Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

This is part two in a two-part series on categorizing small-scale producers.  In the last post, we looked at the fact that the majority of the literature does not offer a definition of small-scale producer, and the diversity of definitions provided by the few articles which do.   In this post, we look at three collections of tools that EPAR has developed to determine the consequences of choosing particular criteria and thresholds for definitions of small-scale producer

The idea of working with small-scale producers, also known as small-scale farmers, is ubiquitous in the development literature, so much so that the term made it into SDG target 2.3: “By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers…” However, an exact definition of what is meant by a small-scale producer remains elusive.

Over the last year and a half, EPAR has constructed over 150 indicators related to agricultural development, and shared our decisions on data cleaning and indicator construction. We do this work and share our outputs both to facilitate analyses of these rich datasets and to make estimates of relevant indicators available to a broader audience of potential users. There are numerous decision points in the process of constructing indicators that affect the final estimates.