Fair Trade is a labeling initiative aimed at improving the lives of the poor in developing countries by offering better terms to producers and helping them to organize. Although Fair Trade-certified products still comprise a small share of the market—for example, Fair Trade-certified coffee exports were 1.8 percent of global coffee exports in 2009—growth has been very rapid over the past decade. Whether Fair Trade can achieve its intended goals has been hotly debated in academic and policy circles.
The poor performance of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa is known to be largely due to the lack of effective and client- responsive agricultural research and development that could generate appropriate technologies and innovations to stimulate the agricultural development process. As a contribution to address this challenge, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), developed a project for Strengthening Capacity for Agricultural Research and Development in Africa (SCARDA).
Little is known about effective ways to operationalize agricultural innovation processes. The authors of this article use the MasAgro program in Mexico (which aims to increase maize and wheat productivity, profitability and sustainability), and the experiences of middle level ‘hub managers’, to understand how innovation processes occur in heterogeneous and changing contexts. Their research shows how a program, that initially had a relatively narrow technology focus, evolved towards an innovation system approach.
In the past 50 years, the application of synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizer to farmland resulted in a dramatic increase in crop yields but with considerable negative impacts on the environment. New solutions are therefore needed to simultaneously increase yields while maintaining, or preferably decreasing, applied N to maximize the nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) of crops. In this review, we outline the definition of NUE, the selection and development of NUE crops, and the factors that interact with NUE.
The Global Innovation Index (GII) aims to capture the multi-dimensional facets of innovation by providing a rich database of detailed metrics for 127 economies, which represent 92.5% of the world’s population and 97.6% of global GDP. As Ban Ki-moon, the eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations, noted at the UN Economic and Social Council in 2013, the GII is a ‘unique tool for refining innovation policies . . . for providing an accurate picture on the role of science, technology and innovation in sustainable development’.
This paper presents a qualitative case study of a US based beef co-operative integrated to a VBSC. Was used an analytical framework of viability, sustainability and resilience to analyse impacts at farm-level. Our analysis highlights a number of positive effects on farm-level viability, sustainability and resilience including improvements to market orientation and price stability, among others which provide crucial insights for beef PO development in Ireland.
The objective of the article is to show how quality tools help the management of the supply chain in the agricultural sector, in this way quality management of the supply chain will improve operating results in companies that produce asparagus. The company is located in Trujillo, Peru; where the managers of each area were interviewed to determine the practices that will be used in the agribusiness sector.
This article addresses the impact of Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) on food security among smallholder farmers in three countries of southern Africa (Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi). Southern Africa has suffered continued hunger despite a myriad of technological interventions that have been introduced in agriculture to address issues of food security, as well as poverty alleviation.
The report specifically analyses the NIS in Peru and Colombia in the coffee and dairy sectors due to their economic importance for both countries and the large percentage of small producers in these sectors. In order to analyse the NIS, we have utilised an innovations systems approach to form the analytical framework. This framework focuses on four main areas – understanding the actors in the NIS, their roles and attitudes, the patterns of interaction of these actors, and the enabling environment with a focus on small producer inclusion.
This policy brief deals with the following points: (i) Given the importance of agriculture and the rural medium for countries’ growth and development, policy makers must strengthen the institutional structure of rural extension and increase public and private investment; (ii) Abundant natural resources, knowledge, technology, and extensionists are not enough.