The UN General Assembly declared 2014 to be the International Year of Family Farming and invited the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to facilitate implementation of the International Year, in collaboration with its partners.

Among its other initiatives for the International Year, FAO has worked with the Global Forum on Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) in setting the spotlight on rural advisory services for family farms. This has been done by jointly organizing two recent side events on the topic – in Buenos Aires on 26 September 2014 during the 5th GFRAS Annual Meeting and in Rome on 27 October 2014 during the Global Dialogue on Family Farming. To continue and expand the dialogue to a global audience, the FAO Research and Extension Unit is now hosting an e-mail conference on “Tailoring rural advisory services to family farms” which will allow participants to share their knowledge, ideas and experiences on this topic. The conference takes place 1-18 December 2014. Results of the two side events and the e-mail conference will feed into preparations of a document on policies to enhance rural advisory services for family farms that FAO and GFRAS are planning to publish in 2015.

The conference is open to everyone, is free and will be moderated. To subscribe to the conference, send an e-mail to with the following one line in the body of the message (leave the subject line blank):
subscribe RAS-L firstname lastname

Where firstname and lastname refer to the person’s first and last name. For example, if the subscriber’s name is John Smith, then the line should be:
subscribe RAS-L John Smith

A short background document was published on 22 November and sent to subscribers before the conference began. We ask you to kindly spread the word about this conference to others, so that it reaches other people who might be interested in joining.

For more information, please contact