After decades of low producer prices and marketing problems, for the past several years a boom situation has prevailed in global agricultural markets. This agricultural boom will lead to increased food crises, to additional environmental degradation and to the displacement of smallholders from their resources that increases poverty if the opportunity is missed to assist them in their quest for intensification opportunities.
 
The increase in producer prices also presents an opportunity for escaping rural poverty not seen for decades if it can be grasped by finding forms of intensification that are appropriate to each specific situation and do justice to the limitations of smallholder livelihood systems and rural.
 

Professor Dr. Theo Rauch
Centre for Development Studies (ZELF) Institute for Geographic Sciences Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
theo.rauch@aol.com