Last year we posted a blog article about the role of infographics in communicating policy and advocacy messages in a simple, accessible and powerful way. The trend for the infographic to present big data and hard hitting facts to the masses is still growing and here are some more infographics we think you should take a look at:

1. Oxfam Australia in their infographic, What’s wrong with our food system, look at why so many farmers are hungry.
2. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center documents Advances in global agriculture.
3. Public Health Degree investigate the Two sides of the global food crisis.

1. Online Schools compare Oil fields with corn fields in terms of their productivity and greenhouse gas emissions.
2. The United States Agency for International Development’s infographic, The global state of agriculture, looks ahead to how we must increase food for a growing population.
3. The International Food Policy…

The Brussels Development Briefing on ‘Building resilience of SIDS through trade and agribusiness development‘, will be held during the morning of Friday 11 July 2014, at the ACP Secretariat in Brussels. This 37th Briefing is taking place in the context of 2104 as the year of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and the upcoming UN Conference on Small Island Developing States (1-4 September 2014, Apia, Samoa).

The panel is being organised by the ACP-EU Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), in collaboration with the European Commission, the ACP Secretariat and CONCORD. It will be composed of speakers who have extensive expertise in business, trade and agriculture in ACP small islands, representing regional and international institutions, farmers’ organisations, the private sector, development partners and academia. They will discuss the vulnerabilities and challenges experienced by small islands, and explore the opportunities and achievements of the agritrade sector in…

The 2^nd of June marked the one year anniversary of the Nutrition for Growth summit in London hosted by the UK Department for International Development, the Brazilian government and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. During the summit, over $4.1 billion was pledged to nutrition programmes until 2020, a financial commitment unprecedented and one that put nutrition in the spotlight. On the 2^nd of June, an event hosted by the School of African and Oriental Studies entitled, Nutrition for Growth – one year on, reported progress made since the summit.

Nutrition has been gaining momentum on the international stage over the last few years: from the Lancet series on Maternal and Child Health in 2008, to the Scaling Up Nutrition movement begun in 2010, to the World Health Assembly targets on nutrition agreed in 2012. Dialogue at an international level about how to integrate nutrition in…

A live chicken vendor weighs a chicken in Hung Yen province, Vietnam (photo credit: ILRI/Nguyen Ngoc Huyen).

An article by Mark Tran in the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog, How to stop zoonoses spreading – don’t keep chickens under the bed, posted on 12 October 2012, highlights findings of new research from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) on zoonotic diseases in urban areas and evidence-based approaches that can reduce risks and improve food safety in informal meat and milk markets.

In many of the world’s dry areas, goats provide poor people with nutrition and livelihoods. An imGoats Project is working to transform the lives of goat keepers in India and Mozambique by turning their subsistence-level goat production into viable and profitable enterprises.

This two-year (2011–2012) project aims to improve the performance of small ruminant value chains in India and Mozambique so they sustainably increase household incomes and food security and reduce the vulnerability of poor goat keepers, especially women. The project will develop and test models for developing goat value chains using innovation platforms and producer hubs.

Innovation platforms provide spaces for all actors in the goat value chain—from veterinary and other input suppliers to landless producers and small-scale farmers to middlemen buyers to market sellers—to interact to improve the performance of this value chain and the benefits it generates for all the actors along it. Producer hubs allow goat…

Workshop participants

From 29 April to 2 May 2014, the Humidtropics CGIAR research program held a capacity development workshop in Nairobi.

Organised by the International Livestock Research Institute ILRI), Wageningen UR, and the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), it brought together platform facilitators, Action Area Coordinators and other key-players from the research program.

The main topics of discussion were agricultural innovation systems, design and implementation of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP), capturing knowledge and learning in MSP, and reflexive monitoring of MSPs.

Beyond mutual sharing and reflection, participants broadened their networks and gained a better understanding of the terminology and the current state of Humidtropics.

I am a natural scientist and this has been my first introduction to social sciences and it has really been an eye-opener” – Endalkachew Wolde-Meskel (N2Africa Ethiopia)

The workshop design involved an online training needs assessment, a pre and post workshop quiz, and posters capturing the…

#OIE collaborates with #IIAD and others centers to promotes global Animal Health

OIE collaborating centres represent expertise in a specific sphere of competence relating to animal health issues. As a collaborating center, IIAD will provide its expertise internationally to support and implement animal health initiatives, provide scientific and technical training, and conduct scientific research focused on global animal health. There are more than 40 collaborating centers worldwide, working in areas related to animal health, including animal welfare, food safety, vaccine development and disease surveillance.

Over the past few years, American consumption of hummus has grown dramatically. Until the 1990s, hummus was unknown outside of specialty Middle Eastern grocers. Today, it’s in virtually every deli and grocery store across the country. It was even named the “official dip of the National Football League.”

Hummus is a simple dish of Middle Eastern origin that combines chickpeas, tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and salt. While both Israel and Lebanon claim ownership of the dish, its exact origins remain a mystery. But growing global demand for the dish is generating some interesting politics.

Last week, Sabra, an Israeli company that dominates the US hummus market, filed a request with the Food and Drug Administration to develop standards to define hummus. The proposals would limit the use of the term “hummus” to describe dips made primarily of chickpeas and that contain a minimum of…

Congress is considering re-imposing requirements that at least three-quarters of all US food aid be transported on American flagged ships. The requirement, which had been reduced to half of all US food aid by the Obama administration last year, is effectively a $75 million subsidy to the US maritime industry. By requiring that American food aid be transported on US-flagged ships, the law would increase the cost of delivering food aid dramatically and slow delivery times, effectively denying food aid to an estimated 2 million recipients around the world.

