REPORT: Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation: Implications for research and the One CGIAR agenda

19 March 2021. Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation: Implications for research and the One CGIAR agenda by IFPRI

“Innovations do not diffuse independently of enabling market, regulatory, and sociocultural environments. Scaling promising technological advances requires sociotechnical innovation bundles of context-dependent, customized combinations of mutually reinforcing innovations.”

Resource:

CGIAR (2020) Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems Transformation. Report of the International Expert Panel on Innovations to Build Sustainable, Equitable, Inclusive Food Value Chains. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Springer Nature. 172 pp.

Barrett CB, Benton TG, Fanzo J, Herrero M, Nelson RJ, Bageant E, Buckler E, Cooper K, Culotta I, Fan S, Gandhi R, James S, Kahn M, Lawson-Lartego L, Liu J, Marshall Q, Mason-D'Croz D, Mathys A, Mathys C, Mazariegos-Anastassiou V, Miller A, Misra K, Mude AG, Shen J, Sibanda LM, Song C, Steiner R, Thornton P, Wood S. 2020. convened by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Nature Sustainability.

The panel synthesized the best current science to describe the present state of the world’s AFSs and key external drivers of AFS changes over the next 25–50 years, as well as tease out key lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic experience this year. As is increasingly widely recognized, the costs that farmers and downstream value chain actors incur and the prices consumers pay understate foods’ true costs to society once one accounts for adverse environmental, health, and social spillover effects. Inevitable demographic, economic, and climate change in the coming decades will catastrophically aggravate these problems under business-as-usual scenarios. Innovations will be needed to facilitate concerted, coordinated efforts to transition to more healthy, equitable, resilient, and sustainable AFSs.

• Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles For Agri-Food Systems Transformation (Full Report) 172 pp.
• Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles For Agri-Food Systems Transformation (Summary) 28 pp.
  This report summary  examines the scope for technological innovations to make agri-food systems healthy, equitable, resilient, and sustainable (HERS).

IFPRI hosted a conversation with Professor Christopher Barrett and other experts on what is required to bring about healthy, equitable, resilient, and sustainable (HERS) food systems and the pressing need to bundle social and technological innovations to most effectively accomplish this.

• Introductory Remarks - Johan Swinnen, Director General, IFPRI
• Christopher B. Barrett, Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University (Presentation)
  
  

Panelists

• Channing Arndt, Director, Environment, and Production Technology Division, IFPRI (Presentation)
  
  
  
• Enock Chikava, Deputy Director, Agricultural Development, Global Growth & Opportunity, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Karen Macours, Chaired professor, the Paris School of Economics (PSE); Senior Researcher, French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE); and Chair of CGIAR's Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) (Presentation)
  
  
  
  
• Claudia Sadoff, Executive Management Team Convener and Managing Director, Research Delivery and Impact, CGIAR (Presentation)
• Moderator - Charlotte Hebebrand, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, IFPRI