As Part of the Livestock Livelihood and Markets Project (LILI Markets), two innovation platforms were implanted in the project sites. First thought to be a mechanism to promote and enhance communication and networking across value chain actors as well as providing them with a platform for addressing common problems the platform, although new, has already surpassed its expected role; it has now become an important element of interaction and problem solving stage among the value chain actors, including the government.
Farm input subsidies are often criticised on economic and ecological grounds. The promotion of natural resource management (NRM) technologies is widely seen as more sustainable to increase agricultural productivity and food security. Relatively little is known about how input subsidies affect farmers’ decisions to adopt NRM technologies. There are concerns of incompatibility, because NRM technologies are one strategy to reduce the use of external inputs in intensive production systems.
This article addresses the impact of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) on food security among smallholder farmers in three countries of southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi). Southern Africa has suffered continued hunger despite a myriad of technological interventions that have been introduced in agriculture to address issues of food security, as well as poverty alleviation.
The impact of global warming on crop growth periods and yields has been evaluated by using crop models, which need to provide various kinds of input datasets and estimate numerous parameters before simulation. Direct studies on the changes of climatic factors on the observed crop growth and yield could provide a more simple and intuitive way for assessing the impact of climate change on crop production.
This publication presents the GEF-6 biodiversity strategy for 2014-2018. As the financial mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) the GEF provides funding to help countries implement the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, 2011-2020, and achieve the Aichi Targets. I am pleased that donors during the recently completed replenishment pledged $1.296 billion towards the biodiversity focal area for GEF-6, making it the largest individual focal area within the GEF.
The purpose of this report is to increase understanding of the nature of the challenges that agriculture and food systems are facing now and will face into the 21st century. Its analysis of 15 global trends provides insights into what is at stake and what needs to be done. Most of the trends are strongly interdependent and, combined, inform a set of 10 challenges to achieving food security and nutrition for all and making agriculture sustainable. ‘Business-as-usual’ is not an option.
This report aims at inspiring strategic thinking and actions to transform agrifood systems towards a sustainable, resilient and inclusive future, by building on both previous reports in the same series as well as on a comprehensive corporate strategic foresight exercise that also nurtured FAO Strategic Framework 2022–31. It analyses major drivers of agrifood systems and explores how their trends could determine alternative futures of agrifood, socioeconomic and environmental systems.
This report explores three different scenarios for the future of food and agriculture, based on alternative trends for key drivers, such as income growth and distribution, population growth, technical progress in agriculture, and climate change. Building on the report The future of food and agriculture – Trends and challenges, this publication provides scenario-based quantitative projections to 2050 for food and agriculture.
Encouraging the adoption and diffusion of low-carbon agricultural technology innovation is an important measure to cope with climate change, reduce environmental pollution, and achieve sustainable agricultural development. Based on evolutionary game theory, this paper establishes a game model among agricultural enterprises, government, and farmers and analyzes the dynamic evolutionary process and evolutionary stable strategies of the major stakeholders.
Long embraced by corporations who are driven only by the desire for profit, industrial agriculture wastes precious resources and spews millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year, exacerbating climate change and threatening the very earth and water on which we depend. However, this dominant system, from which Americans obtain most of their food, is being slowly supplanted by a new paradigm. The Emergent Agriculture is a collection of fourteen thematic essays on sustainability viewed through the lens of farming.