Source link:  http://www.ventures-africa.com/2013/04/innovation-agriculture-africa/

Editor’s Note: This article was feature in Ventures Africa magazine February/March edition

Posted on April 29, 2013

VENTURES AFRICA – Agriculture in Africa currently stands at the crossroads of persistent food shortages compounded by climate change threats. Communities in several African countries are battling food security, as many are not producing enough crops and grain to feed themselves, let alone to sell as surplus. Analysts believe that the effects of unemployment and the resulting increased crime rates can be halted by innovative agricultural solutions that include commercialising crop and livestock production.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, written by Calestous Juma, examines these topics. The book suggests that Africa currently faces three major opportunities that can transform agriculture on the continent into a force for economic growth. These are: advances in science and technology; the creation of regional markets; and the emergence of a new…

Beyond the farm: promoting agribusiness as a way out of poverty

Just improving farm yield is not enough to lift families and communities out of poverty – we also need to change the systems in which smallholders operate
If we’re serious about ending poverty and feeding a growing planet, it’s imperative that we focus on the 2 billion people who live and work on small farms in the developing world. Often, the best way to support these smallholders has less to do with things they can do to improve their farms and more to do with the systems in which they operate.

What happens at the farm level is important, and farmers need access to knowledge that enhance productivity inputs and tools. But to create sustainable growth in agricultural industries, that can provide opportunities for increasing economic benefits for farmers now and in the future, we need to take a…

Ezekial Rop, a smallholder farmer in Moiben, Kenya (photo credit: Jeff Haskins).

‘Supporting smallholder farmers to play a greater role in food production and natural resource stewardship is one of the quickest ways to lift over one billion people out of poverty and sustainably nourish a growing world population, a new United Nations report released today said.

Most of the 1.4 billion people living on under US$1.25 a day live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, while an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture.

These smallholders manage approximately 500 million small farms and provide over 80 per cent of the food consumed in large parts of the developing world, particularly Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, thus contributing to food security and poverty reduction.

‘A previous study showed that a one-per-cent increase in agricultural per-capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP)…

Pastoral areas of Africa are experiencing a booming livestock export trade and inflow of investment that can be harnessed to grow national economies (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

A comprehensive economic evaluation of pastoral livestock’s often invisible livelihood benefits in Africa’s drylands could be key in maintaining and harnessing the increasing economic benefits for poor herders and communities living in the continent’s marginal lands.

An article published by IRIN last month (16 May 2013) cites findings from a book published last year by the Future Agricultures Consortium, to which researchers from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) contributed.

Polly Ericksen, who leads a CGIAR Research Program on Drylands Systems in East and Southern Africa and is based at ILRI, is one of the book’s authors. In a chapter on Climate change in sub-Saharan Africa: What consequences for pastoralism? Ericksen says ‘insights from pastoral systems are critical for generating wider lessons on…

Agriculture policies in many African countries are failing to recognise the true needs and priorities of their young people, say authors of new research published today by the Institute of Development Studies. Unemployment among young people in Africa is increasingly recognised as a first order development challenge. There is widespread economic growth in many parts of the African continent– but ‘jobless’ economic growth combined with the world’s youngest population threatens progress in many African countries. Given that the majority of Africans live in rural areas, the continuing importance of the agricultural sector to most African economies, and the very slow emergence of employment opportunities in the formal sector, it is not surprising that policy and development practitioners frequently look to agriculture as a key source of opportunity for young people. Yet the way they approach the ‘problem of young people and agriculture’ may be flawed, say authors of the new…

Youth are the future. Invest in them!.

With more than 200 million people aged between 15 and 24 years (comprising over 20% of the population and 70% of the population being under 30 years old), Africa’s future seems bright. Young people usually bring new skills and abilities to the table, and tend to be highly competitive into sectors that use innovative technologies (such as ICT, social media or even agriculture).

But presently this is not the case in Africa. According to the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) Youth Policy Case Studies, while approximately 70% of youth live in rural areas and represent almost 65% of the workforce there.
On average, 74% of the youth population in Africa lives on less than…

Earlier this week, I was busy in the barn at one of our farms despite the humidity and rain. We were working cattle and pulling bulls from the cow herds.

