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

粮食和营养安全是主要的全球人道主义关切。目前有10亿人，即世界人口的六分之一，营养不良。预计人口增长（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，给满足全球粮食需求增加了额外的压力。实现全球粮食安全将需要农业系统的“可持续集约化”：用更少的土地和投入（如水和化学品）生产更多的粮食，同时促进保护自然资源。在发展中国家，往往无法充分实现改良作物品种和农业技术进步的潜在利益。农民往往得不到新品种的优质种子，也得不到最佳生产所需的农艺信息。在许多发展中国家，农业推广服务运作不良是落实农业研究和技术进步的主要障碍。小农户采用新品种需要实施适当的、以社区为基础的、农民主导的种子繁殖系统;传播新品种信息的方法，以确保新品种的采用;以及小农户最大限度地提高产量。这些问题影响到所有缺乏强有力的正式种子系统的作物，是实现所有公共部门农业研发成果影响的瓶颈。农业转移是一个交流平台，汇集了三个合作伙伴组织的多样和互补的专业知识，为收集的关于新作物品种（使用小麦作为试验作物）的农艺数据开发一个可行和可持续的传播模式。农业转移伙伴关系包括农业研究机构国家农业植物研究所（NIAB），英国剑桥，肯尼亚农业研究所（KARI），肯尼亚Njoro，以及两个非营利慈善发展组织，马来西亚英联邦研究中心（MCSC）和剑桥马来西亚教育和发展信托基金（CMEDT）。作为一个试点项目，农业转移将在肯尼亚四个小麦种植区之一的纳库鲁县建立一个小麦品种田间试验和示范系统。该项目将与纳库鲁县的自助农场社区组织（CBO）合作，在KARI和NIAB的指导下，农民将在麦田小径上奔跑。将评估使用由MCSC/CMEDT开发的基于信息和通信技术的平台，以及NIAB和KARI目前使用的其他方法，作为向小农户传播从实地试验中获得的数据的方法。

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.