The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa - By Calestous Juma

Innovation Capacity in Agricultural Sector

The changing context for agricultural development has highlighted a strong need to understand and adoptinnovation systems thinking. Science, technology and innovation policy has equated rural development toagricultural development. The main objective of this paper was to examine the role of innovation capacity inagricultural sector. With the growing diversification of rural livelihood options i...

The role of community engagement in the adoption of new agricultural biotechnologies by farmers: the case of the Africa harvest tissue-culture banana in Kenya

BACKGROUND The tissue culture banana (TCB) is a biotechnological agricultural innovation that has been adopted widely in commercial banana production. In 2003, Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International (AH) initiated a TCB program that was explicitly developed for smallholder farmers in Kenya to help them adopt the TCB as a scalable agricultural business opportunity. At the heart of the c...

Controlling the Risk for an Agricultural Harvest

G the harvest represents a complex managerial problem for agricultural cooperatives involved in harvesting and processing operations: balancing the risk of overinvestment with the risk of underproduction. The rate to harvest crops and the corresponding capital investment are critical strategic decisions in situations where poor weather conditions present a risk of crop loss. In this article, we...

Perspectives to Reducing Post-harvest Losses of Agricultural Products in Africa

Agricultural Productivity in Africa

Raising agricultural productivity and accelerating agricultural growth are commonly promoted as core development strategies throughout Africa, since the majority of the continent’s poor and malnourished population depends largely on farming. Despite these strategies, agricultural growth in Africa lags behind overall economic growth, and agricultural performance falls below that of other develop...