A project in Burkina Faso has given a clear demonstration of what supporting family farms can achieve in terms of poverty alleviation and rural development. One important success factor was the transfer of land to farmers, accompanied by a secure land-tenure policy adapted to their needs.

Providing extension and advisory services is expensive. There are salaries to be paid, transporta­tion and operational funds to be provided, buildings to be rented or built, demonstration plots to maintain, and continued education to be offered to the extension staff. And then there is the need to continually invest in an overall functioning agricultural innovation system with strong research and teaching institutions, enabling policies, as well as to make capital investments in rural infrastructure that will not only benefit the farming population.

Snakebites are a crucial, yet underreported issue in many South Asian countries. In India, they kill some 50,000 people every year. However, the government has neglected the issue. Now, it’s time to seriously address this all but forgotten public health problem, our author maintains.

Today, it would be difficult to imagine agricultural extension without modern information and communication technologies. What they can do, where they fit in, and where they reach their limits is shown in the following examples.

The Government extension services in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are weak. There is a general lack of money and staff, and the country has a poor infrastructure. Above all small-scale farmers in remote areas are left out of developments. This applies in particular to women farmers, despite their providing 85 per cent of the rural workforce.

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.

German Development Cooperation has developed an approach for the sustainable production of charcoal that has proved to have a considerable impact in Northern Madagascar. Since both environmental and socioeconomic aspects are addressed in a very effective way, this approach has high potential referring to global challenges such as land degradation, rural poverty and climate change.

For a long time, the agricultural policies of the Mercosur states ignored family farming, focusing on promoting individual crops and export production instead. Rural development was not on the agenda. Only after the turn of the millennium did a process of rethinking set in.

Farmer organisations play a crucial role in the development of rural areas. But how influential are they when it comes to defining national policies? What can they achieve, and where are their limits? Our authors demonstrate this with regard to the small farmer organisations in South Africa.

One of the basic conditions of empowering farmers is to get them organised. Machinery rings are a promising organisational concept to link up the farms and raise their profitability and power by promoting mechanisation in rural areas.

The Future Agricultures Consortium was established in 2005 with support from the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as a learning alliance of leading African and UK-based research organisations. The Consortium provides independent analysis and advice for improving agricultural policy-making. The aim is to encourage critical debate and policy dialogue on the future of agriculture in Africa, elaborating the practical and policy challenges of establishing and sustaining pro-poor agricultural growth.

China has a longstanding tradition of using biogas for decentralised energy supply. Already, there are nearly 42 million household digesters in the rural areas, a figure set to double by 2020. But the country has even more ambitious plans. In order to achieve its own climate targets and raise the share of renewables in overall energy supply to 15 per cent by 2020, it wants to set up 16,000 middle- and large-scale biogas plants. However, implementation isn’t quite so easy.