UK partnership to support the uptake of new crop varieties by smallholder farmers, and advancements in agricultural and dissemination technologies

粮食和营养安全是全球主要的人道主义问题。目前有10亿人，占世界人口的六分之一，营养不良。预计的人口增长(2050年将达到90亿)、气候变化、城市化进程加快以及农作物病虫害的蔓延增加了满足全球粮食需求的额外压力。实现全球粮食安全将需要农业系统的“可持续集约化”：生产更多的粮食，用更少的土地和更少的投入(如水和化学品)，同时促进保护自然资源。在发展中国家，作物品种改良和农业技术进步的潜在效益往往得不到充分实现。农民往往无法获得新品种的优质种子，也无法获得最佳生产所需的农艺信息。在许多发展中国家，运作不佳的农业推广服务是实施农业研究和技术进步的主要障碍。小农的采用需要实施适当的、以社区为基础的、农民主导的种子繁育系统；传播有关新品种的信息以确保其被采用的方法；以及小农最大限度地提高产量。这些问题影响到所有作物，这些作物缺乏强大的正式种子系统，是实现所有公共部门农业研发成果的瓶颈。农业转让是一种交流，它汇集了三个伙伴组织的不同和互补的专门知识，为收集的关于新作物品种(使用小麦作为试验作物)的农艺数据向肯尼亚的小农提供一个可行和可持续的传播模式。农业转移合作伙伴关系包括英国剑桥的农业研究机构国家农业植物学研究所(NIAB)和肯尼亚Njoro的肯尼亚农业研究所(KARI)，以及两个非营利性慈善发展组织，即马来西亚联邦研究中心(MCSC)和剑桥马来西亚教育与发展信托基金(CMEDT)。作为试点项目，农业转移公司将在肯尼亚四个小麦种植区之一的纳库鲁县建立小麦品种田间试验和示范制度。该项目将与纳库鲁县的一个自助农场社区组织(CBO)合作，那里的农民将在Kari和NIAB的指导下管理麦田小径。将对MCSC/CMEDT开发的以信通技术为基础的平台的使用，以及NIAB和CARI目前使用的其他方法进行评估，作为向小农传播田间试验数据的方法。

Food and nutritional security are major global, humanitarian concern. Currently one billion people, one sixth of the world's population, are undernourished. Projected population increase (reaching 9 billion in 2050), climate change, increased urbanisation, and the spread of crop pests and diseases add additional pressures on meeting global food demands. Achieving global food security will require the "sustainable intensification" of agricultural systems: producing more food, with less land and fewer inputs (e.g. water and chemical), while promoting the preservation of natural resources. In developing countries the full realisation of the potential benefits of improved crop varieties and agricutural technological advancements is often not reached. Farmers often do not have access to quality seed of the new varieties, nor the agronomic information required for optimal production. In many developing countries, poorly functioning agricultural extension services are a major barrier to the implementation of advances in agricultural research and technologies. Adoption by smallholder farmers requires the implementation of suitable, community-based, farmer-led seed multiplication systems; methods of disseminating information about new varieties to ensure their uptake; and maximisation of production by smallholder farmers. These issues affect all crops which lack a strong formal seed system and are a bottleneck in achieving impact of outcomes from all public sector agricultural R&D.Agri-Transfer is an interchange which pulls together the diverse and complementary expertise of three partner organisations to develop a workable and sustainable dissemination model for agronomic data collected on new crop varieties (using wheat as the test crop) to smallholder farmers in Kenya. The Agri-Transfer partnership includes the agricultural research institutions National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB), Cambridge, UK and the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), Njoro, Kenya, and two not-for-profit charitable development organisations, the Malaysian Centre for Commonwealth Studies (MCSC) and the Cambridge Malaysian Education and Development Trust (CMEDT). As a pilot project Agri-Transfer will establish a wheat variety field trials and demonstration system in one of the four wheat growing regions in Kenya, Nakuru County. The project will work with a self-help, Farm Community-based Organisation (CBO) in Nakuru County, where farmers, under the direction of KARI and NIAB will run the wheat field trails. Use of an ICT-based platform, developed by MCSC/CMEDT, together with other methods currently used by NIAB and KARI, will be evaluated as methods of disseminating data obtained from the field trials to smallholder farmers.