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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- List of abbreviations -- List of contributors -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Knowledge politics in development-oriented agronomy -- 2 On the movement of agricultural technologies: packaging, unpacking and situated reconfiguration -- 3 South-South cooperation and agribusiness contestations in irrigated rice: China and Brazil in Ghana -- 4 GM crops 'for Africa': contestation and knowledge politics in the Kenyan biosafety debate -- 5 Systems research in the CGIAR as an arena of struggle: competing discourses on the embedding of research in development -- 6 One step forward, two steps back in farmer knowledge exchange: 'scaling up' as Fordist replication in drag -- 7 When the solution became a problem: strategies in the reform of agricultural extension in Uganda -- 8 Sweet 'success': contesting biofortification strategies to address malnutrition in Tanzania -- 9 Crops in context: negotiating traditional and formal seed institutions -- 10 Laws of the field: rights and justice in development-oriented agronomy -- 11 A golden age for agronomy? -- References -- Index
Agriculture is an urgent global priority and farmers find themselves in the front line of some of the world's most pressing issues- climate change, globalization and food security. Twenty years ago, the Farmer First workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, launched a movement to encourage farmer participation in agricultural research and development (R & D), responding to farmers' needs in complex, diverse, risk-prone environments, and promoting sustainable livelihoods and agriculture. Since that time, methodological, institutional and policy experiments have unfolded around the world. Farmer First Revisited returns to the debates about farmer participation in agricultural R & D and looks to the future.The book presents a range of experiences that highlight the importance of going beyond a focus on the farm to a wider innovation system, including market interactions as well as the wider institutional and policy environment. If, however, farmers are really to be put first, a politics of demand is required in order to shape the direction of these innovative systems.
An innovation system can be defined as a network of organizations, enterprises, and individuals demanding and supplying knowledge and bringing it into a social and economic use. This book's primary aim, therefore, is to focus on the largely unexplored operational aspects of the innvoation systems concept and to explore its potential for agriculture. 'Enhancing Agricultural Innovation' evaluates real-world innovation systems and assesses the usefulness of the concept in guiding investments to support knowledge-intensive, sustainable agricultural development. A typology of innovation systems is developed; strategies to guide investments for strengthening innovation capacity are drawn up; and concrete interventions options defined. In its conclusions, the book emphasizes the importance of mechanisms for collaboration and interaction. Intermediary organizations, innovation councils, farmer organizations, and other means to strengthen collaboration are central to creating the exchange of knowledge and perspectives that will convert knowledge into valuable new social and economic products and services.
Innovation Platforms (IPs) form the core of many Agricultural Research for Development programmes, stimulating multi-stakeholder collaboration and action towards the realization of agricultural development outcomes. This book enhances the body of knowledge of IPs by focusing on mature IPs in agricultural systems research, including the crop and livestock sectors, and innovations in farmer cooperatives and agricultural extension services. Resulting from an international IP case study competition, the examples reported will help the many actors involved with agricultural IPs worldwide reflect on their actions and achievements (or failures), and find tools to share their experience. Chapters feature case studies from Central Africa, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nicaragua and Uganda. Authors reflect critically on the impact of IPs and showcase their progress, providing an important sourcebook and inspiration for students, researchers and professionals.
"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--
It is necessary to integrate field data relevant to policy with a global overview with up-to-date information for synthesis into scenarios and a vision of how future research and development in agriculture can best help those who are most needy and have little access to productive resources. The overall task is a huge challenge for policy-makers and the agricultural research establishment. It is also of concern in teaching agricultural students to be able to respond to future challenges. This publication is an attempt to stimulate discussion on future options of research policy, suggesting changes of agricultural R&D for societal development in accordance with the Millennium Development Goals.