© Neil Palmer, Crop Trust
Agricultural research is essential for sustainable and inclusive agricultural development. Research generates new technologies and improved policies which are essential for small-scale farmers who face the interconnected challenges of climate change, land degradation, gender biases, hunger and exploitation.
Despite this, the connection between agricultural research and agricultural development is weak in many of the countries where IFAD works due to lacking institutional capacity, enabling environments and sufficient investment.
IFAD hopes to change this. With funding from the European Union and its own funds, IFAD provides grants to CGIAR research centres and other institutions in the field of Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D).
AR4D projects work in the field, ensuring that the new technologies and practices developed are relevant and based on demand from farmers. The goal of AR4D is to improve the resilience, livelihoods and food security of small-scale farmers in rural communities, particularly youth and women.
IFAD’s AR4D initiative supports:
The initiative currently manages two EU-funded programmes and several individual research projects:
Nelida Sara Maria Alé
Senior Technical Specialist, Agricultural Research for Development
The future of farming belongs to rural youth. In this episode, we explore how to enhance productivity and empower young farmers.
Young people in rural areas of West Africa are leaving unemployment behind and setting up successful agri-businesses.
Every year after the rice harvest in South Asia, a vast area of over 15 million hectares lies idle (fallow) until the next rice planting season several months later. Scientists in countries like Bangladesh, India and Nepal think the fallow land could, and should, be used for additional crops that increase farmer incomes and food security.
The Putting Research into Use for Nutrition, Sustainable Agriculture and Resilience (PRUNSAR) programme is currently one of the most significant ongoing AR4D programmes. It has a budget of almost US$40 million, mainly from the European Union, of which US$8 million is a contribution from IFAD.
Climate change is the most compelling challenge facing the world today. It affects rural smallholders across the developing world, with effects that pose a grave threat to their own, and to the world’s food security.
