Author: Beintema, Nienke M. Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 12
Book Description
The primary role of international public agricultural research is undoubtedly to address key social, environmental, and economic goals at the global level. Further, there is consensus that investment must be accelerated in research-based innovations focusing on sustainable food systems. And given the relatively weak situation of many national agricultural research systems in the global South, it is imperative to reach economies of scale in investments in international initiatives. It is not yet clear, however, how much additional investment is needed or how scarce resources should be allocated across priority research-for-development challenges. At the international level, growing consensus indicates that—in addition to increasing funding—far greater harmonization is needed in funding and executing research in order to more effectively tackle global agricultural research challenges. Growing opportunities for technology spillovers and research alliances to occur across national, regional, and international boundaries necessitates the ability to access new technological knowledge from a variety of sources. And since access to new technologies is closely related to the capacity to generate new technologies, the need to strengthen and harmonize national, regional, and global research systems becomes even more of a priority. Although the role, contributions, and impacts of the CGIAR have been analyzed by many authors, only a few have summarized the recent evolution of its financing. This note is intended to contribute to reflections on the CGIAR’s first 50 years, which it will celebrate in 2021, while also providing a useful reference for the current “One CGIAR” governance and management transformation.
Author: Lynam, John Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: 0896292126 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 459
Book Description
This book—prepared by Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI), which is led by IFPRI—offers a comprehensive perspective on the evolution, current status, and future goals of agricultural research and development in Africa, including analyses of the complex underlying issues and challenges involved, as well as insights into how they might be overcome. Agriculture in Africa south of the Sahara is at a prospective tipping point. Growth has accelerated in the past decade, but is unsustainable given increasing use of finite resources. The yield gap in African agriculture is significant, and scenarios on feeding the world’s population into the future highlight the need for Africa to expand its agricultural production. Agricultural Research in Africa: Investing in Future Harvests discusses the need to shift to a growth path based on increased productivity—as in the rest of the developing world— which is essential if Africa is to increase rural incomes and compete in both domestic and international markets. Such a shift ultimately requires building on evolving improvements that collectively translate to deepening rural innovation capacity.
Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 54
Book Description
This study was conducted to understand the evolution of agricultural mechanization in Nepal, specifically its determinants on both the demand and supply sides, as well as impacts on agricultural production and associations with broader economic transformation processes, in order to draw lessons that can be conveyed to other less mechanized countries. Mechanization levels in Nepal, a largely agricultural country, were relatively low until a few decades ago. However, significant mechanization growth, including the adoption of tractors, has occurred since the 1990s, against a backdrop of rising rural wages, particularly for plowing, combined with growing emigration and growth in key staple crop yields and overall broad agricultural production growth, as well as improved market access and participation. This growth in mechanization has taken place despite the general absence of direct government support or promotion. The growth of tractor use in the plains of the Terai zone has transformed agricultural production rather than inducing labor movement out of agriculture, raising overall returns to scale in intensification and enabling the cultivation of greater areas by medium smallholders than by resource-poor smallholders. Tractors have also facilitated the intensification of crop production per unit of land among very small farmers, enabling mechanization growth despite the continued decline in farm size, although these farmers may not have benefited as much as medium smallholders. Potential future research areas with policy relevance include mitigating accessibility constraints to tractor custom hiring services, identifying appropriate regulatory policies for mechanization, and providing complementary support to some smallholders who may not fully benefit from tractor adoption alone.
Author: Ronnie Vernooy Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134608608 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
Community seed banks first appeared towards the end of the 1980s, established with the support of international and national non-governmental organizations. This book is the first to provide a global review of their development and includes a wide range of case studies. Countries that pioneered various types of community seed banks include Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Zimbabwe. In the North, a particular type of community seed bank emerged known as a seed-savers network. Such networks were first established in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA before spreading to other countries. Over time, the number and diversity of seed banks has grown. In Nepal, for example, there are now more than 100 self-described community seed banks whose functions range from pure conservation to commercial seed production. In Brazil, community seed banks operate in various regions of the country. Surprisingly, despite 25 years of history and the rapid growth in number, organizational diversity and geographical coverage of community seed banks, recognition of their roles and contributions has remained scanty. The book reviews their history, evolution, experiences, successes and failures (and reasons why), challenges and prospects. It fills a significant gap in the literature on agricultural biodiversity and conservation, and their contribution to food sovereignty and security.
Author: Helen Anne Curry Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520973798 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 336
Book Description
Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity. Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.
