THE NEW COMMONS IN AGRICULTURE: LESSONS FROM THE MARGINS AND SRI IN INDIA

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceWith increasing evidence of the unfavourable ecological footprint of the industrialagricultural paradigm, ominous climate changes, and embarrassing social and economic crises in India manifested in farmer suicides over the last decade, there is an urgent need for India's agricultural research system to give more attention to sustainability as well as equity in innovation systems. This requires openness to acknowledging past failures and a willingness to reconfigure the research system's relations with non-research actors. This paper looks at possible lessons to guide this reconfiguration by examining the rapid and surprising spread of a novel sustainable innovation in India – the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). SRI shows how a less hierarchical and less linear architecture of innovation has enabled a new ‘knowledge commons' to emerge in Indian agriculture, contributing substantially to household-level food security, also enabling farmers to cope with vulnerabilities. Open innovation in SRI has enabled the creation of this new commons in an era when privatization of agricultural knowledge has gained sway. Rainfed areas that have been marginal to the Green Revolution are becoming more central to the establishment of sustainability regimes. This innovation has been enabled by the extensive use of the internet, based on new kinds of networking within civil society playing an important role ensuring collaboration among diverse actors from the farm to the national level. The paper highlights the importance of facilitating knowledge dialogues, learning alliances and innovation networks to enhance innovation capacities. ‘Open innovation' and the new ‘commons' have important policy implications for the future of innovation systems and sustainable development

De bezonken actualiteit van een nieuwe wereldatlas

Contains fulltext : 179868.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)14 december 199

Graphical user interface for image processing

A user friendly, menu driven, highly interactive X Windows package for Image Processing Applications using Motif Widget Set under Motif Window Manager is developed. Modules related to Segementation, Enhancement, Representation, Transformations are developed. The above routines are useful for image manipulation. The current gray scale/binary image is displayed on the window. Online histogram is provided so that the user can change the threshold value interactively. The OSF/Motif toolkit is used efficiently and also Xlib calls to display the image by allocating colormap. An on-line image manipulation help menu facility is incorparated in the tool to make it more versatile