Book

This book focuses on how food security and resilience can improve smallholder and subsistence farming and how integration of gender can accommodate this. Through the integration of gender analysis into resilience thinking, this book shares field-based research insights from a collaborative, integrated project aimed at improving food security in subsistence and smallholder agricultural systems. The scope of the book is both local and multi-scalar. The gendered resilience framework, illustrated with detailed case studies from semi-arid Kenya, is shown to be suitable for use in analysis in other geographic regions and across disciplines. »

This book written by Jelleke de Nooy van Tol discusses how we can support and accelerate the transition to agro-ecology practices worldwide. Lessons learned from the frontrunners show that personal leadership and individual action are utmost important. De Nooy van Tol emphasizes that knowledge systems need to change, since now they are too tightly knit to industrial agriculture, and monoculture production systems. New thinking in agricultural research for development is needed to facilitate change instead of providing “objective” knowledge. »

This book chapter elaborates on the spread of mobile phone use across Kenya and the opportunities this brings to improve service delivery for smallscale farmers. International and local companies have already started to capitalize on these opportunities, although many mobile phone-enabled services (m-services) are still at an early stage. Kenya has emerged as a leader in m-service development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors assesses the key factors that have helped the local innovation scene to emerge and reviews existing agricultural m-services that provide Kenyan farmers with access to information and learning, financial services, and input and output markets. »

This book focuses on understanding and improving relations between farmers and firms. The book presents an approach – comprising an analytical framework, a practical assessment tool and suggestions for action – that can be used to analyse, assess and facilitate the relationship between supplying farmers and their organization on the one hand and buying firms on the other. This approach is called “It takes two to trade” (abbreviated as “2-2 Trade”) because farmers and firms need each other if their relationship to perform wel. »

This book links the themes of gender, nutrition and the human right to adequate food and proposes an inclusive food sovereignty framework. The authors argue that the human right to adequate food and nutrition are evolving concept and identifies two structural “disconnects” that fuel food insecurity for a billion people, and disproportionally affecting women, children, and rural food producers. These are the separation of women’s rights from their right to adequate food and nutrition, and the fragmented attention to food as commodity and the medicalization of nutritional health. »

Starting from recently published articles and new research this book presents a structured approach, which offers opportunities and challenges for local and regional food systems, that we see re-emerging globally. Based on a new classification of local food systems the book goes into adequate governance structures. This is demonstrated by a number of examples chosen from all over the world. »