Why a Centre for Smallholder Agriculture: The Ecosystem Challenges
Southeast Asia is home to approximately 100 million smallholder farmers, who collectively form the backbone of the region’s food and agricultural production systems, and provide much of the food for the region’s growing population. These farmers cultivate small plots of land—usually less than two hectares—and are central to staple crops like rice, maize, and cassava, as well as cash crops such as palm oil, coffee, and rubber.
The smallholder farms themselves represent a significant component of the total regional population with average household sizes of 4 to 6 persons each. These families are critical to food security and rural employment, forming nearly 40% of the region’s agricultural workforce with average household sizes of 4 to 6 persons each.
Many of these smallholder farmers, however, practice subsistence farming and struggle to provide enough food for their own family’s use. They are unable to produce surpluses to trade with or to provide to the value chain. These farmers (often women) are constrained by low quality soil, low water availability and high temperatures, limited access to appropriate (smallholder farmer friendly) technologies, limited access to inputs (quality seed, fertilizers, pesticides etc.), limited access to supporting infrastructure, limited access to capital, insurance and other risk reducing tools, and limited access to markets and information. These farmers are some of the poorest and most food and nutritionally insecure people in the region.
Without a sustainable smallholder agriculture sector, it will not be possible for Southeast Asia to assure rural livelihoods, contribute to Greenhouse Gas mitigation, ensure food & nutrition security, and maintain a strong agricultural commodity trade position.
SE Asia Centre for Smallholder Agriculture
The Centre will function as a champion for small farmers and be company-agnostic and technology-integrating. It will serve as a rallying forum for all parties interested to work towards ensuring that small farmers be empowered to play their role in SE Asia economies.
The Centre is a small holder-centric cross sectorial, multi-stakeholder initiative that aims to empower the smallholder farmers of SE Asia. The primary focus of the CoE will be the subsistence and developing smallholder farmer segments, but where appropriate, the progressive smallholder segment can be included. The Centre of Excellence’s underlying tenets are sustainability, inclusion, and equality.
The multi-stakeholder nature of the CoE allows a “whole of system approach” to ecosystem change and will cover the whole value chain. This “whole of system” approach necessitates that partners in the centre will extend beyond the typical agriculture players (input providers and traders), and will include those involved in energy, waste management, investment, environment, nutrition and health, space, etc.
The partnership model aligns well with Sustainable Development Goal 17 and the Centre itself targets aspects in most, if not all, of the SDGs themselves. The centre can also be seen to address the cross-cutting issues of sustainability, namely: education and sustainable development; women and gender equality; education, gender and technology; and SDG-driven investment.
Centre’s Focus Areas
Modus operandi
The Centre will act as a catalyst for the empowerment of smallholder farmers and will have three focus areas: –
- Technology
The development/refinement, and delivery of scale- and gender-appropriate technology that is affordable and profit-enhancing for smallholder farmers. The Centre will identify, evaluate and endorse appropriate technology for smallholder farmers through a system of recognised experts.
- Leadership Capacity Building
A program to empower leaders in agriculture with the skills/knowledge to catalyse the transformation of smallholder farmers from non-commercial to profitable enterprises. This will take the form of short professional development courses.
- Knowledge Management/Thought Leadership
Promotion of a learning culture, knowledge creation, knowledge sharing and use among stakeholders. This pillar will include solution-oriented workshops, think-tanks with global/regional specific experts on nationally specific topics of smallholder farming systems, including policy development and technology. A regional policy-focused conference is also proposed.
Theories of change will be elaborated into Impact Pathways by the partners in the centre at the early stages. The early movers will have the opportunity to craft the centre’s outcome pathway to address key challenges across the region’s agricultural systems, while still allowing the centre to be viewed as an independent entity serving all.
Anticipated Impact
The Southeast Asia Centre for Smallholder Agriculture will deliver a powerful developmental dividend by transforming the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farming families from subsistence to sustainable prosperity. Through its integrated focus on technology, leadership capacity building, and knowledge exchange, the Centre will equip farmers—particularly women—with affordable, context-appropriate innovations that increase productivity, reduce vulnerability to climate and market shocks, and open access to profitable value chains. By fostering cross-sectoral collaboration between agriculture, energy, finance, environment, and health actors, the initiative will unlock new income opportunities, enhance food and nutrition security, and strengthen community resilience. The Centre’s emphasis on inclusion, gender equity, and sustainability ensures that growth benefits extend to entire households—improving education, health, and livelihoods for 400–600 million rural residents—while building a new generation of local leaders and innovators who can sustain the transformation across Southeast Asia’s agricultural systems.
The Centre as an Innovation Hub
It will be important at the earliest stages of the centre to assess the technological needs of the different agricultural systems and to identify possible locations where technology can be showcased. These “lighthouses” of technological advancement will be key in multiplying the benefits of the transformational leadership capacity building in Focus Area 2.
While there will be existing technology that can be rolled out via the partnerships in the centre, the centre can also be seen as a conduit for the technologies that are being developed in the region, and in the numerous agtech accelerators around the world e.g. Creative Destruction Lab Rockies, The Yield Lab, BRINC and Thrive that may meet the needs of the regional smallholder farmers.
Engagement
Asia BioBusiness and the Agri-Biotech Knowledge Centre have engaged with a broad range of stakeholders to socialise the concept of a Centre for Smallholder Farmers. There has been considerable interest from parties in both the private and public sectors, academia, and non-profits in playing a role in the centre.
If you would like to have more information on this initiative or contribute in any way, please contact us.