In many low- and middle-income countries, agribusinesses are deeply engaged in providing services to small- and medium-scale farmers. Such services can include agricultural advisory services or extension. Yet this phenomenon of agribusiness-based advisory services (ABAS) has received relatively little attention in the study of and discussions on advisory services. This is a critical oversight, as agribusinesses are increasingly present as service providers, and hence shape the prevailing service landscape for smallholder farmers. This report discusses the findings of a learning trajectory. It presents evidence on the contribution of agribusinesses to the promotion of inclusive agricultural development, and on the choices they make in operating advisory services under competitive pressures. The report also highlights concrete areas where the different service delivery models by agribusinesses could be improved.

Over the years, Uganda has made significant progress in reducing poverty. Nonetheless, in densely populated rural areas the incidence is still high, with as much as 30 per cent of the population living below the national rural poverty line. IFAD is working with the Government of Uganda to increase the income of rural households living in poverty and improve their food security and resilience. These projects create opportunities, increase access to markets, provide training and mentoring, enable participants to develop alternative sources of income, empower women and build rural people’s resilience.

Latest estimates indicate that over 820 million people are hungry in the world. Extreme weather events caused by climate change, such as droughts and flooding, are damaging the livelihoods of farmers, fishers and forest-dependent people who are already vulnerable and food insecure. Natural resources, such as land, water and fertile soil, are threatened by environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services and, in certain areas, urbanization and industrial use. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) believes that agricultural innovation can help its member countries to meet these challenges by moving towards sustainable food systems that reduce food loss and waste and that produce more food, of greater nutritional value, withless environmental damage. When faced with a major crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all reminded of the importance of innovation in maintaining sustainable food and agriculture systems and uninterrupted food supply chains ensuring diversified, safe and nutritious food for everyone.

The "Towards a More Competitive, Inclusive and Resilient Agrifood Sector in Argentina" is a World Bank assessment prepared for the Government of the Argentine Republic (GoA) to support public policy and program formulation in the agrifood sector. This Review addresses the sector’s past performance and trends and options for policies to support the future development of the sector, while bearing in mind local and international experiences. The Review is based on analyses of agrifood sector data and case studies and benefited from fruitful dialogue through in-person interviews and consultations with various sector stakeholders, institutions and experts from Argentina and abroad.

Global efforts to tackle the climate crisis must address its impacts on people, particularly the most vulnerable. Because of their reliance on weather-dependent agriculture and agrifood systems, climate change has a profound impact on the incomes and livelihoods of rural people living in low- and middle-income countries. However, policy attention and funding for vulnerable rural people falls woefully short of actual needs. In 2017/18, only 1.7 percent of global tracked financing reached small-scale producers, while only 3 percent supported climate adaptation in agriculture, forestry and other land uses. Rural people’s vulnerabilities to climate change are strongly influenced by a person’s wealth, gender and age. These factors also affect their abilities to manage the impacts of climate stressors on their livelihoods and determine the type of adaptive actions they take.

This report brings our organizations together again to reaffirm that, if we do not redouble and better target our efforts, our goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030 will remain out of reach. Although the world is recovering from the global pandemic, this is occurring unevenly across and within countries. On top of this, the world is grappling with the consequences of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has shaken food and energy markets. Agrifood systems remain highly vulnerable to shocks and disruptions arising from conflict, climate variability and extremes, and economic contraction. These factors, combined with growing inequities, keep challenging the capacity of agrifood systems to deliver nutritious, safe and affordable diets for all. These major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition are our “new normal”. We have no option but to redouble our efforts to transform agrifood systems and leverage them towards reaching the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) targets.

The small-scale farms are the main group that has an important role for the development of the agricultural and rural area in Bulgaria. This family business is officially engaged in one member of the family farm and required employment power by all others members. The small-scale farmers with agricultural education are very small. This type of farmers has mostly practical agricultural knowledge and experience and funds their investment costs with their own financial resources. The goal of the present paper is to investigate the role of the extension services for the small-scale farmers. To achieve above goal was (1) to identify farmers’ needs for information and knowledge, (2) to identify actors and their methods of exchange knowledge and (3) to present the processes of achieving knowledge and information among involved actors.

