These presentations have been used during the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the side event "Strengthening Agricultural Innovation Systems for Family Farming. Multi-stakeholder processes to develop capacities to innovate for food and nutrition security", held on 17 October 2019.
The side event pointed out that:
- Innovation is the driving force that can transform food systems and lift family farmers out of poverty to help the world achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
This report describes the main themes and issues discussed during the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the side event "Strengthening Agricultural Innovation Systems for Family Farming. Multi-stakeholder processes to develop capacities to innovate for food and nutrition security", which took place on Thursday 17 October 2019 at FAO Headquarters (Rome, Italy).
Present refrigeration and cold transport technologies typically use either diesel fuel (expensive and a source of pollution) and/or electric power (often not available in rural areas). Promoting the expansion of existing technologies for cold-chain development will have the side effects of increasing pollution, greenhouse gas production and associated climate change. Clean cold-chain development is an environmentally sustainable way to achieve essential cooling and reduction in the post-harvest losses.
Looking at local learning capacity and systems of relations can help to understand the potential to develop innovation within a specific context. This work contributes to the definition of new actors who are developing innovation for sustainability in rural areas. The study focuses on the knowledge systems of farmers who are applying alternative breeding strategies: it uses a network approach to explore the knowledge system in which individual farmers are embedded in order to understand their specific relational features.
Nowadays, there are a number of projects tackling on challenges around which this study is based. For instance, the ultimate goal of the current project SKIN is to create a permanent stakeholders’ association on short food supply chain (SFSC) that works on the joint economic growth of the agricultural sector through the exchange of local food practices and through coaching sessions stimulating innovation. It creates a European network of best practices in SFSC that addresses the fragmentation of knowledge in the agricultural sector and supports bottom-up innovation initiatives.
On-farm agricultural innovation through incorporation of new technologies and practices requires access to resources such as knowledge, financial resources, training, and even emotional support, all of which require the support of different actors such as peers, advisors, and researchers. The literature has explored the support networks that farmers use and the overall importance ranking of different support actors, but it has not looked in detail at how these networks may differ for different farmers.
Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA) is a single-window institutional arrangement for technology and information dissemination at the district level and an attempt was made to assess the dairy extension system in the context of ATMA in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh during 2016. The study revealed that along with organized dairy extension services, ATMA is an important alternative to provide extension services to the dairy sector as animal husbandry sector is an existing allied sector for the ATMA.
This chapter examines the current state of agricultural extension reforms and their linkages to the agricultural research system reforms in India and identifies the policy options and strategic priorities for making it relevant, responsive, and efficient. It explores how the National Agriculture Research Systems (NARS) responded with its own set of reforms that were sought to increase its relevance and its linkages to the extension system reforms.
This paper examines the determinants of participation in an outsourced extension programs and its impact of smallholder farmers' net farm income in Msinga, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A multi-stage sampling technique was used to obtain cross-sectional farm-level data from a sample of 300 farm households, using a structured questionnaire for the interview. The determinants and impacts of participation were estimated using the propensity score matching (PSM) to account for sample selection bias.
In this paper, is first described the design and development process of a modular ICT application system called GeoFarmer. Geofarmer was designed to provide a means by which farmers can communicate their experiences, both positive and negative, with each other and with experts and consequently better manage their crops and farms. We designed GeoFarmer in a collaborative, incremental and iterative process in which user needs and preferences were paramount.