CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Capitalising on Africa’s agriculture to achieve ‘zero hunger’

 

 

It’s a sobering fact that, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), nearly 233 million children, women and men in Africa went to bed each night hungry in 2014-16.

CABI Board Member and 2017 Africa Food Prize winner Professor Ruth Oniang’o has devoted her career helping farmers grow nutritious and healthy crops, to not only help reduce hunger but to achieve sustainable and profitable livelihoods.

Building a climate-smart cassava value chain: The role of partnerships

This is one of a two-part blog series following my visit to Africa supported by CABI’s development bursary

In June 2017, I visited Zanzibar, Tanzania, to attend a 5-day planning meeting organised by the Africa Cassava Agronomy Initiative (ACAI). The purpose of this planning meeting was to bring together all project partners to identify project milestones and discuss scale-up strategies.  

Taking the power back

How apple growers are regaining control of the supply chain from retailers

Apples are one of the world’s most popular fruits. In 2013 world production reached almost 82 million tonnes and the export value broke US$8 billion (FAO STAT, 2017). The fruit comes in all shapes, sizes, flavours and colours; yet what we see in the supermarkets is a mere snapshot of the diversity that exists. The apple market is predominately controlled by retailers who demand strict uniformity in both colour and size of apples from growers, who are encouraged to produce commercial varieties on a large scale, which are then sold on to consumers at low cost.

African indigenous vegetables to help fight hidden hunger in Uganda

African Indigenous Vegetables (AIV) are an excellent source of essential vitamins and minerals including micro-nutrients, supplementary protein, fibre and calories. Micro-nutrient deficiency threatens nutrition security and also causes hidden hunger in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite their nutritive value, these vegetables have not been a high priority in national food programmes. As a result, adequate resources have not been allocated to promote their production and consumption in the region.

Author of the Month: Big Data’s Big Potential in Developing Economies, Nir Kshetri

Big data’s role in addressing the root causes of poverty

There clearly are some signs of big data-led political, economic and social transformations taking place in developing countries. Early evidence has shown the huge potential benefits that can be realized by implementing big data in diverse fields that are critical to the future of these countries. The book Big Data’s Big Potential in Developing Economies: Impact on Agriculture, Health and Environmental Security (CAB International, 2016) delves into some of the key social and economic sectors that are being transformed by the use of big data.

How crop diversity could help secure our future food supply

Diversity within maize. Image source: Sam Fentress, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1293212

16 October is World Food Day (#WFD2016); this year’s theme is ‘Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.’ Jennifer Cunniff, plant scientist in CABI’s editorial team looks at how harnessing crop diversity is vital for us to meet the challenge.

Of the wide variety of edible plant species growing on our planet it’s amazing how few of them we actually include in our diet. Around 30 000 edible plant species are known, yet only 30 of these feed the world, and we are heavily reliant on a handful of cereals - rice, bread wheat, maize, millets and sorghum - provide 60% of the energy intake of the world population (FAO). This narrowing of our food base largely started with the advent of farming – before then, there is plentiful archaeological evidence that shows we were foraging across a much wider breadth of plant species (e.g. Weiss et al. 2004; Fairbairn et al. 2006). Once we formed settled societies we began to focus on crops that offered the best level of return and were best adapted to the cultivated environments we created. Furthermore, even though multiple accessions¹ of our widely grown cereal species exist (naturally and through breeding) only a few dozen are grown on a wide scale. This strategy has consequences – genetic variability for adaptation to future climate change is lost.

¹ A single collected variety or cultivar. It could be a wild variety, a landrace or a bred cultivar.

 

Guaranteeing credit to coffee farmers in Ethiopia and Rwanda

At a time when the coffee sector is faced with many challenges, ranging from low productivity, high production costs, to the threat of climate change, it is crucial to remember those most affected. Approximately 25 million small scale coffee farmers and their families produce 70% of the world’s coffee and it is they who bear the brunt of these problems. - Robério Oliveira Silva, Executive Director International Coffee Organization.

1 October is International Coffee Day, a global celebration of coffee’s journey from farms to local shops around the world. It is a great opportunity to honour the men and women who grow and harvest the coffee we love. The 77 Member States of the International Coffee Organization and several coffee associations around the world will come together to celebrate the second annual International Coffee Day. We take a look at how CABI is helping coffee farmers improve their livelihoods.

Improving crop yield: Looking to the sources and sinks

 

This week I had the pleasure of heading down to the south coast to attend the Society for Experimental Biology’s main meeting in Brighton. The flagship meeting attracts an international audience covering topics across the animal and plant sciences and also cell biology. For me, the main focus was to attend a plant biology session – From source to sink: Resource partitioning in plants – which I have spent the past 18 months organising with colleagues from the University of Sheffield and the University of Illinois.

Climate change to cause more diet related deaths

A young man in drought conditions in Ethiopia (Author: USAID African Bureau)

We are all told to improve our diet; increasing our fruit and vegetable consumption and reducing our red meat intake. But a new study, ‘Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change; a modelling study,’ published in The Lancet has revealed that climate change may make eating our 5 a day more challenging, and that subsequent dietary shifts and changes in body weight will lead to more than half a million additional deaths worldwide by 2050.

The farmers behind your coffee: what challenges do they face?

1 October 2015 is the very first International Coffee Day. Today, I’ll be swapping my usual cup of tea for coffee and encouraging colleagues to do the same. Many of us can’t start the morning without a coffee. But as you’re drinking your first cup, spare a thought for where this important commodity crop comes from and what it takes to get it from the farm to the cup.

There are an estimated 25 million coffee farmers in the world with more than 100 million people directly or indirectly dependant on the coffee trade for their income. But here’s something you may not know: more than 70% of the world’s coffee supply is produced by smallholder farmers – farmers, usually family farmers, growing a mix of crops to eat and sell, on a small plot of land. These people rely on growing and selling coffee for their livelihoods, using the cash from their coffee to pay for things like food, housing and schooling.