| dc.description.abstract | Food insecurity is a major world problem, with ca. 870 million people in the world being chronically undernourished.
Most of these people live in tropical, developing regions and rely on smallholder farming for food security. Solving the
problem of food insecurity is thought to depend, in part, on managing ecosystem services, such as the pollination of
crops and the biological control of crop pests, to enhance or maintain food production. Our knowledge regarding
regulating ecosystem services in smallholder-farmed (or dualistic) landscapes is limited and whilst pollination has
been the focus of considerable research, the provision of natural enemy services, important for every crop worldwide,
has been relatively neglected. In order to assess whether ecosystem-service research adequately represents
smallholder-farmed landscapes, whilst also considering climatic region and national economic status, we examined
the constituent studies of recent quantitative reviews relevant to biological control and pollination. No regulating
ecosystem service meta-analysis, to our knowledge, has focussed on smallholder agriculture despite its importance
to billions of peoples’ local food security. We found that whilst smallholdings contributed 16% of global farmland
area and 83% of the global agricultural population (estimated using Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO’s) World
Census of Agriculture 2000) only 22 of 190 studies (12%) overall, came from smallholder-farmed landscapes. These
smallholder studies mostly concerned coffee production (16 studies). Individual reviews of biological control were
significantly and strongly biased towards data from large-scale farming in temperate regions. In contrast, pollination
reviews included more smallholder studies and were more balanced for climate regions. The high diversity of
smallholder-farmed landscapes implies that more research will be needed to understand them compared to
large-scale landscapes, but we found far more research from the latter. We highlight that these skews in research
effort have implications for sustainable intensification and the food security of billions in the developing world. In
particular, we urge for balance in future ecosystem-services research and synthesis by greater consideration of a
diverse range of smallholder-farmed landscapes in Africa and continental Asia. | en_US |
