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Climate Resilient Agriculture (CRAg) working group
MSC co-chairs the Climate Resilient Agriculture working group of the CIFAR Alliance. The working group is focused on building collaborative initiatives to harness and enable innovation to transform agri-food systems.
1 min
The CRAg working group seeks to address three broad inter-related aspects of agri-food systems:
- Integration and coordination in value chains: This is a central problem in developing economies, characterized by numerous smallholder farmers and businesses with poor communication, weak physical infrastructure, and ineffective formal institutions.
- Diffusion of innovation across value chain participants: Even where innovations are ostensibly well-engineered for the context, frameworks of understanding, values, and risk perceptions play a significant role in shaping the diffusion of innovation and hence the adoption of productivity and resilience-enhancing technologies.
- Financing innovation end-to-end: The transformation of agri-food systems generally requires upfront investment and dealing with the problem of the inherent risks posed by change. Smallholders and small-scale firms in agri-food systems are frequently especially constrained in their ability to raise the finance to enable a shift from business-as-usual.