Food systems in developing countries are transforming, involving a rapid expansion of supermarkets. This supermarket revolution may affect dietary patterns and nutrition, but empirical evidence is scarce. The few existing studies have analyzed implications for food consumers and producers separately. We discuss a more integrated framework that helps to gain a broader understanding. Reviewing recent evidence from Kenya, we show that buying food in supermarkets instead of traditional outlets contributes to overnutrition among adults, while reducing undernutrition among children.
This chapter outlines the role of a well-functioning agricultural innovation system in ensuring good use of public funds, and higher responsiveness to the needs of ‘innovation consumers’ through improved collaboration between public and private participants, including across national borders. A well-functioning agricultural innovation system is key to improving the economic, environmental and social performance of the food and agriculture sector.
LenCD has prepared a joint statement on results and capacity development (presented in this publication), which stresses that meaningful, sustainable results are premised on proper investments in capacity development and that these results materialize at different levels and at different times, along countries’ development trajectory. To provide evidence in support of this statement, LenCD launched a call for submission of stories.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
This book represents the proceedings of the FAO international technical conference dedicated to Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries (ABDC-10) that took place in Guadalajara, Mexico on 1-4 March 2010. A major objective of the conference was to take stock of the application of biotechnologies across the different food and agricultural sectors in developing countries, in order to learn from the past and to identify options for the future to face the challenges of food insecurity, climate change and natural resource degradation.
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’.
In this paper its argued that when flexibly applied and adapted to capture dynamics typical in systems innovation projects, the Log Frame Approach (LFA) ( and logical frameworks have considerable utility to support evaluation for both learning and accountability, and for identifying and addressing institutional logics, which leads to system innovation.
This paper is an inquiry into the process of setting up a national, multi-stakeholder project collaboration aimed at stimulating the role of the private sector in the Australian agricultural extension and innovation systems.
Primary Innovation is a five year collaborative initiative demonstrating and evaluating co-innovation, a systemic approach to innovation addressing complex problems, in five ‘innovation projects’ (active case studies) in different agricultural industries. In defining the elements of co-innovation, Primary Innovation has emphasised nine principles which guide activity in the innovation projects.
This paper describes a process for stimulating this engagement to develop a shared understanding of systemic problems, challenge prevalent institutional logics, and identify individual and collective actions that change agents might undertake to stimulate system innovation. To achieve this the process included (i) multiple actors from the agricultural innovation systems, (ii) steps to prompt reflexivity to challenge underlying institutional logics, (iii) an iterative process of practical experimentation to challenge current practices, and (iv) actions to encourage generative collaboration.