Agricultural development has moved up the agenda. Today it has not only to reduce poverty and hunger, but also become environmentally sustainable and climate smart. Disputes over agricultural policies are highly visible, but consensus exists on fundamentals for growth. It is not just what to do that matters, but also how to do it. Increasingly, the search is not for optimal policy, but for ‘good fit’, or even ‘good-enough’ policy.

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.

In 1978, the rural reform began in China, and since then farmers, including the poor ones, have benefited from a steady growth in income and gradually strengthened food security. This article explains how China achieved food security in the past three decades, how the reform process has affected poverty reduction and what aims are established to deal with extreme poverty and child malnutrition for the period of 2011–2020.

Converting from subsistence to market-oriented farming can increase income. Thanks to the ’Enabling Rural Innovation’ approach, family farmers in Uganda and Tanzania have succeeded in improving production and fetching better prices for their produce while safeguarding food security and sustainable management of natural resources. The recipe for success is that farmers take the development process in their own hands.

The changes in global agricultural markets over the past decade have major implications on agricultural policy. What are the challenges and opportunities for development-oriented agricultural policy-making? And what advisory capacities are needed to deliver substantive advice to developing countries’ governments? The answers to these questions constitute a new agenda for contemporary capacity development for agricultural policy advice.

Representing 30 per cent of Ghana’s formal trade in maize, the Techiman market serves as the main cereals trade platform within the country and the sub-region. However, its role in the region’s economic development is threatened by several shortcomings. The Municipal Assembly and the Techiman traders have therefore launched an innovative public-private initiative to upgrade the maize market infrastructure.

José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), on the role of family farms for global food security, the need for sound rural development stategies and the responsibility of governments, the private sector and civil society.

Many a dogma produced by agricultural policies over the past decades has proved disastrous for African agriculture. Ms Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, Commissioner of Rural Economy and Agriculture of the African Union (AU), looks at lessons learnt and suggests ways to bring progress to Africa’s rural regions.