Private sector actors bring expertise, resources, and new perspectives to agricultural development, but the tendency to short-term approaches and market-based orientation has been unable to drive a systemic change in the development agenda. We explore how multi-stakeholder dialogues can capitalize on and trickle systemic change through private sector involvement. Analysis from the farmer-led irrigation development multi-stakeholder dialogue space (FLI-MDS) in Ghana shows the need for a physical and institutional space to cater for and merge different stakeholder interests.
To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, research concepts and empirical evi-dence are needed to upgrade smallholder activities within local value chains (LVCs) of many developing countries. Yet, comprehensive gender-sensitive investigations ofthe evolution and multiplicity of governance in whole food systems with parallel functioning of local and modern value chains (MVCs) are greatly underrepresented inthe scientific literature.
Innovation rests not only on discovery but also on cooperation and interactive learning. In agriculture, forestry and related sectors, multi-actor partnerships for ‘co-innovation’ occur in many forms, from international projects to informal ‘actor configurations’. Common attributes are that they include actors with ‘complementary forms of knowledge’ who collaborate in an innovation process, engage with a ‘larger periphery’ of stakeholders in the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) and are shaped by institutions.
The merger of Dow and DuPont, the acquisition of Syngenta by Chem- China, and the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer have recently reshaped the global seed and biotech industry and caused concern about growing mar- ket concentration. This review documents market concentration in seed and agricultural biotech markets and discusses its causes and impacts. The avail- able evidence suggests that concentration in seed markets varies strongly by crop and by country, while markets for biotech traits are considerably more concentrated.
Though extension services have long since proved their value to agricultural production and farmer prosperity, their record in sub-Saharan Africa has been mixed. To study the impact of such programs on farmers' learning about agricultural technologies, we implemented a quasi-randomized controlled trial and collected detailed panel data among Malawian farmers. Based on those findings, we develop a two-stage learning framework, in which farmers formulate yield expectations before deciding on how much effort to invest in learning about these processes.
Since development agencies often implement interventions through collective-action groups such as farmer cooperatives and self-help groups, there is a need to understand how participation is affected by group-level and leader attributes. This study collected gender-disaggregated, quantitative and qualitative data on sixty-eight self-help groups in Zambia to understand the participation of men and women farmers in different crop-production activities. Results show that participation rates of men and women are the same across all maize production activities except harvesting.
The adoption of genome editing depends among others, on a clear and navigable regulatory framework that renders consistent decisions. Some countries like the United States decided to deregulate specific transgene-free genome edited products that could be created through traditional breeding and are not considered to be plant pests, while others are still challenged to fit emerging technologies in their regulatory system.
Agricultural production is a crucial and fundamental aspect of a stable society in China that depends heavily on the climate situation. With the desire to achieve future sustainable development, China’s government is taking actions to adapt to climate change and to ensure food self-sufficiency.
Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research and development projects and programs with an innovation objective.
The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, adoption simplifies and mischaracterises what happens during processes of technological change. In all but the very simplest cases, it is likely to be inadequate to capture the complex reconfiguration of social and technical components of a technological practice or system.