The calves were receiving their first round of vaccinations (2 shots – one to protect against 7 different Clostridiums and Pinkeye, another for Respiratory diseases), new ear tags with insecticide to deter flies and ticks, and the males were castrated if not already done at birth and received a Ralgro implant. (Be sure to click the links for more information about why these products are given.)

The cows and calves had their weight recorded. Many of the calves are already getting close to 600 lbs. After we were finished, everyone was turned out to the pasture; less than an hour in the pens for each herd of cows.

The bulls have been out with the…

Why do farmers and ranchers castrate cattle? There can be many welfare and management reasons behind the use of castration in cattle. Castration also comes to mind when I think of the neighbors’ traveling bulls. When it comes down to it, farmers and ranchers use this as a tool for management. Why would you castrate your dog?

When I asked for a blog post topic via Twitter, I received a couple of questions about castration and why we have to do it. Well, we do not have to castrate our cattle, but like many other management decisions in raising beef, it is a decision in response to consumer demand. Consumers want a consistent palatable, flavorful product. So, producers respond with the tools we know can help to accomplish that.

I castrate my male calves a few hours after birth using a band method. Some producers choose to not castrate…

What is a Factory Farm? Does feeding cattle corn harm them? Why are cattle finished in feedlots? These are a few of the questions I often receive when discussing the beef we eat and how cattle are raised.

Do cattle eat grass or grain?

Most all beef cattle are born and raised on pastures where their diet consists primarily of grasses, legumes, and other forages. These feeds are high in fiber and lower in the digestibility of nutrients. The stomach of cattle is made of different compartments and is able to digest these fibrous materials.

When cattle on pasture need more energy than can be obtained from forages, the farmers may feed them supplemental feeds that come from a number of sources, including concentrates that will be explained below.

Do farmers feed cattle corn?

After cattle are weaned (approximately 7-8 months of age, shortly before puberty), most continue to…

A failed maize crop in Ghana. A report by CCAFS is advising Africa’s farmers and policymakers to adapt to climate shifts now to ensure communities are protected from climate change devastations (photo credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT).

The many adverse impacts of climate change on agriculture—from increasing droughts and floods, to more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns, to shorter growing seasons—threaten the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers in Africa today.

For many African countries, dealing with climate change, which has shifted from the realm of academic discussion to that of high-profile policymaking, is now driving greater engagement in the global climate change debate.

That’s a good sign. An article this week (17 Jun 2013) in Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper reports that African countries are now arguing that climate change agreements, such as those under discussion in Bonn last week, should include ways of protecting and boosting agriculture. That’s to…

World Environment Day, the theme being food loss and food waste, got us thinking about practical ways we can reduce the amount of food we throw away. In developing countries the majority of food losses occur at the farm level, particularly during storage, where food is often ‘lost’ after it has been harvested. In the developed world, however, food is most often ‘wasted’ when it is thrown away by retailers and consumers.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimated that some 32% of all food produced in the world in 2009 was lost or wasted. The World Resources Institute converted this figure from food weight to food calories and found that some 24% of food is lost or wasted, that’s 1 in 4 food calories that are never consumed. As the Institute points out it is not just a loss of food but a loss of money and a waste…

The world’s bee populations have been under stress in recent years, fueling concerns over the future of agriculture.  The combination of colony collapse disorder—the cause of which remains disputed—and expanded use of certain classes of pesticides have fuelled sharp die-offs in bee populations in Europe and the United States. In response, the European Union imposed a temporary ban on neonicotinoid pesticides believed to be harmful to bee populations, and researchers at Washington State University of proposed a bee sperm bank  to attempt to preserve the genetic line of bee populations. In the meantime, bee populations continue to fall.

What many people don’t realize is how dependent we are on bees for agriculture. In an effort to illustrate the scope of the problem posed by the loss of bee populations, the University Heights (Rhode Island) Whole Foods Market store temporarily removed produce dependent on bees for pollination services. In…

By Warren Nyamugasira

“In addition to providing high-quality food products (meat and milk), livestock is the most important source of on-farm income and insurance in the low-input farming systems of semi-arid southern Africa.”

ILRI’s sister center the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a long term partner where crops and livestock intersect in southern Africa.

In recent years, André van Rooyen and colleagues in the ICRISAT Zimbabwe office have been paying particular attention to small stock – goats mainly – as mechanisms to improve food security and rural livelihoods.

