"Contract Farming Resource Centre" web site is now available

FAO’s Rural Infrastructure and Agro-industries Division has launched the “Contract Farming Resource Centre”, a new web site where information on contract farming is made available to the international community. The new site is fully accessible at: www.fao.org/ag/ags/contract-farming.
Users are welcome to send their comments and contributions of additional information to:
Contract-Farming@fao.org

New publication:

Promises and challenges of the informal food sector in developing countries a joint publication by the Rural Infrastructure and Agro-Industries Division, and the Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division.

This publication, addressed to local policy makers, provides an overview of recent literature on the potential of the informal food sector to facilitate an affordable supply of food to urban areas and generate income for low-income households. The goal is to identify global patterns and provide policy suggestions as well as topics for future research. It also discusses examples of good practices in various countries and draws on discussions made by an international community of development practitioners and scholars that met in an international conference in 2006.

New occasional papers published in December 2007:

- Business services in support of farm enterprise development

- Profitability and sustainability of urban and peri-urban agriculture

- Guidelines for rapid appraisals of agrifood chain performance in developping countries

Agro-industrial supply chain management: concepts and applications

This publication is an introduction to the discipline of supply chain management (SCM), with particular reference to the agro-industrial domain. It
introduces fundamental SCM concepts and illustrates them with selected agrifood related cases from different regions of the developing and developed world. SCM concepts are already consolidated as an essential part of modern management thinking. Its tools and techniques have helped companies in traditional areas such as manufacturing and retailing to achieve unprecedented levels of operational performance and efficiency in
transaction coordination with suppliers and customers. Yet, the discipline is still rather incipient in the agrifood domain. While managerial literature abounds with textbooks and publications about SCM in general, publications specific to agrifood enterprises are few and far between. This manual represents a contribution to address that gap

Addressing the challenges facing agriculture mechanization input supply and farm product processing

This Technical Report contains the results of the World Congress on “Agricultural Engineering for a Better World”, held in September 2006 in Bonn (Germany). The Congress was co-organized by FAO Rural Infrastructure and Agro-Industries Division, the International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR), the European Society of Agricultural Engineers (EurAgEng), and the Max-Eyth Association for Agricultural Engineering within the Association of German Engineers (VDI-MEG).

Value Chain Finance Conference in Africa

The Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) and the African Rural and Agricultural Credit Association (AFRACA) network are pleased to announce an upcoming conference on the use of the value chain to reduce risk and increase access to financial services for agriculture and agribusiness. The African Value Chain Financing conference to be held in Nairobi, Kenya on October 16-18, 2007 is for bankers, micro and SME finance institutions working with agriculture, agribusinesses, development NGOs and government ministries. As with previous Value Chain Finance Conferences initiated by FAO for Latin America and South Asia, it will look at value chain finance models, innovations and effectiveness from the multiple viewpoints of banks, agribusinesses, farm organizations, government policy makers and development business service providers. With the increasing focus on value chain integration in agriculture and with today's technologies there are new models and ways of structuring finance and collateralization, increased opportunities for price and production risk mitigation and new models for partnerships among diverse stakeholders which can benefit the agricultural sector and rural communities.
Registration is prioritized to those institutions and persons working in or relating with agricultural finance and is limited to availability of space.