Tropentag 2020 Workshops

Description:
In many countries we face the situation that a high number of students study agriculture at universities, but the agricultural sector is not or only very slowly developing. The workshop wants to discuss reasons for this development and options to improve. Three topics seems to be particularly important for this development, which are named in the following. First agricultural education at universities has drifted in the last two decades more and more towards theoretical alignment. Staff was asked by administration to publish papers in peer reviewed international journals and to look for high international recognition and so to support improvement in international universities rankings. The result is that the education shifted away from applied and practical issues since it seems to be very difficult to get with regional and adapted topics into such journals. Placements of students were reduced or even given up totally. If practical issues are shown, it often happens on university farms, where farming is far away from farmers practice. B.Sc. students of agriculture nowadays may never have seen a cow or sit on a tractor and are not familiar with the problems of the farmers in the region and not able to solve these problems. The consequence is that the graduates show a low employability, cannot find jobs and the agriculture in the region is not developing. Second a lot of agricultural universities are located in the capitals or in the biggest towns of the countries. According to the situation that young people leave the rural areas because they can not provide comparable supply situations it is difficult to get the graduates back in the rural areas where they are needed to support farmers. Third the different levels of education and formation should be stronger cooperating to use the respective strengths of all levels for the best and practice oriented education of students. Therefore we need close to the lecture halls the possibilities of modern but to the regional and national demands and possibilities adapted demonstration farms, machinery schools, animal husbandry and cropping schools. A close link to the clients of agriculture, the farmers has to be established and continuously developed.