The International Symposium on Agricultural Innovation for Family Farmers roars into life

The FAO headquarters in Rome was this morning abuzz with delegates and participants to the much anticipated International Symposium on Agricultural Innovation for Family Farmers, which runs from the 21st to the 23rd of November 2018.

The theme of this symposium is ‘unlocking the potential of agricultural innovation to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals”. This theme was chosen amidst the global challenges facing the world which have affected the sustainability of food and agricultural systems, affecting livelihoods of millions of family farmers worldwide.

Hence, innovation is the central driving force that can transform these systems and help lift family farmers out of poverty and help the world in achieving the SDGs targets.

FAO Director-General Welcome message

Objectives of the symposium

The reality is that countries are in disparate levels of innovation and technological development. Notably many developing countries are yet to harness the full potential of agricultural innovation and therefore collective actions are needed to remove lurking barriers to adoption and also collective action could help address the constraints that stifle the capacity of family farmers and other players to fully innovate.

The following are the objectives of the symposium

• Serve as a global knowledge and partnership platform to better understand the potential of innovation in agriculture to address the SDGs, with a special focus on supporting smallholder and family farmers
• Increase understanding of the drivers of innovation and the main constraints
• Propose processes, pathways and interventions needed to unlock the potential of innovation in agriculture and scaling up inclusive innovations;
• Celebrate inspiring success stories of innovation and innovators in sustainable agriculture
• Act as a catalyst for boosting partnerships as well as public and private investments to foster and scale up agricultural innovation

The programme ahead

A glance of the programme indicates three packed days with a number of parallel sessions, plenary sessions and the Innovation fair. The latter will be of great interest to e-Agriculture users as various technologies will be showcased during these 3 days.

Meanwhile one can review the FAO’s Work on Agricultural Innovation: Sowing the seeds of transformation to achieve the SDGs brochure. Furthermore, the e-Agriculture will update its followers of twitter @FAOeagriculture and also follow this harsh tag #AgInnovation.

Useful links

• The meeting streaming  https://goo.gl/7YD2vB
• The programme  http://www.fao.org/3/CA0916EN/https://goo.gl/7YD2vBca0916en.pdf
• Innovation at FAO http://www.fao.org/innovation/en
• Event home page https://goo.gl/ByjeQa