Dr. Bukar Ali USMAN, mni

A new paper published today in Science warns that billions of dollars promised to fund programs to boost small-scale agriculture in developing countries are unlikely to succeed in feeding the world’s increasing populations. This is due not only to increasing populations and changing environments, but also to little “intellectual commitment” to the ubiquitous small-scale “mixed” farmers who raise both crops and animals and are the source of much of today’s food supply and economic development.

The authors, who include scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the World Bank, urge wealthy countries, which pledged US$20 billion for developing-country agriculture at the G8 summit in Italy last year, to look beyond “business as usual” investments.

“In most regions of the world, farming systems are under intense…

Camel role is incredible in its cradle of domestication and its original habitats. In 19th Century some camels were transported to USA, Australia, and some other places for work and armies. After automobile revolution the role of camel as beast of burden was gradually diminished 1,2.

In Australia there are thousands of feral camels, now it’s estimated a million, roaming across Australian deserts but unfortunately considered as pest. Government launches project to kill camel (considering as pest) and save the scarce water resources in the region 3. Many friends from Australia and other parts of the world (including the author) raised voice to halt such killing which results in wastage of such a unique resource . The camel activists gave many good arguments/suggestions to save feral camel; a tool to adapt with the climate change and judiciously use of the scattered bushy vegetation of the region 4…

The sub-department Sociology & Anthropology of Development of the Social Sciences department of Wageningen University invited two key note speakers for a seminar on Foreign Investment in African Agriculture: Prof. Kojo Amanor (University of Ghana) and Prof. Sergio Schneider  (University Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). The two speakers will specifically highlight the role of China and Brazil.

Prof. Kojo Amanor will present an overview of foreign investments in the agricultural sector in Africa. A specific focus will be on investments from BRIC countries, notably from China and Brazil. Prof. Amanor will debate the new roles of China and Brazil in the context of their own political economies, and wider global trends of geopolitical restructuring. Prof. Amanor has published widely on African Agriculture and co-edited a Special Issue of World Development (Vol. 18, 2016) on foreign invest-ment in African agriculture.

Prof. Sergio Schneider will present an analysis of whether and how…

ILRI veterinary epidemiologist Delia Grace presenting at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Science-Policy Forum that preceded the second session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2), on 20 May 2016 (photo credit: ILRI).

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) held its first global Science-Policy Forum in Nairobi, Kenya on 19-20 May 2016 as part of the overall programme of the second session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-2) held on 23-27 May 2016.

The forum offered a platform to the science community to engage with policymakers and civil society stakeholders on the science and knowledge needed to support informed decision-making to deliver on the environmental dimension of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), took part in the forum as a panellist for the launch of the UNEP Frontiers 2016 report

Camel milk has been shown, to be effective in reducing the level of glycosylated or glycated haemoglobin in the blood. This is haemoglobin to which glucose is attached, and is typically found at high levels in people with diabetes. Camel milk can therefore be used to reduce the dose of insulin that diabetes patients require. “This is because camel milk has been shown to contain an insulin-like molecule,” said Dr Dubey. “Diabetes is a disease in which the therapeutic potential of camel milk can be maximally utilised. It has well-observed clinical benefits.” It is no wonder then that, as the authors of the review note, epidemiological surveys indicate that there is a low prevalence of diabetes in communities where camel milk is consumed.

The report of the study published in the National News paper;

http://www.thenational.ae/uae/science/how-camel-milk-could-be-better-for-you-than-anyone-imagined#page1

Before the release of this study, author reported that camel milk is good for diabetes patients. The link…

By Alice Marks

Credit, FAO

On April 26^th 2016 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released their new report, Growing Food for Growing Cities: Transforming food systems in an urbanizing world, as part of their Global Food Security Symposium in Washington, DC. According to UN figures, two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, and this report looks at how such rapid urbanisation is changing the structure and functionality of the entire global food system, from the source of inputs to the farm and on to the consumer.

With urbanisation and the accompanying expansion of urban middle classes comes a shift in dietary expectations and demands. Traditional staple diets such as cereals, roots and pulses are increasingly supplemented with a wide variety of higher-value foods such as fresh fruit and vegetables, or meat and dairy products. For example, in some African…

Bird’s-eye view of a colourful food market in Western Bengal, where 70% of people depend on agriculture (photo credit: Krishnasis Ghosh/Bioversity International).

In a recent blog post (11 April) published by the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition, Delia Grace, a food safety expert at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), discusses food safety and the psychology of risk perception.

