Le Touat-Gourara-Tidikelt est un très vaste espace, qui occupe près du quart la superficie du Sahara algérien. Il fait partie intégrante de la zone la plus aride du monde, aux contraintes naturelles particulièrement difficiles. Cet espace connu comme le « Pays des foggaras » était savamment exploité, depuis plus d’un millénaire, par les oasiens qui profitaient de la dynamique économique impulsée par le commerce transsaharien.
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.
The Raya valley in Tigray, where Alamata Woreda is located, has suitable climate and rich water resources, among others, to grow various tropical fruits. Development of fruits only started a few years ago (1996) with the Raya Valley Development Project and the OoARD (Office of Agriculture and Rural Development), mostly focusing on papaya. A participatory rural appraisal (PRA) study conducted by the Woreda stakeholders identified tropical fruits as a potential marketable commodity in 2005.
Ethiopian agriculture is changing as new actors, relationships, and policies influence the ways in which small-scale, resource-poor farmers access and use information and knowledge in their agricultural production decisions. Although these changes suggest new opportunities for smallholders, too little is known about how changes will ultimately improve the wellbeing of smallholders in Ethiopia. The authors of this paper examine whether these changes are improving the ability of smallholders to innovate and thus improve their own welfare.
Rural growth is seen as an engine to drive the economy of developing countries and the use of Agriculture Market Information Services (AMIS) is believed to enable this growth. This paper is based on a literature study and investigates the spread and use of AMIS in the least developed countries (n=49) in terms of users, management, funding, infrastructure, and data. This paper investigates success as well as failure aspects, and discuss the role of new technologies.
Bure district has a diverse ago-ecology, different soil types, a relatively long rainy season and a number of rivers and streams for irrigation. Therefore, it has suitable tract of land to grow temperate, subtropical and tropical fruit crops. In 2007, fruits were identified as a potential marketable commodity by the stakeholders participating in the IPMS project. They diagnosed that farmers had limited orchard management knowledge and skill and were growing locally available less productive and low quality fruit varieties.
As Part of the Livestock Livelihood and Markets Project (LILI Markets), two innovation platforms were implanted in the project sites. First thought to be a mechanism to promote and enhance communication and networking across value chain actors as well as providing them with a platform for addressing common problems the platform, although new, has already surpassed its expected role; it has now become an important element of interaction and problem solving stage among the value chain actors, including the government.
Most of today’s information services on the web are designed for PC users. There are few services fit to be accessed by mobile devices. In the countryside of China, most of the mobile phone users can not access the Internet. For this reason, was developed a General Agriculture Mobile Service Platform. The Platform is designed to make these information services fit to be accessed by mobile users, and to make those mobile phone users can use these services without Internet connection.
To give more attention to the normative character of sustainable development, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and Food Quality requested for a participatory approach to evaluate Dutch agriculture, which was characterized by stakeholder workshops, dialogue, and learning. This article describes and reflects on this approach, using the Fourth Generation Evaluation framework developed by Guba and Lincoln (Fourth generation evaluation, 1989).
Participatory varietal selection (PVS) is a recent approach increasingly being used in developing countries to make the farmers choose the best suited variety for their locality. Sugarcane Breeding Institute, Coimbatore implemented this participatory approach in M.R.K. Cooperative Sugar Mills Ltd., Sethiathope, Tamil Nadu during 2002 to 2006. Participatory rural appraisal and agro-eco system analysis were done with the participation of farmers to assess the situation and identify the needs of sugarcane growers.