IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2016, and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2017 at the global and regional levels. This year’s report looks at the impact of rapid urban growth on food security and nutrition, and considers how food systems can be reshaped to benefit both urban and rural populations. Drawing on recent research, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider a range of timely questions:
■ What do we know about the impacts of urbanization on hunger and nutrition?
The Australian story of farmer innovation in Conservation Agriculture reveals a complex interplay of policy, economics, science, and farming. Farmer experimentation with Conservation Agriculture began in the 1960's and has continued to this day where around 80%-90% of Australia's 23.5 million hectares of winter crops are now grown using Conservation Agriculture principles. This remarkable achievement is the result of both sustained investment in agricultural research and development and farmer innovation.
This study identifies systemic problems in the New Zealand Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) in relation to the AIS capacity to enact a co-innovation approach, in which all relevant actors in the agricultural sector contribute to combined technological, social and institutional change. Systemic problems are factors that negatively influence the direction and speed of co-innovation and impede the development and functioning of innovation systems. The contribution in the paper is twofold.
An analysis of the impact of simulation modelling in three diverse crop-livestock improvement projects in Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) reveals benefits across a range of aspects including identification of objectives, design and implementation of experimental programs, effectiveness of participatory research with smallholder farmers, implementation of system change and scaling-out of results. In planning change, farmers must consider complex interactions within both biophysical and socioeconomic aspects of their crop and animal production activities.
This Thematic Research Note reviews the evolution of collective action among smallholders. It assesses determinants of their success such as incentives, capacities, and social impediments. The Note also discusses lessons and options for future action. These include lessons from collective action for market participation by African smallholders, value chain penetration by developed country farmers, and natural resources management among pastoralist communities.
Public-private partnerships are a new way of carrying out research and development (R&D) in Latin America's agricultural sector. These partnerships spur innovation for agricultural development and have various advantages over other institutional arrangements fostering R&D. This report summarizes the experiences of a research project that analyzed 125 public-private research partnerships (PPPs) in 12 Latin American countries. The analysis indicates that several types of partnerships have emerged in response to the various needs of the different partners.
Africa RISING (AR) is a research-for-development program that aims to create opportunities for smallholder farmers to move out of hunger and poverty through sustainable intensification of their farming systems.
Esta investigación tiene como objetivo proponer un modelo de asociatividad en cadena productiva de las micro, pequeñas y medianas empresas (MIPYMES) agroindustriales de cítricos en el norte del estado de Veracruz, México, con el propósito de explicar en qué medida los actores directos, los servicios de apoyo, el entorno, las relaciones y las políticas de gobierno determinan la asociatividad en la cadena productiva. La problemática que origina esta investigación es el desconocimiento del funcionamiento de las MIPYMES agroindustriales de cítricos en esta zona del país.
The present research aimed at investigating the effect of communication channels on the economic success of early profitable and entrepreneur small and medium enterprises in the agricultural sector. It was an applied research in which the descriptive-survey method was used. The research sample included 356 founders of entrepreneur small and medium enterprises (at the time of conducting the research) in the Markazi province, Iran, among which 100 founders were selected according to the Cochran formulation using the stratified random sampling method.
The present essay aims to present a partial view of the evolution of thought on business management and economics of organizations applied to agriculture and identifies perspectives for empirical studies. The paper contains four topics. Following this introduction, the second part revisits the concept of agribusiness systems, the third part presents the institutional/property rights perspective and contractual approach, and part four suggests research issues in the field of economics of organizations