Rising global demand for vegetable oil during the last few decades has led to a drastic increase in the land area under oil palm. Especially in South- east Asia, the oil palm boom has contributed to economic growth, but it has also spurred criticism about negative environmental and social effects. Here, we discuss palm oil production and consumption trends and review environmental, economic, and social consequences in different parts of the world. The oil palm expansion has contributed to tropical deforestation and associated losses in biodiversity and ecosystem functions.

The Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) provides regular updates on activities by TAP and its partners, on the projects and on upcoming events. This issue specifically refers to the period from November 2021 to January 2022.

The Date Palm Innovation Platform is a collaborative work is a platform for research, technology and innovation for the integrated production system of the Date Palm. The platform has been developed by the Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in the Near East and North Africa (AARINENA) in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

In early 2020, GFRAS provided support to the Agricultural Extension in South Asia (AESA) Network and the Bangladesh Agricultural Extension Network (BAEN) in order to customize one of the NELK Modules in the context of Bangladesh. The BAEN Executive Committee selected the GFRAS NELK Module 7 on ‘Facilitation for Development’ for customization. AESA and BAEN jointly implemented the development of the customized module for Bangladesh. The process of customization consisted of five phases spread over a span of six months.

The Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) provides regular updates on activities by TAP and its partners, on the projects and on upcoming events. This issue specifically refers to the period from February 2022 to April 2022.

The Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) provides regular updates on activities by TAP and its partners, on the projects and on upcoming events. This issue specifically refers to the period from May 2022 to July 2022.

This training manual, which is based on a methodology developed by FAO’s Research and Extension Unit (OINR), presents a training course on assessing AIS consisting of eight modules.

TAP and its partners carried out regional surveys in Asia, Africa and Central America to assess priorities, capacities and needs in national agricultural innovation systems. This document provides a Regional synthesis report on capacity needs assessment for agricultural innovation in Africa.  FARA was selected as Recipient Organization by FAO to facilitate TAP implementation in Africa. This is mainly due to its position as the umbrella organization bringing together and forming coalitions of major regional stakeholders in agricultural research and development.  

This study introduces a framework for managing information flow in innovation systems. An organisation's capacity to receive information, to share it with others and to learn from it is assumed to be the key factor that shapes the flow patterns and, hence, the performance of the innovation system concerned. The framework is applied to characterise the information structure underlying the agricultural innovation system of Azerbaijan and to develop an information strategy for the system to accelerate the information flow.