The ‘food riots’ of 2008, notably in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, were triggered by a sharp rise in food prices on the international market due to poor harvests in Asia, the main supplier of rice. The effects of rising food prices, however, were made worse by the fragility of the agricultural systems and the precariousness of the resources available to African rural populations. The severe repercussions of these events prompted refl ections about the impact of international aid on agricultural and rural development, particularly in Africa, and the role that agricultural research ought to be playing in it in the broad sense. This questioning of the international aid system was stimulated by the economic crisis in the industrialized nations. Indeed, it highlighted the economic, ecological and social limitations of our development approach and the agricultural policies implemented for the last 20 years or so, policies that have widened the gap between rich and poor, between North and South. The structural adjustments uniformly and rigidly operated by the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s, increased the isolation of rural Africa, by suppressing the fabric of the extension systems and state support for agricultural prices after independence. In its annual report on world development in 2008 – the fi rst report of its kind to be devoted to agriculture by the WB for more than 30 years – the WB itself admitted its responsibility in the plight of food crop production in Africa (World Bank 2008).