agricultural productivity

This article demonstrates that showing agricultural extension videos significantly increased farmers’ knowledge of recommended practices on seed selection, storage and handling. The video messages were delivered through Android tablets to a sample of potato farmers in southwestern Uganda. This research suggests that videos should be crop and context specific, featuring model farmers to maximize the potential of videos to leverage knowledge farmers already possess but may not be confident enough to use. »

This article, published in the Global Food Security journal, argues that if small-scale farms continue to dominate in the face of the increasing wage rate in Asia, many countries in this region will lose their comparative advantage in agriculture. If machinery and land are complementary and machines are indivisible to some extent, large-scale mechanized farms become more efficient, which tends to weaken the inverse farm size-productivity relationship. »

This book by UNU-WIDER comprehensively evaluates trends in living conditions in 16 major sub-Saharan African countries, corresponding to nearly 75% of the total population. An important message from ten of the countries they looked at is that there are potentially high returns to policies that take agriculture seriously. Countries that place a particular emphasis on upgrading the capabilities of small-scale farmers are more likely to achieve broad-based development objectives. »

This book by The Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA) is offering 14 best practises and policies that increase agricultural productivity and farmers’ resilience to climate change. Key ingredients for success can be distilled out of these cases, such as active farmer participation and youth attraction. Projects which involve high levels of initial investment or drudgery, fail to attract young people, and are costly in terms of time and labour are unlikely to be successful. »

This article argues that contrary to the opinions expressed by many commentators, the recent episode of higher prices for agricultural commodities is likely a transitory phenomenon. When compared to the last half-century, population growth is expected to be much slower in the coming decades, with nearly all of the growth occurring in lower income countries, where added population places less pressure on global markets. »

This report from CTA demonstrates how young agro-entrepreneurs across the developing world are tackling some of the value chain’s most substantial challenges through using information communication technologies (ICT). The authors argue that when it comes to building a more efficient and equitable value chain, the potential impact of ICTs is more than incremental; it is catalytic. One reason for this is that through having better access to information, farmers can save time and faster access the information they need to support their work. »