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 report presents the impact and lessons learned from the Andhra Pradesh Drought Adaptation Initiative (APDAI). The APDAI was implemented as a package of pilot activities in two dryland districts in Andhra Pradesh (Anantapur and Mahbubnagar) with the aim of developing and testing approaches for natural resource-based economic activities to better respond to current climate variability and long-term consequences of climate change. The report discusses how innovations are being scaled up through integration into regular government programs for greater outreach.
One of the most important challenges for the researchers in the 21st Century is related to global heating and climate change that can have as consequence the intensification of natural hazards. Another problem of changes in the Earth's climate is its impact in the agriculture production. In this scenario, application of statistical models as well as development of new methods become very important to aid in the analyses of climate from ground-based stations and outputs of forecasting models. Additionally, remote sensing images have been used to improve the monitoring of crop yields.
L’agroécologie s’inscrit dans le registre de l’écologie, qui s’intéresse aux interactions - et à leurs conséquences - entre l’homme et son milieu, en tentant de minimiser les effets négatifs de certaines des activités humaines. Elle vise la préservation de l’environnement, le renouvellement durable des ressources naturelles nécessaire à la production (eau, sol, biodiversité...) et l’économie d’utilisation des ressources non renouvelables.
The purpose of this article is to investigate effective reformism: strategies that innovation networks deploy to create changes in their environment in order to establish a more conducive context for the realization and durable embedding of their innovation projects. Using a case study approach, effective reformism efforts are analyzed in a technological innovation trajectory related to the implementation of a new poultry husbandry system and an organizational innovation trajectory concerning new ways of co-operation among individual farms to establish economies of scale.
This case study describes the history and business model of the Rural and Community Bank (RCB) network in Ghana, analyzes its performance, identifies key issues, and makes recommendations on the way forward. The study analyzes the service delivery and financial performance of the RCBs. Before the establishment of RCBs in the late 1970s and the subsequent expansion of other service providers into rural areas, access to institutional credit for farm and nonfarm activities was scarce. The main sources of credit were moneylenders and traders that charged very high interest rates.
Although Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the worst nutrition indicators in the world, nutrition remains a low priority on the policy agendas of many African governments. This despite the fact that proven interventions are known and available and that investment in them is considered a cost-effective strategy for poverty reduction. This case study is one in a series seeking to understand (1) what keeps African governments from committing fully to reducing malnutrition, and (2) what is required for full commitment.
Over the last 10 years much has been written about the role of the private sector as part of a more widely-conceived notion of agricultural sector capacity for innovation and development. This paper discusses the emergence of a new class of private enterprise in East Africa that would seem to have an important role in efforts to tackle poverty reduction and food security. These organisations appear to occupy a niche that sits between mainstream for-profit enterprises and the developmental activities of government programmes, NGOs and development projects.
This report assesses the impact of participation in farmer organizations (FOs) on food security of rural households in Cambodia. The study is particularly set out to following: (1) examine FOs’ roles and operation and challenges for improving household’s food security; (2) analyze household’s characteristics that determine participation in FOs; (3) assess the impact of FOs on food security and livelihood of the rural poor; and (4) provide specific recommendations for changes in relevant legal acts and regulatory frameworks associated with FOs.
In Cameroon, women as the primary gatherers and traders of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) have limited access to processing technologies, marketing strategies and market information. The objective of this paper is to explore how CIFOR research and capacity building implemented from 2000 have been perceived by Cameroonian traders. An evaluation of the program took place in 2006 with thirty-eight traders out of seventy-two traders trained. Of the traders initially interviewed, 95 percent of them were women.