25 pages, The 2020 growing season presented new and significant challenges for farmers and farms across the United States as they navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. The rich and diverse agricultural landscape of Washington State offers a valuable microcosm in which to explore the experiences of farms in the U.S. during the pandemic. The purpose of this study was to qualitatively assess the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on directly marketing small farms in western Washington State, with a focus on farmers’ experiences with resilience. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 15 farmers and used thematic analysis to explore the influence of the pandemic on overall experiences, responses, and values and perceptions related to small farms. Interviewees provided insights on the impacts of the pandemic on their daily farm operations, production costs, marketing channels, demand, and revenue. Farmers also reported shifting personal and public attitudes towards small farms during the pandemic. Product diversity, flexibility, multiple forms of support, values, and access to resources emerged as drivers of COVID-19 impacts and farm adaptations. When compared to existing frameworks on farm resilience, farms in this study are seen to demonstrate resilience via buffer and adaptive capabilities, which enable them to absorb and adjust to shocks. Farmers also discussed resilience via transformative capability, the potential to create new systems, leveraging the collective power of small farms to shape future food systems. Future research on the resilience of small farms should focus on ways to both promote resilience attributes and facilitate the ability of farmers to act on resilience capabilities.
9 pages., The paper explored the policy options targeted at preventing extreme hunger after surviving the COVID-19 pandemic. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select 15 key informants across five purposively selected Local Government Areas in Kaduna and Ogun States for this study. Checklist (administered through recorded telephone calls) was used to elicit responses (qualitative data) on the impacts of COVID-19 on the food system. This paper concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted on the food system thus challenging the AES to employ more innovative and pragmatic approaches to reach the farmers. Major impacts of COVID-19 on food system were disruptions in agricultural production, limitation of field visit by extension personnel and distortion of technology delivery system. Major recommendations include: in response to the stay-at-home order in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Agricultural extension services (AES) should explore virtual means to reach the clientele. To this end, farm operations and new techniques should be packaged into short clips and shared via various platforms. Also, legislative means to consider AEAS as essential services should be sought; and extensionists should be trained and provided with personal protection equipment (PPE) to enable them reach farmers. Such field officers should be insured and provided with adequate tangible mobility.
16 pages, This study analysed the delivery of public agricultural extension services to the rural households of Idutywa, Eastern Cape. Primary data were collected from 75 participants. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. Results revealed that there is generally a lack of access to extension services by households in the study area. Above all, the findings showed that access to agricultural extension services is influenced by limited movements, cellphone data, household size, and a limited number of farmers for training. Based on the control and treated variables, the Average Treatment Effect Treated from Kernel, Nearest Neighbours, and Radius matching methods were found to be negative which means that if farmers did not receive the program during the pandemic, the performance and yields were going to be very poor and low. The study recommends that extension officers should be empowered with modern tools to deliver need-based agricultural extension services in the future.
37 pages., Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most recent example that global development problems can occur anywhere, rebutting the assumption of a world divided into developed and developing countries. Recent scholarship has coined the term “global development” to capture this changing geography of development problems.
Purpose
Our article contributes to these debates by proposing a novel empirical approach to localize global development problems in country contexts worldwide.
Methods and approach
Our approach rests on a universal understanding of “development.” We identify countries that are particularly relevant for global problem-solving and consider not only the problem dimension but also countries’ capacities to address these problems.
Findings
Our results show that countries with the most severe combinations of problems are as diverse as Afghanistan, Nigeria and the United States. Two thirds of countries with above-average contributions to global problems are authoritarian regimes. We also find that middle-income countries have hardly anything in common apart from their income level.
Policy implications
Our analysis shows that traditional development concepts of a binary world order and of foreign aid as financial transfer to remedy imbalances are not enough to address constellations of global problems and capacity that have long evolved beyond rich and poor.
18pgs, The novel coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, China in December 2019. This zoonotic disease quickly spread through over 100 countries, including the U.S. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency by the end of January 2020. Soon after, many U.S. states issued mandatory stay-at-home orders, which caused adverse effects for agricultural businesses and food supply chains. During this crisis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shared information through social media platforms such as Facebook. This study sought to understand how the CDC framed direct communication to the public about issues related to COVID-19 using Facebook videos. Five videos directly related to COVID-19 were selected from the CDC’s Facebook page for analysis. A content and framing analysis was used to determine emergent frames and the use of organization-public relationship (OPR) indicators to better understand how a public entity communicates with the public during a pandemic. Emergent frames were community, protecting yourself, encouragement to take action, understanding, and fear. A conversational tone of voice was used in four out of the five videos, and each video demonstrated the use of at least one OPR indicator. Implications from this work reinforce that Facebook videos can be used to communicate the importance of scientific information using conversational voice and OPR indicators. It is recommended that agricultural communicators include OPR indicators in social media videos during other similar zoonotic disease crises. Future research should seek to understand the public’s response to this type of scientific communication.
19 pages, Agricultural extension service delivery remains pivotal in disseminating contemporary and innovative agricultural information, and the training and capacity building of farmers; all of which are critical to increased farmer productivity. There are several agricultural extension methods used by extension field officers to engage their target farmers; some of the contact methods used, like the individual and group methods amongst others, necessitates close interactions between both parties. As such, physical contact between persons cannot be avoided. In the current spate of COVID-19 threats to global health, there is a possible risk of human-to-human transmission of the disease. Some temporary measures like social distancing and the ban of gatherings are currently utilised by many countries to mitigate the rapid spread of the virus. The findings of several research reports showed that these restrictions negatively impacted agricultural extension service deliveries. This paper, therefore, reviewed alternative media delivery mechanisms as a probable palliative measure in sustaining the continuous delivery of agricultural information to farmers. The paper recommends intensifying the use of the electronic extension (E-extension) system. The mobile and computer/web-based platforms should be significantly harnessed (where applicable), while concurrently promoting the intense use of print media, radio, television, agricultural documentaries and instructional videos.
12pgs, COVID 19 has exacerbated and underscored structural inequalities and endemic vulnerabilities in food, economic, and social systems, compounding concerns about environmental sustainability and racial and economic justice. Convergent crises have amplified a growing chorus of voices and movements calling for new thinking and new practices to adapt to these shifts, mitigate their impact, and address their root causes through far reaching changes in social and economic life and values, including breaking with the free market paradigm. In the face of a historic choice between transition or multiple systems collapse that deepen injustice and threaten planetary survival, I make the case for expanding on liberatory tendencies in Extension programs to build capacities for response-ability to transition toward more just and sustainable futures.
14 pages, Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the U.S. and other countries around the world saw a dramatic increase in the number of people starting pandemic gardens. In this article, the authors use rhetorical framing analysis to explore how news coverage of this gardening boom presented the illusion of control framed around the themes of economics, food sovereignty, physical and mental health, and community and connection. It concludes with a discussion of how these four themes offer an overly-optimistic view of gardening that deemphasizes sustainability, focuses on processes over harvests, and ignores food chain inequities.