She notes that when it comes to food safety, what consumers perceive to be risky and what experts consider to be the most important risks are often not the same.

Citing the example of genetically modified foods, Grace says: “. . . there is remarkable consistency from scientists and expert bodies that genetically modified foods are safe to eat, and yet in many countries, most of the public are skeptical about them.”

The blog post, Healthier food supply: what you worry about and what makes you…

This week, the International Conference on Pulses for Health, Nutrition and Sustainable Agriculture in Drylands takes place in Morocco. ILRI and ICARDA scientists from the Livestock and Fish program are sharing experiences on the opportunities and limitations of multidimensional crop improvement in grain legumes to support increased productivity in mixed crop-livestock systems.

While rising demand for animal-source food (ASF) in emerging and developing countries increases feed demand, the shrinking natural resources base, particularly arable land and water limit feed production.

Crop residues as feed resources have thus become more important and more valuable; in some cases the haulms are more valuable than the grains. Crop breeders and livestock nutritionists are exploring opportunities and limitations to improve crop residue quantity and fodder quality at source through multidimensional crop improvement.

The presentation presents findings on crop species and crop cultivar variations in grain and haulm yield, haulm fodder quality and possible trade-offs…

By Katrin Glatzel

Credit: Katrin Glatzel, 2015 (Senegal)

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where agriculture is predominantly rainfed, farmers’ access to water is often limited based on seasonal variation. Yet water scarcity in the region is not necessarily caused by a physical lack of water, but rather by an ‘economic water scarcity’. This implies that the necessary public investments in water resources and infrastructure are not substantial enough to meet water demands in an area where people do not have the means to make use of water sources on their own. In fact, in many parts of SSA there is plenty of water available. However, groundwater resources, such as aquifers, remain a relatively abundant yet underused resource, with less than 5% of the water used for irrigation coming from groundwater.

The challenge is therefore to increase the amount of available water that is ‘harvested’ for crop growth. Such water harvesting…

The Routledge Handbook of Food and Nutrition Security has just been published.

The Handbook was edited by Bill Pritchard, Rodomiro Ortiz and Meera Shekar and includes great contributions.

Overview:
The concept of food and nutrition security has evolved and risen to the top of the international policy agenda over the last decade. Yet it is a complex and multi-faceted issue, requiring a broad and inter-disciplinary perspective for full understanding. This Handbook represents the most comprehensive compilation of our current knowledge of food and nutrition security from a global perspective. It is organized to reflect the wide scope of the contents, its four sections corresponding to the accepted current definitional frameworks prevailing in the work of multilateral agencies and mainstream scholarship.

The first section addresses the struggles and progression of ideas and debates about the subject in recent years. The other sections focus on three key themes: how food has been…

The Routledge Handbook of Food and Nutrition Security has just been published.

The Handbook was edited by Bill Pritchard, Rodomiro Ortiz and Meera Shekar and includes great contributions.

Overview:
The concept of food and nutrition security has evolved and risen to the top of the international policy agenda over the last decade. Yet it is a complex and multi-faceted issue, requiring a broad and inter-disciplinary perspective for full understanding. This Handbook represents the most comprehensive compilation of our current knowledge of food and nutrition security from a global perspective. It is organized to reflect the wide scope of the contents, its four sections corresponding to the accepted current definitional frameworks prevailing in the work of multilateral agencies and mainstream scholarship.

The first section addresses the struggles and progression of ideas and debates about the subject in recent years. The other sections focus on three key themes: how food has been…

By Alice Marks

click to view report

On March 31^st the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published the 2016 Global Food Policy Report. The report highlights the scale of the challenged faced by the global food system, including that 1/3 of people in the world are malnourished, nearly a billion people go to bed hungry each day, and environmental degradation and climate change will only exacerbate these problems by making global food markets increasingly unstable.

In a previous blog series (part 1/part 2) agriculture’s role in underpinning all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was explored. Ahead of the launch of the new report, IFPRI’s director Shenggen Fan explained that to meet the SDG’s by 2030 “We have a lot of work ahead. We must promote and support a new global food system that is efficient, inclusive, climate-smart, sustainable, nutrition- and health-driven, and…

Women clean fish to provide nutritious food

From 4-8 April 2016, the program’s gender initiative is convening a writeshop of scientists and gender specialists to bring together results and lessons learned in the past 18 months.

Thirteen ’coached’ projects are participating, drawn from all the program’s flagships, CGIAR partners and several countries.

