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Alternatives for Seed Regulatory Reform: An Analysis of Variety Testing, Variety Regulation and Seed Quality Control
(1997) Tripp, Robert; Louwaars, Niels P.; Van Der Burg, W. Joost; Virk, D.S.; Witcombe, J.R.
"This paper summarises the findings of a recently completed project which examined the conduct of seed regulation in developing countries and produced a set of guidelines for seed regulatory reform. The three areas of seed regulation included in the study were: public sector plant breeding (particularly the management of variety testing); variety regulation (registration, performance testing and release); and seed quality control (seed certification and seed testing). Adjustment to seed regulatory frameworks is necessary because of significant changes in national seed systems. These changes include: reductions in budget for public agricultural research; the failure of many seed parastatals; increasing concern about plant genetic diversity; pressure for the establishment of plant variety protection; the increasing contributions of commercial seed enterprises; and the emergence of innovative local level variety development and seed production initiatives. There are a variety of reasons why current public seed regulation is unsatisfactory. It is not efficiently organised, often uses inappropriate standards, does not offer opportunities for farmer and seed producer participation, and is not sufficiently transparent. At the same time there are a number of options for regulatory reform. In plant breeding, more emphasis should be placed on decentralising variety testing, breeding for particular niches, and making site selection, trial management and analysis more representative of farmers' conditions. In variety regulation, simpler registration procedures are required, and the demands of plant variety protection should not be allowed to bias or limit the development and use of public and farmer varieties. Variety performance testing for release should be made more flexible. In seed quality control, standards should be re-examined for their relevance to particular farming conditions, and much of the responsibility for monitoring seed quality should be passed to seed producers and merchants, accompanied by well defined public oversight and enforcement mechanisms."
The Causes of Land Degradation Along Spontaneously Expanding Agricultural Frontiers in the Third World
(1990) Southgate, Douglas
"The extent and consequences of deforestation and related environmental degradation in the developing world have become the subject of considerable debate and concern. There is disagreement about how rapidly tree-covered land near the equator is being cleared or otherwise disturbed. Likewise, tropical deforestation's impacts have proven difficult to identify and to evaluate. By contrast, the contribution small farmers make to deforestation is universally understood. Land clearing has been more rapid in Rondonia, for example, than anywhere else in the Brazilian Amazon and more than half the deforested land in that state is divided among small agricultural holdings (Browder 1988; Mahar 1989). Throughout the developing world, small farmers are primary agents of deforestation."
Competitive Agricultural Technology Funds in Developing Countries
(1999) Gill, Gerald J.; Carney, Diana
"Dissatisfaction with traditional mechanisms of funding agricultural research and dissemination (AR&D) in developing countries has led to the introduction of competitive agricultural technology funds (CATFs) in an increasing number of them. This model is now favoured by many donors, despite the fact that available information on its modalities and performance has been fragmentary. This paper reviews experience with ten such funds in very different national and institutional settings."
The Effects of Agricultural Irrigation on Wetland Ecosystems in Developing Countries: A Literature Review
(2005) Galbraith, Hector; Amerasinghe, Priyanie H.; Huber-Lee, Annette
"The purpose of this review was to evaluate the extent to which the current scientific literature allows us to determine and quantify the ecological costs and benefits of irrigated agriculture in wetland ecosystems of the developing countries, and to establish quantitative relationships between anthropogenic activities and ecological responses. The following are the main points that emerged: • Irrigation or activities associated with agricultural irrigation can and do cause adverse impacts to wetland ecological resources ranging from localized and subtle, to long-distance and severe. • Irrigation or activities associated with irrigation can also result in the creation or enhancement of important wetland ecological resources. • Depending on the irrigation activity and scale, irrigated agriculture and ecological resources can sustainably coexist. • The confounding effects of 'natural' or other anthropogenic stressors are not often evaluated when the effects of irrigation on wetlands are being assessed, and it can be difficult to partition the effects due to irrigation. • The potential long-term ecological benefits of water storage schemes are rarely investigated. Any measurement of impact usually stops once the project is implemented. • Because of the above (bullets 4 and 5), 'quantitative' information on the relationships between irrigated agricultural activity and ecological effects is sparse to non-existent. This severely impairs our ability to learn from previous failures or successes and, importantly, to design future activities and projects so as to minimize environmental impacts. • If we are to minimize the potential for ecological injury and enhance the likelihood of benefits in future projects, it is crucial that the existing data base be enormously expanded. Specifically, we need to treat each new project and scheme as a 'natural experiment' where the ecological resources and effects are quantified from before the project is implemented until long after implementation. Until this is accomplished, we run the risk of repeating the same mistakes that have been made in the past."
