The development objective of the Sustainable Management of Agricultural Research and Technology Dissemination Project is to improve the institutional capacity and performance of the Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD) to develop and disseminate relevant and demand-driven innovative technologies, meeting the needs of producers and of the agri-food system. There are four components to the project. The first component of the project is human resource development and management.

Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood on agriculture, hunting, fishing, or forestry. However, unsustainable land management already is leading to large-scale land degradation trends, which pose a threat to food security and poverty alleviation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate change threatens to exacerbate and add to the existing vulnerabilities.

Research, extension, and advisory services are some of the most knowledge-intensive elements of agricultural innovation systems. They are also among the heaviest users of information communication technologies (ICTs). This module introduces ICT developments in the wider innovation and knowledge systems as well as explores drivers of ICT use in research and extension.

This white paper is intended to summarize the key insights gleaned from prior work applying information and communication technologies (ICTs) in support of agriculture and food systems, identifying approaches and opportunities that hold promise for enhancing global food security, and to identify important knowledge gaps that remain, offering guidance for new work that investigates how to apply information and communication technologies in agriculture.

The youth crisis has recently received much attention from the global community, particularly in how it intersects with the future of agriculture. Causes of the youth crisis include univeral youth disinterest in agriculture, deskilled youth populations, lack of access to resources, gender disparity and lack of reliable data regarding youth in agriculture.

USAID’s Bureau for Food Security (BFS) commissioned this literature review to identify evidence or evidence gaps on innovation diffusion and the related field of market strategy for scaling up new technologies, particularly in the context of agriculture markets in relevant developing countries. The review is expected to inform the design of future BFS programming related to the scaling of agricultural innovations. 

This review aims to identify key issues and opportunities needed to bring current Agricultural Education and Training (AET) systems up to the needed capacity. This paper first looks at the opportunities identified in the preliminary research. Next the paper looks at some of the many pitfalls learned from previous AET work that should be avoided moving forward. Lastly the paper gives a brief explanation for some of the key areas that the preliminary research identified as requiring further research and study in a modern day context. 

One of the most important challenges for the researchers in the 21st Century is related to global heating and climate change that can have as consequence the intensification of natural hazards. Another problem of changes in the Earth's climate is its impact in the agriculture production. In this scenario, application of statistical models as well as development of new methods become very important to aid in the analyses of climate from ground-based stations and outputs of forecasting models. Additionally, remote sensing images have been used to improve the monitoring of crop yields.

Automation of essential processes in agriculture is becoming widespread, especially when fast action is required. However, some processes that could greatly benefit from some degree of automation have such difficult characteristics, that even small improvements pose a great challenge. This is the case of fish disease diagnosis, a problem of great economic, social and ecological interest. Difficult problems like this often require a interdisciplinary approach to be tackled properly, as multifaceted issues can greatly benefit from the inclusion of different perspectives.