This paper has been prepared under the guidelines provided by the TAP Secretariat at the FAO, as a contribution to the G20 initiative TAP, which includes near 40 partners and is facilitated by FAO. Its purpose is to provide a Regional synthesis report on capacity needs assessment for agricultural innovation, with capacity gaps identified and analyzed, including recommendations to strengthen agricultural innovation systems (AIS) and draft policy recommendations to address the capacity gaps.
El documento trata sobre las áreas de cultivo de frijol y maíz en Centroamérica y República Dominicana. Se abarcan también aspectos relacionados con su consumo, rendimiento, producción, tipo de productores, factores socioeconómicos y se hace uso de estadísticas para brindar la información respectiva.
“Before, people were not really interested” says Lionel Ozorio, president of the ATESCATEL seed cooperative, “but the CDAIS project has helped to bring people together and now we see much more buy-in.” This innovation partnership is building key functional capacities amongst producer associations, and now, bringing other stakeholders onboard to help improve nutritional security through innovative approaches in promoting a new bean variety with increased production potential and nutritional content.
This volume is devided into three parts. The first part describes on-going
processes of change within, or aside, the socio-technical regime that we have
inherited from the modernisation and industrialisation process of agriculture,
which took part after the second world-war. The focus in this part is on studies
dealing with the issue of agro-ecological initiatives born in niches of organic
movement, which are questioning the mainstream regime of industrialised
agriculture.
This paper, presented at the 8th European IFSA Symposium ( Workshop 6: "Change in knowledge systems and extension services: Role of the new actors") in 2008, discusses the FutureDairy project, which is developing more productive forage and feeding systems and testing technical innovations such as robotic milking in Australian pasture based dairy systems.
La R&D agricole considère aujourd’hui les innovations de terrain comme des sources d’idées et de références pour améliorer durablement les modes de production. La « traque de systèmes innovants » et l’évaluation de ces systèmes pour définir les plus performants du point de vue économique et agrienvironnemental nécessitent cependant un travail de mise au point méthodologique, auquel cet article vise à contribuer.
Depuis plusieurs décennies, la canne et la banane, monocultures fortement dépendantes des intrants, façonnent le paysage guadeloupéen de manière binaire : canne au Nord et banane au Sud. Depuis quelques années la production de bananes est dans une situation difficile avec l’évolution rapide du cadre régle- mentaire et du fonctionnement du marché de la banane. Les planteurs et les organisations agricoles doivent réfléchir à une nouvelle orientation des itinéraires techniques conventionnels.
The French Ministry of Agriculture has called for agro-ecological transitions that reconcile farming and the environment. In this review, we examine the transformations of farmers and AKIS (Agriculture Knowledge Innovation System) actors’ work during agro-ecological transitions, and argue that the content, organization, and aim of farmers’ work are influenced by agricultural training, agricultural development, and discussions between peers, research, and regulations. Our main findings concern those transformations.
Based on international literature, preliminary experiences in a three-country West African research programme, and on the disappointing impact of agricultural research on African farm innovation, the current paper argues that institutional change demands rethinking the pathways to innovation so as to acknowledge the role of rules, distribution of power and wealth, interaction and positions. The time is opportune: climate change, food insecurity, high food prices and concomitant riots are turning national food production into a political issue also for African leaders.
This report sets out the synthesis of work carried out within the framework of the Sahel and West Africa Club (SWAC) Secretariat Initiative on “The family economy and agricultural innovation: towards new partnerships”. The initiative aimed to stimulate analyses, collect field data and case studies that encourage debates between regional actors, with a view to informing the development of regional policies and actions in order to promote and strengthen producer access to agricultural innovation, where most producers are anchored in the family economy.