A synthesis of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th ISOFAR Scientific Conferences: pointers to future frontiers of knowledge

There is a dearth of information on synthesis of research studies in different areas of organic agriculture in the world. This could partly be attributed to limited funding of basic and applied organic agriculture research projects. Consequently, the development of innovations that can properly tackle multifarious challenges in the organic food and agriculture sector is being hindered. Research findings are usually disseminated to the end users such as other researchers, stakeholders, policy makers, and politicians among others through different outlets including conference proceedings. Therefore, a synthesis of 1118 scientific papers presented at the last four editions (2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th) of ISOFAR Scientific Conferences held in 2008, 2011, 2014, and 2017, respectively, was carried out in 2019 to establish the distribution of research efforts across research areas and identify areas not receiving adequate attention. The results revealed that 45.8–66.6% of papers presented were on agronomy (crop and soil) followed by socio-economics (9.8–20.3%) and livestock (3.9–14.7%). Very few scientific papers (0.0–4.0%) were based on organic aquaculture, policy issues, health and safety of organic products, and standards and certification. The papers were more skewed towards the production phase of the value chains on most commodities than the phase involving processing, distribution, and consumption. It is recommended that in the nearest future, inter- and transdisciplinary research projects be commissioned to explore the potential of these identified and largely overlooked research areas in solving global challenges in the organic food and agriculture sector.