Tailoring Rural Advisory Services for Family Farms

Rural Advisory Services (RAS) are increasingly recognised as critical to agricultural and rural development. They provide rural communities with wide range of skills and knowledge and facilitate their interactions among the different actors to help them access support and services required for improving their livelihoods. Family Farmers are one of the important clients of RAS as they are the most predominant type of farmers worldwide. This policy document results from several initiatives held during IYFF 2014: the FAO-GFRAS side event organized at the 5th GFRAS Annual Meeting in Buenos Aires on ‘RAS for family farms’, the side event during the Global Dialogue on Family Farming at FAO HQ and the FAO e-conference on ‘Tailoring RAS to family farms’. The results of these events are the basics of this policy document. It looks at what are the specific needs of family farms and the response needed by RAS.