Food touches upon so many aspect of our society. It touches upon the soil, the water, the landscapes in rural areas, the health of every human being. It touches upon the livelihoods of millions of people, especially the farmers that produce our food. But we cannot take the incredible variety of food on our plate for granted. We are facing critical challenges: 1. By 2050, the global population is projected to exceed 9.6 billion. Global food production will need to increase by 50 percent to meet this challenge, which will be particularly acute in rapidly expanding urban areas (70% will live in cities) 2. Climate change: with every degree the temperature rises above optimum temperature in the season, the yield decreases with 10% (Brown). Soil quality and water resources are already depleting and 70% of fresh water is used for agriculture 3. Low prices and poverty are forcing farmers from the land and young people are turning their backs on a future in agriculture. The average age of farmers evolves towards 60 years. Rikolto (formerly VECO) believes family farms are a big part of the solution. Together they produce 70% of our food worldwide, but individually they're often cut out of the trade, ending up in poverty and leaving their huge potential untapped. Rikolto's always works into multi-stakeholder settings, and our contribution there is: 1. Support to farmer groups to become solid business partners. We do that by joint analysis, coaching and capacity development. We connect them with finance and service providers 2. We connect them with other actors within the food chains and explore new ways of collaboration between those actors 3. We inspire others to take successful experiences to scale and install an enabling institutional environment 4. We continuously monitor and adapt our strategies and actions to the complex and quickly changing realities Rikolto is also a frontrunner in creating and/or testing new models and tools for smallholder farmers: SenseMaker™, LINK, SCOPE