With the rapid pace of climate change and its impact on food security and livelihoods, climate-smart agriculture is one strategy aiming to help farmers adopt more sustainable farming practices. This study looked at farmers’ adoption of agricultural innovations and the role of social networks in the process.

Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities, industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising labor costs are beginning to inhibit the sector’s ability to compete globally as a low cost producer of bulk undifferentiated commodities.

Farming systems in Vietnam are undergoing rapid change, including increased levels of commercialisation and market integration, adoption of (or desire for) labour efficient technologies, and migration of youth in response to non-farm work opportunities. These processes are not only shaping rural landscapes and communities, but challenging traditional gender roles.

This booklet is the third in the CIAT in Asia Research for Development series. It was based on the experiences of researchers and farmers working with the AusAID-funded Forages for Smallholders Project (FSP) in Southeast Asia from 1995 to 1999. This project was a partnership of smallholder farmers, development workers and researchers who were using participatory approaches to developing forage technologies on farms.

Agricultural innovation systems are complex, multi-layered, and can be difficult to define and analyse. In this paper, we provide examples of ‘systems analysis’: describing the context, what was done, and how the outcomes informed broader research and development activities. The five cases describe analyses of: i) agricultural systems in North-West Vietnam; ii) household food security in Central Vietnam; iii) agricultural innovation systems in Central Africa; iv) wheat commodity systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, and v) the national agricultural research system in Papua New Guinea.

The Feed the Future Asia Innovative Farmers Activity (AIFA) is a regional project transforming the lives of farmers by developing and supporting a regional technology ecosystem that fosters new technology, partnerships, and innovative practices in South and Southeast Asia with a focus on Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Nepal. The project aims to build a diverse regional agricultural innovation community that can test, adapt, and share the latest practices and technologies with smallholder farmers in the region.

Capacity building for integrating gender in research and development (R&D) on agricultural innovations often remains with organizing single gender training. Alternatively, it is often limited to hiring a gender specialist to allocate a small amount of her/his time to the project. This has proofed to be ineffective and a heavy burden for gender specialists. This success story presents an innovative approach to capacity development, which successfully changed agricultural researchers’ attitude to gender in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus in Vietnam.

Although agricultural innovation systems (AIS) have recently received considerable attention in academic and development circles, links between an AIS's regional specifications and structural-functional analysis have been neglected. This paper aims to understand how regional and structural dimensions determine systemic problems and blocking mechanisms that, in turn, hinder a regional AIS's function.

This paper evaluated the implementation of an initiative for promoting risk-based approaches to improve food safety management in Vietnam. A Taskforce of Risk Assessment for Food Safety (Taskforce) was formed and consisted of researchers working on risk assessment and food safety, and representatives of the related ministries of Health and of Agriculture. We used the OECD Development Assistance Committee Evaluation Criteria as a framework for assessing the impact of the Taskforce with five evaluation areas – relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability.

This presentation describes the sucessful experiences of capacity development for livestock production carried out in Vietnam and Cambodia. This seminar was presented in the 15th International Symposium of Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics in November, 2018. The presentation discuss about transnational research in food safety in low-and middle-inmcome countries (LMIC), the importance of bridging institutions and policies and the reached achivements