The creation of commercialization opportunities for smallholder farmers has taken primacy on the development agenda of many developing countries. Invariably, most of the smallholders are less productive than commercial farmers and continue to lag in commercialization. Apart from the various multifaceted challenges which smallholder farmers face, limited access to extension services stands as the underlying constraint to their sustainability.
Conventional approaches to agricultural extension based on top–down technology transfer and information dissemination models are inadequate to help smallholder farmers tackle increasingly complex agroclimatic adversities. Innovative service delivery alternatives, such as field schools, exist but are mostly implemented in isolationistic silos with little effort to integrate them for cost reduction and greater technical effectiveness.
Providing economic opportunities for youth in agriculture is essential to securing the future of agriculture in Africa, addressing poverty, unemployment, and inequality. However, barriers limit youth participation in agriculture and the broader food system. This scoping review aimed to investigate the opportunities and challenges for youth in participating in agriculture and the food system in Africa. This review conducted a scoping review using the PRISMA guideline. Published studies were retrieved from online databases (Web of Science, Cab Direct, and Science Direct) for 2009 to 2019.
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) proposes environmental policies developed around action-based conservation measures supported by agri-environment schemes (AES). High Nature Value (HNV) farming represents a combination of low-intensity and mosaic practices mostly developed in agricultural marginalized rural areas which sustain rich biodiversity. Being threatened by intensification and abandonment, such farming practices were supported in the last CAP periods by targeted AES.
Indicator-based tools are widely used for the assessment of farm sustainability, but analysts still face methodological and conceptual issues, including data availability, the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the heterogeneity of agricultural systems. This study contributes to this debate through the illustration of a procedure for farm sustainability assessment focussed on the case study of the South Milan Agricultural Park, Italy. The application is based on a set of environmental, social and economic indicators retrieved from the literature review.
The process of adopting innovation, especially with regard to precision farming (PF), is inherently complex and social, and influenced by producers, change agents, social norms and organizational pressure. An empirical analysis was conducted among Italian farmers to measure the drivers and clarify “bottlenecks” in the adoption of agricultural innovation. The purpose of this study was to analyze the socio-structural and complexity factors that affect the probability to adopt innovations and the determinants that drive an individual’s decisions.
In recent decades, the confluence of different global and domestic drivers has led to progressive and unpredictable changes in the functioning and structure of agri-food markets worldwide.
Agricultural production is a crucial and fundamental aspect of a stable society in China that depends heavily on the climate situation. With the desire to achieve future sustainable development, China’s government is taking actions to adapt to climate change and to ensure food self-sufficiency.
Agricultural innovation in low-income tropical countries contributes to a more effective and sustainable use of natural resources and reduces hunger and poverty through economic development in rural areas. Yet, despite numerous recent public and private initiatives to develop capacities for agricultural innovation, such initiatives are often not well aligned with national efforts to revive existing Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS).
Grown in Jamaica since the days of slavery, food yams are major staples in local diets and a significant non-traditional export crop. The cultivation system used today is the same as 300 years ago, with alleged unsustainable practices. A new cultivation system called minisett was introduced in 1985 but the adoption rate twenty four years later is extremely low.