Formal Farmers' Organisations in the Agricultural Technology System: Current Roles and Future Challenges
(1996) Carney, Diana
"Farmers organisations (FOs) need to be relatively sophisticated and well-funded to become involved in agricultural technology development and transfer. This is because of the complexity of understanding members technological needs and of building productive partnerships with other technology suppliers. Only small-scale initiatives are likely to be possible for organisations which have limited capacity. Such initiatives usually rely on leaders existing knowledge of or access to improved technologies. Organisations with relatively homogenous membership and with close links to the market (which helps both to set quality standards and to generate money for the organisation itself) are generally better able to get involved in technology than their larger, more political counterparts. The attitude of the public and private technology suppliers is also likely to be a critical factor in determining whether farmers organisations will be successful in their technology-related activities, as is the support of donors and/or NGOs on the capacity-building and financial sides."
How Does Stronger Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Affect Seed Supply? Early Evidence of Impact
(1996) Van Wijk, Jeroen
"Recent international conventions seeking the stronger protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) have been promoted largely by the OECD countries. Is there evidence to indicate that early benefits have, in fact, been gained by the world s main biotechnology and seed companies? What will be the consequences for developing countries? Will IPR legislation result in better varieties becoming available more quickly? Will it encourage local plant breeding or will IPR predominantly strengthen the market position of foreign seed companies? Will traditional seed diffusion practices become restricted? Most early experience with the implementation of IPR has been gained in developed countries and in Latin America. This paper reviews preliminary evidence against the above questions."
Improving Livestock Production Through Extension: Information Needs, Institutions and Opportunities
(1996) Morton, John; Matthewman, Richard
"Transmitting information on livestock production has rarely been a priority for centralised extension services in developing countries. National agricultural extension services are usually designed around the need to transmit information on annual crops, while livestock ministries and departments are dominated by vets and animal health concerns. Yet the potential for increasing livestock production through the provision of information is growing in many developing countries. This paper describes the context of that growth and looks at some of the ways in which livestock extension services and institutions differ. Future development in this field must build pragmatically on existing institutions, while attempting to respond flexibly and equitably to the needs of livestock producers."
Neglected Species, Livelihoods and Biodiversity in Difficult Areas: How Should the Public Sector Respond?
(1997) Blench, Roger
"Recent research on neglected crop and animal species suggests that there exists an important gap between the priorities of development and research agencies and the way small farmers, both in Africa and elsewhere in the world, treat such species. This paper argues that policies to promote neglected species will have positive effects on biodiversity and livelihoods, especially in more difficult areas where conjunctive management of common pool and private resources remains important."
Organisational Roles in Farmer Participatory Research and Extension: Lessons from the Last Decade
(1998) Farrington, John
"Experience over the last decade suggests that participatory approaches to technical change are falling into two broad camps: public sector approaches are generally part of a client orientation strategy and rarely aim to do more than enhance the functions of technology design and delivery. By contrast, NGO approaches generally aim for the empowerment of weaker groups. This paper reviews the complementarities and tensions between the approaches, and suggests ways forward."
Public Sector Agricultural Extension: Is There Life After Structural Adjustment?
