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Author: Ambler, Kate
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 55
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Book Description
Conservation agriculture techniques can increase agricultural production while decreasing CO2 emissions, yet adoption in the developing world remains low—in part because many years of continuous adoption may be required to realize gains in production. We conduct a framed field experiment in northern Ghana to study how randomly assigned incentives and peer information may affect adoption. Incentives increase adoption, both while they are available and after withdrawal. There is no overall effect of peer information, but we do find evidence that information about long-term adoption increased adoption, particularly when that information shows that production gains have been achieved.
Author: Ambler, Kate
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 55
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Book Description
Conservation agriculture techniques can increase agricultural production while decreasing CO2 emissions, yet adoption in the developing world remains low—in part because many years of continuous adoption may be required to realize gains in production. We conduct a framed field experiment in northern Ghana to study how randomly assigned incentives and peer information may affect adoption. Incentives increase adoption, both while they are available and after withdrawal. There is no overall effect of peer information, but we do find evidence that information about long-term adoption increased adoption, particularly when that information shows that production gains have been achieved.
Author: Ambler, Kate
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 46
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Book Description
Accurate understanding of peoples’ livelihoods activities is needed to inform effective policy. Existing evidence relies heavily on studies that use designated respondents to provide information about their household members, imposing significant costs on these respondents along with possible distortions in the data. In rural Ghana, we randomize the order that household members are asked about and estimate that response fatigue leads to undercounting of labor activities by 8% on average. Women are twice as impacted as men while youth are four times as impacted as older adults, distorting both within-household and population wide comparisons. These biases result from women and youth being listed systematically later in rosters and stronger effects of fatigue for them, conditional on roster position. The implications of our results extend to other topics of enquiry as well, wherever similar repetitive survey structures are deployed, such as birth records, plot-level inputs, and household consumption and expenditures.
Author: Ambler, Kate
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 33
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Book Description
Livelihoods are changing rapidly in rural areas. Measuring and categorizing peoples’ labor activities in relation to the agricultural sector is important for understanding income earning opportunities and designing effective policy. Conventional data collection methods ask about individuals’ main work activities over the past year. Descriptions are recorded in the field, postcoded, and eventually categorized. This approach is costly to collect, fatiguing for respondents, and may create distortions. We show that a more direct approach, asking respondents to categorize their major work activities themselves, provides similar resulting data despite some caveats and lessons for best enumeration practices. We compare these main activities to a series of yes/no questions about participation in a set of specific work tasks. We find a 12% incidence of “missing” work, whereby individuals who reported participation in at least one but did not have any recorded major activities. Looking by sector of work, women and youth are disproportionately more likely to have agricultural contributions “missed,” while we find no corresponding bias in undercounting of non-agricultural work. Finally, we test the effect of randomly positioning the task-based questions before the listing of major activities but do not find significant effects on the number or type of activities reported.
Author: Kazembe, Cynthia
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 10
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Book Description
This paper reviews different studies on technology adoption in sub-Saharan Africa to understand the determinants of low adoption of improved technologies, with a special focus on Malawi. This will in turn help explain why there is a gap between awareness and adoption of agriculture technologies. As evidenced from the results of the FGDs conducted in Malawi in 2018, despite the visible benefits of the new technologies, farmers often do not adopt or take a long time to adopt them. This creates a gap between awareness of agriculture technologies and their adoption. The existing literature from sub-Saharan Saharan Africa, demonstrates that adoption, as a decision-making process, is affected by farmers’ access to information, their financial and human capital, incentives and external programs, plus farmers’ attitude to risk.
Author: Edward H. Faulkner
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806148748
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 172
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Book Description
Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognized as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world. It was on July 5, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.
Author: Stephen Whitfield
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317534727
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Future climatic and agro-ecological changes in Africa are uncertain and associated with high degrees of spatial and temporal variability and this change is differently simulated within divergent climate-crop models and in controlled crop breeding stations. Furthermore, uncertainty emerges in local contexts, not just in response to climatic systems, but to social, economic, and political systems, and often with implications for the appropriateness and adoption of technologies or the success of alternative cropping systems. This book examines the challenges of adaptation in smallholder farming in Africa, analysing the social, economic, political and climatic uncertainties that impact on agriculture in the region and the range of solutions proposed. Drawing on case studies of genetically modified crops, conservation agriculture, and other 'climate smart' solutions in eastern and southern Africa, the book identifies how uncertainties are framed 'from above' as well experienced 'from below', by farmers themselves. It provides a compelling insight into why ideas about adaptation emerge, from whom, and with what implications. This book offers a unique perspective and will be highly relevant to students of climate change adaptation, food security and poverty alleviation, as well as policy-makers and field practitioners in international development and agronomy.
Author: Masanobu Fukuoka
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590173929
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.” Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature’s own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Whether you’re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here—you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.
Author: Ephraim Nkonya
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319191683
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 695
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Book Description
This volume deals with land degradation, which is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agro-ecologies, in both low and high income countries and is stretching to about 30% of the total global land area. About three billion people reside in these degraded lands. However, the impact of land degradation is especially severe on livelihoods of the poor who heavily depend on natural resources. The annual global cost of land degradation due to land use and cover change (LUCC) and lower cropland and rangeland productivity is estimated to be about 300 billion USD. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for the largest share (22%) of the total global cost of land degradation. Only about 38% of the cost of land degradation due to LUCC - which accounts for 78% of the US$300 billion loss – is borne by land users and the remaining share (62%) is borne by consumers of ecosystem services off the farm. The results in this volume indicate that reversing land degradation trends makes both economic sense, and has multiple social and environmental benefits. On average, one US dollar investment into restoration of degraded land returns five US dollars. The findings of the country case studies call for increased investments into the rehabilitation and restoration of degraded lands, including through such institutional and policy measures as strengthening community participation for sustainable land management, enhancing government effectiveness and rule of law, improving access to markets and rural services, and securing land tenure. The assessment in this volume has been conducted at a time when there is an elevated interest in private land investments and when global efforts to achieve sustainable development objectives have intensified. In this regard, the results of this volume can contribute significantly to the ongoing policy debate and efforts to design strategies for achieving sustainable development goals and related efforts to address land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.
Author: Calestous Juma
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0190237236
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and can help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by advancing scientific and technological research, investing in infrastructure, fostering higher technical training, and creating regional markets.
Author: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Publisher: Food & Agriculture Org.
ISBN: 9251305722
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.
