Innovation platform approach and food legumes value-chain improvement in Abda and Ahmar regions, Morocco

Abstract

Morocco has been experiencing during the last decade innovating approaches to improve its agricultural productivity while adopting an ascending territorial and value-chain development approaches. Among the multi-actors approaches, that are undergoing the adoption process to reach this purpose in a limited scale, is the Innovation Platform (IP) approach which is being tested on the value-chain of “Food Legumes” that are undergoing a rehabilitation initiative at the national level in the main production areas. The objectives of this work are: to present briefly this experience and to examine its possible impact on governance and sustainable use of different resources. This IP is a coalition of stakeholders who meet to share their experiences, knowledge, skills, resources and ideas for the purpose of solving problems and seize opportunities of common interest. It includes collaborators from various social and economic actors and institutions that govern their behavior, all working toward a common goal. They serve as a mechanism to improve communication, coordination and the sharing of knowledge between the key players on the India-Morocco Food Legume Initiative (IMFLI) project sites. This IP is serving also as a tool for dialog between the different actors of the value-chain to identify collectively the challenges and find opportunities to improve the food legumes production and marketing by the adoption of better technologies and innovations. The platform has adopted innovation as a systemic and dynamic process of institutional learning and recognizes that innovation can emerge from several sources, of complex interactions and knowledge flows. In our IP case the innovation consists of 3 main traits: the technology could be a commodity, a crop type, a variety, a race or integrated management of crops, water or soil packages; organizational in terms to organize and disseminate the knowledge of new ways; and institutional in terms of rules, cultures, values, norms, behavior, policy and laws. This concept of innovation systems embraces not only the providers of science but the totality and the interactions of the actors involved in innovation to achieve a common goal.