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Enabling agricultural innovation systems to promote appropriate technologies and practices for farmers, rural youth and women during COVID-19











FAO. 2020. Enabling agricultural innovation systems to promote appropriate technologies and practices for farmers, rural youth and women during COVID-19. Rome. 



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    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Information and tools for young agricultural workers during COVID-19 crisis 2020
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    The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis which is already affecting the food and agriculture sector. Countries with existing humanitarian crises are particularly exposed to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Support to ensure sustainable agriculture production and maintaining the critical supply chain linkages are extremely important during this crisis and in the context of associated lockdown measures implemented by countries. FAO is playing a key role in assessing and responding to the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic on people’s lives and livelihoods, global food trade, markets, food supply chains and livestock. To mitigate the pandemic’s impacts on food and agriculture, FAO urges countries to meet the immediate food needs of their vulnerable populations, boost their social protection programmes, keep global food trade going, keep the domestic supply chain gears moving, and support smallholder farmers’ ability to increase food production. There are multiple challenges that need immediate attention to safeguard the livelihoods of the smallholders. Some of these challenges include maintaining the linkages with input suppliers, access to markets, provision of knowledge on innovative technologies and practices, and above all maintaining the employment opportunities for rural agricultural workers and youth. Addressing these challenges requires tools, methods and training resources that young agricultural development professionals and rural youth as the critical agents can apply to facilitate the use of innovative solutions and practices by farmers to be able to face these challenges posed. This brief offers a package of tools, training materials and best practices that are immediately available to support youth in responding to the challenges of the pandemic from a food and agriculture point of view.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Innovative markets for sustainable agriculture 2016
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    Between 2013 and 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) undertook a survey of innovative approaches that enable markets to act as incentives in the transition towards sustainable agriculture in developing countries. Through a competitive selection process, 15 cases from around the world provide insights into how small-scale initiatives that use sustainable production practices are supported by mar ket demand, and create innovations in the institutions that govern sustainable practices and market exchanges. These cases respond to both local and distant consumers’ concerns about the quality of the food that they eat. The book evidences that the initiatives rely upon social values (e.g. trustworthiness, health [nutrition and food safety], food sovereignty, promotion of youth and rural development, farmer and community livelihoods) to adapt sustainable practices to local contexts, while creat ing new market outlets for food products. Specifically, private sector and civil society actors are leading partnerships with the public sector to build market infrastructure, integrate sustainable agriculture into private and public education and extension programmes, and ensure the exchange of transparent information about market opportunities. The results are: (i) system innovations that allow new rules for marketing and assuring the sustainable qualities of products; (ii) new forms of organ ization that permit actors to play multiple roles in the food system (e.g. farmer and auditor, farmer and researcher, consumer and auditor, consumer and intermediary); (iii) new forms of market exchange, such as box schemes, university kiosks, public procurement or systems of seed exchanges; and (iv) new technologies for sustainable agriculture (e.g. effective micro-organisms, biopesticides and soil analysis techniques). The public sector plays a key role in providing legitimate political and ph ysical spaces for multiple actors to jointly create and share sustainable agricultural knowledge, practices and products.
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    Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet
    Africa’s youth in agrifood systems: Innovation in the context of COVID-19 2020
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    Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, young entrepreneurs in agrifood systems in sub-Saharan Africa were already facing a number of challenges. The main challenges include limited access to natural resources, finance, technology, knowledge and information, and insufficient participation in policy dialogues and other decision-making processes. The COVID-19 pandemic and its disruptions to agricultural value chains are presenting additional hurdles for these agripreneurs. Without focused and appropriately designed response interventions addressing their specific constraints and contexts, it is increasingly observed that some of the policy responses and measures put in place by governments to halt the spread of the virus are exacerbating the existing challenges that the youth are facing in engaging in agrifood systems. For example, several formal and informal micro, small and medium-sized agribusinesses that employ many young people, have been forced to close or downscale significantly as a result of lockdowns and movement restrictions at national and local levels. FAO, together with other members of the United Nations Inter-Agency Network on Youth Development (IANYD), has called for effective and safe partnerships with young people during and after the COVID-19 crisis to ensure that government and development partners’ response measures are inclusive of youth’s needs.

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