Many indigenous vegetables are generally underutilized across different cultures, but they remain alternatives to exotic vegetables that often are expensive. This study investigated effects of participation in indigenous vegetable production on livelihood of farmers. Multistaged sampling was used to collect data from 222 vegetable farmers sampled from using a semi-structured questionnaire. Principal component analysis and endogenous switching regression (ESR) were employed for analysis
This paper looks at brokerage functions in a project on building innovation capacity through improved networking. Innovation capacity influences how actors respond to changes in their environments. In such dynamic environments well connected sets of actors are at an advantage in that they can combine skills to address the emerging opportunities and challenges. However, policy and cultural barriers especially in African innovation systems raise the transaction costs of networking leading to weak connectivity among actors thus poor innovation capacity.
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 report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD), self-assessment by the Country Platforms (CPs) and backstopping visits to five CPs. In 2014, the Prolinnova network saw a need to re-strategise in a changing context, and started this process by reviewing the activities it had undertaken and assessing its own functioning.
Sustainable agricultural intensification requires the use of multiple agricultural technologies in an integrated manner to enhance productivity while conserving the natural resource base. This study analyses the adoption and impacts of sustainable intensification practices (SIPs) using a dataset from Ghana. A multivariate probit (MVP) model was estimated to assess the adoption of multiple SIPs. Moreover, we used a multivalued semi-parametric treatment effect (MVTE) model to estimate the effects of adopting multiple SIPs on maize productivity.
Climate variability and change threaten and impact negatively on biodiversity, agricultural sustainability, ecosystems, and economic and social structures – factors that are all vital for human resilience and wellbeing. To cope with these challenges, embracing sustainability in food production is therefore essential. Practising sustainable agriculture is one way of ensuring sustainability in pro-poor farming communities in low-income countries.
Participatory forest management is credited for supporting social learning processes and fostering capacity of forest users for collaboration and collective actions. Despite more than a decade of practice, the empirical evidence substantiating the contribution of participatory management for the capacity development of forest users is scarce. This study assesses a participatory forest management program in Madhupur Sal forest, Bangladesh, by comparing the capacity of de-facto groups of participants and nonparticipants and identifies factors that influence the capacity development.
Latin America has historically been a vanguard of agroecology. In Nicaragua, an agroecological transition is occurring, with three decades of building a groundswell based on the farmer-to-farmer movement and the recent institutionalization of agroecology in national law. Yet, problems remain with agroecology’s diffusion. We introduce the Technological Innovation Systems approach to examine systemic barriers to the agroecological transition and cycles of blockages caused by barriers’ interactions.
Ecological intensification has been proposed as a promising lever for a transition towards more sustainable food systems. Various food systems exist that are based on ecological intensification and may have potential for a sustainability transition. Little is known, however, about their diversity and about how they perform against dominant systems in terms of the multiple societal goals. The aim of this study is to contribute to knowledge about sustainability transitions in food systems through an empirical analysis of vegetable food systems in Chile.
Sustainable intensification of agriculture will have to build on various innovations, but synergies between different types of technologies are not yet sufficiently understood. We use representative data from small farms in Kenya and propensity score matching to compare effects of input-intensive technologies and natural resource management practices on household income. When adopted in combination, positive income effects tend to be larger than when individual technologies are adopted alone.