# Mobile Remittance for Small Farmers Blockchain offers low-cost, rapid, and secure payments, alleviating the financial burden on farmers. Payments can be processed within minutes with minimal transaction fees, eliminating the need for intermediaries like remittances or banks. Mobile payment systems have opened up new opportunities for many smallholder farmers excluded from mainstream financial services. Approximately 450-500 million smallholder farmers, cultivating small plots of land for subsistence and a few cash crops, constitute 85% of the world's farms. These farmers, often located in hyper-rural areas with minimal profits, exemplify the need for improved payment systems for small-scale agriculture. **The financial services enable smallholders to:** • Invest in agriculture • Relieve liquidity constraints Blockchain brings fairness in the process of agricultural finance via transparency and shared control accessibility. Blockchain technology is used in removing counterparty risk for sellers through real time payment, automating and democratizing access to supply chain financing for buyers, and guaranteeing that all consumers have access to the provenance of their commodities to make informed purchase decisions. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://whitepaper.gemmest.com/gemmest-use-cases/mobile-remittance-for-small-farmers.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.