Trade integration in agriculture is typically associated with the trend toward commercialization, which involves increasing the share of agricultural produce that is sold by farmers. It often implies intensive farming and specialization, with monoculture cash crops, alongside diversification among smallholders, with the shift in farming from low-value staple crops into higher-value commodities, such as horticultural products. The underlying farming model is one heavily reliant on external inputs – mechanization, improved seeds, agrochemicals – with a move from local and traditional knowledge and innovation systems to formal, proprietary models of knowledge generation and diffusion. These dynamics can present new opportunities for small, resource-poor producers, including female farmers, but also pose significant challenges for them. Specifically, this transformative pathway tends to favour commercially-oriented farmers who have easier access to inputs and marketing networks, with a tendency to crowd out poor, risk-averse farmers, including disadvantaged or vulnerable communities and women. The local food security implications of this process are likewise complex, often double-edged, with a high degree of context specificity. For the ultimate objective of inclusive and sustainable development, it is critically important to seize the distributional and food security consequences of trade-led structural transformations in agriculture, and tackle exclusion. In particular, institutional and policy coherence is needed, across trade and agriculture, to tackle the challenges that small and subsistence producers face. These challenges are multifaceted and entangled, and tend to be gender-specific. They stem from supply-side constraints on smallholder productivity, from infrastructural deficiencies and market and institutional failures, and from trade restrictions and distortions. This project aims to strengthen national capacities to design and implement complementary trade and agricultural policies supportive of small scale and subsistence-oriented farmers, including female farmers and vulnerable groups, and supportive of local food security. Its objective is twofold: 1) generate knowledge and build awareness and understanding of stakeholders on the social effects of trade-led structural transformation in agriculture; and 2) increase capacities of policy-makers and other stakeholders to integrate this knowledge and tools in trade policy planning and implementation, to harness trade for inclusive and sustainable development in rural areas. The intervention rationale is that trade integration should not only foster economic growth but should also address socioeconomic concerns such as poverty reduction, food security, gender equality and environmental sustainability. This will contribute to achieve economic, environmental and social objectives in a balanced and integrative manner, by making trade policy integral part of National Sustainable Development Strategies (NSDS). To attain these objectives, the project revolves around two sets of activities: knowledge generation, through data collection and processing, and policy-relevant analysis; and capacity building activities, through validation /policy uptake workshops, hands-on training in each country, an end-of-project inter-regional workshop in Geneva. In one country, it involves piloting specific policy options and models for integrating small agricultural producers in supply chains in a sustainable manner. Through these sets of activities, the project aims to deliver high-quality micro-level data and evidence-based analysis of the effects of trade-led structural transformation in agriculture on different rural constituencies. The project also delivers a toolbox of methods, processes and policies to integrate social inclusiveness and sustainability concerns into agricultural trade policy. The project targets three developing countries with high socio-economic vulnerabilities in agriculture: Guatemala, Vanuatu and Malawi. Key stakeholders include policy-makers and officers from the ministries of trade and agriculture, small and subsistence-oriented farmers, including female farmers and vulnerable groups, and local research institutions. The project is implemented in close coordination with the FAO and the UN Regional Commissions.