Food security is critical to creating an inclusive and peaceful world. Accelerating the pace of innovation in agriculture will be key to addressing the many challenges facing our planet. ACS Agricultural Science & Technology (AAST) supports the building of inclusive science communities to speed progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
This paper discusses innovation in low and middle-income countries, focusing on the role it has played in local and national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lessons from this effort for how innovation might be harnessed to address wider development and humanitarian challenges by mobilising resources, improving processes, catalysing collaboration and encouraging creative and contextually grounded approaches. The paper also examines how international development and humanitarian organisations can improve their support for local and national innovation efforts.
AgriFoodTech start-ups are coming to be seen as relevant players in the debate around and reality of the transformation of food systems, especially in view of emerging or already-established novel technologies (such as Artificial Intelligence, Sensors, Precision Fermentation, Robotics, Nanotechnologies, Genomics) that constitute Agriculture 4.0 and Food 4.0. However, so far, there have only been limited studies of this phenomena, which are scattered across disciplines, with no comprehensive overview of the state of the art and outlook for future research.
The Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) provides regular updates on activities by TAP and its partners, on the projects and on upcoming events. This issue specifically refers to the period from August 2023 to February 2024.
Addressing 21st century development challenges requires investments in innovation, including the use of new approaches and technologies. Currently, many development organisations prioritise investments in isolated innovation pilots that leverage a specific approach or technology rather than pursuing a strategic approach to expand the organisation's toolbox with innovations that have proven their comparative advantage over what is currently used.
The OECD InDeF team developed a portfolio approach to innovation. A portfolio approach takes a balcony view on innovation which helps organizations align innovation processes, resources and performance with organizational objectives and enables them to track innovation with a view to scaling. Coached by the OECD team, Enabel colleagues in Benin, Morocco and Palestine piloted this portfolio approach by reviewing their current innovation supporting activities and investments against a set of key criteria.
The overarching research question developed in the Conceptual Framework conveys the core objective of SALSA (What is the contribution of small farms and of the related food businesses to sustainable FNS in a wide range of foos systems?) by highlighting that the research follows a systemic approach.
The SALSA project aims at assessing the current and future role of small farms and related small food businesses in contributing to sustainable food and nutrition security at regional level in Europe and in selected African regions, and to identify the conditions for them to meet the demand for food in an increasingly populated and resource-constrained world.
In the SALSA project, transdisciplinarity means a process of integration of knowledge between researchers belonging to different disciplines (in our case, sociology, economics, anthropology, geography) and with non-academic actors such as NGOs members, innovation brokers, policy makers). The role of transdisciplinary theory building within SALSA is to link diverse areas of knowledge through a co-constructed conceptual framework in order to underpin effective action towards improved FNS.
The project Small Farms, Small Food Business and Sustainable Food Security (SALSA) intends to assess the role of small farms and small food business in terms of food production and food security. One important first step in doing this is to test and develop methods and tools able to produce accurate and useful information about small farms.