This document provides an overview of the Tropical Agriculture Platform and highlights its main goals and activities.
This flyer is about the AgriFood chain toolkit, which has been launched in 2013 by the CGIAR programme on Policies, institutions and markets.The AgriFood chain toolkit acts as a clearing house and learning platform – using the power of information and communication technologies to bring together people and resources.
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.
This paper analyzes the impact of participation in multi-stakeholder platforms (Plataformas) aimed at linking smallholder potato farmers to the market in the mountain region of Ecuador. It describes and evaluates the Plataformas’ program to determine whether it has been successful in linking farmers to higher-value markets and the effects that such connections have brought, particularly with regard to farmers’ welfare and to the environment. The analysis is run comparing a set of different and carefully constructed control groups to beneficiaries and using various specifications.
The purpose of this issues paper is to provide an overview of the issues, numbers, disputes, and approaches so that contributors to SOW11 can share a common framework and consider how the innovations they describe fit into the larger international discourse. The paper is structured as follows: • Section 2 describes diverse perspectives on food security that emphasize global supply chains to feed middle-class populations in cities; smallholder farmers who still supply much of the world; and smallholder farmers who are relatively disengaged in commercial markets.
This paper illustrates already practiced models and strategies of high impact innovations around the world with particular respect to India. The shown examples of innovative businesses were selected based on four criteria reflecting their innovative character. Firstly, innovations need to fulfil a value for the life of people which exceeds the mere use of the product. Secondly, it requires good quality products or service for an affordable price even for lower income groups.
With the rapid pace of climate change and its impact on food security and livelihoods, climate-smart agriculture is one strategy aiming to help farmers adopt more sustainable farming practices. This study looked at farmers’ adoption of agricultural innovations and the role of social networks in the process.
The problem being addressed during this session of the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2), which was held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in 2012, is how we can bring together the needed diversity – of stakeholders and approaches – and understand better a number of multidimensional and complex questions such as: How can we inform stakeholders on alternative future scenarios and debate the desirability, consequences, winners and losers of diverse scenarios? How to better combine quantitative analyses with qualitative arguments?
The CDAIS project, funded by the EU and jointly implemented by Agrinatura and FAO, enhances innovation in agriculture by improving the functional capacities of individuals, organizations and systems. It brings partners together and uses continuous learning cycles to address the challenges and opportunities in and around selected ‘innovation niche partnerships’ in eight pilot countries in Central America, Africa and Asia.
Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and treatment communities, contact farmers (CFs) serve as points-of-contacts between agents and other farmers. The intervention (Treatment) aims to address two pitfalls of the T&V model: i) infrequent extension agent visits, and ii) poor quality information.