Future directions in agricultural technology transfer for plant disease management
Angela Records: USAID
<div>Feed the Future (FTF), the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, works with partner countries to develop their agriculture sectors and break the vicious cycle of poverty and hunger. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) leads FTF and its research agenda, which includes addressing emerging plant diseases—like coffee rust in Central America and wheat rust in Africa and Asia—which can have devastating impacts in developing countries, where the livelihoods and food security of smallholder farmers and their families depend on healthy plants. An important component of FTF is support for research to develop agricultural innovations. These innovations, once proven effective and ready for implementation at the field level, are ripe for scale up, which depends on the establishment of strong and complementary partnerships and often on organizational and institutional change. In recent years, USAID has increasingly focused on the translation of research investments into population level impacts through the systematic identification of scale up-ready technologies, surveys on research uptake, and the development of a scaling assessment tool. Past successes and future directions in scaling and technology transfer will be discussed in the context of plant disease.</div>
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