This is the proceedings of the international conference ‘Innovations in Organic Food System for Sustainable Production and Enhanced Ecosystem Services’. The proceedings are a compilation of peer-reviewed articles based on presentations of 18 speakers invited conference speakers and published as a Special Issue of the scientific journal ‘Sustainable Agriculture Research’ by the Canadian Centre of Science and Education.
The creative process that leads to farmers’ innovations is rarely studied or described precisely in agricultural sciences. For academic scientists, obvious limitations of farmers’ experiments are e.g. precision, reliability, robustness, accuracy, validity or the correct analysis of cause and effect. Nevertheless, we propose that ‘farmers’ experiments’ underpin innovations that keep organic farming locally tuned for sustainability and adaptable to changing economic, social and ecological conditions.
Farmers’ experiments can be defined as the autonomous activities of farmers to try or introduce something new at the farm, and include evaluation of success or failure with farmers’ own methods. Experiments enable farmers to adapt their farms to changing circumstances, build up local knowledge, and have resulted in countless agricultural innovations. Most research on the topic has been conducted in countries of the south.
Organic farming is recognized as one source for innovation helping agriculture to develop sustainably. However, the understanding of innovation in agriculture is characterized by technical optimism, relying mainly on new inputs and technologies originating from research. The paper uses the alternative framework of innovation systems describing innovation as the outcome of stakeholder interaction and examples from the SOLID (Sustainable Organic Low-Input Dairying) project to discuss the role of farmers, researchers and knowledge exchange for innovation.
Since the early 1990s, Uganda has implemented a number of reforms in the agricultural sector. However, in the past 10 years, the performance of the sector has lagged behind other sectors particularly services and industry. There are concerns among researchers and policy analysts that institutional constraints in agriculture play a central role in the lacklustre agricultural performance registered during the 2000s. This study examines the institutional constraints affecting agricultural production in Uganda.
This paper draws lessons from selected country experiences of adaptation and innovation in pursuit of food security goals.
Innovation system approach offers an holistic, multidisciplinary and comprehensive framework for analyzing innovation process, the roles of science and technology actors and their interactions, emphazing on wider stakeholder participation, linkages and institutional context of innovation and processes. This paper was aimed to: 1. review the concept of innovation system; 2. appraise the application to agriculture and its relevance and 3. analyze the policy implications for agricultural extension delivery in Nigeria.
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.
A challenge for researchers and other developers of new technologies in agriculture is to find ways of communicating their results and recommendations. This challenge is particularly acute in regions in which farmers have limited access to education and where illiteracy is widespread, such as in the rural areas of Mali. One approach that shows potential, yet remains largely unused by extension services, is the dissemination of educational video on mobile phones with video and Bluetooth technology, which are widespread in the region.
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.