Various indications that research and development efforts are escalating in developing countries indicate the slight shift of such countries from just being end markets to being developers. The aggregate adoption of biotech crops in developing countries is clearly approaching that in developed countries. The next generation biotech crops with superior traits, with improved properties and quality traits will likely be created and deployed in developing countries, particularly in Asia, where half of the world’s population dwells.
In recent decades, the confluence of different global and domestic drivers has led to progressive and unpredictable changes in the functioning and structure of agri-food markets worldwide.
Despite the rapid international development of biotechnology, we still lack knowledge and information about how low- and middle-income countries can best access this promising technology. Nor are the socioeconomic repercussions of applying biotechnology in these countries’ agricultural sectors well understood. This study seeks to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge by analyzing a biotechnology transfer project that provided proprietary recombinant potato technology to Mexico.
Given the search for new solutions to better prepare cities for the future, in recent years, urban agriculture (UA) has gained in relevance. Within the context of UA, innovative organizational and technical approaches are generated and tested. They can be understood as novelties that begin a potential innovation process. This empirical study is based on 17 qualitative interviews in the U.S. (NYC; Philadelphia, PA, USA; Chicago, IL, USA).
The agricultural industry is getting more data-centric and requires precise, more advanced data and technologies than before, despite being familiar with agricultural processes. The agriculture industry is being advanced by various information and advanced communication technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The rapid emergence of these advanced technologies has restructured almost all other industries, as well as advanced agriculture, which has shifted the industry from a statistical approach to a quantitative one.
The challenge of food security in Nigeria hinges on several factors of which poor technical efficiency is key. Using a stochastic frontier framework, we estimated the technical efficiency of agricultural households in Nigeria and tested for the significance of mean technical efficiency of food-secure and food-insecure agricultural households. We further assessed the determinants of agricultural households’ inefficiencies within the stochastic frontier model and adopted a standard probit model to assess the determinants of households’ food security status.
Inclusive business models dominate current development policy and practices aimed at addressing food and nutrition insecurity among smallholder farmers. Through inclusive agribusiness, smallholder food security is presumed to come from increased farm productivity (food availability) and income (food access). Based on recent research, the focus of impact assessments of inclusive business models has been limited to instrumental aspects, such as the number of farmers supported, the training provided, and immediate farm outcomes, namely revenue.
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) proposes environmental policies developed around action-based conservation measures supported by agri-environment schemes (AES). High Nature Value (HNV) farming represents a combination of low-intensity and mosaic practices mostly developed in agricultural marginalized rural areas which sustain rich biodiversity. Being threatened by intensification and abandonment, such farming practices were supported in the last CAP periods by targeted AES.
Indicator-based tools are widely used for the assessment of farm sustainability, but analysts still face methodological and conceptual issues, including data availability, the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the heterogeneity of agricultural systems. This study contributes to this debate through the illustration of a procedure for farm sustainability assessment focussed on the case study of the South Milan Agricultural Park, Italy. The application is based on a set of environmental, social and economic indicators retrieved from the literature review.
The process of adopting innovation, especially with regard to precision farming (PF), is inherently complex and social, and influenced by producers, change agents, social norms and organizational pressure. An empirical analysis was conducted among Italian farmers to measure the drivers and clarify “bottlenecks” in the adoption of agricultural innovation. The purpose of this study was to analyze the socio-structural and complexity factors that affect the probability to adopt innovations and the determinants that drive an individual’s decisions.