Rather than focusing on project assistance, this book emphasizes the success of rural Bolivian families to carry out their own productive business activities. This book tells the story of a successful development project through the eyes of a main participant. The author, Preston Pattie, developed a novel business approach to transform subsistence farmers into suppliers in formal value chains. Through the buyer-led, business approach, the USAID-funded Rural Competitiveness Activity (RCA project) reached 20 thousand Bolivian rural families. Half of these families-ten thousand-have or will overcome poverty in a short time. Rather than emphasizing project assistance, the RCA team facilitated efforts of rural families to carry out their own productive business activities. What appears a subtle difference in focus turned a corner that required the re-engineering of virtually every aspect of project implementation. The need to reform so many varied aspects of project implementation was not foreseen, and the path to take in each case was not pre-determined. Instead each aspect of the RCA project became an endeavor for reform to solve problems as they were identified or to improve performance toward reaching targets. "Pattie has boiled down a lot of complex material very nicely, and his writing style is refreshingly simple, making The Small Farmer Can accessible to a broad range of development professionals."― James T. Riordan, author of We Do Know How: A Buyer-Led Approach t...