African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
In many countries of the world, technology plays a leading role in the transformation of businesses. This study adopts a survey of literature in agriculture sector and gives certain recommendations which are evolved after descriptive analysis of literature. After systematic review of literature in Chinese, Pakistani and Nigerian context, our paper describes that agricultural policy and agricultural funding are connected to many problems in agriculture field and needs social and strategic steps to be taken particularly in Nigeria.
In the context of an exponential rise in access to information in the last two decades, this special issue explores when and how information might be harnessed to improve governance and public service delivery in rural areas. Information is a critical component of government and citizens’ decision-making; therefore, improvements in its availability and reliability stand to benefit many dimensions of governance, including service delivery.
This presentation was realized for the GFAR workshop on "Adoption of ICT Enabled Information Systems for Agricultural Development and Rural Viability" (at IAALD-AFITA-WCCA World Congress, 2008). It presents lessons learned through linking research to extension, including examples from projects in Nigeria, Colombia, Uganda ,Costa Rica, Egypt and Bhutan.
Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
This paper briefly analyse the genesis, development and change in public sector-led extension approaches in India showing its temporal pattern, emerging innovations in extension approaches and the way forward. It discusses decentralized, community based, pluralistic extension approaches and their opportunities as well as limitations in changing agricultural and natural resources scenario.
Conflicts of interests have been hypothesized when agricultural advisory services are connected to agri-input businesses. However, these have not been examined using large sets of advisory service and grower data. We provide quantitative insights into dependencies between service, crop production, sustainability and the level of agri-input business-linkage of extension workers. This study analyzed 34,000+ prescription forms (recommendations) issued to growers in China, as well as grower interview data.
The Chinese Government has initiated a series of agricultural reforms since the 1970s to encourage agents to provide more services to farmers. In 2006, a new round of agricultural reforms was extended nationwide; however, the effectiveness of these reforms has not been examined. Based on a comparison of survey data sets before and after the reforms, we found that overall they significantly increased the time agents spend on agricultural extension services, although their effectiveness differs among three major components of the reforms.
Most of today’s information services on the web are designed for PC users. There are few services fit to be accessed by mobile devices. In the countryside of China, most of the mobile phone users can not access the Internet. For this reason, was developed a General Agriculture Mobile Service Platform. The Platform is designed to make these information services fit to be accessed by mobile users, and to make those mobile phone users can use these services without Internet connection.
In order to solve the problems of low efficiency and backward methods in the agro-technical extension activities, this paper designed an agro-technical extension information system based on cloud storage technology. This paper studied the key technologies, such as cloud storage service engine, cloud storage management node and cloud storage data node and designed the overall architecture of the agro-technical extension information system based on cloud storage technology.