• Mapping gender dimensions: towards gender sensitive geographical targeting and scaling out
• Evaluating best-bet intervention in contrasting L&F value chains in sub Saharan Africa in a gender differentiated manner: from household to intra household level patterns
• A methodological framework for the collection and analysis of producer level gender-disaggregated value-chain data
• Differential gender impacts of animal diseases in small ruminant production in Ethiopia
• Gender dimensions of pig management in the smallholder pig production systems in Uganda: case of control of African Swine Fever
• Mainstreaming gender in feed and fodder interventions in “MoreMilkIT” sites in Tanzania
• Engendering FEAST – the feed…

Over 1000 Nigerians will this year be beneficiaries of N500Million Naira Grant seed capital set aside for young Nigerian entrepreneurs and students. This was disclosed today during the launch of the YESGrant Scheme (www.YESGrant.com) by the Nigerian Young Professionals Forum (NYPF) (http://www. NYPForum.org) in partnership with Heritage Bank, which took place at the Four Point Hotel in Lagos, Nigeria.… Read more on http://africa-newsroom.com/press/1000-young-nigerians-to-receive-n500million-naira-grant-for-start-ups?lang=en

A woman milking her goat

Gender equality is an essential component for sustainable economic development. This year, the International Women’s Day (IWD) sparked a variety of discussions about climate change, livestock and gender in ensuring food security, improved nutrition and generating income at the household, national and international levels.

Empowering rural women, especially in Africa, is vital to enabling poor and vulnerable people to improve their livelihoods, increase their household incomes, overcome poverty and build resilience to impacts of climate change. However, social and economic inequalities between men and women continue to undermine food and nutrition security and thus negatively affect economic and agricultural growth.

In 2015, the world witnessed two critical global agreements – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Paris Climate Agreement. Both agreements emphasize the need to enhance gender equality while developing response measures to address climate change, reduce food insecurity and improve nutrition. Now, most countries…

It was the first day of June in the serene and sunny – but slightly windy – city of Montpellier, and from all around the world researchers and academics in the fields of agriculture and family farming were gathered: experts in international development, decision makers, NGOs, as well as farmers organizations’ and private sector representatives. The stage had been set for the “International Encounters on Family Farming and Research”.

The “Encounters” had been organized as part of the International Year of Family Farming, declared by the United Nations for 2014 by research institutions of Montpellier hub – Agropolis International – in collaboration with international partners like the CGIAR Consortium, the Global Forum for Agricultural Research (GFAR) and the World Rural Forum (WRF). With the support of the Government of France, the aim of the conference was to foster exchanges between all stakeholders and…

Source: ROLE OF AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY IN DEVELOPING ECONOMIES 2

Next week (March 22) I will be speaking in Paris at INRA for a workshop on Food Security and Democracy. The title of my talk is Global governance for ecologically integrated food security policies: Reflections on reflexive governance  but if all goes well in the next week, I plan to use the talk to present some of my thinking on justice in global governance. More specifically, when I say I want to understand how we can design governance arrangement to support pathways to just and sustainable food futures, how can we start to qualify “just”.

Programme:

10h30 – 12h, Jessica Duncan (Rural Sociology, Wageningen University), Global governance for ecologically integrated food security policies: Reflections on reflexive governance

13h30 – 15h, Delphine Thivet (CMH, EHESS, Paris), Politiques agricoles et droits des paysannes : retour sur l’émergence de la notion de “souveraineté alimentaire”

15h30 – 17h, Nora McKeon (Rome…

What if you could be guaranteed that participants would come to your workshop having already mastered the basic content knowledge of your topic area? Think about the possibilities! You would be free to challenge them to apply that knowledge to a range of professional problem scenarios. After all, learning theory tells us that good learning is contextual. Think of the invigorating discussions that would unfold.

Instead, the current status quo has you spending the first few days of valuable face-to-face time lecturing participants about content with which many of them are already familiar, at least to some extent.

Workshops attended by informed professionals ready to explore how new knowledge and technologies can be applied in their own professional contexts. This is the scenario that ILRI’s capacity development unit is trying to make a reality by creating online modules to cover basic knowledge objectives. The intent is that participants will…

Agroforestry could give Nigeria’s IDPs a new future

Date palm tissue culture laboratory – Picture from FAO

GM crops have once again come under the spotlight with the recent news that Burkina Faso will no longer be growing Bt cotton (a genetically modified cotton variety, which produces a pesticide to counter the insect pest bollworm). Originally an early adopter of the technology, Burkina Faso became one of the first African countries to develop and release, with Monsanto, crosses of local and Bt cotton crops in 2008. As one of Africa’s largest cotton producers, their adoption of GM technology was ground-breaking. And, at least for some time, successful, increasing cotton production, yields and profits while reducing the number of pesticide sprays needed. With some 140,000 smallholders cultivating Bt cotton, it was also seen to de driving rural development, the average Bt cotton farming family reaping 50% more profits than families growing conventional cotton.

