Technology - seeds, breeds, fertility inputs, disease control measures, water management - is clearly key to getting agriculture moving. But the impacts of extensive investment in technology development and transfer in Africa and in some parts of Asia have been patchy. With new technology options coming on-stream (e.g. biotechnologies or various sorts) and important new players in the private sector in particular, there are new challenges for the governance of technology in the agriculture sector. The old research and development extension arrangements of 20-30 years ago are not appropriate, but what is? We want to ask a number of questions:
Six new Policy Briefs shed light on the political economy of seeds in Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. They arise from the work of the Science, Technology and Innovation theme of the Future Agricultures Consortium.
These Policy Briefs also link to an IDS Bulletin on the politics of seed in Africa's Green Revolution.
Does more agricultural research automatically contribute to the public good? In a new blog post Jim Sumberg, FAC researcher, argues for a rethink of some common assumptions.
"It is as if there is a pipe labelled Agricultural Research (or better yet, Agricultural Research for Development – AR4D). If enough money is stuffed into one end, we can fully expect useful “public goods” to emerge from the other..."
Read the full post on the FAC blog.
As calls for a ‘Uniquely African Green Revolution' gain momentum, a focus on seeds and seed systems is rising up the agricultural policy agenda. Much of the debate stresses the technological or market dimensions, with substantial investments being made in seed improvement and the development of both public and private sector delivery systems. But this misses out the political economy of policy processes behind this agenda: whose interests are being served?
FAC's Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Team co-sponsored an international conference on ‘Sustainable Seed Systems in Ethiopia: Challenges and Opportunities’ in Addis Ababa on 1-2 June 2011, co-hosted by the Ethiopian Institute for Agricultural Research (EIAR), in partnership with The Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Some 90 participants took part in the event, including senior officials from national and regional government, academics from national and regional universities, and professionals from international research and development organisations.
Simulating the reality of small-scale farmers
Future Agricultures Consortium plans to develop an interactive, open-source, web-based computer simulation game as an educational tool to inform and influence policy debates about the Green Revolution in Africa, including the dynamics of agrarian change and governance of agricultural science and technology. The design and implementation work for this project will be developed over a three-year time span from March 2010 to February 2013.
This project is exploring the political economy of cereal seed systems across five distinct country contexts (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana and Zimbabwe). Each country has a very different history of research and development in this area; in each setting the importance of the public or the private sector differs, with different actors and interests involved; each country has a different reliance on ‘modern’ hybrid (or sometimes biotech) varieties and associated R&D and supply systems; and each country has a different form and extent of independent informal sector, involving networks of farmer experimenters and seed bulkers and suppliers.
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Overall focus
Key questions
The Politics of Seed in Africa's Green Revolution
