ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at some facts, and some relationships between poverty, nutrition, food staples, and subsistence. Revolution in staples production–and much of the subsequent shift to higher-value, traded farm products–started and has been sustained largely on family, subsistence farms; this has induced unprecedented growth and industrialization in the surrounding economies. People need much better policies to make incentives, institutions, and public goods, affecting production and trade in food staples, favorable to low-income, family-based smallholders and, in particular, to "subsistence" farmers. Subsistence farmers are smallholders. Efficient subsistence farming is the mother of food trade, not its enemy. Subsistence farming is seen as an increasingly "inefficient" use of resources, as countries develop. Its reduction is seen as a natural process, to be accelerated by policy. As compared with large-scale commercial farms, small-scale family farms, including "deficit" and subsistence farms, slash the cost of managing labor, but raise the cost of acquiring and managing capital.
