The progress of the country and the welfare of the people depends on productivity, as an indicator of efficiency in the use of natural resources, capital and human talent. Ecuador is going through a deep crisis in the production of coffee where demand is much greater than supply with 1,560,000 bags of deficit, mainly of robusta coffee.
The 2016–2018National Invasive Species Council (NISC) Management Plan and Executive Order 13751 call for US federal agencies to foster technology development and application to address invasive species and their impacts. This paper complements and draws on an Innovation Summit, review of advanced biotechnologies applicable to invasive species management, and a survey of federal agencies that respond to these high-level directives.
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach for fully co-creating research into environmental problems with the public. The paper argues this is mostly done for manifest environmental problems that clearly threaten livelihoods and have highly predictable impacts. But the conventional PAR approach is not suitable when the impacts are poorly understood and pose a low threat to livelihoods. Such latent environmental problems do not have a clear conflict to be resolved; instead, the community’s inertia should be overcome.
The sustainability of milpa agriculture, a traditional Mayan farming system in southern Belize, is uncertain. For centuries, the milpa has been a sustainable agriculture system. The slash-and-burn aspect of milpa farming, however, has become less reliable and less sustainable over the last 50 years due to several factors, including forest loss, climate change, population growth, and other factors. The traditional milpa practices of slash-and-mulch and soil nutrient enrichment (nutrient cycling) are agroecological practices that produce food in a more sustainable way.
Present research set out the public and private agricultural extension services with the term of human resources practices. Five districts, one from each ecological zone, were taken purposively: namely Kech, Lasbela, Kalat, Killa Saifullah and Sibi. A sample of (250) farmers and (100) public and private Extension Field Staff (EFS) was taken as sample size by using the multi-stage random sampling technique. Null hypothesis was also tested in order to know the variances in the perceptions of the respondents.
“Business as usual” is no longer an option for a food-secure future. Pastoralism can be an innovative system: a time-tested, undervalued alternative to high-input and resource-intensive farming, and a valuable lesson for the much needed evolution towards ‘farming with nature’, with largely-untapped potential for income growth and employment in marginal areas.
While education access has improved globally, gains are uneven, and development impacts driven by increases in education continue to be left on the table, especially in rural areas. Demand-driven extension and advisory services (EAS) – as a key institution educating rural people while providing agricultural advice and supplying inputs – have a critical role to play in bridging the education gap. This can help ensure that millions of young people successfully capitalise on opportunities in agriculture markets, as surveys in Rwanda and Uganda demonstrate.
Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas.
This study uses 344 women and men survey respondents involved in conservation agriculture (CA) and small-scale irrigation schemes (SSIS) as data sources for examining the effect of gendered constraints for adopting climate-smart agriculture amongst women in three areas in Ethiopia. Qualitative and quantitative data collections were applied using survey, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's chi-square test and binary logistic regression using statistical software for the social sciences (SPSS) version 24.
Agriculture remains the mainstay of Indian economy and major source of livelihood of rural household, predominantly by small and marginal farmers, and securing the food and nutritional security. This paper describes the reality of small and marginal farmers in India. These farmers face several problems of credit, input supply, proper linkage with market as so on. Women farmers are lagging behind in adopting the drudgery reduction technologies followed by health and nutrition of farm families.