Assessing The Role Of Small Farmers And Households In Agriculture And The Rural Economy And Measures To Support Their Sustainable Development

The role of agri-food sector in Ukraine’s economy is difficult to underestimate. Its share in the GDP (including forestry and fishery) has been floating around 10%. If upstream and downstream industries of agriculture (input supply, food processing, trade) are also considered, the contribution of the sector to the Ukrainian economy increases roughly to 20% of GDP. Agriculture employs 22% of the labor force and one-third of Ukraine’s population lives in rural areas. Agri-food sector is critical for country’s trade balance and earning foreign exchange. The share of agri-food exports in total exports increased from 11% in 2001 to about 40% in 2019. Defining small scale farmers. There is a confusion about who do we define as small scale family farms. There are at least 4 groups/definitions available to define smallholders (small scale farmers): i) individual farmers - legal entities (ua: fermerski hospodarstva), ii) family farmers – physical persons entrepreneurs (ua: simeyni fermerski hospodarstva), iii) individual rural farms physical persons (ua: osobysti selianski hospodarstva/odnoosibnyky); iv) other commercial farms that effectively fall into the category of small farmers (so called physical persons entrepreneurs or other types of legal entities operating on relatively small scale). In agricultural sector there exist a certain informal segmentation of farms according to their farm size: small farms are the farms with land holdings of up to 150-200 ha, and up to 500 ha in some cases, medium farmers are 200 (500) to 10 thds ha, and large farms are above 10 thds ha. Clearly, in this case we have the same problem as with the criteria of 20 ha for small family farmers we mentioned above.