Why FARM ?
Agriculture and related industries are fundamental to economic development and the struggle against poverty of a large share of the world’s population.
Malnutrition and famine still haunt hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The UN’s Millenium Development Goal (MDG) of cutting extreme poverty in half by 2015 is unrealistic without significant improvement in farm revenues in poor areas.
A new set of actors has emerged in the form of agricultural professional organisations. These organisations constitute the best partners for any attempt to rethink and renew agricultural development and relations among economic actors in this sector. For this reason private companies and other professional actors have decided to pool their resources to spur a mobilisation of civil society in favor of international solidarity and agricultural and rural development.
What are the goals of FARM ?
The aim of the founders of FARM is to put their experience, their analytic capabilities and their capacity for action at the disposal of these new agricultural actors.
Bringing their capabilities to bear on agricultural production should lead to the development of new approaches and contribute to the development of sustainable agriculture at the world level. The foundation FARM is concerned with all developing countries, with a special emphasis on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the African-Caribbean-Pacific Countries (ACP) with which the European Union (EU) maintains a special partnership.
On what priorities is FARM focusing ?
Several thematic areas emerge from the experience of FARM’s members and the needs of its partners :
- International trade regulation
- Food sovereignty
- Agricultural finance (micro-credit, banking services, risk coverage, insurance, etc.)
- The productive environment and the basic goods of rural life (water, energy)
- Innovation and technical progress
- Marketing agricultural products (market access, outlets, logistics, etc.)
- Social organisation and the farmer
What are its means of action ? FARMS’s innovative approach will take three forms :
- field experimentation ;
- reflection and propositions ;
- information and training.
- Acting as a hub for coordinating field-oriented initiatives and communicating results, FARM will :
- respond to expressed needs and act in partnership with professionals ;
- promote joint experimental projects with other actors ;
- increase the coherence of interventions by French and European actors.
- Acting as a center for exchanges, reflection and policy proposals, FARM’s goals are :
- to disseminate concrete diagnoses of agricultural reality, of technical progress, and of specific economic aspects of agricultural trade ;
- to promote the collective enunciation of proposed actions ;
- to participate in international debate.
FARM will draw on studies and applied research projects to generate and disseminate diagnostic tools and analyses.
- Acting as a clearinghouse for information and training :
- FARM will facilitate the dissemination of information and training in order that professionals and FARM’s partners will have quick and easy access to economic and technical information.
