BRAC is a global leader in creating large-scale opportunities for the poor. This chapter describes how small farmer innovations are being developed by BRACAgriculture and Food Security program. In collaboration with the Government and theInternational Agricultural Research Centers, the program aims to achieve food security and reduce hunger and malnutrition through increased environmentally sustainable agricultural production systems. The research focus is on cereal crops (rice andmaize), vegetables and oilseeds.
Decline farm product prices and the subsequent effect of diminishing farm income become a core factor of sustaining peasant agriculture in developing countries. The small holding agriculture concentrated on paddy and vegetables farming in Sri Lanka also suffered from the issue causing many threats to sustain the industry. Nearly 30 percent of the labour force in Sri Lanka occupied in agriculture and thus deteriorating farm income has become core issue in national development.
Development processes, economic growth and agricultural modernization affect women and men in different ways and have not been gender neutral. Women are highly involved in agriculture, but their contribution tends to be undervalued and overseen. Sustainable agricultural innovations may include trade-offs and negative side-effects for women and men, or different social groups, depending on the intervention type and local context. Promising solutions are often technology-focused and not necessarily developed with consideration of gender and social disparity aspects.
This chapter presents an analytic framework to identify agricultural innovations that are sustainable and suitable for the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the population. The framework contains a set of tools to collect and evaluate information on appropriate innovations based on relevant criteria. It considers the dimensions of environmental resilience, economic viability, and social sustainability, as well as technical sustainability considering important properties of the innovation itself.
Smallholders in Asia and Africa are affected by increasingly complex national and global ecological and economic changes. Agricultural innovation and technology shifts are critical among these forces of change and integration with services is increasingly facilitated through innovations in institutions. Here the authors focused mainly on innovation opportunities for small farmers, with a particular emphasis on marginalized small farm communities. The chapter elaborates on the concept of the ‘small farm’ and offers a synthesis of the findings of all the chapters in this volume.
Smallholders have begun to take advantage of a growing pool of investment in climate change mitigation. Meanwhile, early movers in this area are working to develop innovative models that will allow projects to be financially sustainable and scalable while benefiting local actors. This study focuses on two of these projects in East Africa, managed by Vi Agroforestry in Kenya and ECOTRUST in Uganda. They engaged in a participatory action research process to identify ways that local actors could take on expanded roles within the projects
This study addresses this particular research gap by adopting a multi-scale approach to understand how climatic and non-climatic stressors vary, and interact, across three spatial scales (household, community and district levels) to influence livelihood vulnerability of smallholder farming households in the Savannah zone of northern Ghana. This study across three case study villages utilises a series of participatory tools including semi-structured interviews, key informant interviews and focus group discussions.
This paper was synthesized from several scholarly literature and aimed at providing up-to-date information on climate change impacts, adaptation strategies, policies and institutional mechanisms that each agriculture subsector had put in place in dealing with climate change and its related issues in West Africa. For each subsector (crop, fishery and livestock), the current status, climate change impacts, mitigation and adaption strategies have been analyzed
There is a considerable shortage of improved seed in Ethiopia. Despite good reasons to invest in this market, private sector investments are not occurring. Using an institutional economics theoretical framework, this chapter analyzes the formal Ethiopian seed system and identifies transaction costs to find potential starting points for institutional innovations.
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.