The government of Rwanda is promoting agricultural intensification focused on the production of a small number of targeted commodities as a central strategy to pursue the joint policy goals of economic growth, food security and livelihood development. The dominant approach to increase the productive capacity of the land, crops and animal resources has been through large-scale land consolidation, soil fertility management, and the intensive use of biotechnology and external inputs.
Even prior to COVID, there was a considerable push for food system transformation to achieve better nutrition and health as well as environmental and climate change outcomes. Recent years have seen a large number of high visibility and influential publications on food system transformation. Literature is emerging questioning the utility and scope of these analyses, particularly in terms of trade-offs among multiple objectives.
If the world is to transition towards agrifood systems that are more sustainable and equitable, small-scale production systems will be key to progress. Large parts of the world depend on small-scale systems for maintaining food security and nutrition (Lowder, Sánchez and Bertini, 2021; Herrero et al., 2017). Despite this centrality, neither small-scale production systems nor small-scale producers have received due recognition under predominant agrifood systems paradigms.
“Business as usual” is no longer an option for a food-secure future. Pastoralism can be an innovative system: a time-tested, undervalued alternative to high-input and resource-intensive farming, and a valuable lesson for the much needed evolution towards ‘farming with nature’, with largely-untapped potential for income growth and employment in marginal areas.
The rapid transformation of agri-food value chains in Africa and other developing countries has important implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. Policy makers increasingly recognize this but there is a need for a better understanding of what value chain transformation entails and what the main policy options are. This paper provides an overview and analysis of different value chain models that have emerged in the past decades and reviews the literature on the main development implications.
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have serious health and economic ramifications in Africa. This paper presents a technical position on demand and supply shocks associated with the COVID19 pandemic within the African context. We document the disruptions associated with containment measures implemented by various governments and their implications on labour mobility, import and export of food commodities, production and productivity of major staples and prices of food items.
Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research and development projects and programs with an innovation objective.
Este documento busca obtenern un mejor conocimiento sobre los mencionados mecanismos de articulación a mercados que sirvan de insumos para un diálogo informado entre los actores públicos y privados, así como para el intercambio de aprendizajes entre los miembros del Grupo de Diálogo Andino, por lo que se ha decidido la realización de un estudio de identificación y caracterización inicial de los mismos, cuyos resultados sean presentados ante el Grupo y sirvan además como experiencias de referencia en análisis posteriores de mayor profundidad
This working paper provides the following text as a abstract: