Forward pion production at large transverse momenta in pp collisions and beyond

The inclusive production of high-p_\perp particles (pions) in the beam fragmentation regions of high-energy hadronic collisions is driven by the breakup of valence constituents of the beam hadrons into their two-body Fock-state components,and their subsequent fragmentation. We briefly discuss an approach, that allows the consistent inclusion of intrinsic and radiatively generated transverse momenta of initial state partons, and describe an extension of our approach to nuclear targets