The recently-concluded International Food Policy Research Institute conference, “Advancing Agriculture in Developing Countries through Knowledge and Innovation”, was one more signal that the idea of an innovation system is now an integral part of the new international vision for agricultural development. In the April edition of the LINK News Bulletin (subscribe to it by emailing info@innovationstudies.org) Andy Hall says the conference also revealed this ambition is yet to be translated into action. More worrying is that critical sticking points — such as questions about how innovation should be evaluated — arise from the closely-guarded disciplinary perspectives of a small but powerful group of stakeholders in the international agricultural research community that has recently and reluctantly hitched itself to the agricultural innovation systems bandwagon. Andy concludes that unless the international agricultural research community legitimises a much broader suite of evaluation , the expansion of the agricultural innovation repertoire is going to be , and that will harm us all. Can a new innovation evaluation gold standard be arrived at? What would it look like and how can agreement on this be achieved? What do you think? We would love to know, so please do comment!
1 comment:
"What's Different Now"
Dear Andy and Rasheed,
In the August edition of LINK, you identify the complexity of the environment-agriculture-globalized market economy interactions as the crucial difference between 20th and 21st century contexts for agricultural development.
These points, and the rest of your article, are all valid, but they miss the elephant in the room (again).
The real difference between 20th and 21st century context is that now we have exceeded ecological carrying capacity. While uneven distribution of resources, economic and political power and information access all play a role, overpopulation is the underlying force which prevents movement out of poverty, and has prevented the many positive interventions of the past decades from having sustainable benefit.
It's time agriculturalists stopped pretending to the policy-makers that we can actually deliver the required increases in food production and environmental enhancement, if enough resources are thrown at us. This is a self-serving falsehood.
What is needed (if anything can prevent a return of famines this century) is a systemic approach to development of sustainable communities, with ALL technical interventions coupled with socio-cultural interventions, to ensure education and economic empowerment of women, access to family planning and reproductive health, and engagement of the whole community in discussion of sustainable outcomes. Communities need to reach a common understanding of how the gains that may be achieved through a particular project can either improve the wealth of the current or smaller population, or be lost through population expansion. They need to look at ways of ensuring security for the aged and infirm that do not depend on their own children. They need to know that those who move to towns for work are still fed from the land, and place greater pressure on farming communities to produce marketable surpluses rather than feeding themselves. The higher proportion of people who live in cities, the lower the value paid for farm produce compared with the total cost of living, simply because it is a smaller proportion of total human endeavour that the economy must reward.
You have taken a valuable step away from reductionism in advocating the integration of scientific, institutional and social capacity. We need to go the next step in integrating a holistic package of intervention that can improve community outcomes sustainably.
Jane O'Sullivan
University of Queensland
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