Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
In Asia and the Pacific, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is working with member countries to leverage breakthroughs in information and communication technologies (ICT) to fight hunger, improve nutrition and counter the effects of climate change and extreme weather events that can devastate farmers and their crops. In the Philippines, a country prone to typhoons, aerial drones are taking to the sky to map out at-risk areas of agricultural land to mitigate risk. This innovative practice is also able to quickly assess damages when a disaster strikes.
evelopment projects on interventions to reduce postharvest losses (PHL) are often implemented largely independently of the specific context and without sufficient adaptation to the needs of people who are supposed to use them. An approach is needed for the design and implementation of specific, locally owned interventions in development projects. This approach is based on Participatory Development and includes Living Lab and World Cafés. We applied the approach in a case study on reducing PHL in tomato value chains in Nigeria. The approach consists of nine steps.
Rice is one of the most important food crops in sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change, variability, and economic globalization threatens to disrupt rice value chains across the subcontinent, undermining their important role in economic development, food security, and poverty reduction. This paper maps existing research on the vulnerability of rice value chains, synthesizes the evidence and the risks posed by climate change and economic globalization, and discusses agriculture and rural development policies and their relevance for the vulnerability of rice value chains in sub-Saharan Africa.
The tank-based irrigated agricultural system in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka is one of the oldest historically evolved agricultural systems in the world. The main component of the system consists of a connected series of man-made tanks constructed in shallow valleys to store, convey and utilize water for paddy cultivation. Up to 10,000 tanks originating from the heydays of ancient kingdoms are still integrated in the current agricultural landscape. During the last two millennia, this indigenous system has undergone many changes in technological, management and socio-cultural norms.
The citrus industry is very important for Pakistan as it is the 4th most important export commodity. There are two product flows in the citrus value chain, one is more traditional with abundant intermediaries, in which contractors, commission agents and wholesalers are the main stakeholders, and the other is export-oriented with processors and exporters (P&Es) as the main stakeholders. It has been noticed that growers are not using ICT extensively at the production stage.
Boundary-spanning search for knowledge is an effective way for enterprises to acquire heterogeneous knowledge, and is also an important pre-stage to realize effective knowledge reconstruction. Based on the boundary-spanning search for knowledge theory, this paper studies the relationship between boundary-spanning search for knowledge and the sustainable innovation ability of agricultural enterprises considering the influence of organizational knowledge reconstruction, from a Chinese perspective.
Recent Society 5.0 efforts by the Government of Japan are aimed at establishing a sustainable human-centered society by combining new technologies such as sensor networks, edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and robotics. Many research works have been carried out with an increasing emphasis on the fundamentals of wireless sensor networks (WSN) for different applications; namely precision agriculture, environment, medical care, security, and surveillance.
Rice is a primary food for more than three billion people worldwide and cultivated on about 12% of the world’s arable land. However, more than 88% production is observed in Asian countries, including Pakistan. Due to higher population growth and recent climate change scenarios, it is crucial to get timely and accurate rice yield estimates and production forecast of the growing season for governments, planners, and decision makers in formulating policies regarding import/export in the event of shortfall and/or surplus.
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.