Bridging the gaps between scientists, farmers and market leaders

Naglaa Abdallah

Faculty of Agriculture, Cairo University

Director of EBIC- ISAAAwww.e-bic.net

We need to know

• What do scientists need?• What do farmers need?• What do market leaders need?

• To overcome challenges in food security, we need to bridge the gap between understanding and implementation

• That require to bring together diverse agri-food professionals working at the science and policy interface to increase awareness and capacity for evidence-informed policy-making in this sector.

• Science plays a crucial role in an ‘agriculture for the future’ but it is not enough, “share scientific research” with the smallholder farmer is is requested.

• Scientists should offer credible, legitimate, and balanced solutions that come from scientific evidence.

• Farming communities should share their knowledge, experience and feedback amongst themselves and towards the scientists.

• We should bring together farmers, plant breeders, extension agents, seed merchants, and policymakers, and to demonstrate to them the diversity of genetic resources, biotech plants, knowledge, and ways to strengthen management of the resource, as well as plant breeding and seed supply.

• Market leaders would like to hear about experiences, successes, and challenges of using evidence.

• Bridging the gap between science and policy requires interactive training in science-to-policy methods and strategies for the agri-food public awareness.

• Training will help participants to learn how to synthesize, disseminate, and exchange scientific evidence to increase its uptake and use to inform policy- and decision-making in this sector.

• knowledge sharing is the central of development. Without it, the knowledge we generate, might as well be locked up for life.

• Knowledge should directly reaches smallholder farmers - and their knowledge reaches researchers – through collaboration with many partners working closely with rural communities.

• Science and research constantly produce promising results, but what are the impact of those results for the community , in terms of tangible development outcomes ‘research-for-development’

• Achieving development outcomes depends on our capacity to generate changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills and practices of actors involved.

• Knowledge sharing, capacity strengthening and learning enhance the use and adaptation of scientific results and insights; and they boost the innovation capacity of smallholder farmers.

Communication• Farmer participatory approaches in agronomy,

breeding and biotech crops research to bridge the communication gap between researchers and farmers.

• Provide information on production constraints, solutions, and prevention, for their crops is required.

• When farmers test and promote successful technology in the fields they will be interested in actively sharing their experiences with neighbors.

• “Farmers have good knowledge, skills and experience gained from doing a lot of experimentation and implementation on their own often with great success. Researchers can learn a lot from them.

• Farmers situations, problems, what they know and what they are doing should be considered

Workshops with participants — farmers, researchers, private sectors and officials — exchange many opinions, ideas, experiences, and of course seeds. c

• The field experiments use both a researcher-led and a farmer-led approach with different research focuses in each trial for comparison.

• The field experiments have proved to be effective in strengthening interaction, communication, and collaboration among the stakeholders.

• They have also strengthened the local-level organizational and decision-making capacity of farmers.

Field trips with participants —farmers, researchers, private sectors and decision makers — Seeing is believing

• Researchers and farmers had to work shoulder-to-shoulder in the field to understand each other.

• Researchers – farmers link is important to observe, discuss, and understand, and possibly propose potential new solutions for their problems.

• knowledge sharing: Using participatory video in several research sites as a way to empower communities to document and share their knowledge, and provide insights of local community members that researchers and others can learn from.

• The farmer-to-farmer exchanges will also help researchers understand whether successful adaptation options in one place are indeed transferable to another

• Knowledge sharing include listening and reflecting, but this is hard to ‘budget’ in a project.

• The University curriculum does not prepare graduates for applied agricultural research, for collaboration with small-scale farmers, or for facilitation of communication and knowledge sharing; they gain these skills after graduates when they face the reality on the ground.

Science and policy• The goal of bridging the gap between science,

farmers and policy is to help decision-makers make better decisions.

• Decision-makers must integrate inputs from many different perspectives, and knowing how to retrieve, assess, and synthesize the results of scientific evidence can contribute to the production of more transparent and accountable policy and practices.

Initiating science Network

• National and regional research networks are needed to disseminate information to reach multiple stakeholders with a common interest or goal, farmers, research organizations, development and cooperation agencies, universities, policy makers and private businesses.

Thank You