Climate-resilient crops and crop varieties have been recommended as a way for farmers to cope with or adapt to climate change, but despite the apparent benefits, rates of adoption by smallholder farmers are highly variable. Here we present a scoping review, using PRISMA-P (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic review and Meta-Analysis Protocols), examining the conditions that have led to the adoption of climate-resilient crops over the past 30 years in lower- and middle-income countries. The descriptive analysis performed on 202 papers shows that small-scale producers adopted climate-resilient crops and varieties to cope with abiotic stresses such as drought, heat, flooding and salinity. The most prevalent trait in our dataset was drought tolerance, followed by water-use efficiency. Our analysis found that the most important determinants of adoption of climate-resilient crops were the availability and effectiveness of extension services and outreach, followed by education levels of heads of households, farmers’ access to inputs—especially seeds and fertilizers—and socio-economic status of farming families. About 53% of studies reported that social differences such as sex, age, marital status and ethnicity affected the adoption of varieties or crops as climate change-adaptation strategies. On the basis of the collected evidence, this study presents a series of pathways and interventions that could contribute to higher adoption rates of climate-resilient crops and reduce dis-adoption.
Sustainable Development Goal 2 aims to end hunger, achieve food and nutrition security and promote sustainable agriculture by 2030. This requires that small-scale producers be included in, and benefit from, the rapid growth and transformation under way in food systems. Small-scale producers interact with various actors when they link with markets, including product traders, logistics firms, processors and retailers. The literature has explored primarily how large firms interact with farmers through formal contracts and resource provision arrangements. Although important, contracts constitute a very small share of smallholder market interactions. There has been little exploration of whether non-contract interactions between small farmers and both small- and large-scale value chain actors have affected small farmers’ livelihoods. This scoping review covers 202 studies on that topic. We find that non-contract interactions, de facto mostly with small and medium enterprises, benefit small-scale producers via similar mechanisms that the literature has previously credited to large firms. Small and medium enterprises, not just large enterprises, address idiosyncratic market failures and asset shortfalls of small-scale producers by providing them, through informal arrangements, with complementary services such as input provision, credit, information and logistics. Providing these services directly supports Sustainable Development Goal 2 by improving farmer welfare through technology adoption and greater productivity.
he United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are guideposts for an international community that aspires to achieve a better life for all people. For example, SDG 2 seeks to achieve zero hunger by 2030. This requires ensuring that the world is food secure while at the same time preserving the environment for future use far beyond 2030. Solutions to development problems are rooted in domain-specific knowledge such as agriculture and livelihoods, environment and natural resource management, nutrition and health, human capital and education. Policy and funding organizations need a synthesis of scientific information to inform their decision-making 1-3. But it is difficult to synthesize the world's accumulated scientific knowledge for complex issues like food security, because these solutions are spread across millions of individual studies, and the breadth and depth of human research is estimated to double every nine years 4. Moreover, the questions of policy actors are substantially different from the questions that researchers are trained to answer. Evidence-informed decision-making rose as a means to fill the gaps between research and policy 5,6. Systematic and scoping reviews, evidence gap maps, and meta-analyses all fall under the broad umbrella of evidence synthesis and provide a model under which policy and intervention examinations can be made with greater focus, reliability and transparency 6. In recent years researchers in education, international development, economics and ecology have adapted these methodologies-originally designed by the health and medical communities to evaluate claims presented in clinical trials-in order to introduce more standardized approaches to examine their own growing evidence bases 7,8. Producing evidence syntheses are time-consuming. A single evidence synthesis takes a research team anywhere from 18 months to three years and involves an initial analysis of thousands of search results to determine which are capable of supporting evaluation of the original research question 9,10. This frustrates policy's demand-driven cycle, wherein answers are needed now in order to make decisions about resource allocation.
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