Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.
Debates about public expenditure in the agricultural sector have reopened in many developing and emerging economies because of high budget deficits and changes in public opinion. As a result, agricultural policy in many of these countries is beginning to take a more market-oriented approach to agrarian problems, most notably through the introduction of contract farming. This book explores the policy issues around contract farming and its transformative potential and addresses the lack of empirical research on this topic by focusing on South Asia: principally India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The book first addresses the effects of contract farming (vertical coordination) on productivity, food security indicators (yield, consumption expenditures, prices), employment and input usage. Then it draws lessons from the South Asian case studies on the impact of institutional changes, like contract farming, on income and food security of smallholder households. The core of the book includes case study chapters on several commodities that are produced under contract farming, including vegetables and fisheries in Bangladesh, low-value crops in Nepal and coffee in India. Other chapters also explore contracts, storage, input usage and technical efficiency in these cases. This book serves as an essential guide to academics, researchers, students, legislative liaisons and think tank groups interested in agrarian issues, agricultural economics and agricultural policy in emerging economies and particularly in South Asia.
Agricultural Extension Reforms in South Asia: Status, Challenges, and Policy Options is based on agricultural extension reforms across five South Asian countries, reflecting past experiences, case studies and experiments. Beginning with an overview of historical trends and recent developments, the book then delves into country-wise reform trajectories and presents several cases testing the effectiveness of different types (public and private) and forms (nutrition extension, livestock extension) of extension systems. Further, the book provides a comprehensive overview of challenges and constraints faced in formulating and implementing reforms, tying the results into a concrete set of lessons and highlighting areas that require further research. In addition, the book discusses how a major aspect of agricultural development is the productivity increase from the knowledge base of farmers, and how translating research results into a knowledge base for farmers requires designing and implementing well-functioning extension programs. - Presents the current challenges and solutions by region, and provides insights for application in global settings - Provides key foundational information for the effective and efficient design of future intervention programs - Includes workshops and presentations based on real-world research of specific aspects of extension systems and provision of advisory and consultation services to various governments
Since the 1960s, Southeast Asia's agricultural sector has experienced phenomenal growth, with increases in production linked to an energy-intensive capitalization of agriculture and the rapid development of agrifood systems and agribusiness. Agricultural intensification and territorial expansion have been key to this process, with expansion of areas under cultivation playing an unusually important role in the transformation of the countryside and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Borneo, with vast tracts of land not yet under crops, has been the epicenter of this expansion process, with rubber and oil palm acting as the spearhead. Indonesia's Kalimantan provinces and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak have all undergone major changes but the time frames have varied, as have the crops involved. Agricultural expansion in Borneo is both an economic and a political process, and it has brought about profound socio-economic transformations, including deforestation, and development of communication networks. There has also been rapid population growth, much faster than in either Indonesia or Malaysia as a whole, with attendant pressures on employment, housing and social services. Until the end of the 20th century, agricultural expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia was largely state driven, with the goal of poverty reduction. Subsequently, as in Borneo, boom crop expansion has been taken over by private corporations that are driven by profit maximization rather than poverty reduction.
Southeast Asia made considerable progress in building and strengthening its agricultural R&D capacity during 2000–2017. All of the region’s countries reported higher numbers of agricultural researchers, improvements in their average qualification levels, and higher shares of women participating in agricultural R&D. In contrast, regional agricultural research spending remained stagnant, despite considerable growth in agricultural output over time. As a result, Southeast Asia’s agricultural research intensity—that is, agricultural research spending as a share of agricultural GDP—steadily declined from 0.50 percent in 2000 to just 0.33 percent in 2017. Although the extent of underinvestment in agricultural research differs across countries, all Southeast Asian countries invested below the levels deemed attainable based on the analysis summarized in this report. The region will need to increase its agricultural research investment substantially in order to address future agricultural production challenges more effectively and ensure productivity growth. Southeast Asia’s least developed agricultural research systems (Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) are characterized by low scientific output and researcher productivity as a direct consequence of severe underfunding and lack of sufficient well-qualified research staff. While Malaysia and Thailand have significantly more developed agricultural research systems, they still report key inefficiencies and resource constraints that require attention. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam occupy intermediate positions between these two groups of high- and low-performing agricultural research systems. Growing national economies, higher disposable incomes, and changing consumption patterns will prompt considerable shifts in levels of agricultural production, consumption, imports, and exports across Southeast Asia over the next 20 to 30 years. The resource-allocation decisions that governments make today will affect agricultural productivity for decades to come. Governments therefore need to ensure the research they undertake is responsive to future challenges and opportunities, and aligned with strategic development and agricultural sector plans. ASTI’s projections reveal that prioritizing investment in staple crops will still trigger fastest agricultural productivity growth in Laos. However, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam could achieve faster growth over the next 30 years by prioritizing investment in research focused on fruit, vegetables, livestock, and aquaculture. In Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand, the choice between focusing on staple crops versus high-value commodities was less pronounced, but projections did indicate that prioritizing investments in oil crop research would trigger significantly lower growth in agricultural productivity.
This book is based on the findings of a long-term (2000-2014) interdisciplinary research project of the University of Hohenheim in collaboration with several universities in Thailand and Vietnam. Titled Sustainable Land Use and Rural Development in Mountainous Areas in Southeast Asia, or the Uplands Program, the project aims to contribute through agricultural research to the conservation of natural resources and the improvement of living conditions of the rural population in the mountainous regions of Southeast Asia. Having three objectives the book first aims to give an interdisciplinary account of the drivers, consequences and challenges of ongoing changes in mountainous areas of Southeast Asia. Second, the book describes how innovation processes can contribute to addressing these challenges and third, how knowledge creation to support change in policies and institutions can assist in sustainably develop mountain areas and people’s livelihoods.
A comparative study which describes and analyses the contribution of agriculture to the economies of East Asia. Until now, little attention has been paid to the agricultural sector which actually underpins industrial and commercial development. Recently, this sector has become the focus of increasingly bitter economic disputes, especially over protection and the use of import tariffs. A comparative framework is used, employing case studies from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea to highlight both the common characteristics of agriculture's role in East Asian development, and features particular to the political economy of agriculture in each country.
Due to such factors as poor economic conditions, climate change, and conflict, food security remains an issue around the world and especially in developing nations. Rapid changes in technology over the last decade has brought a renewed focus on how information and communication technologies (ICTs) and application systems are deployed to improve rural competitiveness. Unfortunately, agricultural stakeholders in developing countries, particularly in Africa, have not been able to reap comparable benefits from adopting agricultural information systems as compared to their counterparts in the developed economies. Understanding the challenges that hinder the effective adoption of agricultural information systems and identifying opportunities or innovations is imperative to improve the agricultural sectors and overcome the problems in these developing economies. Opportunities and Strategic Use of Agribusiness Information Systems is an essential reference book that examines the key challenges that hinder the effective adoption of agricultural information systems. Moreover, it identifies and evaluates opportunities for the strategic deployment of ICTs and information systems to drive agricultural development for the benefit of agricultural sector stakeholders in emerging countries. While highlighting such topics as agricultural entrepreneurship, food value chain, and innovation systems, it is intended to provide sound and relevant frameworks and tools that will aid agricultural industry practitioners, smallholder farmers, and managers of agricultural extension systems looking to make more effective and responsible decisions when selecting, planning, deploying, and managing agribusiness information systems. It is additionally targeted for agricultural funding organizations, government policymakers, academicians, researchers, and students concerned with exploiting the potential of a variety of ICTs and information systems in the quest to achieve food security and poverty reduction in emerging economies.
