PM Edition: Top 10 Business Articles on LiveNews. co. nz for September 21, 2026 – Full Text

NEW YORK – Hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers could play an outsized role in feeding humanity’s growing population while restoring nature, but a new book underlines that they are the least supported producers in global agriculture. Whole Earth Farming: Smallholders and the Great Regenerative Transformation says there are roughly 475 million smallholder farms in the Global South, typically operating on less than two hectares (five acres). Together, these farmers already produce about 30% of the world’s food, despite severely limited access to finance, markets, technical and practical education support. In his book, development expert Hugh Locke says helping just half of the smallholders farmers worldwide – about 240 million farming families – to adopt regenerative agriculture and agroforestry could yield all the additional food required by population growth through 2050 while improving rather than degrading nature. And those farms would occupy only about 12% of the world’s arable land. “The world’s smallholder farmers are too often treated as beneficiaries of development assistance when they should be recognized as architects of the next agricultural transformation,” says Locke, co-founder of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance in Haiti. The world…