(1994) Farrington, John
"The public sector extension services in which ldcs - often at the behest of donors - have invested large sums are achieving only limited impact but face unsustainably high recurrent costs. This is especially true of the 'Training and Visit' model promoted by the World Bank. Further, the fundamental promise of public sector extension - that low-income farmers are unlikely to obtain technical information unless it is provided by government - is increasingly being challenged. This paper reviews the pressures facing conventional agricultural extension and examines the prospects of recent approaches which are participatory, institutionally pluralistic and geared towards cost-sharing."
Rethinking Approaches to Tree Management by Farmers
(1998) Arnold, J.E. Michael; Dewees, Peter
"This paper examines farm households tree management strategies and proposes a framework for policy interventions. Farmers plant or retain some trees on their land nearly everywhere. Historically this component of on-farm resources has attracted little interest but practical policy measures can be identified, and differ substantially from those relevant to forestry."
Sustainable Livelihoods in Practice: Early Applications of Concepts in Rural Areas
(1999) Farrington, John
"What is poverty and how it can best be addressed are central questions at conceptual and practical levels in international development. Increased donor commitment to tackling poverty has made the search for answers more urgent. This paper outlines a new approach to poverty alleviation, sustainable livelihoods, setting out its basic concepts and drawing lessons from early experience. The approach is being pursued by, amongst others, the UK Department for International Development."
Using Logframes to Monitor and Review Farmer Participatory Research
(1997) Farrington, John; Nelson, John
"Farmer participatory research (FPR) is difficult to monitor and review because it uses a process' approach; it is done in variable, unpredictable situations; it produces some outputs that are hard to measure objectively; and it involves different types of stakeholder, each with their own aims and ideas of success or failure. For these reasons, FPR projects tend to have permeable boundaries, with sometimes important spillover effects, and less than direct relationships between inputs and outputs. "This paper examines how far a conventional project management tool, the logframe, can be adapted to the monitoring and review of FPR. Normally used in 'blueprint' projects, the logframe presents some difficulties in handling those with process' characteristics. But it has a number of strengths: it requires clear specification of purposes, anticipated outputs, activities, and the relationship among them, as well as performance indicators and means of assessing them. Also, it is becoming almost universally adopted by funding agencies, so organisations using FPR may in future have to structure their proposals and monitoring activities in logframe format."
Valuing Nutrients in Soil and Water: Concepts and Techniques with Examples from IWMI Studies in the Developing World
(2004) Drechsel, Pay; Giordano, Mark; Gyiele, Lucy
"The value of soil nutrients in plant growth and agricultural output is closely related to water availability. Likewise, agricultural water productivity is in large part determined by nutrient supplies. Despite the importance of nutrient-water interactions, they are often ignored in analysis. For example, assessments of the benefits of irrigation often fail to consider the costs of increased nutrient export through greater crop harvest while the value of nutrient import is often neglected in discussions of wastewater agriculture. It is only through the combined and balanced consideration of nutrients and water that their true value can be measured and accurate assessments of the relative benefits and costs of various agricultural land and water management options can be assessed. However, to conduct such an analysis it is essential to have methods for valuing soil nutrients. The primary goal of this report is to provide descriptions of some of those methods and some examples of their application. "After discussing the interrelationships between soil nutrients and water and reviewing methods for determining nutrient balances, this report describes an array of available methods for soil nutrient valuation (the Replacement Cost Approach, the Productivity Change Approach, Willingness-to-Pay, Hedonic Pricing and Total Factor Productivity) and provides a discussion of four nutrient valuation studies, which together cover a range of scales, perspectives, and geographic contexts. The case studies, based on previous work from the International Board for Soil Research and Management (IBSRAM) and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), include a comparison of the costs of nutrient mining in two Ghanaian farming systems, a valuation of nutrients in wastewater irrigation in Mexico, a continental assessment of nutrient depletion costs in sub-Saharan Africa, and an examination of possible approaches to valuing soil organic matter and its various functions--an often ignored area in literature. The report concludes with a synthesis of the advantages and limitations of the two analytical approaches most commonly used in developing countries, considerations for choosing between them and their usefulness for future research."

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