This paper presents an overview of current opportunities and challenges facing efforts to increase the impact of rural and agricultural extension. The starting point for this analysis is in recognition that the days when agricultural extension was synonymous with the work of public sector agencies are over.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
Present-day society asks more from agriculture than just the production of food. Agriculture is now required to be concerned with the quality of food, ecosystem services, inclusion of marginalized populations, revitalization of rural territories, energy production, etc. This opening up of the future of agriculture encourages rural actors to experiment with new farming systems, using imagination, creativity and determination to replace dominant models. At the same time, low-cost mass-production systems continue on their way, with promises of a future based on green technologies.
Beyond the City evaluates the contribution of rural development and policies to growth, poverty alleviation, and environmental degradation in the rest of the economy, as well as in the rural space. This title brings together new theoretical and empirical treatments of the links between rural and national development. New findings and are combined with existing literature to enhance our understanding of the how rural economic activities contribute to various aspects of national development.
The purpose of this sourcebook is to pull together into a single document a collection of common sense tips and recommendations based on actual practices and experience around the world.
This work summarizes background papers prepared for the World Bank Group with significant input from government counterparts and other development partners. It takes stock of major recent developments and argues that a lot has been achieved in the last decade in terms of production of commodities for export and food consumption, with favorable impact on rural poverty reduction. It also argues that the two factors driving the recent agricultural performance, namely favorable international prices and expansion of the agricultural frontier, have reached their limits.
Agriculture remains fundamental for Nicaragua from both a macroeconomic and social view. It is the largest sector of the Nicaraguan economy, and it remains the single biggest employer with around 30 percent of the labor force and including processed foods, like meat and sugar, agriculture accounts for around 40 percent of total exports value. Nicaragua appears to be gradually losing competitive edge of some of its key agricultural exports within the most important export markets.
Agricultural Innovation Marketplace - South-South Cooperation Beyond Theory provides a thorough discussion of the creation, the current status, and future of the Agriculture Innovation Marketplace (The MKTPlace), an international, open partnership aiming to contribute to agricultural development in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Using the recent success of Brazilian agriculture, this partnership seeks to learn from those achievements, financing and organizing projects in other developing countries.
The main objective of the Guidelines is to provide a non-binding complement to other guidelines and offer advice to RDP evaluation stakeholders on how to carry out the evaluation activities for answering the common evaluation questions related to innovation. Since the RDP’s effects on innovation in rural areas can be expected to take place, most likely, in the long-term, the guidelines focus in particular on those evaluation related activities, which will be reported in the AIR in 2019 and in the ex post evaluation. The Guidelines are structured in three parts:
L'innovation est souvent présentée comme l'un des principaux leviers pour promouvoir un développement plus durable et plus inclusif. Dans les domaines de l'agriculture et de l'alimentation, l'innovation est marquée par des spécificités liées à sa relation à la nature, mais aussi à la grande diversité d'acteurs concernés, depuis les agriculteurs jusqu'aux consommateurs, en passant par les services de recherche et de développement.