Renewal of Agriterra’s assets in the Netherlands "A business plan: Agriterra's Farmer-to-Farmer technical assistance"
For the renewal of Agriterra's assets, the professionalisation of the Agripool is paramount. Agriterra launched in the beginning of 2013 a call to raise proposals from internal and external parties. The call has to lead to production of business plans. The winner is probably invited to present a plan for implementation. Profesionalisation is due in basically two aspects: the product-market proposition and corresponding marketing, along with training for the agripool experts. A full description is available form Agriterra.

“Strong(er) membership organisations contribute to development” 
Providing evidence for Agriterra’s theory of change 
The core business of Agriterra is the strengthening of producer organisations: cooperative societies, rural women’s associations, farmers’ unions, regional federations… the common denominator being twofold: these are rural organisations AND they are membership-based. That is, what they are and do is ultimately endorsed and validated by their members.   

Agriterra (and other agri-agencies: see www.agricord.org) do this work because they are convinced that strong membership organisations (i.e., associations) are a necessary condition for true development to take place, in three dimensions:

•	More economic development (e.g. annual economic growth)
•	More equality (e.g. a lower Gini index)
•	More democratic societies (e.g. a higher score on the liberties index by Freedom House)

"A business plan: Agriterra's Farmer-to-Farmer technical assistance"
To come to a business proposal we will go through the following process:
* persons or reams that envisage themselves as cindidates to play a leading role in the new Agripool can present a three page pre-proposal containing a short vision on the future of Agripool, issues that will be tackeld in the business plan and  a lost of quick wins.
* recruitment of a commission with two more specialists to assess the pre-proposals in case that more than one acceptable pre-proposal is presented;
* the pre-proposals will be assessed by the commission headed by the managing director of Agriterra.
* elaboration of a full-fledged proposal
* selection of the winning business plan
* decision to implement.



"Strong(er) membership organisations contribute to development"
What we look for with this call is the involvement of the academia to help us. The challenge that we pose is threefold. First, we want documented confirmation four our basic tenet: that rural membership organisations stimulate development. But we also want more evidence on how exactly the mechanism works – that is, how the diagram of the result chain looks. And thirdly, whether the found mechanism is universal or rather stage-, context- or scale-specific. 

We therefore call upon members of the development studies community to deliver input for our  vision that reads strong (rural) membership organisations are conducive to development, equality and democracy.  In a parallel traject, we call upon investigative journalism to propose to us additional publication formats  to divulge the scientific outcomes and their own findings, in addition to more specific contributions on:
•	Examples of the positive role of cooperatives and other farmers’ organisations in the industrialized countries;
•	The role of such organisations in times of crisis;
•	And the contribution(s) they can make to innovation in agriculture and agro-industry.

the harmonisation of deliverables, targbets and cross-cutting issues as impact indicators among agri-agencies and farmers' organisations. Securing the audit trail on data by offering farmers' organisations possibilities for direct data enty