Background
Weather risk is a serious issue in the African small farm sector that will further increase due to climate change. Farmers typically react by using low amounts of agricultural inputs. Low input use can help to minimize financial loss in bad years, but is also associated with low average yield and income. Increasing small farm productivity and income is an important prerequisite for rural poverty reduction and food security. Crop insurance could incentivize farmers to increase their input use, but indemnity-based crop insurance programs are plagued by market failures.
Sustainable intensification of agriculture will have to build on various innovations, but synergies between different types of technologies are not yet sufficiently understood. We use representative data from small farms in Kenya and propensity score matching to compare effects of input-intensive technologies and natural resource management practices on household income. When adopted in combination, positive income effects tend to be larger than when individual technologies are adopted alone.
Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers and a stochastic frontier approach, we show that participation in supermarket channels increases mean technical efficiency by 19%. This gain is bigger at lower levels of efficiency, suggesting the potential for positive income distribution effects.
Most micro-level studies on the impact of agricultural technologies build on cross-section data, which can lead to unreliable impact estimates. Here, we use panel data covering two time periods to estimate the impact of tissue culture (TC) banana technology in the Kenyan small farm sector. TC banana is an interesting case, because previous impact studies showed mixed results. We combine propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimator to control for selection bias and account for temporal impact variability.
Grown in Jamaica since the days of slavery, food yams are major staples in local diets and a significant non-traditional export crop. The cultivation system used today is the same as 300 years ago, with alleged unsustainable practices. A new cultivation system called minisett was introduced in 1985 but the adoption rate twenty four years later is extremely low.
This report explores the role of rural networks in enhancing innovation processes, questioning the features of the agricultural/rural networks could enhance farmers’ ability to co-innovate in cooperation with other actors. The prospect of this investigation is also to provide interesting and significant experiences that constitute examples for the ‘European Innovation Partnership’ by increasing farmers’ capacities to create, test, implement and evaluate innovations in cooperation with other rural actors.
This paper reviews the experience of the Biodiversity Consortium at the Philippine site in conducting research to develop tools and approaches to improve biodiversity conservation with the active involvement of the communities that live near the Mt. Kitanglad Range Nature Park. The following section discusses the global setting of Integrated Conservation Development Projects (ICDP) , highlights some of the key lessons learned so far, and proposes a theoretical framework.
This capacity building material is developed in response to requests made by small-scale farmers and
relevant stakeholders in Malawi to support their capacity development for the implementation of Farmers’
Rights in the country. This capacity building material is intended, mainly, for small-scale farmers, local leaders
that live and depend directly on family farming; farmers’ organizations and decision makers, including the
Ministry of Agriculture; the Malawi Plant Genetic Resource Centre; agricultural research institutes; and the
El Foro Global de la Investigación Agrícola- GFAR, el Programa Colaborativo de Fitomejoramiento Participativo en Mesoamérica, implementado en comunidades de la Sierra de los Cuchumatanes por la Asociación de Organizaciones de los Cuchumatanes –ASOCUCH, y la Fundación para la Innovación Tecnológica Agropecuaria y Forestal FUNDIT, con financiamiento del Fondo de Desarrollo de Noruega presentan este material de capacitación para las comunidades indígenas y locales agrícolas sobre un tema que tiene gran relevancia en el mundo de hoy: la necesidad e importancia de reconocer e implementar los der