Using multi-stakeholder platforms offers a promising approach for sharing agricultural innovation, reducing transaction costs, and catalyzing development through stimulating stakeholder engagement in the innovation process to accelerate food systems transformation. Agriculture-related multi-stakeholder platforms (AMSPs) are major players to intervention strategies of agricultural development programs. However, often AMSPs have faced multiple challenges that limit and negatively impact their functions.

• Climate change has led to increased production risks especially for smallholder farmers who often tend to be more vulnerable
• Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has several climate change hotspots and is more vulnerable to weather shocks compared to other regions.
• >363 million people affected by drought between 1980-2014 causing > US$31 billion in losses – with 19 billion in East Africa (FAO, 2015)
• Agricultural insurance is a risk management tool for extreme weather events; however, its coverage remains lowest in SSA (Hess and Hazell, 2016).

This document presents the results of the financial evaluation of the potential of carbon markets for cocoa production systems in the departments of Caquetá and Cesar on small producer farms. The economic benefits were evaluated from the potential of carbon capture from the implementation of Cocoa agroforestry systems and the containment of the expansion of natural forest areas for the REDD initiative.

There is renewed interest in the engagement of smallholder farmers in carbon markets. This follows in the wake of commitments by governments and companies to reduce or avoid the release of greenhouse gases. It is well known that soil can store large amounts of carbon, and soil stewardship offers a means to harness this potential. However, issues around permanence and scaling in smallholder farmer systems must be addressed if progress is to be made in this area.

This paper analyses timber and wood processing companies' views on opportunities and challenges for FLEGT implementation in Vietnam based on a literature review, online surveys with 56 timber and wood processing companies, in-depth interviews with 26 stakeholders from different institutions, and a consultation workshop involving 94 participants.

Credit constraint is considered by many as one of the key barriers to adoption of modern agricultural technologies, such as chemical fertilizer, improved seeds, and irrigation technologies, among smallholders. Past research and much policy discourse associates agricultural credit constraints with supply-side factors, such as limited access to credit sources or high costs of borrowing. However, demand-side factors, such as risk-aversion and financial illiteracy among borrowers, as well as high transaction costs, can also play important roles in credit-rationing for smallholders.

We assess the extent of access and degree of participation by smallholder tenants in the land rental market in Malawi. Our study is based on three rounds of nationally representative Living Standards Measurement Surveys collected in 2010, 2013 and 2016, from which we construct a balanced panel. We apply the transaction cost theory, which suggests transaction costs to be non-linear and depend on resource as well as socioeconomic characteristics within the customary tenure system that determines who hold, use and transfer land.

The Vietnamese government is currently attempting to upgrade rice value chains in the Mekong River Delta by encouraging (i) vertical coordination between exporters and farmers through contract farming, and (ii) horizontal coordination among farmers through the “small farmers, large field” program. Previous studies on the determinants of contract farming participation assume that firms offer only a single contract type, whereas in reality, farmers may face a continuum of exclusive contract options.

Despite their recognized agricultural sustainability benefits, mixed crop-livestock farms have declined in the Northern hemisphere. As such, crop-livestock integration beyond the farm level is a promising alternative to this trend, but the knowledge of critical factors and strategies towards its successful implementation is still lacking. We developed an analytical framework to assess the critical determinants of the emergence and outcomes of integration, which helped us understand farmers’ collective strategies for reducing integration transaction costs.

This article presents a comparison for the impact from lack of land governance in Brazil between livestock and agricultural production. It begins with a brief description of the land regulatory system and its development in Mato Grosso do Sul State and Brazil. The methodology was based on focus groups research, conducted by CEPEA/USP (Center for advanced Studies on Applied Economics/University of São Paulo) on local production sites in Mato Grosso do Sul state, where a regional modal farm was established.

The agricultural and food production sector plays a key role in fighting poverty and food insecurity in Moldova, but is facing critical challenges to modernize and integrate into the international market. This paper focuses on smallholder farms, which make up 95 percent of all farms, and explores their potential for growth and the poverty links. Findings reveal that structural change is slow and smallholder farm growth in Moldova is an exception, not the rule.

The new Country Partnership Framework
(CPF or framework) presents the engagement of the World Bank
Group (WBG) in Sri Lanka over the next four years (fiscal
years 2017-20 (FY17–20)). The CPF aims to support the
achievement of some of the government’s medium-term goals in
areas that are critical for reducing extreme poverty and
promoting shared prosperity, and that are consistent with
the WBG’s comparative advantage. Notably, the CPF provides