Adapting Agricultural Extension to Peacebuilding: Report of a Workshop by the NAE and the United States Institute of Peace

Societies have sought to improve the outputs of their agricultural producers for thousands of years. Efforts to convey agricultural knowledge to farmers became known as extension services, a term adopted from programs at Oxford and Cambridge designed to extend the knowledge generated at universities to surrounding communities. Extension services traditionally emphasized a top-down model of technology transfer; more recently, they have moved toward a facilitation model, in which extension agents work with agricultural producers to identify needs and sources of expertise to help meet those needs. In May 2012, the Roundtable on Science, Technology, and Peacebuilding, a partnership between the NAE and the US Institute of Peace held a workshop to explore whether and how extension activities could serve peacebuilding purposes. Speakers and participants considered the potential function of extension personnel in peacebuilding activities, selection and training of such personnel, institutional changes necessary to support them, and the role of technology in supporting extension agents in peacebuilding. This report summarizes the discussions at the workshop.