Food security is a critical challenge – the World Bank includes it among the eight global challenges to be addressed at scale in 2024. Climate shocks, economic instability and geopolitics have significantly impacted crop yields and food supply chains.
Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) and short organic supply chains have emerged as promising solutions for smallholder farmers to provide organic produce to nearby consumers. PGS is an institutional innovation that builds trust among producers, traders and consumers through a low-cost transparent and participatory certification mechanism. They have particularly gained a foothold among smallholder farmers in middle- income countries, where third-party certification costs are often unaffordable.
In India, Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) are considered as the most preferred institutional mechanism for enhancing productivity and income of farmers. This is based on the resounding success of a few farmer collectives that have aggregated their produce to realise better incomes. However, when efforts were made to scale up this interesting model across the country, several challenges emerged.
Meeting rising global demand for food and responding to changes such as climate change, globalization, and urbanization will thus require good policy, sustained investments, and innovation – not business as usual. Agricultural innovation enables the agriculture sector, farmers and rural entrepreneurs to adapt rapidly when challenges occur and to respond readily when new opportunities arise – for example in the fields of technology and markets.
La innovación se implementa en un entorno de objetivos de desarrollo productivo a través de un sistema que incluye incentivos, tecnología y redes público-privadas. El objetivo principal de este estudio es analizar la innovación en los agronegocios de El Oro y determinar cómo incide en la competitividad del sector agropecuario. La metodología utilizada en este estudio es descriptiva y documental, con carácter científico, además está enmarcada bajo el enfoque cuantitativo.
This research delves into the underlying impacts of farmers' innovative entrepreneurship on agricultural and rural economic development in China, adopting a dynamic and spatio-temporal perspective. The study utilizes panel data encompassing 30 provinces (cities and autonomous regions) from 2015 to 2020, with a systematic consideration of diversified spatial weight matrices.
In the rapidly changing context of agri-food systems, extension and advisory services (EAS) are expected to provide new roles and services that go well beyond the traditional production-related technology transfer. Consequently, pluralistic EAS systems with diverse actors have emerged with diverse actors, including private and civil society organisations. These multiple EAS actors must adopt innovative entrepreneurship models if they are to act proactively and respond to the increasing diversity of farmers’ demands while staying independent and sustainable.
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.
Facilitation has proved crucial for enabling the interaction of Agricultural Innovation System (AIS) actors to address the target and to innovate. This “Guide on training of facilitators of multi-actor agricultural innovation platform” is aimed at serving facilitators when multi-actor agricultural innovation platforms (MAIPs) are organized. Since MAIPs are still an emerging concept, there are not many cases to refer to.