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Enabling Extension and Advisory Services to facilitate Innovations for Agroecology

Year of publication 2022

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 2p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Synopsis (short abstract) FAO promotes extension and advisory services that put producers and sustainability at the center of the innovation process, and hence are aligned with the main principles of agroecological philosophy. As it is quite a new area, efforts are needed to enable EAS to support effective and efficient agroecology approaches. That is why FAO is hosting an e-discussion and a webinar on this topic, to share experiences and knowledge, document good practices and kick off a global dialogue on EAS and agroecology.

Language English

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    The global impacts of the climate crisis are becoming ever clearer, and natural resources and ecosystems are being depleted. Despite some progress, hunger and poverty persist, and inequalities are deepening. The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world. There is global consensus on the urgent need for a transition to agri-food systems that ensure food and nutrition security, social and economic equity, and sustain the ecosystem on which all these elements depend. Agroecology provides a crucial pathway towards this objective. Making extension and advisory services (EAS) demand-driven is not an end in itself but a means to improving their relevance and impact.
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    In the rapidly changing context of agri-food systems, extension and advisory services (EAS) are expected to provide new roles and services that go well beyond the traditional production-related technology transfer. Consequently, pluralistic EAS systems with diverse actors have emerged with diverse actors, including private and civil society organisations. These multiple EAS actors must adopt innovative entrepreneurship models if they are to act proactively and respond to the increasing diversity of farmers’ demands while staying independent and sustainable. Entrepreneurship in EAS means applying innovations such as creative and sustainable business models that can capture opportunities and new ideas, broaden the range of services and clients, and foster innovation in the agri-food system. It can strengthen autonomy (e.g. from donor funding), empower community-engaged providers that offer locally relevant services, create job opportunities, and strengthen resilience of EAS to shocks and disruptors. EAS entrepreneurs can include private agribusinesses, scalable start-ups, farmer champions and local volunteers, producer organisations and cooperatives, as well as public sector actors with innovative ideas who can network, create successful partnerships, and are result-oriented, willing to change and take risks. However, the development of appropriate EAS entrepreneurship models is conditioned by internal and external factors, like farmers’ demands, economic motivation, enabling and risk-mitigating policies and regulations, capacities and, perhaps most importantly, a profound mindset change of all the actors, moving towards sustainable and inclusive entrepreneurship and away from institutional silos, rigid public-only and big agribusiness-only schemes.
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    2021
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