Science and Innovation Forum 2026 Programme

Robust scientific evidence for informing decisions, investments and actions for food security and agrifood systems is continually being generated. However, the institutional machinery and processes that turns science into decisions, policies and impacts is often unclear, weak or inefficient. This session examines why the science-policy interface, the process connecting science with policymakers can function as a bottleneck rather than a driver of agrifood systems transformation. It asks how national science advisory systems, from chief scientists to advisory boards, councils and academies, can be strengthened and better connected across global, regional, national and sub-national levels; how coherence can be achieved across ministries of agriculture, environment, health, trade and finance that rarely share a single evidence base; how legitimacy, safeguards against capture, and the inclusion of Indigenous and marginalized knowledge can be built into these systems; and how the capacity of officials to demand and use evidence can be strengthened beyond a focus only the supply of evidence itself. Drawing on voices from national governments, international organizations, research institutions and regional research networks, the session will launch a range of practical resources including a joint FAO-CIRAD assessment of the effectiveness of science-policy interfaces and an FAO e-learning course on science-policy interfaces. The session (with audience engagement) will deliver a frank exchange on what has worked, what has not, and what a better functioning global to national architecture for science advisory systems could look like. 

Agricultural extension and advisory services are the connective tissue between agricultural science and farmers fields. Yet in many countries the connection is broken or weak, underfunded or absent. The scale of the challenge is immense to improve the skills and capabilities of smallholder farmers, where progress is constrained by systems that are understaffed and poorly coordinated, and that can lack the monitoring and evaluation needed to know what is actually working. As a result investment decisions for agricultural extension systems can rest on evidence that is thin, contested and poorly standardised. This session reviews what rigorous evidence can tell us about extension effectiveness, and will consider what knowledge and skills farmers need in addition to agronomy, spanning decision-making under uncertainty, market intelligence, climate adaptation and financial literacy. The session will explore why adoption often fails not for lack of information but because of risk perceptions, social norms, trust in messengers and gendered constraints. It will examine the institutional mechanisms and policy frameworks needed to give farmers continuous, context-specific access to technologies and innovations, and weighs the comparative case for digital advisory platforms (including AI-enabled digital agronomy), rural knowledge centres, farmer field schools, embedded value-chain extension and peer-to-peer networks. The session will confront whether extension systems are equitably responsive to women, whose education and knowledge access remain systematically underserved. A key current consideration is how and whether remote sensing, precision agriculture, digital identity and AI are reshaping the content and delivery of extension. The session will enable provocative questions such as: Who will the farmers of 2040 actually be?; Can the private sector, NGOs and farmer organisations deliver what governments find difficult to deliver? The session aims to enable discussion and perspectives that can pave the way towards a shared view of the foundations of a future-fit, pluralistic extension system for smallholder farmers. 

This session launches the fifth cohort of the Accelerator Mentorship Programme for Women-led SMEs in Africa, a joint initiative of FAO and Emerging Ag. Women make up roughly half of the agrifood workforce across sub-Saharan Africa, yet persistent gaps in access to land, finance, extension services and market networks continue to hold back the productivity and profitability of women-run enterprises relative to those run by men. Mentorship is one response to these information and network gaps, pairing emerging entrepreneurs with experienced business leaders who can pass on practical management knowledge, open doors to markets and finance, and model pathways into higher-return activities. Since 2022, the programme has connected women-led agrifood SMEs across many African countries with one-to-one mentors, alongside tailored training in areas from digital tools and food processing to finance, leadership and marketing. Mentorship combined with technical training, access to finance and market linkages can be highly effective. The new cohort will bring fifty women entrepreneurs together with experienced mentors from across the global agrifood sector for a nine-month programme. The launch event will bring together programme leadership, mentors and selected mentees to discuss the evidence, results, challenges and opportunities facing women-led agrifood SMEs in Africa, and to open the floor for questions before the new cohort formally begins.

While scientific evidence that can drives progress for agrifood systems and food security is being continually generated, there is an ongoing need for ongoing evidence-synthesis on a wide range of topics to better inform decisions, investments, actions and impacts. To support accelerated progress on food security and agrifood systems transformation, different types of evidence synthesis to meet needs are required across topics and stakeholder groups. In particular, evidence needs differ by format, timescale and scale, from rapid responses to in-depth technical reports, Unlike climate change and biodiversity, agrifood systems have very few dedicated “on demand” and responsive agrifood systems evidence synthesis platforms. This session will consider why that gap persists, and what future evidence synthesis systems for food security and agrifood systems should consist of. It will examine why existing agrifood-specific mechanisms remain narrow, under-resourced or precarious to meet the need, and how evidence is balanced along with political priorities, values and institutional constraints. The session will confront gaps and bias in the evidence base, including whose research and knowledge counts, and how grey literature, private-sector data and indigenous knowledge can be better included. Looking to the future, leading experts from across the evidence-synthesis supply and demand spheres will explore what artificial intelligence, new financing models and stronger knowledge brokering could offer. The session will set the scene considering more powerful and democratic evidence synthesis platforms. Leading voices from research institutions, international bodies and national systems will consider in this interactive session what it will take to make evidence work harder for food security.

