The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2023-2032 provides a consensus assessment of the ten-year prospects for agricultural commodity and fish markets at national, regional, and global levels, and serves as a reference for forward-looking policy analysis and planning. Recent surges in agricultural input prices experienced over the last two years have raised concerns about global food security. This year’s Outlook demonstrates that rising fertiliser costs can lead to higher food prices.

This document collects a series of fact sheets realized under the EU-funded SALSA project, which is aimed to understand how small farms and food businesses contribute to sustainable food and nutrition security (FNS).

The research findings in the fact sheets concern 30 reference regions from countries in Europe and Africa. For each region, we present:

● The regional indicators on the concentration and spatial distribution of small farms (SF), obtained also with support of the Sentinel-2 satellite data

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) and short organic supply chains have emerged as promising solutions for smallholder farmers to provide organic produce to nearby consumers. PGS is an institutional innovation that builds trust among producers, traders and consumers through a low-cost transparent and participatory certification mechanism. They have particularly gained a foothold among smallholder farmers in middle- income countries, where third-party certification costs are often unaffordable.

In India, Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) are considered as the most preferred institutional mechanism for enhancing productivity and income of farmers. This is based on the resounding success of a few farmer collectives that have aggregated their produce to realise better incomes. However, when efforts were made to scale up this interesting model across the country, several challenges emerged.

This research delves into the underlying impacts of farmers' innovative entrepreneurship on agricultural and rural economic development in China, adopting a dynamic and spatio-temporal perspective. The study utilizes panel data encompassing 30 provinces (cities and autonomous regions) from 2015 to 2020, with a systematic consideration of diversified spatial weight matrices.

In rural areas of developing countries, more than 70% of the population still depends on agriculture. However, economic crises, unscientific land allocation and climate change issues have hindered attempted gains in agricultural productivity and related rural development outcomes. Technology-driven breakthrough has usually pushed agriculture to the brink of another development that can affect not only plant diversity and yield, but also climatological and socio-economic outcomes.