With the global population projected to reach around 8.5 million by 2050, the pressure on land is intensifying. Rising demand for food, energy, and urban space, coupled with global challenges such as food security, climate change, and industrialization, is pushing today’s landscapes to their limits.
The room was already buzzing before the discussions began. Farmers greeted cooperative leaders with familiar handshakes. Exporters set down their notebooks. Representatives from public institutions, civil society groups and development agencies settled into small clusters around square tables. Everyone knew why they were there: to rethink the cocoa value chain in Côte d'Ivoire together, not in theory, but in a way rooted in lived experience.
As the global community grapples with a “polycrisis” of climate change, geopolitical instability, and rising food insecurity, the traditional tools of agricultural development are hitting a wall. For decades, the primary strategy of agricultural research for development (AR4D) has been a “hard” mechanistic approach: developing a high-tech solution and attempting to scale it linearly across the globe. However, a groundbreaking new study published in Agricultural Systems suggests that this reductionist mindset is no longer enough to transform our food systems.
When floodwaters washed away Woudou Oumar’s home in northern Cameroon, he and his family lost not only shelter but hope. Then a government-supported cash transfer arrived.
In May 2025 in Malawi, Mercy Phiri joined the Business Acceleration for Youth project expecting entrepreneurs to chase grants. Instead, working with 61 MSMEs, she discovered they were not lacking ambition, but systems and scale.
When people think of West Africa, cocoa often comes to mind: a crop that shapes rural livelihoods, national economies, and the global chocolate industry. Across major producing countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon and Guinea, millions of families depend on the harvest each year. Together, these countries generate over 60% of global cocoa output, making the region the engine of global supply.
Indian agricultural policy has long worked with a neat fiction: a single, rational decision-maker called “the farmer” who receives information, weighs costs and benefits, and decides whether the household should adopt a new technology.
Bangladesh’s coastal belt is home to rich marine biodiversity and millions of people whose lives are tied to the sea