Monthly Archives: May 2013

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
American food writer and activist Michael Pollan (photo on Flickr by PopTech). The meat market, says Bill Gates, is ripe for reinvention. The market is growing fast to meet rising demands for animal-source foods throughout…

Originally posted on ECO-opia:
May 08, 2012 | by Bill Gates I’ve made many trips to Africa, but my recent visit to Ethiopia was definitely one of the most exciting. With effective governance and coordinated support from our foundation and…

Originally posted on ECO-opia:
The 2013 DATA Report: Financing the Fight for Africa’s Transformation The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) deadline is now less than 1,000 days away. The world has officially entered the final leg of its 15-year journey to…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
A diverse, intercropped field A story carried by the Huffington Post yesterday suggested that the pace of biodiversity loss was increasing as a result of economic forces and global climate change, threatening the future…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Calorie Counts Posted on McDonald’s Lunch Menu The provision of the Obamacare Act requiring restaurants with more than 20 stores post calorie counts for their menu items was supposed to be in place already.…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Goat in Nairobi slum (photo on Flickr by The Advocacy Project). ‘. . . [L]et’s consider what it means to raise urban livestock in the developing world, where people are poorer and hungrier, and cities…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Charging Bull (sometimes called the Wall Street Bull), a 3,200 kg bronze sculpture by Arturo Di Modica, near Wall Street in New York City (photo on Flickr by Randy Lemoine). ‘Africa still suffers from a lack…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO and head of mission of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), based in South Africa, is chair of ILRI’s board of trustees (photo credit: Lindiwe Majele Sibanda).…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
A dairy cow on a smallholder farm in Ol Kalou, near Nairobi, Kenya (photo credit: ILRI/Paul Karaimu). Should farm animals share our cityscapes with us? While policies are often based on the prejudice that urban…

Originally posted on Science on the Land:
The first Soil Atlas of Africa became available last month. Bernard Appiah at the Guardian tells us why this atlas is big news. Living in the British Isles as I do, it’s almost…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Food Democracy Now Food policy advocates have begun a campaign around repeal of the Monsanto Protection Act. The act was actually part of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, which was…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Climate scientists observed last week that the world crossed an important milestone. For the first time in 3 million years, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million. The last…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
A story by Tom Zeller at Huffington Post this week highlighted the intersection between climate change and global fisheries.  I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the potential impact of climate change on…

Originally posted on AgHealth:
Farmer Ma Thi Puong feeds her pigs on her farm near the northern town of Meo Vac, Vietnam. Intensification of livestock farming has been found to increase the risk of zoonotic disease transmission (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Fincher on the Farm (Credit: Nashville Public Radio) In what has to be one of the most egregious examples of tone deafness, Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tennessee) condemned poor Americans who relied on the government’s…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” Captain Jean Luc Picard. Star Trek. It’s not quite replicator technology from Star Trek, but NASA today awarded a 6 month grant to a company to develop the world’s first…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
The Butcher Shop by Ferdnand Leger, 1921 (via WikiPaintings). ‘A World Bank report launched last week has suggested that Africa’s farmers and agribusinesses could create a trillion-dollar food market by 2030. ‘However, the pre-condition for…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Kenyan children weed a maize plot (photo on Flickr by Care of Creation). ‘A senior Kenyan government official has dismissed last year’s ban on the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the country—calling it…

Originally posted on One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?:
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has recently brought attention to two neglected areas of food security: forests and insects. On the 13th to 15th May 2013 the…

Originally posted on One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?:
This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles. Let’s tackle inequality head on…

Originally posted on Foundation for Young Farmers:
How do you empower young farmers? It is widely acknowledged that empowerment means knowledge. You can’t have one without the other. Empowering youth means providing them with the necessary skills and knowledge about…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Fulani boy in Niger herds his family’s animals (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann). Mobility to unlock scattered food, feed, water and other scarce and scattered essential resources is a human strategy as old as humankind itself—and one that remains…

