Sustainable agriculture for health and prosperity: stakeholders’ roles, legitimacy and modus operandi

Abstract

Food systems need to focus more on health, prosperity, and environmental sustainability. This requires changes in what, where, how and by whom food is produced, marketed, and consumed. Interdisciplinary research and trans-disciplinary collaboration are needed. Stakeholders need to agree on their respective roles, values, responsibilities and modus operandi so that research better responds to real-world challenges and opportunities. This viewpoint argues that this is especially the case in the Global South post Covid-19. Without these changes, there will continue to be unrealistic expectations of impact from agricultural research, and disappointment when these are not realised.

Global impact of COVID-19 on agriculture: role of sustainable agriculture and digital farming

“…However, these products are expensive and take months to deliver to the market. In recent years, there has been a promising approach toward sustainable agriculture and farming to deliver better health and economic outcomes (Arora and Mishra 2016 ; Hellin et al 2020 ). Capitalizing the advantage of information and communication technologies (ICTs), functioning and efficiency of the supply chain management can be increased extensively.…”

The impact of COVID-19 on the small and medium dairy farms and comparative analysis of customers’ behavior in Armenia

“…In post-pandemic conditions not only relevant events aimed at the restoration of affected agricultural sectors should be implemented, but also a policy should be developed by the policymakers, so as not to put the main burden only on the farmers in such situations and to enable all agricultural stakeholders to rapidly get adapted to this new environment. All this requires new managerial approaches in food sector and consciousness by all stakeholders of their new roles, as well as introduction of new approaches for agriculture management, availability of the plan to give adequate response in emergency situations and, as it comes to prove once more, the application of good hygiene and manufacturing practices in the food, and particularly in the dairy industry ( Djekic et al, 2021 ; FAO, 2020b ; Hellin et al, 2020 ; Poppe, 2020 ; Savary et al, 2020 ; Song et al, 2020 ; Vesković-Moračanin et al, 2020 ).…”

Transformative adaptation and implications for transdisciplinary climate change research

“…Furthermore, in the context of a climate response, transdisciplinary networks of researchers and practitioners can further blur the lines between research and development (Cundill et al 2019a). There is a danger of mission drift in terms of researchers straying too much into development work for which they have neither the skills nor long-term presence on the ground (Hellin et al 2020). Of equal concern is the growing trend for researchers and research organizations being evaluated as though they are development organizations, this has often led to researchers over-promising on the impact of research outputs and disappointment when these impacts are not realized (Leeuwis et al 2017).…”

“…Of equal concern is the growing trend for researchers and research organizations being evaluated as though they are development organizations, this has often led to researchers over-promising on the impact of research outputs and disappointment when these impacts are not realized (Leeuwis et al 2017). The danger can be mitigated by plausible theories of change that capture the complexity of societal transformations (Schneider et al 2019), and that detail the roles, legitimacy and modus operandi of different actors along the impact pathway (Thornton et al 2017, Hellin et al 2020.…”