two hectares of land or less. By some estimates they represent approximately a quarter of the world’s population, and manage half of the world’s arable land; they generate billions of dollars in forest and timber products. Collectively, smallholders have the transformative potential to achieve sustainable development and respond to climate change at landscape scales. In order to achieve this collective action, smallholders can and do organize themselves into organizations such as associations and cooperatives, i.e. forest and farm producer organizations (FFPOs). Empowering forest and farm producer organizations will be critical to delivering on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for mitigating climate change as part of the Paris Agreement. This document has three main premises: first, that smallholders’ farms are businesses, and the decisions that smallholders make about their farms are primarily based on their expected return on investments. The second premise is that the business of growing trees on farms can increase family farmers’ economic resilience and improve the net environmental impact of family farming. The third premise is that small farmers’ business of growing trees will be more economically successful if they can organize themselves to achieve scale. What follows from these premises is the purpose of this document: supporting producer organizations to collect information on their tree assets (i.e. trees grown on their farms) for commercial purposes.