Brazilian agriculture is a success story. The country that until the 1960s systematically received food donations from abroad. and up to the 1980s was still a large food importer, had its agriculture profoundly changed. The traditional agriculture that prevailed in Brazil until the 1970s was progressively transformed in the following decades into a modern and highly competitive agriculture based on science.
Accordingly to the authors It is beyond the scope of this chapter to empirically explore the determinants of the commercialization of agriculture and its impact on poverty; so instead, they will present and discuss some empirical evidence on topics that remain hotly debated regarding commercialization and poverty. In Sect. 12.2, it is investigated how smallholder farmers in northern Vietnam have been affected by the recent food price volatility with respect to their income and consumption levels, while in Sect.
Successful cases of innovation invariably demonstrate a range of partnerships, alliances and network-like arrangements that connect together knowledge users, knowledge producers and others involved in enabling innovation in the market, policy and civil society arenas. With this comes the realisation that public agricultural research needs to strengthen links to a wider set of players from the private and civil society sectors and, of course, farmers themselves. Public agricultural extension services have traditionally played the role of linking farmers to technology.