This Charter defines the general conditions and obligations of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) and its Partners, and sets forth the governance structure for voluntary cooperation by TAP Partners.
Based on three regional needs assessments, a strategic Action Plan has been formulated and adopted by the Partner Assembly of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP), held in China in September 2013. It defines the outcomes, outputs and activities of TAP, which are considered instrumental for facilitating effective and sustainable Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems in tropical areas.
This paper provides background information and introduce the topics of the conference "Innovation systems for food security and nutrition: understanding the capacities needed". Organized by the Tropical Agriculture Platform, the conference aimes at bringing together the issues of capacity development, agricultural innovation, and food security and nutrition with the objective of developing recommendations for policy-making.
This paper has been prepared under the guidelines provided by the TAP Secretariat at the FAO, as a contribution to the G20 initiative TAP, which includes near 40 partners and is facilitated by FAO. Its purpose is to provide a Regional synthesis report on capacity needs assessment for agricultural innovation, with capacity gaps identified and analyzed, including recommendations to strengthen agricultural innovation systems (AIS) and draft policy recommendations to address the capacity gaps.
Rural Advisory Services (RAS) are increasingly recognised as critical to agricultural and rural development. They provide rural communities with wide range of skills and knowledge and facilitate their interactions among the different actors to help them access support and services required for improving their livelihoods. Family Farmers are one of the important clients of RAS as they are the most predominant type of farmers worldwide.
Traditional approaches to innovation systems policymaking and governance often focus exclusively on the central provision of services, regulations, fiscal measures, and subsidies.
Feeding an additional three billion people over the next four decades, along with providing food security for another one billion people that are currently hungry or malnourished, is a huge challenge. Meeting those goals in a context of land and water scarcity, climate change, and declining crop yields will require another giant leap in agricultural innovation. The aim of this paper is to stimulate a dialogue on what new approaches might be needed to meet these needs and how innovative funding mechanisms could play a role.
The paper uses a stochastic frontier analysis of production functions to estimate the level of technical efficiency in agriculture for a panel of 29 developing countries in Africa and Asia between 1994 and 2000. In addition, the paper examines how different components of an agricultural innovation system interact to determine the estimated technical inefficiencies.The paper has been presented at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Birmingham, AL, February 4-7, 2012.
This paper explores the use of actor-oriented approaches in natural resource-based development. It begins by reviewing the need to bring an analysis of actor linkages, coalitions and information flows higher on the agenda in planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. Various tools which could assist in doing this are introduced and their use is illustrated in case studies of natural resource-based research and development (R&D) projects in Nepal and Bangladesh.
In the framework of a wide Foresight process, launched by the Standing Committee on Agricultural Research (SCAR) and aiming to identify possible scenarios for European agriculture in a 20-year perspective, DG RTD/E of the European Commission established a high-level Consultancy Expert Group (CEG) that analysed and synthesised foresight information in order to provide research policy orientations, tacking stock of the report from the first Foresight Expert Group (FEG) published in February 2007.