Enabling extension and advisory services to promote agroecology

FAO (2022) Enabling extension and advisory services to promote agroecology' prepared by FAO’s Research and Extension Unit, 4 p.

The world is realizing that unsustainable high external inputs and resource-intensive industrialized systems pose a real danger of biodiversity loss, increased greenhouse gas emissions, shortages of healthy food, and the impoverishment of dispossessed peasants around the world. 

Why should extension and advisory services promote agroecology?

There is global consensus on the urgent need for a transition to agri-food systems that ensure food and nutrition security, social and economic equity, and sustain the ecosystem on which all these elements depend. Agroecology provides a crucial pathway towards this objective. Making extension and advisory services (EAS) demand-driven is not an end in itself but a means to improve their relevance and impact.

Adopt the FFS approach, which sees agroecology is an intrinsic cornerstone in facilitating a paradigm shift, empowering FFS groups to participate in multi-stakeholder dialogues and frame collective policies.

To read the brief, please click here.