‘Follow the Innovation’ – The Second Year of a Joint Experimentation and Learning Approach to Transdisciplinary Research in Uzbekistan

In 2008, the BMBF-funded, interdisciplinary research project 'Economic and Ecological Restructuring of Land- and Water Use in the Region Khorezm (Uzbekistan) initiated a participatory approach to innovation development and diffusion with local stakeholders. Since mid 2008, four selected agricultural project innovations are jointly tested by teams of researchers, local farmers and water managers under real-life settings. While the activities during the first year focussed on induced learning by scientists, the second year's emphasis was on the identification of and integration with the appropriate stakeholders and the conducting of jointly designed and implemented experiments to test, validate, and if needed, adapt the selected innovation packages. This paper documents these and focuses on the sub-processes within each team, how the team members understood and approached stakeholder collaboration, how they operationalised their scientific thinking into practical steps, and what impacts these processes had in terms of improving or validating the innovations

An Optimization Model for Technology Adoption of Marginalized Smallholders: Theoretical Support for Matching Technological and Institutional Innovations

The rural poor are often marginalized and restricted from access to markets, public services and information, mainly due to poor connections to transport and communication infrastructure. Despite these unfavorable conditions, agricultural technology investments are believed to unleash unused human and natural capital potentials and alleviate poverty by productivity growth in agriculture. Based on the concept of marginality we develop a theoretical model which shows that these expectations for productivity growth are conditional on human and natural capital stocks and transaction costs. Our model categorizes the rural farm households below the poverty line into four segments according to labor and land endowments. Policy recommendations for segment and location specific investments are provided. Theoretical findings indicate that adjusting rural infrastructure and institutions to reduce transaction costs is a more preferable investment strategy than adjusting agricultural technologies to marginalized production conditions

Methodological Review and Revision of the Global Hunger Index

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a multidimensional measure of hunger that considers three dimensions: (1) inadequate dietary energy supply, (2) child undernutrition, and (3) child mortality. The initial version of the index included the following three, equally weighted, non-standardized (i.e. unscaled) indicators that are expressed in percent: the proportion of the population that is calorie deficient (FAO's prevalence of undernourishment); the prevalence of underweight in children under five; and the under-five mortality rate. Several decisions regarding the original formulation of the GHI are reconsidered in light of recent discussions in the nutrition community and suggestions by other researchers, namely the choice of the prevalence of child underweight for the child undernutrition dimension, the use of the under-five mortality rate from all causes for the child mortality dimension, and the decision not to standardize the component indicators prior to aggregation. Based on an exploration of the literature, data availability and comparability across countries, and correlation analyses with indicators of micronutrient deficiencies, the index is revised as follows: (1) The child underweight indicator is replaced with child stunting and child wasting; (2) The weight of one third for the child undernutrition dimension is shared equally between the two new indicators; and (3) The component indicators of the index are standardized prior to aggregation, using fixed thresholds set above the maximum values observed in the data set. The under-five mortality rate from all causes is retained, because estimating under-five mortality attributable to nutritional deficiencies would be very costly and make the production of the GHI dependent on statistics about cause-specific mortality rates by country and year that are published irregularly, while the expected benefits are limited

Institutional Environments for Enabling Agricultural Technology Innovations: The Role of Land Rights in Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Bangladesh

Land rights are essential assets for improving the livelihoods of the rural poor. This literature based paper shed light to some land rights issues that are crucial for the effectiveness and sustainability of implementing technological innovations in marginalized rural areas of Ethiopia, Ghana, India and Bangladesh. By analysing country specific land right regimes, this paper aims to understand what institutional conditions might constitute barriers to the effective implementation of technological innovations and how they might be overcome. Land rights issues considered in this paper include public and private ownership of land in Ethiopia, customary and statutory law in Ghana, and gender equality and land rights in India and Bangladesh. A better understanding of institutional barriers for the effective implementation of technological innovations is a precondition for complementing technological with enabling institutional innovations and for improving priority setting, targeting and sequencing in the implementation of productivity increasing development measures

Social Safety Nets for Food and Nutritional Security in India

This paper brings together existing literature on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNRGEA) and the Public Distribution System (PDS) in India, offering a narrative review of the evidence on impacts on food security, health and nutrition of beneficiaries. Both programs operate on a large scale and have the capacity to impact the factors leading to undernutrition. It is evident that despite the deficiencies in implementation, both the MGNREGA and the PDS are inclusive and reach the poor and the marginalized who are likely to also experience greater undernutrition and poor health. Data challenges have however prevented researchers from conducting studies that assess the ultimate impact of these two large-scale programs on health and nutrition. The evidence that exists suggests largely positive impacts indicating a clear potential to make these programs more nutrition sensitive not just by incorporating elements that would explicitly address nutritional concerns but also by directing specific attention to innovations that strengthen critical complementarities and synergies that exist between the two programs

Food and Nutrition Security Indicators: A Review

In this paper, we review existing food and nutrition security indicators, discuss some of their advantages and disadvantages, and finally classify them and describe their relationships and overlaps. In order to achieve this, the paper makes reference to the existing definitions of food and nutrition security (FNS), in particular as they have been agreed upon and implemented in the FoodSecure project (www.foodsecure.eu). The main existing conceptual frameworks of FNS predating the present paper are also used as guidelines and briefly discussed. Finally, we make recommendations in terms of the most appropriate FNS indicators to quantify the impacts of various shocks and interventions on food and nutrition security outcomes

The Economics of Land Degradation

Healthy soils are essential for sustaining economies and human livelihoods. In spite of this, the key ecosystem services provided by soils have usually been taken for granted and their true value - beyond market value - is being underrated. This pattern of undervaluation of soils is about to change in view of rapidly raising land prices, which is the result of increased shortage of land and raising output prices that drive implicit prices of land (with access to water) upward. Moreover, the value of soil related ecosystems services is being better understood and increasingly valued. It is estimated that about a quarter of global land area is degraded, affecting about 1.5 billion people in all agro-ecologies around the world. Land degradation has its highest toll on the livelihoods and well-being of the poorest households in the rural areas of developing countries. Vicious circles of poverty and land degradation, as well as transmission effects from rural poverty and food insecurity to national economies, critically hamper their development process. Despite the need for preventing and reversing land degradation, the problem has yet to be appropriately addressed. Policy action for sustainable land use is lacking, and a policy framework for action is missing. Key objectives of this Issue Paper and of a proposed related global assessment of the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) are: first, to raise awareness about the need for and role of an assessment of the economic, social and environmental costs of land degradation; and second, to propose and illustrate a scientific framework to conduct such an assessment, based on the costs of action versus inaction against land degradation. Preliminary findings suggest that the costs of inaction are much higher than the costs of action