Many studies show that interaction with extension services impact farmer’s technology adoption decisions and profitability levels. However, analysis of extension impact across all farm systems whilst controlling for endogeneity biases is less common. This research attempts to redress that research gap by firstly discussing the various biases related to the motivation to engage with extension services, omitted variable bias and measurement error, and subsequently applying instrumental variable (IV) regression estimation to the relationship between extension engagement and farm level outcomes, namely family farm income over a pooled panel data set. Distance to the local advisory office and the introduction of a policy change were chosen as valid and relevant instruments. The results indicate a positive impact of extension engagement on farm income, and imply that an ordinary least squares approach underestimates the benefits of extension engagement. 

The study examined published works on the contribution of agricultural extension to the empowerment of women for agricultural development. It also explored the theoretical and practical implications. The findings revealed that research on women’s empowerment in agriculture through capacity building had grown steadily since 1987, with leading journals being Gender, Technology and Development and the Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension. Quisumbing, Mudege, and Ponnusamy emerge as prolific authors, while India boasts the most distributed studies. Beyond a comprehensive review, this work introduces a novel concept for understanding women’s empowerment in agriculture. The concept comprised of five extension methods designed to empower women farmers, emphasising informed decision-making and leveraging the various forms of capital.

The paper contains the analysis of AKIS systems in three European Countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The discussed subject is the comparison study of the chosen results of survey of agriculture, the history of creation the agricultural advisory system, and the structures of agricultural advisory and systems of knowledge, information and innovation flows. The analysed three Baltic countries, in spite of nearly half century of their links by common history and central command of economy policy, after regaining independence, they chosen individual ways to build the AKIS structures. In these processes they used patterns taken from some Western Europe countries, and reached different results. 

National-scale studies of pluralistic advisory and extension systems and impacts from privatisation rarely encompass farmer and advisor perspectives for an integrated examination. Without such examination, all pluralistic systems may be considered to share the same risks or require similar forms of intervention. Combining farmer and advisor perspectives could assist diagnose and focus new governance efforts in pluralistic systems. This paper reports on an integrated methodology and results from a study of the Australian agricultural advisory and extension system to examine the extent to which Australia’s pluralistic agricultural advisory and extension system shares the risks, consequences and governance challenges reported in other countries.

This Lessons Learned publication reviews experiences from the IFAD grant “Scaling up sustainable land management (SLM) practices by smallholder farmers: working with extension services to identify, assess and disseminate SLM practices”. The three-year grant (2018-2020) was aimed at piloting – and gaining insights from– the application of WOCAT’s SLM tools and methods with extension services in three countries, namely Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Uganda. In each country, there was an ongoing IFAD-supported loan project, which was the main grant partner. Scaling up was to be achieved by working with these partners to enhance their communities’ resilience to climate change shocks and other environmental pressures. 

This study examined strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within the extension service delivery in Kaduna State, Nigeria. The total population (130) of extension agents was used for the study. A structured questionnaire and focus group discussion schedule were used to elicit information. Percentages, and mean were used to analyse the data collected. The findings showed Insecurity, high farmer-to-extension agent ratio and inadequate training facilities as challenging factors that affect extension service delivery. The study concluded that extension service delivery was highly ineffective because of the low extension-farmer ratio and low motivation among the agents. It is recommended that the government employ more extension agents to reduce the possible imbalance in extension service delivery to farmers.

In 2023, the world returned to older, Cold War-like patterns with decidedly modern twists. There was considerable speculation the world was slipping into a new Cold War rife with conflict. Wars openly raged in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip, the Sudan, Syria,and many others. With so many conflicts, humanitarian workers in Sudan asked if allies were forgetting about the largest human displacement crisis in the world. NATO was seen dusting off military plans that reflected Cold War strategies. The International Monetary Fund asked how to preserve economic cooperation amid geopolitical tensions and a rocky economic recovery. We have similar questions about environmental cooperation. The climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises continue to loom over these geopolitical and technological worries. Environmental crises can exacerbate conflict and vice versa.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization coupled with an ageing rural population pose serious challenges to agriculture in South Korea. More than 46% of farmers in Korea are 65 years old or older. International trade agreements related to agriculture concluded in the early 1990s made Korean agriculture more vulnerable as it opened intense competition to its agricultural produce. The Government recognized the need to deploy cutting-edge technologies (including mechanization and automation) and the importance of having highly competent professional agricultural managers to lead its agriculture and fisheries industries so as to enhance the competitiveness of Korean agriculture. Though the country has been producing agriculture graduates who have studied the discipline for four years, they have been reluctant to put their expertise to use in agricultural fields as they prefer laboratories and offices. The education system in the agricultural colleges have failed to foster a new generation that can practice agriculture.