In a world of rapidly changing conditions, enhancing the adaptability and hence the resilience of family farms is crucial to their viability. Here, diversity plays an important role, as the following article demonstrates.

Nowadays it is hard to imagine European livestock production without soya-based feed. But this trend has had a massive impact on rural areas in the global South – the bulk of the soya fed to livestock in Europe is imported from Argentina and Brazil. That is not sustainable, says WWF’s Birgit Wilhelm, who advocates a change in mindset.

Family farming has many different meanings to many different people. While such farms come in all shape and sizes, one thing all practitioners agree on is that family farming is more than a business – it’s a way of life. The following article shows what constitutes this way of life, the challenges that family farms in Europe and throughout the world face and why and how the European Union supports this type of enterprise.

Tropical forage grasses and legumes as key components of sustainable crop-livestock systems in Latin America and the Caribbean have major implications for improving food security, alleviating poverty, restoring degraded lands and mitigating climate change. Climate-smart tropical forage crops can improve the livestock productivity of smallholder farming systems and break the cycle of poverty and resource degradation.

Improving watershed conservation and household food security has been one of the major development challenges in the semi-arid areas of northern Ethiopia. The initial survey by ILRI’s Improving Productivity and Marketing Success project has revealed that physical conservation measures alone do not result in higher farmers’ income. However, the introduction of market-oriented commodity development such as beekeeping, sheep-fattening, and high value crops resulted in farmers’ income rising fivefold from 2005 to 2009.

Family farms are often associated with greater sustainability. But the definition of sustainability is a highly disputable topic. The School of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences (HAFL) in Switzerland has developed a method enabling a more objective evaluation of sustainability in agriculture. Response-Inducing Sustainability Evaluation (RISE) covers ten sustainability indicators and supplies the foundation for agricultural advice.

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.

Family farms are especially well suited to meet the challenges of labour organisation in agriculture. In early stages of development, they play a particularly important role in creating productive employment for the major share of the population. Moreover, they have strong incentives to use their resources sustainably so as to pass them on to future generations. Yet, family farms should not be romanticised. Often, they only survive by working longer hours and accepting lower incomes than people employed in other sectors of the economy.

The growing global demand for animal products also offers poor livestock keepers the opportunity to switch from the subsistence to the market economy. Our author gives an account of three approaches in the meat and dairy sector in Africa and Asia with their respective potentials and limitations – and also warns against possible negative effects.

The basic role for agricultural policies consists of providing the core investments and services that farmers need to develop their operations into viable farm businesses. Focusing on the sector’s enabling environment benefits both agriculture and the wider rural economy, facilitating the construction of diversified rural economies. Such policies are likely to be more effective in the long term than subsidies or market interventions, which have the opposite tendency.

Is there good reason to make family farms a focus of global attention for a year? Or is it not rather reckless to advocate a concept while completely disregarding the fact that the necessary conditions are often not in place? A few entirely personal thoughts on the International Year of Family Farming.

Grain markets in Africa suffer from a range of constraints. Smallholder farmers are particularly affected owing to their vulnerability to price fluctuations and their weak bargaining position. Many African governments as well as donors reckon with improvements through warehouse receipt systems. The article illustrates the theoretical potential of the WRS and some of the obstacles in setting them up in African countries.