Abstract
The paper focuses on the current development and future potential of the agricultural research.
Since the World Food Summit - Five Years After (2002), the World has seen a clear affirmation of
the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as the central aim of the international development policy
for the poverty mitigation and food provision. In spite of the above commitment at the national,
regional and global levels, the progress has been rather slow and uneven. It is true that the
number of people living in the extreme poverty has dropped, however, in some regions like
(and especially) in Sub-Saharan Africa there has been little prospect for achieving dramatic changes.
On the other hand there are encouraging symptoms that national governments and international donors are
decided about supporting agricultural development as the only way to achieving a real food security.
It is enabled thanks to the agriculture that has a potential to make significant progress through the
growing productivity and enhancing new technology approaches. It is a very important fact because
the agricultural sector in many low-income countries accounts for 60 - 80 percent of employment and more
than half the national income and it is constrained by years of underinvestment and absence of the basic infrastructure.
New (modern) technologies are also not contributing much because they are mostly area specific and not proper
for the low-income farmer. They are rarely supported by advanced forms of the inter-economic
use of the technologic inputs. The proper strategies covering main development potential and solving
the most important constraints must be worked out and regularly reconsidered in tune
with changing needs and challenges. However, while the research capacities of some developing countries
have evolved into a factor featuring a strong national-wide regulating impact, a large number of
other countries have limited declining capacities to address the emerging challenges. On the other hand,
the emerging globalized research issues can compensate the lack of local research capacities and encompass the whole value chain.
This respects a global concern that nearly 2.5 billion people are still engaged in small-scale
agriculture and that in the world-wide scale there are more than 100 million small-scale farms
relying upon the hand-tool and draught-animal technologies.
Key words:
millennium development goals, World Food Summit, globalized research, low-income countries, small-scale agriculture, hand-tool and draught-animal technologies