The International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD), the European Consortium for Agricultural Research in the Tropics (ECART) and IFAP signed a grant agreement on March 2007 for a collaborative research on “empowering smallholder farmers in markets”. For a number of years, IFAP and its member organisations have been concerned about the position of family farmers and their organisations within agrifood markets. Farmer’s empowerment is crucial to face markets characterized by increasing industrial concentration, restructuring, and shifts in market governance.

The IFAP-ECART-IFAD program aims to help family farmers and their representative organisations to be better able to adapt and respond to dynamic global and local change today and in the future. Shared learned lessons from IFAP members will be a key part of collaboration. This challenging proposal it will also allow our membership to strengthen the “farmers centred approach” in the sense that farmers will participate since the beginning of the proposal to the end in a combination of virtual and presencial activities.

Christian Hoste, Director of ECART; Ignace Coussement, Managing Director of AgriCord; David King, Secretary General of IFAP, Giel Ton, Wageningen University; and Philippe Remy, Policy Coordinator of IFAD.