This publication brings some sucessful experiencies in Digital Agriculture in African countries. In this issue of Spore, it is explored how digitalisation is providing women with better access to finance, information and markets, as well as opening up new opportunities for young entrepreneurs to develop apps and other digital services in agribusiness
Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
This brief describes the activies carried out by the project: South-South knowledge transfer strategies for scaling up pro-poor bamboo livelihoods, income generation and employment creation, and environmental management in Africa. The project, funded by the European Union and IFAD and implemented by the International Bamboo and Rattan Organisation (INBAR), targeted three countries – Ethiopia, Madagascar and Tanzania. This project aims to Contributing to higher productivity and incomes, it fully conformed to the strategy of the EU-IFAD agriculture research for development programme (AR4D).
This paper addresses the question how public-private partnerships (PPPs) function as systemic innovation policy instruments within agricultural innovation systems. Public-private partnerships are a popular government tool to promote innovations. However, the wide ranging nature of PPPs make it difficult to assess their effects beyond the direct impacts they generate for the partners.
Looking at local learning capacity and systems of relations can help to understand the potential to develop innovation within a specific context. This work contributes to the definition of new actors who are developing innovation for sustainability in rural areas. The study focuses on the knowledge systems of farmers who are applying alternative breeding strategies: it uses a network approach to explore the knowledge system in which individual farmers are embedded in order to understand their specific relational features.
Using a mixed methods approach, this study gathered the views of farmers, farm advisors, and industry representatives about integrated farm management in England and Wales, and interpreted these through a theoretical framework to judge the strength of the concept. Overall, the general principles of Integrated Farm Management were found to be coherent and familiar to most of our respondents. However, the concept performed poorly in terms of its resonance, simplicity of message, differentiation from other similar terms and theoretical utility.
The innovation of agricultural systems management is a determinant factor that guarantees adaptation to a new paradigm of global economy, environmental protection, and social requirements. The conventional concepts of innovation, applicable to new products and processes, do not consider many characteristics of the agricultural sector, such as social innovation and innovation resulting from new or renewed processes.
Innovative approaches are needed to shift towards more sustainable, equitable and healthy agri-food systems. Building on the increasing recognition of the relevance of traditional agroecological knowledge (TAeK) in sustainable food systems, this paper aims to describe innovative agri-food initiatives and explore how the use and valorization of TAeK may transform conventional agri-food systems. It employs a case-study approach in Spain, where we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 representatives of alternative agri-food initiatives.
The impulse towards a larger introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the agricultural field is currently experiencing its momentum, as digitisation has large potentialities to provide benefits for both producers and consumers; on the other hand, pushing technological solutions into a rural context encounters several challenges.
The economic globalisation has opened new pathways for commerce and triggered a logistical revolution, which in turn has produced enormous technological innovations. In this context, the role of startups is becoming increasingly crucial since they are positioning themselves as innovation enablers among large and small companies. Between these innovations, IoT, Big Data Analytics and Blockchain can be used in various domains, among which the logistics of the whole wine supply chain.