Men and women farmer participation and choice of variety could guide breeding and drive the adoption of different haricot bean varieties. Thus, understanding how gender influences participation and choice of bean cultivation and marketing is fundamental. The study sought to analyse how socio-cultural norms determine women and men, participation and choice of variety for cultivation and sale in Cameroon’s West region. A mixed-method was used in collecting data from men and women farmers in six subdivisions in the West region of Cameroon in 2019.

African smallholders should adopt climate-smart agriculture to make a sustainable transition towards cleaner, circular and more productive food systems. Farmers must play a key role in that process. However, the adoption and diffusion of climate-smart technologies have been slow. Here, a cross-sectional econometric analysis using primary data on sustainable farming practices in the cereal-legume farming systems of Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania is applied to analyse the drivers and intensity of innovation adoption.

This book examines the challenges and impacts of poor diets and nutrition from current food systems and the potential contribution of biodiversity and ecosystem services in addressing these problems. It also presents a multi-country, cross-sectoral analysis of initiatives that have promoted local food biodiversity in four countries: Brazil, Kenya, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Food security, at national and household levels, is on the decline because traditional capital (physical, natural, human and financial) has not fully led to its improvement. There is an increasing shift of attention to social capital as an element that explains household food security, but there is a lack of adequately documented information on this. Therefore, this study investigates the effects of social capital on food security, using data collected on a cross-section of 775 cassava farming households from four zones of Nigeria.

This study examines the extent of the productivity gap between male and female bean producers, its discriminatory nature and implications for the policymakers in agriculture in Tanzania. Generally, women are distinctively “invisible” in agriculture, due to social norms and even from the national agricultural policy perspective. Their discrimination arises from uncounted and unaccounted for farm work, and their productivity is reduced by triple roles, limited access to education, having triple effects on access to technology, training and land rights.

Agricultural mechanization in developing countries has taken at least two contested innovation pathways—the “incumbent trajectory” that promotes industrial agriculture, and an “alternative pathway” that supports small-scale mechanization for sustainable development of hillside farming systems.

At present, our ability to comprehend the dynamics of food systems and the consequences of their rapid ‘transformations’ is limited. In this paper, we propose to address this gap by exploring the interactions between the sustainability of food systems and a set of key drivers at the global scale.

As the population increases, demand for food increases too, which has led to large-scale land conversion to improve livestock production in Colombia. Fulfilling these criteria of increasing demand in a sustainable way is a challenge and remote sensing data provides an accurate method to support this task. In this study, Planet Scope multispectral satellite datasets and coincident field measurements acquired over test fields in the study area (Patía) of September 2018 was used.

Overlooked in national reports and in conservation programs, wild food plants (WFPs)

This study evaluated the poverty reduction impact of the adoption of cropping system intensification (CSI) technologies using the endogenous switching regression (ESR) model in the Great Lakes region of Africa that comprises Burundi, eastern DR Congo, and Rwanda. The study data came from a household survey of 1,495 sample households interviewed between October and December 2014. Results indicated that the adoption of the CSI technologies had increased crop yield, crop income, and per capita consumption expenditure in the region, resulting in poverty reduction.

The cassava system in Nigeria is developing, with increasing attention to its potential positive outcomes. However, credit access is a major problem in expanding productive activities of the different actors across the value chains of cassava products. This study investigates the extent of access to credit by cassava actors with respect to the different financial institutions in the country using data obtained from a sample of 168 actors, including producers, processors, marketers, fabricators and end users.