Their latest brief argues that investing in goat production, reducing animal mortality rates, commercializing the goat sector and developing more efficient functional markets will generate cash for rural households.

Earlier briefs consider the important role of informal goat markets, ways to improve the functioning of rural markets (facilities, information, organization and transport), and strategies to overcome health…

Yesterday Sharon Oosthoek at Nature told us about some new science, showing that pesticides spark broad biodiversity loss. It’s easy to spray pesticides within legal limits. But many pesticides accumulate in soil and water. Many organisms can be affected, going far beyond pest control.

This kind of thinking doesn’t have to lead to extremism. It can lead to Integrated Pest Management.

African markets are relatively small and new to Taiwan, but their strong economic growth could turn them into drivers of the country’s exports, Taiwan’s main trade promotion body said Tuesday.

Africa, along with other emerging markets, has great business potential and remains among the fastest growing markets in the world despite the global economic slowdown, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said.

Citing a report by the World Bank published in April, TAITRA said economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is likely to average more than 5 percent from 2013 to 2015 as a result of high commodity prices worldwide and strong consumer spending on the continent.

In 2012, about a quarter of African countries grew 7 percent or more, and several of them, notably Sierra Leone, Niger, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Rwanda, were among the fastest growing economies in the world…

I am a huge learning addict. Case in point – this blog, which gives me a good reason to go and do hours (sometimes) of research on things such as flood prevention or in vitro meat. Another favorite tool of mine to add to my knowledge and understanding of the world around me are MOOCs. The acronym stands for Massive Open Online Courses, and revolves around a simple concept: free online courses that you take with thousands of other students, exchanging your views in online forums, and getting inspired by readings and links to get further involved. Sounds like even more school? Yup. But the best kind of school.

Camels cover dozens of kilometres in search of water; average distances to watering points in the outskirts of Marsabit and Moyale, in the upper east corner of Kenya, run into dozens of kilometres (photo by Ann Weru/IRIN www.irinnews.org).

‘Camels are known for their ability to travel long distances across the desert without water.

‘But they’re also becoming an increasingly important source of milk for people in drought-prone regions. That includes East African countries like Kenya, where camel numbers have skyrocketed over the past few decades.

‘But introducing camels—or any species—to a new region, could mean bringing in new diseases.

‘The St. Louis Zoo has been studying camel diseases in Kenya to help assess their risks.’

A couple of years ago, Margaret Kinnaird, the executive director of the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya ‘began a project on camel health with wildlife veterinarian Sharon Deem, who directs the Institute for Conservation Medicine…

New 5-minute ILRI film, New approaches to chicken farming reduce poverty without adding to disease risks. 

‘. . . Before he got into chickens, Bradshaw had raised pork and cattle on Greenfire Farms, his plot of land 12 miles west of Tallahassee, FL. Now Bradshaw has stopped farming cattle and pork entirely, fully dedicating his operations to the heritage breed chicken business. . . .

‘The 19 breeds he raises, which range from the American Bresse to the Tolbent Polish, are sold throughout the U.S. and Canada and often come with waiting lists. Some are so rare that they verged on extinction before Bradshaw began importing them; two years ago, there were fewer than 60 Olandtz Dwarfs – a tiny, cold-hardy bird native to Sweden – left in the world. Today, Bradshaw estimates their numbers to be in the hundreds to thousands.

‘Bradshaw credits the boom in business to…

The Asia Pacific Participatory Epidemiology Network (APPEN) based at Chiang Mai University is holding its first Introductory Training for PE Practitioners. The course is divided into two 5-day sessions. The first session was held at Khon Kaen University from June 8 to 12. The course included 22 veterinary and public health participants from Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia and China. Participants were sponsored by the RESPOND Project and by CIRAD though the SEA-PREID Network. The first session included 2 days of field work on the epidemiology and control of Opisthorchis liver fluke disease in man associated with the consumption of raw fish. The second session will be heldat Chiang Mai University from July 8 to 12, 2013. PENAPH and ILRI are providing trainers to led the program.

A 2 day Tanzania dairy value chain impact pathways workshop was held on 7-8 May 2013 to communicate and validate the program’s intervention logic in the Tanzania dairy value chain, question and clarify the program’s potential to achieve impact in the Tanzania dairy value chain, and to develop an initial framework for program monitoring and evaluation/impact assessment.