One Health is a systems approach that considers pandemic risk and agrifood resilience within a connected system. One Health approaches go beyond a core layer of zoonotic spillover risk to also encompass the health of crops, forests, fish and soils that shape how exposed people to shocks and disasters. This session examines where pandemic and antimicrobial resistance risk are concentrated, rather than assuming One Health works evenly everywhere. The session will trace how livestock systems, land-use change and climate-driven shifts in species ranges are reshaping where and how zoonotic spillovers happen. The session will consider antimicrobial, herbicide, pesticide and biological-control resistance as expressions of the same evolutionary dynamics, one that cannot be solved sector by sector. The session will confront critical questions faced by One Health systems: does it reach the farms, fisheries and frontline services where risk concentrates, and has it measurably changed outbreak and resistance outcomes, or are we still at the stage of improved coordination? Additional questions include who bears the costs of prevention versus who captures the benefits of One Health approaches. Farmers, funders, scientists, policymakers and equity advocates will explore these tensions and discuss practical, time-bound commitments on outcome measurement, integrated surveillance and cost-sharing.

This session considers whether current models for financing agrifood research and development are fit for purpose, and how they could be redesigned to generate more high-quality knowledge, technologies, tools and investment approaches capable of delivering greater impact for people and the planet. The session examines why agrifood research and development remains underinvested relative to need, including why fragile and conflict-affected states, which carry a large share of global food insecurity, attract so little research investment. The session participants will debate how short-term, project-tied funding cycles and reward of low-risk, easily fundable research predominates over sustained, higher-risk work that produces substantively new knowledge. It will also examine whether concentrating funding in large grants, merged institutions and single investigators improves or undermines research quality and impact, and why research waste and duplication persist when funders rarely require evidence of what is already known. Power dynamics in research agenda setting will be explored, including what it would take for farmers, national systems and Global South institutions to better shape the research questions being asked. Speakers and panellists will be drawn from leading research and funding organisations across the globe, with scientists' and researchers own perspectives central throughout, as the session works toward practical proposals for an R&D funding system able to generate the knowledge, technologies and investment approaches that agrifood systems and food security most urgently need.

2026 marks the International Year of the Woman Farmer, a moment to take stock of the promise of digital agriculture for women farmers. Digital agriculture is attracting rising investment and expectations of productivity, income and food security gains, yet evidence that those benefits are reaching women farmers currently remains thin and is too often measured at the point of access rather than the point of impact. The session considers a triple divide, gender, digital and rural, that can leave digital tools structurally out of reach for many smallholder women, and asks how counting women as users or registrants can be better connected to real gains in control, voice and economic power. The session will examiner whose knowledge gets encoded into digital agricultural tools, and how women's indigenous and local expertise can be built in as a primary input rather than an afterthought. Men's roles will also be considered, including household dynamics around technology and how the economic gains digital tools generate are shared. The session will investigate why promising pilots so often struggle to scale equitably, how farmer data can be handled with proper consent and benefit-sharing, and how climate finance flowing into digital agriculture can be designed to reduce rather than reinforce existing inequities. Built around an exchange between advocates and critics of digital agriculture, the session works toward practical, shared commitments on financing, accountability and design that support women's agency and empowerment. 

Focusing scientific excellence and the brightest minds for real-world impacts on food security is a key challenge. This session focuses on one of the biggest bottlenecks: the gap many early-career researchers face in translating science into impacts, for the betterment of humanity and planet scientists that the vast majority of scientists are motivated by. Structured as a series of short, focused mentoring conversations between emerging and senior scientists, for a defined cohort of early-career researchers the session moves participants through five dimensions of scientific impact in turn: articulating scientific ambition, building meaningful collaborations, engaging with policymakers, communicating science effectively, and navigating a research career with purpose. The early-career researchers are treated as active contributors throughout and will be asked to challenge established approaches, including to put forward their own ideas on how scientific institutions could better support early-career researchers to respond to emerging agrifood systems challenges. The session will consider how scientific institutions can better enable ambitious, interdisciplinary and impact-oriented research careers, and what practical insights, networks and strategies early-career researchers need to translate scientific innovation into policy and societal impact. Drawing on the perspectives of early-career researchers from across nutrition, agroecology, digital innovation, fisheries, water management and other domains, the session works toward a shared set of actions that scientific institutions and early-career researchers can carry forward together to accelerate impacts on food security.

Agrifood research and development is central to transforming agrifood systems and advancing food security. Critically its value depends on connecting R&D investment to outcomes such as productivity growth, incomes and resilience. This session focuses on the data and indicators base that makes that connection possible, namely: internationally comparable data and indicators on agricultural research capacity and investment. Many countries still lack reliable, comparable statistics on agricultural R&D, which limits their ability to prioritise investment, design policies and strengthen national research and innovation systems. The session will examine why sustainable, institutionalised mechanisms for collecting these statistics matter, not just one-off data collection, and why R&D indicators are weakly linked to extension, advisory services and technology-adoption data, leaving a gap in understanding whether research investment reaches farms and value chains. It will look at coverage gaps, including gender-disaggregated data on researchers and private-sector R&D investment, both thinly measured in most countries. Focussing on the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI initiative and its recent global data release, the session will present current trends in agricultural R&D capacity and investment, and consider emerging approaches, including geospatial data, imputation methods, open data practice and AI-assisted analysis, that could shape the next generation of agrifood science and technology indicators. Leading experts and authorities from different sectors and perspectives will discuss how stronger data and indicators systems can reinforce science-policy interfaces and support better-informed agrifood R&D decisions for improved impacts.