Since the Green Revolution, worldwide agriculture has been characterized by a typical top–down approach. The degree of autonomy, creativity, and responsibility of farmers has been limited by the continuous external inputs of chemicals, machinery, advice, subsidies and knowledge. The issue of sustainability has brought complexity and uncertainty to this mainly linear process of innovation, steering agriculture toward alternative models. Agroecology represents an innovative paradigm of agriculture in which external inputs are minimized, and the assets of the farm are greatly valued.
The well-being of the rural population globally has been associated with the performance and resilience of the agriculture sector. The sector continually requires new needs-based knowledge and technologies. It has become necessary to empower the rural communities through a wider bottom-up system that directly addresses their needs. This paper explores the application of little-used Participatory Livelihood Analysis for the adoption and up-scaling of its use in the assessment of agricultural-extension-needs for disadvantaged rural communities.
Private sector actors bring expertise, resources, and new perspectives to agricultural development, but the tendency to short-term approaches and market-based orientation has been unable to drive a systemic change in the development agenda. We explore how multi-stakeholder dialogues can capitalize on and trickle systemic change through private sector involvement. Analysis from the farmer-led irrigation development multi-stakeholder dialogue space (FLI-MDS) in Ghana shows the need for a physical and institutional space to cater for and merge different stakeholder interests.
To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, research concepts and empirical evi-dence are needed to upgrade smallholder activities within local value chains (LVCs) of many developing countries. Yet, comprehensive gender-sensitive investigations ofthe evolution and multiplicity of governance in whole food systems with parallel functioning of local and modern value chains (MVCs) are greatly underrepresented inthe scientific literature.
Access to and usage of smartphones for agricultural purposes amongst small-scale farmers in rural areas of developing countries is still limited. Smartphones may provide an opportunity to develop farmers’ capacities with specific applications offering fast access to continually updated and reliable information. This study develops a framework to investigate the cognitive and affective behavioural drivers of smallholder farmers´ intention to use a smartphone in a developing country context.
There is increasing demand for institutional reform in the agricultural sciences. This paper presents lessons from the content and directions in soil science research in India, to make a case for institutional reform in the agricultural sciences. It demonstrates how existing institutional and organizational contexts shape the research content of the soil sciences and its sub-disciplines. These contexts also shape the capacity of the soil sciences to understand and partner with other components of the wider natural resource management (NRM) innovation systems.
There are divergent views on what capacity development might mean in relation to agricultural biotechnology. The core of this debate is whether this should involve the development of human capital and research infrastructure, or whether it should encompass a wider range of activities which also include developing the capacity to use knowledge productively. This paper uses the innovation systems concept to shed light on this discussion, arguing that it is innovation capacity rather than science and technology capacity that has to be developed.
Innovation rests not only on discovery but also on cooperation and interactive learning. In agriculture, forestry and related sectors, multi-actor partnerships for ‘co-innovation’ occur in many forms, from international projects to informal ‘actor configurations’. Common attributes are that they include actors with ‘complementary forms of knowledge’ who collaborate in an innovation process, engage with a ‘larger periphery’ of stakeholders in the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System (AKIS) and are shaped by institutions.
The merger of Dow and DuPont, the acquisition of Syngenta by Chem- China, and the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer have recently reshaped the global seed and biotech industry and caused concern about growing mar- ket concentration. This review documents market concentration in seed and agricultural biotech markets and discusses its causes and impacts. The avail- able evidence suggests that concentration in seed markets varies strongly by crop and by country, while markets for biotech traits are considerably more concentrated.
The adoption of genome editing depends among others, on a clear and navigable regulatory framework that renders consistent decisions. Some countries like the United States decided to deregulate specific transgene-free genome edited products that could be created through traditional breeding and are not considered to be plant pests, while others are still challenged to fit emerging technologies in their regulatory system.