Workshop participants were drawn from a wide range of stakeholders: program implementers in the value chain, various scientists involved in the dairy value chain, representatives of the Tanzania dairy regulatory board, farmer forums, implementing partner organizations, national agricultural research institutions, government and the private sector.

Among the biggest challenges of the Tanzania dairy value chain identified by participants were production related challenges such as subsistence production, low production resulting to low per capita consumption of milk, poor feeds and technology practices resulting to low outputs and the inability to access good practice information.

The BBC yesterday reported on a new database covering global land acquisitions by governments and private investors and arrived at the conclusion that the level of land grabs is exaggerated. The Land Matrix, which bills itself as “a global and independent land monitoring initiative that promotes transparency and accountability in decisions over land and investment,” concluded that there is considerable hype in the global land market, driven predominately by investment companies trying to influence the market and by concerns over the growing role of China.

But in its latest study, Land Matrix concludes that about 46 million hectares of land has changed hands in 756 verified land deals. About half of all transactions have taken place in Africa, with the bulk of those taking place in Ethiopia and Mozambique. Land deals that are occurring are generally equally divided between production of food and fuel crops.

Frequently, reports of massive…

Have you ever wondered how cities today, and in the past, are provided with the immense amounts of food they need to feed their inhabitants? Carolyn Steel gives a fascinating overview on the interrelations of food and urbanity and the possibility of creating a proper ‘sitopia‘, a food place.

I particularly like the last quote she used:

If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city.

Now that summer is here and I have a bit of time away from the classroom, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in my garden. I’ve also been catching up on some food films I’ve been meaning to review for a while. The first is Hungry for Change, released last year. Look for more over the next few weeks.

Hungry for Change offers a powerful critique of the diet industry, observing that most diets call on dieters to remove one component of a well-rounded diet. A better approach, they argue, is to consume a more natural diet. It’s a fairly straightforward argument rooted in biological and evolutionary human history. For millions of years, the film observers, our bodies have been programmed to consume and store as much fat and sugar as possible. But our diets were defined by low calorie, high nutrient content. In the developed world today…

These past days, dramatic scenes have unfolded all over Germany and Central Europe in general: after unrelenting rainfalls had overburdened the natural absorption capacity of soils and riverbeds, massive floods spread throughout Central European lowlands and threatened the lives and livelihoods of thousands of persons. People had to be evacuated, some even died, and many have to come to terms with the fact that the second ‘flood of the century’ comes a mere 10 years after the 2002 catastrophe and will again swallow all their belongings. Having followed the news quite extensively these past days, I began to wonder – in which way did human activities contribute to or exacerbate the crisis?

This weekend, David Cameron hosted the G8 “Hunger Summit” in Northern Ireland, resulting in promises, pledges, praise – and a lot of backlash from African civil society, who this summit was supposed to help. What was the problem?

(the IF campaign actually had a really good promotion video.)

Prior to the summit, Cameron announced his goals – trade, taxes, and transparency – and stressed the continued importance of the G8, since “as eight countries making up around half of the world’s entire GDP, the standards we set, the commitments we make, and the steps we take can help solve vital global issues, fire up economies and drive prosperity all over the world.” He promised that this G8 would be different, though – “Too often, development at the G8 has been about rich countries doing things to poor countries. But at Lough Erne, we in the developed 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.

Global Action on Nutrition, ICRISAT

Can Women Deliver a New Development Agenda in 2015?, New Security Beat

Ending Malnutrition, Jose Graziano Da Silva, Huffington Post

Global hunger: Expert calls for fresh action on child malnutrition, BBC

International community must focus on reducing food loss on farms, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Malnutrition identified as root cause of 3.1 million deaths among children, The Guardian

Biotech crops vs. pests: Successes and failures from the first billion acres (Update), Phys.org

In Pictures: Fighting malnutrition, BBC

In defiance of the New Alliance, World Development Movement

Kenyan MPs to champion rural women’s influence on climate policy,Thomson Reuters Foundation

How do you feed 9 billion people?, Michigan State University

Smallholder Farmers…

The 19th OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2013-2022 was recently released, which is an annual report on projections for 15 agricultural products over a ten year period. It covers OECD countries as well as India, China, Brazil and Russia as well as Argentina, South Africa and other developing countries. The report specifically analyses the impact of economic developments and government policies on world commodity market trends.