So why the reversal? The lint…

Date palm tissue culture laboratory – Picture from FAO

GM crops have once again come under the spotlight with the recent news that Burkina Faso will no longer be growing Bt cotton (a genetically modified cotton variety, which produces a pesticide to counter the insect pest bollworm). Originally an early adopter of the technology, Burkina Faso became one of the first African countries to develop and release, with Monsanto, crosses of local and Bt cotton crops in 2008. As one of Africa’s largest cotton producers, their adoption of GM technology was ground-breaking. And, at least for some time, successful, increasing cotton production, yields and profits while reducing the number of pesticide sprays needed. With some 140,000 smallholders cultivating Bt cotton, it was also seen to de driving rural development, the average Bt cotton farming family reaping 50% more profits than families growing conventional cotton.

So why the reversal? The lint…

By Alice Marks

Using drones for agriculture. Credit: Lima Pix (Flickr)

According to experts at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, we are sitting on the edge of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This revolution builds on the third, which was the digital revolution, and is predicted to blur the lines between the physical and digital world through innovations such as artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, and the use of Big Data, which will integrate digital technologies into daily lives ever more closely. It is predicted to be exponentially fast and far reaching in its scope and impact, transforming entire production, governance and management systems in an unprecedented way. Whether this will mean “promise or peril” for humanity will likely only be clear with the benefit of hindsight, but optimists hope that it offers the opportunities to improve lives and help to eradicate poverty through improved connectivity and…

Photo by phanlop88

Digital technology is likely to continue to be a major driver of development and industry in Africa. The capabilities of local entrepreneurs, start-ups and businesses to provide services such as technical assistance and finance are growing significantly due to greater access to mobile and internet technology. As such digital solutions are likely to make a huge contribution to addressing local concerns, connecting people in remote areas and to reaching greater numbers of people than more traditional development initiatives. Such technologies are already transforming the way in which smallholder farmers work and interact. Here we discuss five ways in which digital technology can play a part in transforming agriculture in Africa.

• Extension services

Accessing information on farming practices, crop diseases, pest control and land management can be made easier for rural farmers through mobile technology. At present there is a large gap between extension services provided and farmers…

The Sustainable Development Goals, described as a social contract to transform the world by 2030, were the focus of a panel event at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, which aimed to introduce the advocacy work being done around the SDGs as well as discuss what needs to be done to ensure the SDG agenda motivates action.

Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon’s opening remarks introduced the goals as an ambitious blueprint to put the world on a more sustainable path, and as both a vision and a promise by world leaders. In order to deliver on the SDGs, and as quickly as possible, he affirmed that we need partnership and advocacy, introducing the SDG Advocacy Group (see below for a list of all members). Co-chair of the group, Mr. John Dramani Mahama, President of Ghana, was next to speak, further explaining the SDGs as…

By Alice MarksIn Part 1 of this series Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1-8 were explored to demonstrate that a healthy agriculture sector underpins so much of the international development agenda. For the SDGs to succeed, agriculture needs to be an integral part of discussions around every one of the global goals. Here is how it fits into goals 9 – 17:

9. Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Road in Uganda Credit: Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Strong agricultural value chains offer the opportunity to capture added value at each stage of the production, marketing and consumption process. There are a myriad of opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship in the agriculture and food sectors, from ‘farm to fork’: from mechanisation at the farm level to retail management and marketing for both domestic and international markets. However, according to ONE, poor infrastructure is reported by African companies as the biggest barrier…

Group photo of the participants of the writeshop to write up the situational analysis report of the Humidtropics Northwest Vietnam action site situational analysis, 25 January 2014, Hoa Binh Province, Vietnam (photo credit: ILRI/Aziz Karimov).

As promised six months ago, the Humidtropics situational analysis being conducted in the Northwest Vietnam action site is now ready to share its first lessons.

This preliminary research activity of the Humidtropics CGIAR research program has been coordinated by Steve Staal, Regional Representative for Southeast Asia of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). It has involved several international partners: The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) and Bioversity International. The bulk of the field work and writing up has been undertaken by Vietnamese partners from the Soils and Fertilizers Research Institute (SFRI), the Centre for Agrarian Systems Research and Development (CASRAD), the Fruit and Vegetable Research Institute…