Development agriculture

Equitably providing safe and nutritious food for 7 billion people is the imperative challenge facing humanity. Agriculture is the main source of our food, fibre and biofuel, and remains the primary livelihood of most families in the developing world, including many of the world’s poorest. We now recognise that simplistic interventions that expect farmers to adopt new technologies has not always succeeded. In many cases, this is because other constraints in farmer’s lives have not been understood or addressed appropriately. The tremendous technical achievements of the Green Revolution in the twentieth century need to be broadened and translated to address the complex scientific, economic, health, political, infrastructural and educational environments facing people in developing nations.

The Development Agriculture theme brings together researchers with vast experience and diverse expertise from across the Faculties and with other University of Sydney Centres, such as the Charles Perkins Centre, Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, and Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity.

The goal of the Development Agriculture theme is to initiate and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations by uniting researchers from multiple disciplines with expertise relating to agriculture and food in developing economies. The SIA is a forum designed to nurture and support these collaborations. Our aim is to discover and apply transformative and innovative solutions that drive sustainable and profitable agriculture. Only if agriculture is profitable and sustainable, and developed as an integrated component of raising living standards, will we improve food and nutrition security across the world.

Current research projects include:

• improving the genetics of cereals and pulse crops
• developing public-private partnerships in cocoa farming
• increasing development impact of agricultural research in Africa
• strengthening food and nutrition security through family poultry and crop integration in Tanzania and Zambia.

Current projects funded by ACIAR:

The Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) fund the following projects by our team:

• Optimising soil management and health in PNG integrated cocoa farming systems - find out more (pdf 661KB)
• Developing the cocoa value chain in Bougainville - find out more (pdf 965.9KB)
• Evaluating smallholder livelihoods and sustainability in Indonesian coffee and cocoa value chains - find out more (pdf 836.5KB)

Reports from previous field schools in Indonesia:

We take our undergraduate students on an annual field school in Indonesia - read more about our past field schools:

• 2018 New Colombo Plan Field School on Palm Oil and Sustainability in Indonesia - read report (pdf 8MB)
• 2017 Beyond Smoke and Fire: A field school on peatlands in Indonesia - read report (pdf 1.8MB)