The increasing negative impact of climate change on agricultural production has led to food insecurity in many rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Unpredictable rainfall patterns coupled with wide spread pest and disease infestation and high input prices are some limitations smallholder farmers face in producing food. As a result, they are unable to produce at optimal levels and do not earn enough profits for their efforts. Despite advances in crop breeding which has brought about drought tolerant varieties, these new varieties still require good management that encompass of the application of Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) practices and fertilizer use.
Some of the farmers that participated in the a meeting with CABI/AFAP team in December 2016 in Chalangwa village, Chunya district, Mbeya region. Second from left is the District Agricultural Officer Mr. Augustine Ndelwa. Photo: Abigael Mchana, CABI
By Monica Kansiime, Seed systems scientist, CABI
In the southern highlands of Tanzania, people’s livelihoods are dependent on what farmers can grow for food and sale. Legumes, such as common beans, soybean and groundnut, are good protein sources and play a key role in nutritional security and household incomes. But yields lately have been in decline. This is mainly due to a lack fertilizer and quality seeds, both of which can increase productivity, as many of the farmers are wedded to traditional production practices.
Continue reading "Access to market key to adopting improved legume technologies" »
A CABI representative presents on how future plant health clinics will be conducted. Farmers can bring plant samples to the plant clinic when requesting for advice on addressing their crop problems. Photo: F. Emdin (WorldFish)
The 22nd Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) took place in Marrakech, Morocco on 7-18 November 2016. The conference was aimed at building momentum and cooperation between countries to work together towards climate change mitigation and adaptation for sustainable development.
CABI, through its development projects around the world, works towards building resilience into smallholder farmers’ production systems. By improving their knowledge and skills, these farmers, who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, are able to adopt climate-smart practices that equip them to mitigate and adapt to climate change. One of the CABI-led projects with a climate focus is the establishment of plant clinics in Climate Smart Villages in Cambodia.
This post has been re-blogged from the CGIAR CCFAS Blog and looks at plant clinics in Cambodia as part of CSV.
One Health is about connectedness: "the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines working locally, nationally, and globally to attain optimal health for people, animals, plants and our environment”.
On One Health Day, November 3rd 2016, CABI's editors held a One Health (#OneHealth) Blogathon to focus attention, contributing a total of 6 blogs to Handpicked... and Carefully Sorted, each written from the viewpoint of a different sector. Our Plantwise Blog contributed One Health: Plantwise’s ambition to improve the health of people, plants and animals.
We hope you found them informative but your learning need not be confined to our blogs!
Sign up to a free online One Health course from FutureLearn: starts November 7th 2016, runs for 6 weeks. Lecturers are the CABI authors Esther Schelling, Jakob Zinsstag and Bassirou Bonfoh of Swiss Tropical & Public Health Institute.
Esther, Jakob and Bassirou are all authors of chapters in CABI’s book One Health: The Theory and Practice of Integrated Health Approaches [2015]. Indeed Esther and Jakob are also co-editors.
FutureLearn courses are easy to follow and well-paced: you get one unit per week. I speak from experience as because of my interest in evidence-based medicine, in October 2015, I took "Informed Health Consumer: Making Sense of Evidence".
I hope you can make use of this One Health course.
One of a series of blogs written by CABI editors for One Health (#OneHealth) Day on November 3rd 2016
"It is difficult to rate the importance of the different soil functions, since all are vital to our well-being to some extent. However, the function of supporting food and agriculture worldwide is fundamental for the preservation and advancement of human life on this planet." - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States (FAO).
The multiple roles of soil often go unnoticed. During time spent carrying out research for this blog I came across the following quote which I feel really captures the relevance of soil health for the One Health concept:
‘The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible’.
This was actually said seven decades ago by Lady Eva Balfour, one of the first women to study agriculture at an English University, who went on to found the Soil Association in 1946. Yet it seems that on many levels we are still to realise the connectedness between health in soils, plants, animals and people.
Continue reading "How soil health is integral to One Health" »
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.
Continue reading "How crop diversity could help secure our future food supply" »
This month, Sara Finley puts the spotlight on popular education tools for sustainable development. Her new book, Sustainable water management for smallholder farming: Theory and Practice is now available in the CABI bookstore.
Can I speak to the manager?
Fundamentally, water management is not really about managing water, it’s about managing people. Water in nature ‘manages’ itself- its how we interact with it as water users that can cause problems. Yes, each and every one of us are water managers! To me, that means that the key to sustainable water management lies in developing the ability of water users, both big and small, to make decisions that promote the long-term quantity and quality of their local water supplies.
The control of mites that are harmful to economic plants can be achieved by physical, chemical, biological, cultural and Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Alternatively, host plants can be bred to be resistant to mites but, in my opinion, the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) lacks any ecological foundation and, therefore, can result in being environmentally harmful to serious agriculture.
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