With 20% of the world's population but just 7% of the arable land, China has invested heavily in crop biotechnology to increase agricultural productivity. We examine research on insect-resistant genetically engineered (IRGE) crops in China, including strategies to promote their sustainable use. IRGE cotton, rice, and corn lines have been developed and proven efficacious for controlling lepidopteran crop pests. Ecological impact studies have demonstrated conservation of natural enemies of crop pests and halo suppression of crop-pest populations on a local scale.
Precision farming enables agricultural management decisions to be tailored spatially and temporally. Site-specific sensing, sampling, and managing allow farmers to treat a field as a heterogeneous entity. Through targeted use of in- puts, precision farming reduces waste, thereby cutting both private variable costs and the environmental costs such as those of agrichemical residuals. At present, large farms in developed countries are the main adopters of pre- cision farming.
International agricultural research is often motivated by the potential benefits it could bring to smallholder farmers in developing countries. A recent experimental literature has emerged on why innovations resulting from such research, which often focuses on yield enhancement, fail to be adopted due to either external or internal constraints. This article reviews this literature, focusing on the traits of the different technologies and their complexity and distinguishing between yield-enhancing, variance-reducing, and water- or labor-reducing technologies.
Though Odisha is India’s top sweetpotato-producing state, most farmers grow low-yielding varieties of limited nutritional value. The Odisha Directorate of Horticulture and the International Potato Center (CIP) spent four years promoting improved varieties and good agricultural practices in four districts of Odisha, resulting in a 25 per cent growth in the area dedicated to the crop, a 17 per cent increase in farm productivity, and a 40 per cent increase in farmer incomes within the project areas; as well as the introduction of a nutritious, orange-fleshed sweetpotato variety.
Capacity building for integrating gender in research and development (R&D) on agricultural innovations often remains with organizing single gender training. Alternatively, it is often limited to hiring a gender specialist to allocate a small amount of her/his time to the project. This has proofed to be ineffective and a heavy burden for gender specialists. This success story presents an innovative approach to capacity development, which successfully changed agricultural researchers’ attitude to gender in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus in Vietnam.
While livestock constitute a strategic sector to reduce poverty and enhance growth in developing countries, decision makers often lack data reflecting the diversity of livestock functions and systems. The authors therefore mobilised the Livestock Sector Investment Policy Toolkit to assess the economic contributions of livestock in Zambia. Valuing their plural contributions by system, we found that mixed rainfed systems were the main contributors to added value, even if specialised intensive systems provided around 45% of meat and milk production.
This guide on Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning was prepared under the project Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (CDAIS), a global partnership (Agrinatura, FAO and eight pilot countries) that aims to strengthen the capacity of countries and key stakeholders to innovate in complex agricultural systems, thereby achieving improved rural livelihoods. CDAIS uses a continuous learning cycle approach to support national agricultural innovation systems in eight countries in Africa, in Asia and Central America.
This document is accompanyng the volume Public Agricultural Research in an Era of Transformation: The Challenge of Agri-Food System Innovation (available in TAPipedia here), which provides some of the groundwork in answering the question of how the CGIAR system and other public agricultural research organisations should adapt and respond to an era of transformation framed by the SDGs.
Este folleto describe brevemente el proyecto "Desarrollo de Capacidades para los Sistemas de Innovación Agrícola en El Salvador", implementado por la FAO en conjunto con el Centro Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria y Forestal “Enrique Álvarez Córdova” (CENTA), del Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería (
This publication describes the activities carried out in the tripartite event ‘Transforming Nutrition-Sensitive Value Chain Development in the Pacific Islands.” It was implemented by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in collaboration with MORDI Tonga Trust, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Pacific Islands Private Sector Organisation (PIPSO). The document starts discussing the main events and field trips that were realized after talk about the lessons learned and in the end brings some case studies and sucess stories.