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Agricultural research and development organizations are increasingly under pressure to shift from enhancing productivity of food crops to improving profitability and competitiveness of small-scale farming, and linking smallholder farmers to more profitable markets. What is not obvious however, is how to make small-scale farming more market orientated, and how to effectively integrate participatory research approaches to marketing and agroenterprise development. This paper outlines an integrated approach for demand-driven and market-orientated agricultural research and rural agro-enterprise development. This approach termed Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) offers a practical framework to link farmer participatory research and market research in a way that empowers farmers to better manage their resources and offers them prospects of an upward spiral out of poverty. ERI uses participatory processes to build the capacities of farmers' groups and rural communities in marginal areas to identify and evaluate market opportunities, develop profitable agroenterprises, intensify production through experimentation, while sustaining the resources upon which their livelihoods depend. The approach emphasizes integrating scientific expertise with farmer knowledge, strengthening social organization and entrepreneurial organizations through effective partnership between research, development and rural communities. By strengthening human and social capital, ERI encompasses effective and proactive strategies for promoting gender and equity in the access to market opportunities and improved technologies, and in the distribution of benefits and additional incomes. Results of action research applying the ERI approach in pilot sites in Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania show that small-scale farmers are not always attracted by higher economic returns. Rather they use a range of economic and non-economic criteria for selecting their existing crops and livestock for new markets, as well as new crops for new markets. Evaluation of market opportunities stimulates farmers' experimentation to reduce risks, access new technologies, and improve the productivity and competitiveness of the selected enterprises. Lessons learned suggest that building and sustaining quality partnerships between research and development organizations, government, private agribusiness sector; and building necessary amount of human and social capital over a certain period of time are critical for achieving success in small- scale agroenterprise development. This however, requires that an explicit scaling up strategy be mapped out to link successful community processes to meso and macro level market institutions at the national and regional levels.

Smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa have undergone changes in land use, productivity and sustainability. Understanding of the drivers that have led to changes in land use in these systems and factors that influence the systems' sustainability is useful to guide appropriate targeting of intervention strategies for improvement. We studied low input Teso farming systems in eastern Uganda from 1960 to 2001 in a place-based analysis combined with a comparative analysis of similar low input systems in southern Mali. This study showed that policy-institutional factors next to population growth have driven land use changes in the Teso systems, and that nutrient balances of farm households are useful indicators to identify their sustainability. During the period of analysis, the fraction of land under cultivation increased from 46 to 78%, and communal grazing lands nearly completely disappeared. Cropping diversified over time; cassava overtook cotton and millet in importance, and rice emerged as an alternative cash crop. Impacts of political instability, such as the collapse of cotton marketing and land management institutions, of communal labour arrangements and aggravation of cattle rustling were linked to the changes. Crop productivity in the farming systems is poor and nutrient balances differed between farm types. Balances of N, P and K were all positive for larger farms (LF) that had more cattle and derived a larger proportion of their income from off-farm activities, whereas on the medium farms (MF), small farms with cattle (SF1) and without cattle (SF2) balances were mostly negative. Sustainability of the farming system is driven by livestock, crop production, labour and access to off-farm income. Building private public partnerships around market-oriented crops can be an entry point for encouraging investment in use of external nutrient inputs to boost productivity in such African farming systems. However, intervention strategies should recognise the diversity and heterogeneity between farms to ...