The CSIRO Agriculture and Food & the CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council (ISPC) Secretariat are collaborating to explore the nature of agri-food systems innovation and impact. This workshop report is a record of the key outcomes from a workshop held on the 14-15 December 2016 in Canberra, Australia
This study examines interventions in two agricultural development projects in Ghana which aimed to build competitiveness of selected value chains to generate growth and reduce poverty – the Northern Rural Growth Project, implemented between 2009 and 2016, and the Market Oriented Agriculture Programme, which began in 2004 and is still in place.
This practitioner’s guide, a companion volume to The Innovation Paradox picks up where the previous report left off. It aims to help policy makers in developing countries better formulate innovation policies. It does so by providing a rigorous typology of innovation policy instruments, including evidence of impact—and more importantly, the critical conditions in terms of institutional capabilities to successfully implement these policy instruments in developing countries.
The goal of this paper is to access the state, specify trends, compare with other EU states, and identify intervention needs of Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) in Bulgaria, and assist policy formation for the next programing period. Modern scientific approaches of SWOT, Strategic Orientation, Gap Analysis, Comparative Institutional Analysis, etc. are used to identify actors and relations, trends in development, assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, formulate adequate strategy, and specify overall and public intervention needs of AKIS in the country.
“Business as usual” is no longer an option for a food-secure future. Pastoralism can be an innovative system: a time-tested, undervalued alternative to high-input and resource-intensive farming, and a valuable lesson for the much needed evolution towards ‘farming with nature’, with largely-untapped potential for income growth and employment in marginal areas.
Agricultural innovations are seen as a key avenue to improve nutrition and health in smallholder farm households. But details of these agriculture-nutrition-health linkages are not yet well understood. While there is a broad literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, most studies primarily focus on impacts in terms of productivity and income. Nutrition and health impacts have rarely been analyzed. In this article, we argue that future impact studies should include nutrition and health dimensions more explicitly.
There are divergent views on what capacity development might mean in relation to agricultural biotechnology. The core of this debate is whether this should involve the development of human capital and research infrastructure, or whether it should encompass a wider range of activities which also include developing the capacity to use knowledge productively. This paper uses the innovation systems concept to shed light on this discussion, arguing that it is innovation capacity rather than science and technology capacity that has to be developed.
Pour faire face à l'augmentation de la population, l'agriculture devra améliorer sa productivité. L'innovation est donc un processus nécessaire. Le progrès technique en représente une part importante, mais ne peut suffire sans une démarche multi-acteurs participative. Les plateformes d'innovation peuvent ainsi favoriser cette démarche de manière pérenne.
In the existing literature, the effects of contract farming on household welfare were examined with mixed results. Most studies looked at single contract types. This paper contributes to the literature by comparing two types of contracts – simple marketing contracts and resource- providing contracts – in the Ghanaian oil palm sector. We investigate the effects of both contracts on farm income, as well as spillovers on other household income sources. We use survey data collected with an innovative sampling design and a control function approach to address possible issues of endogeneity.
Communication is essential to making biotechnology and genomics relevant to developing countries and poor people. Few would disagree with that. But many are sceptical about public relations efforts to impose inappropriate technological ‘solutions’ on developing countries. This paper is a partial reflection on how PR and advocacy ‘mixes’ can be understood and whether they can be useful to innovation in developing country contexts.