TAP and its partners carried out regional surveys in Asia, Africa and Central America to assess priorities, capacities and needs in national agricultural innovation systems. This document provides a Regional synthesis report on capacity needs assessment for agricultural innovation in Africa. FARA was selected as Recipient Organization by FAO to facilitate TAP implementation in Africa. This is mainly due to its position as the umbrella organization bringing together and forming coalitions of major regional stakeholders in agricultural research and development.
Transgenic maize was approved in Brazil in 2008/2009. In 2012, it occupied 73% of the country maize growing area. This high adoption rate confirms studies indicating that technology use has been the major driving force in Brazilian agriculture. Maize seed market in the world has been a concentrated sector. Although, when this sector is associated with transgenesis, this concentration increases sharply. In one side, there is the idea that companies can benefit from gains of scale and complementarities to maximize their efficiency in research and development (R&D).
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
This book represents the proceedings of the FAO international technical conference dedicated to Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries (ABDC-10) that took place in Guadalajara, Mexico on 1-4 March 2010. A major objective of the conference was to take stock of the application of biotechnologies across the different food and agricultural sectors in developing countries, in order to learn from the past and to identify options for the future to face the challenges of food insecurity, climate change and natural resource degradation.
Agricultural research continues to be a good investment. The studies show that investments in international and national agricultural research account for almost all of the total factor productivity (TFP) growth in SSA and large shares of agricultural growth globally. The existing agricultural research institutions have, on average, delivered rates of return to public investment above 30-40%, which is much higher than the 5-10% available to other public investments or the 2-5% cost of borrowing public funds.
The aim of this report is to provide a detailed review of documented social learning processes for climate changeand natural resource managementas described in peer-reviewed literature. Particular focus is on identifying (1) lessons and principles, (2) tools and approaches, (3) evaluation of social learning, as well as (4) concrete examples of impacts that social learning has contributed to.
The rise of new powers in development has generated much debate on the extent to which South–South Cooperation (SSC) constitutes a new paradigm of development more relevant to African needs or a disguise for a new form of imperialism. This paper critically examines the rise of Chinese and Brazilian technical and economic cooperation in African agriculture with two cases drawn from Ghana and Mozambique.
Brazil’s influence in agricultural development in Africa has become noticeable in recent years. South–South cooperation is one of the instruments for engagement, and affinities between Brazil and African countries are invoked to justify the transfer of technology and public policies. In this article, examines the case of one of Brazil’s development cooperation programs, More Food International (MFI), to illustrate why policy concepts and ideas that emerge in particular settings, such as family farming in Brazil, do not travel easily across space and socio-political realities.
Agricultural Innovation Marketplace - South-South Cooperation Beyond Theory provides a thorough discussion of the creation, the current status, and future of the Agriculture Innovation Marketplace (The MKTPlace), an international, open partnership aiming to contribute to agricultural development in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Using the recent success of Brazilian agriculture, this partnership seeks to learn from those achievements, financing and organizing projects in other developing countries.
This article addresses the impact of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) on food security among smallholder farmers in three countries of southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi). Southern Africa has suffered continued hunger despite a myriad of technological interventions that have been introduced in agriculture to address issues of food security, as well as poverty alleviation.