Bridging the gaps between scientists,
farmers and market leaders
Naglaa Abdallah
Faculty of Agriculture,
Cairo University
Director of EBIC- ISAAA
www.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 agrifood 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-fordevelopment’
• 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