Now food aid has lots of problems. In can undermine production in recipient countries, depressing prices for local farmers. Food aid shipped from the United States—regardless of the requirement to ship on US-flagged vessels—is almost always more expensive than purchasing food in the region. And US policy makers have long been clear that the primary purpose of US food aid…

Smallholder farmers produce the bulk of the world’s food with only minimal resources such as land and water. In fact small-scale food producers farm less than one quarter of the world’s farmland, a proportion that is declining. A new GRAIN report, Hungry for Land, investigates whether the shrinking size of land under small-scale farming poses a potential threat to the global production of food. The conclusion was clear, “we need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems”.

As a multitude of media articles tells us land is a hot commodity, one that is fought over and one that increasingly small-scale farmers are being evicted from. Be it for large-scale oil palm plantations, the creation of protected areas or the discovery of oil, insecure systems of land tenure and opaque policy…

A new report recently released by the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition, entitled, The Nutrition Sensitivity of Agriculture and Food Policies, investigates, through eight country case studies, current understanding of effective nutrition-sensitive agriculture and food policies, and the development of food-based solutions that help countries to scale up nutrition.

Recognition of the links between agriculture and nutrition is growing, and both countries and institutions are working towards making agricultural policies more nutrition sensitive. The report discusses the work of Brazil, Malawi, Mozambique, Nepal, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Thailand to make agriculture, a sector important for both economic development and livelihoods in many developing countries, more able to address issues of nutrition insecurity, gender inequality and resilience.

The links between agriculture and nutrition are complex, and not well understood. In particular our knowledge of how agricultural programmes or policies can impact nutritional outcomes and consumption…

Cattle | Gombe State Nigeria | JujuFilms.tv

A study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published by the World Health Organization earlier this week reached some starting public health conclusions. The study found that the proportion of overweight and obese people increased in every country in the world between 1980 and 2013, and that nutrition-related diseases, including diabetes and pancreatic cancer, are also increasing. The report, published in the Lancet yesterday, found that globally, 36.9 percent of men and 38.0 percent of women are now overweight, increases from 28.8 percent of men and 29.8 percent of women in 1980. The study found that the fastest rate of growth in the prevalence of overweight and obesity was in the developing world. And perhaps most alarmingly, the report could not identify a single national success story—a country in which the proportion of overweight and obesity held steady or declined over the study period.

The study’s lead…

While our choice at the cafe makes us feel we did the right thing, the reality might be different, with the farmer often…

R-L Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, Hon. Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Federal Republic of Nigeria and Dr. Jendayi Frazer, EAX Board Chairman Photo credit: EAX

KIGALI, RWANDA – Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, Honorable Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Federal Republic of Nigeria, visited the East Africa Exchange (EAX) to learn more about the exchange’s capabilities and functionality.

Dr. Adesina congratulated the EAX team for the progress that has been made since the concept of EAX was first discussed two years ago and emphasized the important role the exchange plays in creating access to markets for farmers. “The work you are doing here is remarkable and needs to be shared with the global community,” Dr. Adesina said.

Dr. Adesina invited EAX to further discuss how the Ministry can partner with EAX and EAX’s sister company, AFEX Nigeria. “I will make myself available so we can move quickly on improving warehouses and…

Plant intelligence experiments are not new although earlier studies have been met with criticism for being unscientific. The 19773 book, “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird…

Napier grass (aka ‘elephant grass’), a major feed supplement for dairy cows and other ruminant animals in Kenya (photo credit: Jeff Haskins).

Even though research has shown that [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions from the Western world far outweigh those from the developing world, livestock keeping methods in Africa are increasingly becoming a key subject.

Europe, North America and Latin America are at the epicentre of beef production, with each region producing about 12 to 14 million tonnes per year. By comparison, all of sub-Saharan Africa produces less than five million tonnes of beef annually.

A new study shows ‘that most livestock in the developed world consume feeds of higher quality in form of concentrates and grains, compared to developing nations where livestock rely mainly on low quality natural pastures and crop residues. . . .

A recent International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) study titled Biomass Use, Production, Feed efficiencies and…

Is humanity substituting the quality and safety of our meat with quantity? Published in January 2014, the Meat Atlas looks at commercial and small & medium scale meat production in the developed and developing countries and the global effects on livestock farming on livelihoods and individuals.

‘…Contribution to poverty reduction, gender quality and a healthy diet and eating meat does not have to damage the climate and the environment.

The report chapters include:

‘A species-poor planet; The genetic basis of livestock is getting ever narrower. We are relying on a few, specialized breeds of animals, such as the black-and-white Holstein-Friesian dairy cattle that are raised in over 130 countries. A few high-yielding strains also dominate the production of chickens, goats, pigs and sheep.

‘The grain in the feed trough;Ruminants and people do not have to compete over food. But producing more meat requires ever more grain to feed to…

New technologies and ideas – from mobile phone information systems to new crop varieties – are rapidly transforming agriculture across Africa.

Yet the sector continues to be stereotyped as one synonymous with poverty and subsistence.

Simply put, people don’t believe it will pay a proper wage, let alone their children’s school fees or health bills. Farming is seen as a dead-end job, something of no interest to aspiring youth.

Following the theme of this year’s annual letter by Bill and Melinda Gates, I would like to debunk the myth that Africa’s farmers will always be poor.

In fact, there are huge opportunities for farmers. Yields of staple crops have steadily increased over the past decade and there is potential for them to increase by two or even three times more.

This would have a tremendous impact on farmers, their families, communities and economies. Research from around the world shows that…