While vaccination campaigns against COVID-19 were launched worldwide, a drama has been unfolding in the Moroccan countryside. It has been marked, over the last couple of decades, by rapid agrarian transformation, manifestations of which have included expanding irrigation frontiers and the increasing growth of high-value crops. These dynamics rely strongly on female agricultural wageworkers. Although they earn low wages, their income is crucial and is used to care for loved ones by paying for school fees, rent, electricity, and medicines.
Le secteur agricole constitue une activité importante au Maroc, représentant 14 % du produit national brut et employant 40 % de la population active. Avec l’émergence de la pandémie de la Covid-19, il a été ébranlé par des incertitudes économiques et par la distanciation physique qui a accentué les contraintes du travail. Toutefois, l’agriculture s’est imposée comme une activité cruciale, puisqu’elle a continué à assurer l’approvisionnement alimentaire à des prix abordables.
This publication provides a collection of papers, commentaries, expert opinions and reflections on state-of-the-art innovation systems thinking and approaches in agriculture. It is the direct output of a CTA and WUR/CoS-SIS collaboration which had its genesis in an expert consultation on ‘Innovation Systems: Towards Effective Strategies in support of Smallholder Farmers’.
Land and property rights, migration, and citizenship are complex issues that cut across all social, economic, and political spheres of West Africa. This paper provides an overarching scoping of the most pressing contemporary issues related to land, migration, and citizenship, including how they intersect in various contexts and locations in West Africa. The way issues are analytically framed captures structural challenges and sets them against the regional and global meta-trends of which policy makers and practitioners should be aware for conflict-sensitive planning.
This paper was synthesized from several scholarly literature and aimed at providing up-to-date information on climate change impacts, adaptation strategies, policies and institutional mechanisms that each agriculture subsector had put in place in dealing with climate change and its related issues in West Africa. For each subsector (crop, fishery and livestock), the current status, climate change impacts, mitigation and adaption strategies have been analyzed
Following the food price crisis in 2008, African governments implemented policies aiming at crowding in investment in rice value chain upgrading to help domestic rice compete with imports. This study assess the state of rice value chain upgrading in West Africa by reviewing evidence on rice millers’ investment in semi-industrial and industrial milling technologies, contract farming and vertical integration during the post-crisis period 2009–2019. We find that upgrading is more dynamic in countries with high rice production and import bills and limited comparative advantage in demand.
Literature is scanty on how public agricultural investments can help reducing the impact of future challenges such as climate change and population pressure on national economies. The objective of this study is to assess the medium and long-term effects of alternative agricultural research and development investment scenarios on male and female employment in 14 African countries. The authors first estimate the effects of agricultural investment scenarios on the overall GDP growth of a given country using partial and general equilibrium models.
Cet article analyse un processus d’innovation dans la filière arachide au Sénégal entre 1999 et 2016. L’accent porte sur la mise en évidence des facteurs décisifs dans l’émergence d’un nouveau réseau de coopératives semencières au Sénégal sous l’impulsion de l’organisation de producteurs Asprodeb. L’analyse est basée sur la théorie du changement qui accorde une place importante aux relations entre les innovations techniques et leur contexte politique et social.
This report describes issues presented and discussed at a workshop held in Rwanda from 6 - 8 September 2012, focused on strengthening capacity in agricultural innovation in post-conflict and protracted crisis (2PC) countries. It was the first workshop of its kind that attempted to bring participants from 2PC countries around the globe to rally around a common cause.
Starting with background information, the report presents a summary of the plenary presentations of the workshop, which includes a brief on the post-conflict and protracted crisis environment in the 15 participating countries (Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia, Uganda, Central African Republic, Chad, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan). Some countries like Afghanistan qualified all in one as conflict, post-conflict and protracted crisis country.