Drones, aquaponics systems, solar power water desalinization, LED-lit farms with optimized photosynthesis and digital soil mapping. That’s the list of top five innovations in agriculture for 2015. How many of these are applied in Africa? And how many of these are applied on a large scale in smallholder farming?
Innovation is crucial for development. We already know a lot about how to achieve high yields in a resource-efficient and nature-nourishing way. Yet in Africa, where more than half of the population is employed in agriculture and the land is rich and arable, the uptake of new agri tech is rather low.
In a world busting with tech innovation it seems that most of it stays in conference presentations. Adopting new approaches and technologies requires favorable social and economic conditions as well as infrastructure. People need to know what innovation is for and how they can apply it, they need to have resources to work with it, and they need to have the means to make use of it if they are to benefit.
Read the full post on the CFS blog here.
Blogpost by Ekaterina Bessonova #CFS43 Social Reporter ekaterina.bessonova (at) sei-international.org
Photo credit: Hendrik Terbeck via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0
This post is part of the live coverage during the 43rd Session of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), a project GFAR is running in collaboration with CFS. This post is written by two of our social reporters, and represents the authors’ views only.
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