In this latest report the main headlines are:

• Productivity growth is projected at 1.5% for the next decade, a reduction on the 2.1% productivity growth seen for the period 2003-2012.
• We can expect food prices to remain higher than historical averages given increasing demand and stagnating productivity.  Price volatility and trade disruption are expected to continue to be a risk as food stocks, important as buffers against shocks to the food production system, remain low. As the report states, “a wide-spread drought such as the one…

From 9-11 September 2013, the CGIAR research programs on ‘policies, institutions and markets’ and ‘livestock and fish’ will organize a first AgriFood Chain Toolkit conference in Kampala.

The AgriFood chain toolkit of the CGIAR Research program on Policies, institutions and markets was launched in January 2013. This online platform on agrifood value chains is designed to help overcome the information gaps between researchers analyzing value chains and practitioners developing value chains. Both often lack access to the latest information and tools on value chains. There is still need for greater rigour in analysis and better peer feedback. Finally, tool designers need to engage purposefully with tool users.

To help crystallize the potential of the online network into real-world activities, the AgriFood chain toolkit will organize regular real-world conferences designed to collate, synthesize and share good practices of value chain tool users, practitioners and researchers.

The objective of the conference is…

Back row:   Yordanos Mekonnen, Eshetu Zerihun, Said Mohammed, Michael Temesgen, Gelane Kumssa , Judy Bettridge,  Camilla Brena, Alemayehu Guteta, Jibril Yusuf
Front row:  Zelalem Gutu, Marisol Collins

All fieldwork has now been completed. The eight villages selected to take part in the study have now been visited a total of 4 times each over the last two years. Eighty households in each village have been interviewed, and had two of their chickens examined. This gives us a grand total of 640 households, and 1280 chickens sampled!

In addition, 520 of those households selected to take part were revisited 6 months after they were initially recruited to the study. This enabled us to find out what happened to the chickens we sampled, and will allow us to look for factors which may predict which chickens are more likely to survive.

A new study exploring the root causes of the two-decade drought that ravaged the African Sahel from the 1970s to the 1990s arrives at an interesting conclusion. Historically it had been maintained that the drought—which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and sparked Bob Geldoff’s Band Aid and We Are the World—was rooted in environmental degradation caused by poor land management practices (particularly overgrazing) in the region.

But according to a new study conducted by Yen-Ting Hwang, Dargan Frierson (both of University of Washington), and Sarah Kang (at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea) and published in Geophysical Research Letters, shifting rainfall patters that facilitated the drought were likely the result of increased aerosols in the Northern Hemisphere.

The paper argues that the widespread use of aerosols led to a slight cooling of the Northern Hemisphere, which caused the tropical rainfall…

Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson at Food Tank posted a list of “15 Websites Saving the Environment by Changing the Food System.” As usual, they’ve done their research and have a pretty good list that includes everything from fairly mainstream sources like Beth Hoffman’s blog on Forbes, CNN’s Eatocracy, The Guardian’s Sustainable Development, and NPR’s The Salt, to the Civil Eats metablog, to more radical sites like Eat Drink Politics, Food and Water Watch, Tom Philpott’s Food for Thought at Mother Jones,  and The Grist.

I was surprised that they missed Food First, which I regard as one of the best resources on global food politics, and Marion Nestle’s classic Food Politics blog.  I might have also liked to see Food (Policy) For Thought,  Science on the Land,  GRAIN, and Triple Crisis on their list.

What…

A report in the medical journal The Lancet last week argued  that undernutrition is responsible for approximately 45 percent of all under-five child deaths around the world. Some 3.1 million children die each year from undernutrition; half from wasting or severe acute undernutrition, and the other half from other causes to which undernutrition contributed. Undernutrition is, in other words, is the single-greatest threat to child survival.

In conjunction with The Lancet’s publication, the British and Brazilian governments are co-hosting a conference this weekend to address the undernutrition crisis. Dubbed “Nutrition for Growth,” the conference will “bring together business leaders, scientists, governments and civil society to make the ambitious financial and political commitments needed to reach millions more pregnant women and infants with the right nutrition at the right time, and reduce cases of stunting and deaths from severe acute malnutrition.” The conference follows on a similar summit…