Originally posted on Foundation for Young Farmers:
Kalu Samuel’s Blog Some youth’s have asked me this question: Is there money in Agriculture? This shows that their attitude towards agriculture is as a result of lack of information or misinformation, information…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Cotton Farmers in Mali In 2005, economist Pietra Rivoli published The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. The book, which quickly became a classic, traces process of globalization by following a single…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Why does fair trade clothing matter? Blogging at Foreign Policy and prompted by the death toll in the collapse of the Rana Plaza textile factory in Bangladesh, Marya Hannun yesterday asked, “When it comes…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Most—but certainly not all—of my students are comfortably middle class. This means that they have never really had to think about where their next meal might come from. That’s what makes the food stamp…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Meat, ink and watercolour on paper (15 x 11″), created 25 April 2012 by artist Kristy Modarelli for the The Aldas Project: 366 Drawings for Good, a year-long project conducted by artist in 2012. Vegan…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Bill Gates visits a site of the East African Dairy Development project, which is funded by his foundation; researchers based in Nairobi at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), a CGIAR centre, provide technical and…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Saulosi Tchinga is a potato, maize, soya, sheep and chicken farmer in central Malawi (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann). ‘The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Friday called on African governments to implement policies that will help…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Distribution (density) of poor livestock keepers based on the international US$2.00/day poverty line in 2010 (published in a research brief by J Otte and R Leslie, Animal Health and Production Commission for Asia and the…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Distribution (density) of poor livestock keepers based on the international US$2.00/day poverty line in 2010 (published in a research brief by J Otte and R Leslie, Animal Health and Production Commission for Asia and the…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Sheep and goats in northern Kenya (photo on Flickr by gordontour). ‘The Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources (IBAR) is asking the [Kenya] Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (MALF) to reserve at least five per…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
The explosion of materials on food politics, and the increasing popularity of food as an area of social science research, makes teaching a course on the politics of food both increasingly interesting and increasingly…

Originally posted on One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?:
Think organic farming doesn’t use harmful compounds, think again. As the expiry date for the use of the antibiotics, Streptomycin and Oxytetracycline, on organic apple and pear farming in…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Herding cattle in Kenya (photo on Flickr by davida3 [Davida De La Harpe]). ‘The [Kenya] government has unveiled a plan to improve trade in livestock by vaccinating 61 million livestock in the next financial year. ‘According…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
Ethel Makila writes in New Agriculturalist about an African fund that is leading to breakthroughs and opening new frontiers in the continent’s biosciences research (photo: ILRI/David White). This month (Mar 2013), New Agriculturalist features an…

Originally posted on ILRI Clippings:
The health of people and their farm animals in Kenya and other developing countries are closely linked (photo credit: ILRI/Charlie Pye-Smith). ‘While livestock contribute about 40 per cent of the value of agriculture and forms…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Mother Jones this week published a fascinating article on the humble apple. The apple tells the classic story of industrialized agriculture. There were once thousands of varieties of apples grown across the United States,…

Originally posted on ECO-opia:
Posted on May 6, 2013 02:45 pm under Investing, Investors, Markets VENTURES AFRICA – Africa’s share of global foreign direct investment has grown to 5.6 percent from 3.2 percent over the past five years; highlighting growing…

Originally posted on ECO-opia:
    When convening at the lakeside city of Bahir Dar, last week, the ruling EPRDFites were high-spirited and ready to brainstorm on the major dealings of the state they are entrusted to lead until 2015.…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Food Tank (The Food Think Tank) published its list of 10 Moves about the Food Movements Worth Watching today. The ten include some good items, most of which are available through Netflix. Their top…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
As part of its presidency of the European Union, the government of Ireland hosted a conference earlier this month to explore the intersection of hunger, nutrition, and climate justice. The conference documents are all…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
US Capitol, Washington DC President Obama’s proposal to reform the US food aid system was widely celebrated by critics of the current system. But his proposals appear to have run into strong opposition in…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Somali family displaced during the 2010-12 famine. Image courtesy UN Media Center. A report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization issued earlier this week concluded than some 258,000 people died a result of…

Originally posted on Kalu Samuel's Blog:
The Pineapple plantation. For several years I have been involved in one way or the other in farming. Once I started learning my right from left, I could always remember my parents taking…

Originally posted on Kalu Samuel's Blog:
Feeding my snails Early this morning while some dudes were busy sleeping, I went out to bring food (Water leaf) for my little babies (my Snails). Been a very long time I blogged,…

Originally posted on Science on the Land:
Would it solve the world’s food crisis if we all went vegetarian or vegan? Priyamvada Gopal at the Guardian says no, inequality is a bigger factor in food shortages. I think that food…

Originally posted on AgHealth:
Aflatoxin-contaminated groundnut kernels from Mozambique. The Partnership for Aflatoxin Control in Africa has identified five priority strategic areas for action towards control of aflatoxins in Africa (photo credit: IITA). Regional and international experts in agriculture, health,…

Originally posted on ECO-opia:
Sam Dryden  –  May 02, 2013 Events leading up to the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland this June will focus, in part, on the intersection of hunger, food, nutrition, and the need to transform the agricultural development…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
I had a great conversation with the folks at the Financial Humanity Project Network yesterday. If you’ve not seen their work, it’s definitely worth a browse, particularly for folks interested in financial speculation in…

Originally posted on Global Food Politics:
Despite the recent focus on immigration reform at the highest levels of government, surprisingly little attention is usually paid to the plight of farmworkers in the United States. This despite the fact that an…