Enhancing the livelihoods of family farmers with the law

Book excerpt: This publication primarily aims to support decision-makers and practitioners in developing legislative measures to enhance the livelihoods of family farmers through a dedicated attention being placed on the importance of defining family farming and some of its most common features with cases discussed from different parts of the globe. While each context provides for a tailored definition of family farming with some of the definitions being broader and others narrower in their inclusion and enumeration, recurring elements made their way through multiple definitions and hint to certain commonalities across regions and languages. Against this setting, this publication primarily analyses cases of legislative measures for family farming through clear and tailored definitions while presenting examples, commonalities and differences on legislative practices in different parts of the globe and on a variety of intrinsic matters for family farmers’ livelihoods. After setting the legal background on which legislative interventions for family farming are mostly based, the publication delves into specific features of definitions through various examples before examining the closely linked nature of legislative and policy processes, which are presented through assorted examples of multisectoral legislative measures undertaken to enhance family farmers’ livelihoods.