This book focuses on smallholder agriculture or family farms in three parts: 1. African agriculture in the face of multiple challenges – demographic, economic and environmental; 2. Steering transitions of rural economies – five fields of action that can be incorporated into government policies: land tenure, innovation processes, regional food markets, agricultural finance and human capital development; 3. Cross-cutting views which gives platform to four African officials who present their vision for the future of agriculture and action that needs to be promoted.

The book ends with a question: ‘Can tropical Africa be a future agricultural giant?’ and a conclusion that ‘the recent return to favour of agricultural development can and must allow farmers in Africa to take their rightful place, as they do in Brazil, which has lifted itself to the rank of agricultural giant in the space of two decades.’ Unfortunately, no explanation is provided about what is so different about the agriculture production paradigm in Brazil (which is based on no-till farming) and why it is succeeding.

The title and content of the book reflect the changing attitude of the development-assistance community in the North from its customary desire to impose a top-down paradigm for development in African Agriculture to elaborating instead what might be key challenges and how they might be met. The book is a cumbersome attempt to reinvent the development rhetoric. Much credibility would have been added to the book had it elaborated the new paradigm of sustainable production intensification (as reflected by no-till farming) upon which much of the smallholder agriculture will have to depend for its future survival and prosperity.