Author: Mywish K. Maredia Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 48
Book Description
Assessing impacts of public investments has long captured the interest and attention of the development community. This paper presents the evolution of different methods and approaches used for ex ante appraisal, monitoring, project evaluation, and impact assessment over the last five decades. Among these tools, impact assessment (IA) conducted retrospectively comes closest to providing the proof of development effectiveness. It is defined as the systematic analysis of the significant or lasting changes in people's lives brought about by a given action or series of actions in relation to a counterfactual. There are three basic types of retrospective IAs: macro-level IAs that focus on the contribution of developmental efforts to an impact goal aggregated at a sector or a system level; micro-level impact evaluations (IEs) concerned with estimating the average effect of an intervention on outcomes at the beneficiary level; and micro-level ex post impact analysis concerned with total effects of a development effort after the outputs are scaled-up. Ex post IAs have evolved and expanded over the decades in both breadth and depth of analysis in response to evolving development themes and methodological advancements. The increased emphasis on learning from evaluations has also seen responses from both quantitative and qualitative camps of the evaluation community. The paper argues that generation of robust knowledge that feeds into making developmental policies and investment decisions requires a hierarchical and cumulative approach to "improving the proof" through rigorous and a variety of impact assessment methods applied incrementally at the project, program and system level. Subjecting as many development interventions as resources allow to rigorous impact assessment based on a common framework can help build a critical body of evidence on impacts of development interventions, which can then be subjected to meta-analyses to help assimilate results across different studies and build a knowledge base on what works and what does not.
Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 41
Book Description
Demand for mechanization in Nigeria is growing in a fairly consistent way predicted by economic theories. The farming system has intensified and the use of animal traction has grown at a substantial rate. Demand side factors considerably explain the low adoptions of tractors in Nigeria. Where demand is sufficient for tractors, the private sector has emerged over time as a more efficient provider of hiring services (particularly farmer-tofarmer services) than the public sector. Conditions are consistent with the hypotheses that, because of generally low support for the agricultural sector in Nigeria in the past few decades, agricultural mechanization (tractor use in particular) has remained low despite the declining share of the workforce engaged in the agricultural sector. Agricultural transformation in the form of a declining agricultural labor force has happened partly through the growth in the oil industry since the 1970s. Instead of inducing further exit from farming, tractor adoptions in Nigeria might have helped those who have remained in farming to start expanding their production scale. A knowledge gap, however, still remains regarding the dominance of large tractors and the potential effects of tractor adoptions on smallholders who have yet to adopt them.
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org. ISBN: 9251379998 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 56
Book Description
Well-funded agricultural research and development (R&D) systems play an important role in transforming agrifood systems and helping countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The advantages of investing in agricultural R&D are also clear from looking at the past, where a wide range of studies have clearly demonstrated the substantial benefits that resulted from investments in agricultural R&D. The importance of investing in R&D has also been highlighted by governments on numerous occasions in intergovernmental settings. Gathering, compiling and analysing multi-year, multi-country datasets on investments in agricultural R&D are complicated tasks that require a lot of meticulous work and dedication. Only a small number of groups have worked actively in this specialized area. In some cases, they have used different procedures for gathering data on public and private sector investments in agricultural research. This report reviews the current situation and trends regarding investments in agricultural R&D in the world and presents some clear results that emerge from recent studies.
Author: Uma Lele Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198755171 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 1063
Book Description
This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the 1970s, when CGIAR was established and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was created to recycle petrodollars. Despite numerous international consultations and an increased number of actors, there has been no real growth in international assistance, except for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The book concurrently focuses on the structural transformation of developing countries in Asia and Africa, with some making great strides in small farmer development and in achieving structural transformation of their economies. Some have also achieved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG2, but most have not. Not only are some countries, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lagging behind, but they face new challenges of climate change, competition from emerging countries, population pressure, urbanization, environmental decay, and dietary transition. Lagging developing countries need huge investments in human capital, and physical and institutional infrastructure, to take advantage of rapid change in technologies, but the role of international assistance in financial transfers has diminished. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only set many poorer countries back but starkly revealed the weaknesses of past strategies. Transformative changes are needed in developing countries with international cooperation to achieve better outcomes. Will change in the United States bring new opportunities for multilateral cooperation?"--
Author: Beintema, Nienke M.
Author: Lynam, John
Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki
Author: Ronnie Vernooy
Author: Helen Anne Curry
Author: Mywish K. Maredia
Author: Robert Flint Chandler
Author: Takeshima, Hiroyuki
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Author: Uma Lele