To meet global demands towards food security, safety as well as sustainable agriculture and food systems innovative approaches are inevitable. Despite the growing body of literature in both innovation research and in values and aims, what has been explored to a lesser extent is the bridging link between these areas. This study represents a first step in addressing this relationship.
This study examines the influence of farmers’ social capital on their decisions to deal with climate change and climate variability in Burkina Faso. The study is based on a household survey conducted among 450 households, randomly selected from three communities in Burkina Faso.
The question of how social enterprises foster social innovation in rural regions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, was developed the assumption that the embeddedness of social enterprises in rural communities and their ability to connect rural communities with supra-regional networks and decision makers are crucial preconditions for generating and fostering social innovation in the countryside.
Agricultural innovation in low-income tropical countries contributes to a more effective and sustainable use of natural resources and reduces hunger and poverty through economic development in rural areas. Yet, despite numerous recent public and private initiatives to develop capacities for agricultural innovation, such initiatives are often not well aligned with national efforts to revive existing Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS).
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.
Although the benefits of genetically modified (GM) crops have been well documented, how do farmers manage the risk of new technology in the early stages of technology adoption has received less attention. We compare the total factor productivity (TFP) of cotton to other major crops (wheat, rice, and corn) in China between 1990 and 2015, showing that the TFP growth of cotton production is significantly different from all other crops. In particular, the TFP of cotton production increased rapidly in the early 1990s then declined slightly around 2000 and rose again.
Familiar mixed dairy sheep farm is the most widespread system in the Mediterranean basin, in Latin America and in developing countries (85%). There is a strong lack of technological adoption in packages of feeding and land use in small-scale farms. To increase competitiveness, it would be of great interest to deepen the knowledge of how innovation was selected, adopted, and spread. The objective of this research was to select strategic feeding and land use technologies in familiar mixed dairy sheep systems and later assess dairy sheep farms in Spain.
Past studies showing that barriers to farmers’ adaptation behaviors are focused on their socio-economic factors and resource availability. Meanwhile, psychological and social considerations are sparingly mentioned, especially for the related studies in developing countries. This study investigates the impact of psychological factors and social appraisal on farmers’ behavioral intention to adopt adaptation measures for the aforementioned reason, due to climate change and not to anthropogenic climate change.
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.