To determine whether a farmer’s accessibility predicts the delivery of extension services, this study used banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) disease-management advisory as a typical case with which to collect extension-delivery information from 690 farmers, distinguished by their respective accessibility. Cost–distance analysis was applied to define each farmer’s accessibility. The results revealed that a farmer’s accessibility does not predict extension delivery to that farmer in all forms of the examined extension parameters.
Innovations are fast changing the agricultural landscape driven by the increasing need to shift towards sustainable practices without sacrificing the productivity and profitability of farming. Innovations in technology, institutions, processes, and products have contributed to the growth of agriculture, globally and in developing countries including India and Africa, as observed in the cases of green revolution in cereals; and gene revolution in cotton.
The government of Rwanda is promoting agricultural intensification focused on the production of a small number of targeted commodities as a central strategy to pursue the joint policy goals of economic growth, food security and livelihood development. The dominant approach to increase the productive capacity of the land, crops and animal resources has been through large-scale land consolidation, soil fertility management, and the intensive use of biotechnology and external inputs.
The rapid transformation of agri-food value chains in Africa and other developing countries has important implications for economic growth and poverty reduction. Policy makers increasingly recognize this but there is a need for a better understanding of what value chain transformation entails and what the main policy options are. This paper provides an overview and analysis of different value chain models that have emerged in the past decades and reviews the literature on the main development implications.
This paper addresses four questions: · What lessons can be drawn from the "rise and decline" of NARS in Africa? · What can African research managers learn from some of the successful reforms of NARS in Asia and Latin America over the past 10 to 15 years? · What are the major challenges facing the NARS in the ASARECA region in the coming 10-20 years? · What are the critical reforms and the incentives needed to develop pluralistic, accountable, productive and financially self-sustaining NARS in AFRICA?
The slow adoption of new agricultural technologies is an important factor in explaining persistent productivity deficits among smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Farmers delay in particular the uptake of technology packages. Since knowledge constraints are an important barrier to adoption, effective extension approaches are key. In recent decades, extension systems in many SSA countries have moved towards decentralized “bottom-up” models involving farmers as active stakeholders.
If the world is to transition towards agrifood systems that are more sustainable and equitable, small-scale production systems will be key to progress. Large parts of the world depend on small-scale systems for maintaining food security and nutrition (Lowder, Sánchez and Bertini, 2021; Herrero et al., 2017). Despite this centrality, neither small-scale production systems nor small-scale producers have received due recognition under predominant agrifood systems paradigms.
The paper defines and explains the concept of gender equality in advisory services and discusses the opportunities that gender equality in RAS would potentially create for global and local food production, women’s economic empowerment, household food security and nutrition as well as the challenges in achieving this.
Rural advisory services (RAS) can play an important role in addressing gender inequalities. However, RAS programmes have often fallen short of expectations to design and implement relevant services to help rural women and men achieve food security and generate more income. This paper is based on an examination of a broad selection of existing literature on gender-sensitive RAS. It looks at gender-differentiated barriers in access to RAS and challenges of effectively targeting women family farmers when delivering these services.
This publication represents a synthesis of assessments of national agricultural innovation systems in countries of Central Asia, South Caucasus and Turkey. The first chapter gives an introduction of the project “Capacity Development for Analysis and Strengthening of Agricultural Innovation Systems in Central Asia and Turkey”, out of which the current publication reports about one of the project outputs achieved.