special series on agricultural advisory services Can agricultural extension1 systems deliver quality services to smallholder producers, often in remote areas? Yes, there is evidence that this is achieved in some developing and emerging economies. But this is by no means a common practice, and many extension systems continue to struggle with weak performance. This series of six papers seeks to u...

Over the past two decades many countries have undertaken to decentralize government functions and transfer authority and responsibilities from central to intermediate and local governments, and often to communities and the private sector. Decentralization is potentially important to agricultural knowledge and information systems, but decentralization is not an end in itself, and successful dece...

opening the market early for consumers and for funding the expensive lawsuit. Yet Cobalt, which had agreed to delay consumer access to the generic brand by abandoning its effort to knock out what proved to be a patent that never should have been issued in the first place, was able to “double-dip.” Cobalt was able to keep the money it was paid by the brand-name drug company to abandon the patent...

success of the agricultural advisory services plan that has recently been implemented in the form of agricultural engineering, technical and consulting firms (aetcfs) is dependent on an understanding of the level of the advisors' competencies to design and implement purposeful human resources development programs. the aim followed in this study was to investigate and compare the competenci...

This research paper presents the development of a fuzzy-logic advisory system to assist smallmedium size companies (SMEs) as a decision support tool for implementing lean manufacturing. The system is developed using fuzzy logic rules, with a combination of research methodology approaches employed in the research study that included data collection from ten manufacturing SMEs through documentati...