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HOW CAN AGRICULTURE RESEARCH MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN COUNTRIES EMERGING FROM CONFLICT?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2009

W. ERSKINE  and
H. NESBITT
W. ERSKINE*
Affiliation:
Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
H. NESBITT
Affiliation:
Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia
*
†Corresponding author: william.erskine@uwa.edu.au
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Summary

Conflict is the most common cause of food insecurity. Foreign aid to countries emerging from conflict often allows a funded but brief window for the confirmation-testing and diffusion of agricultural innovation in affected areas. This paper asks the question: what lessons has agricultural research learned through its involvement in this process in countries emerging from conflict? Drawing on experience from Afghanistan and other countries, this paper documents some cases in which it has been possible to inject an element of simple hypothesis testing, often in farmer-managed trials, into post-conflict plans leading to useful lessons. Agricultural researchers need to be cognizant of this approach so that the practice becomes more widely used and lessons recorded for future use.

Type
Research Article
Information
Experimental Agriculture , Volume 45 , Issue 3 , July 2009 , pp. 313 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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