Latin America

This publication assesses how to improve agricultural value chains, particularly value chains that include smallholders. Despite increasing use of innovation-system and value-chain approaches to promote rural income growth, poverty reduction, and greater gender equity, there is little systematic knowledge about how to operationalize value-chain approaches in different contexts and how best to evaluate innovation and value-chain development. This book consists of 14 papers that present results of recent work associated with CGIAR and its partners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. »

This note by GFRAS argues that it is important to include men in nutrition initiatives to turn around food discrimination. Women may learn a lot from courses on good nutrition, but excluding men means that women may not be able to act on their improved knowledge. Men may feel angry because their own nutritional needs are ignored. »

This report by the Global Network For The Right To Food And Nutrition concludes that transnational corporations are monopolizing control over seeds with dire consequences for human rights and biodiversity. Increasingly, seed and agrochemical businesses seek to privatize, monopolize and control seeds by patenting and commodifying this very source of life. Meanwhile, peasant and indigenous communities, who have been the developers and guardians of seeds for millennia, are finding their rights to save, use, exchange and sell seeds overshadowed by a corporate agenda that prioritizes profit over human rights and the sustainable maintenance of nature. »

This article in the Agronomy for Sustainable Development Journal, conceptualizes scaling processes as an integral part of a systemic approach to innovation, to anticipate on the possible consequences of scaling efforts. The authors propose a method that connects the heuristic framework of the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions (MLP) to a philosophical ‘modal aspects’ framework, with the objective of elucidating the connectedness between technologies, processes and practices. »

This brief by Global Canopy Programme and The Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN) draws on innovative trade-flow modelling and analysis for three key agricultural supply chains in the Amazon region – soy in Brazil, palm oil in Peru and beef in Colombia – alongside multi-stakeholder interviews and group discussions to discuss trade-offs and barriers for implementing more sustainable productive landscapes in the Amazon region. »

The longitudinal study synthesized in this report is the result of a 4-year collaboration between IDS, Oxfam and research partners. The research was carried out between 2012 and 2015 and involved annual visits to communities in 23 rural, urban and peri-urban sites, along with commissioned reviews of national-level prices and policies over the period. The social, economic and political adjustments made by people in developing countries in the wake of the global food crisis are the focus of this report. »