Developing competitive agro-industries is crucial for generating employment and income opportunities. It also contributes to enhancing the quality of, and the demand for, farm products. Agro-industries have the potential to provide employment for the rural population not only in farming, but also in off-farm activities such as handling, packaging, processing, transporting and marketing of food and agricultural products. There are clear indications that agro- industriesare having a significant global impact on economic development and poverty reduction, in both urban and rural communities.
The biodiversity of food plants is vital for humanity's capacity to meet sustainability challenges. This goal requires the rigorous integration of plant, environmental, social and health sciences. It is coalescing around four thematic cornerstones that are both interdisciplinary and policy relevant.
Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is based on the decentralization of selection in farmers’ fields and their involvement in decision-making at all steps of the breeding scheme. Despite the evidence of its benefits to develop population varieties adapted to diversified and local practices and conditions, such as organic farming, PPB is still not widely used. There is a need to share more broadly how the different programs have overcome scientific, practical, and organizational issues and produced a large number of positive outcomes.
La FAO a adopté une approche multidimensionnelle pour aider les exploitants familiaux pauvres à faire face aux difficultés qu’ils rencontrent au quotidien et renforcer leur capacité de création de revenus, afin de réduire la pauvreté rurale.
All over the world, one of the main purposes of extension is to increase the level of living standards of the rural family through non-formal education. Extension has a very crucial role to play in sustainable development and organic agriculture. For that reason, extension activity is implemented by different institutions. Extension systems worldwide are operated by governmental (86%) and non-governmental (14%) organizations. In this paper, allelopathy is accepted as a technology to implement for weed control and biological control of other useful traits.
En este artículo se presenta brevemente un panorama de las principales áreas temáticas abordadas en 14 encuentros realizados por la Asociación Latino-Iberoamericana de Gestión Tecnológica (ALTEC). Ester encuentros constituyen en uno de los espacios más importantes en esta región para la discusión de la investigación en la disciplina de la gestión de la innovación y la tecnología esa asociación desde 1985 hasta el año 2011.
The integration of ethics into the day-to-day work of research and innovation (R&I) is an important but difficult challenge. However, with the Aachen method for identification, classification and risk analysis of innovation-based problems (AMICAI) an approach from an engineering perspective is presented that enables the integration of ethical, legal and social implications into the day-to-day work of R&I practitioners.
One option for practically applying innovation systems thinking involves the establishment of innovation platforms (IPs). Such platforms are designed to bring together a variety of different stakeholders to exchange knowledge and resources and take action to solve common problems. Yet relatively little is known about how IPs operate in practice, particularly how power dynamics influence platform processes.This paper focuses on a research-for-development project in the Ethiopian highlands which established three IPs for improved natural resource management.
The research programme URBAL (Urban-driven Innovations for Sustainable Food Systems) (2018–2020), funded by Agropolis Fondation (France), Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso (France/Spain), and Fundazione Cariplo (Italy), and coordinated by CIRAD (France) and the Laurier Center for Sustainable Food Systems at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada), seeks to build and test a participatory methodology to identify and map the impact pathways of urban-driven innovations on all the dimensions of food systems sustainability.
Cotton, a major crop worldwide, is harvested in mechanized production systems once at the end of the growing season. To facilitate harvest and maximize fiber quality, the plants are typically defoliated when about 60% of the cotton bolls are open. Due to non-uniform maturation, the bolls that have opened early expose their fiber to weather until harvest, commonly for weeks, degrading fiber quality. Furthermore, high capacity harvesting machines are heavy, potentially compacting the soil that in turn reduces hydraulic conductivity in the wheel tracks and reducing yield.