The framework is designed to assess resilience to specific challenges (specified resilience) as well as a farming system's capacity to deal with the unknown, uncertainty and surprise (general resilience). The framework provides a heuristic to analyze system properties, challenges (shocks, long-term stresses), indicators to measure the performance of system functions, resilience capacities and resilience-enhancing attributes. Capacities and attributes refer to adaptive cycle processes of agricultural practices, farm demographics, governance and risk management.

While livestock constitute a strategic sector to reduce poverty and enhance growth in developing countries, decision makers often lack data reflecting the diversity of livestock functions and systems. The authors therefore mobilised the Livestock Sector Investment Policy Toolkit to assess the economic contributions of livestock in Zambia. Valuing their plural contributions by system, we found that mixed rainfed systems were the main contributors to added value, even if specialised intensive systems provided around 45% of meat and milk production.

This research delves into the implementation of Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) among seven types of independent smallholders in Rokan Hulu regency, Riau province. The research area consisted of a relative established agricultural area on mineral soils and a relative frontier, mostly on peat. Smallholder types ranged from small local farmers to large farmers who usually reside in urban areas far from their plantation and regard oil palm cultivation as an investment opportunity.

Increasing on-farm production diversity and improving markets are recognized as ways to improve the dietary diversity of smallholders. Using instrumental variable methods to account for endogeneity, this paper studies the interplay of production diversity, markets and diets in the context of seasonality in Afghanistan. Accordingly to the authors improved crop diversity over the year is positively associated with dietary diversity in the regular season, but not in the lean season.

Ghana is characterized by obvious economic disparities between northern and southern Ghana. In this paper, we analyze these disparities and economic growth by examining the current farming structure with reference to land use patterns and farming practices and linkages with the market economy.

The paper analyses the linkages that prevail between women’s empowerment, agriculture and household consumption, through a case study of an initiative for empowerment of women farmers, Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP), undertaken by the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), which became a government-funded national-level programme in 2010..

The purpose of the TATA-BOX project was to develop a toolbox to support local stakeholders in the design of an agroecological transition at local level. A participatory process based on existing conceptual and methodological frameworks was developed for the design of new configurations of stakeholders and resource systems in the farming systems, supply-chains and natural resources management that were to form a new agroecological territorial system. This process, presented here, was adapted and tested on two adjacent territories in south-western France.

This book presents feedback from the ‘Territorial Agroecological Transition in Action’- TATA-BOX research project, which was devoted to these specific issues. The multidisciplinary and multi-organisation research team steered a four-year action-research process in two territories of France.

This book presents: