Poor farmers seldom benefit from new agricultural technologies. In response, research and extension approaches based on agricultural innovation systems are popular. Often agricultural research organisations are the network brokers, facilitating the emergence of the innovation system. Based on an analysis of the Sustainable Modernization of Traditional Agriculture (MasAgro) initiative in Mexico, this viewpoint suggests that such organisations are more often suitable network brokers when the objective is the development and scaling out of a technology by itself.
IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2016, and highlights challenges and opportunities for 2017 at the global and regional levels. This year’s report looks at the impact of rapid urban growth on food security and nutrition, and considers how food systems can be reshaped to benefit both urban and rural populations. Drawing on recent research, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider a range of timely questions:
■ What do we know about the impacts of urbanization on hunger and nutrition?
This paper characterises some of the main issues confronting water-catchment managing in a climate-changing world and addresses wide-spread concerns about the lack of connectivity between science, policy making and implementation. The paper’s arguments are ‘framed’ within a paradigm of systemic and adaptive governing, regulating, planning and managing understood as a nested systemic hierarchy. It is argued that climate change adaptation is best understood as a coevolutionary dynamic, principally, but not exclusively between human beings and the biophysical world.
This report assesses trends in investments, human resource capacity, and outputs in agricultural research in SSA, excluding the private (for-profit) sector. The analysis uses information collected by Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI)—led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) within the portfolio of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM).
This concept note has been developed within the context of the EU-funded CDAIS project, which is jointly implemented by AGRINATURA-EEIG and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to support the TAP Action Plan in eight pilot countries in Africa (Angola, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Rwanda), Asia (Bangladesh, Laos) and Central America (Guatemala, Honduras) .
The poster briefs the introducing and utility of education materials and teaching notes on multi‐stakeholder innovation processes and how they work, results and outputs and who the legacy products are useful for.
The poster briefs the introducing and utility of tools and training materials to help to mainstream gender in Humidtropics activities, how they work, results and outputs and who the legacy products are useful for.
The sustainable agricultural intensification research and learning in Africa (SAIRLA) project is a five-year program (2015–2020) funded by the UK Department of International Development. The project seeks to generate new evidence and design tools to enable governments, investors and other key actors to deliver more effective policies and investments in sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI) that strengthen the capacity of poorer farmers’, especially women and young people, to access and benefit from SAI.
Between 2012 and 2016, in collaboration with research and development partners, ILRI undertook specific action research and capacity development interventions to address identified challenges and generate evidence for wider applicability along the pig value chain. The work was funded by three major bilateral donors, the European Commission/International Fund for Agricultural Development (EC/IFAD) and Irish Aid.
Good agricultural practices (GAPs) are an indispensable tool for risk management due to the close relationship between agriculture and climate, as well as the climate variability currently being experienced. The implementation of these tools, however, involves fostering innovation, increasing knowledge and giving stakeholders, small producers in particular, a holistic view, so that they may improve their production systems, increase their resilience, and ensure their sustainability.