News


From Voice of America

A new report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says grasslands have vast untapped potential to limit climate change by absorbing and storing carbon dioxide. The report says proper land use can also help one billion people who depend on livestock.

The United Nations report says if pastures and rangelands are properly managed, they can be a useful carbon sink – potentially more powerful than forests in the battle against climate change.  The report says that agricultural lands can help control global warming by limiting greenhouse gas emissions.  At the same time,  the report also states that these kinds of agriculture practices can increase land productivity which will lead to stronger food security.

Read the VoA article

The FAO report brief

FAO full discussion paper

On-line article from ‘Farmers Weekly Interactive’, UK

OFC 2010: Business as usual will not feed the world

A “business as usual” approach to increasing food production would be useless against the challenge of feeding a growing world population, the conference heard.

John Parker, globalisation correspondent for The Economist, told delegates that agriculture needed to achieve the kind of technological breakthroughs in plant breeding and livestock development last seen in the 1960s and 70s.

“The UN predicts a world population of around 9bn by 2050 – that’s about 30% more people to feed. And for a 30% population increase, world wheat yields will need to increase by the same amount over the next 20 years.”

That was without accounting for the 1bn-odd undernourished people in the world today, he added. “So therefore we need about 40% more cereals by 2050.”

Read the entire article

The Agriculture and Consumer Protection Department of FAO, in collaboration with Embrapa, IFAD and IICA, will co-organize an international consultation on the theme: Integrated Crop-Livestock Systems for Development: The Way Forward for Production Intensification.

The consultation process will operate largely through an electronic exchange by experts during February 2010 followed by a smaller workshop in Sete Lagoas, Minas Geráis, Brazil, from 23-26 March 2010. A Background Note on the Consultation is attached for your information.

The technical discussions will focus on the following four topics across a range of types (on-farm or area-wide) and scales of crop-livestock integration (braodly defined to include trees and pastures) in different agroecologies in the developing regions:

1.  Promising integrated crop-livestock systems and innovations that merit mainstreaming and scaling, and the tactics for implementation.

2.  Input and output market linkage development for promising crop-livestock systems and associated input and output supply chain  processes and public-private service providers for different production systems and diverse markets.

3.  Political will, and policy and institutional support for the adoption and enabling the spread of innovations and practices associated with promising crop-livestock systems for food and nutritional security.

4.  Research needed to generate knowledge and innovative practices to underpin farmer adoption and scaling of promising crop-livestock systems for sustainable production intensification.

The above four topics will be offered for discussion to a diverse group of stakeholders during the month of February 2010 through an electronic consultation process. The output from the electronic consultation will form an input into the workshop process in March in Brazil.

We would be most grateful if you would kindly inform your collaborators and colleagues of the above planned electronic consultation and workshop, and provide us with names and contact details (institutional affiliation, position, e-mail, telephone and fax) of those people who you feel should be invited to participate in the electronic consultation in February 2010 and possibly the smaller workshop in March 2010.

With best regards.

Eric Kueneman, Theo Friedrich and Amir Kassam

FAO-AGP, Rome, Italy

View background document

The spread of Conservation Agriculture: Justification, sustainability and uptake

Amir Kassam, Theodor Friedrich, Francis Shaxson and Jules Pretty

Abstract
Conservation Agriculture (CA) has been practised for three decades and has spread widely.We estimate that there arenow some 106 million ha of arable and permanent crops grown without tillage in CA systems, corresponding to an annual rate of increase globally since 1990 of 5.3 million ha. Wherever CA has been adopted it appears to have had both agricultural and environmental benefits. Yet CA represents a fundamental change in production system thinking. It has counterintuitive and often unrecognized elements that promote soil health, productive capacity and ecosystem services. The practice of CA thus requires a deeper understanding of its ecological underpinnings in order to manage its various elements for sustainable intensification, where the aim is to optimize resource use and protect or enhance ecosystem processes in space and time over the long term. For these reasons CA is knowledge-intensive. CA constitutes principles and practices that can make a major contribution to sustainable production intensification. This, the first of two papers, presents the justification for CA as a system capable of building sustainability into agricultural production systems. It discusses some of CA’s major achievable benefits, and presents an overview of the uptake of CA
worldwide to 2009. The related paper elaborates the necessary conditions for the spread of CA.

Full article

Read today on Timesonline

For years cows were the most important thing in John Nyirenda’s life. In Malawi, as in much of rural Africa, a man’s worth is calculated by the number of cows and other livestock he owns.

Until recently Mr Nyirenda, who has nine children, was the proud owner of two cows, several sheep and goats and a flock of chickens that still peck away in the dirt outside his modest brick and corrugated iron roofed home in this tiny village in northern Malawi.

“We sold milk and other diary products and with that money I brought up my entire family,” the 63-year-old farmer told The Times. “When I saved enough money to buy the second cow I felt very proud, I was looking so successful.” Less than a year ago Mr Nyirenda’s life was revolutionised by a small solar panel not much bigger than a paperback novel. If it was left in the daylight for five hours or so it would provide enough power through two wires with crocodile clips at the end to light a small LED bulb, charge a mobile phone or two rechargeable batteries that came with the pack….

Read the full story on TimesOnLine

Vacancy Number: PD/SLP/12/09

SLP/ILRI seeks to recruit a post-doctoral scientist to contribute to the SLP funded project ‘Optimizing livelihood and environmental benefits from crop residues in smallholder crop-livestock systems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia”

The Systemwide Livestock Programme (SLP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a consortium of 12 international agricultural research centres and the organisations that collaborate with them. The SLP contributes to the CGIAR goals of alleviating poverty in the developing world and protecting natural resources in order to achieve sustainable food security by building and strengthening links between diverse CGIAR centres and programmes, their partners and other stakeholders to develop integrated research on livestock related issues.

The position:

SLP/ILRI seeks to recruit a post-doctoral scientist to contribute to the SLP funded project ‘Optimizing livelihood and environmental benefits from crop residues in smallholder crop-livestock systems in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia” jointly conducted by CIMMYT, CIP, ICRISAT, IITA, ILRI/IWMI, and Wageningen University. He/she will play a leading role in implementing trade-off and sustainability models in coordination with all the partners. In addition he/she will collect and organized relevant secondary bio-physical information for the study sites and will build regional capacity for modeling approaches.

Location:

ILRI principal campus in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Preferred Skills:

The successful candidate will have:

• PhD in Agricultural or Environmental Sciences, Biology, Ecology, Geo-information Science and/or Mathematic, obtained within the last 5 years;
• Strong capabilities in quantitative analysis, with expertise in state-of-the-art systems modeling;
• Capability to quickly adapt and learn/adopt new methods/approaches and tools;
• Good understanding of and interest for agricultural challenges in the developing world;
• Experience in GIS/Remote Sensing and spatial analysis would be an advantage;
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills and the ability to perform in multidisciplinary and multicultural research environments;
• Be fluent in English with good writing skills;
• A willingness to travel frequently.

Terms of appointment:

The initial appointment will be for two years with the possibility of one renewal for one year, contingent upon individual performance and availability of funds. ILRI offers a competitive remuneration package paid in US dollars.

Applications:

Applicants should send a cover letter expressing their interest, detailed CV, names and contact details (Telephone, E-mail) of three professional referees to the Human Resources Office, ILRI, P.O. Box 30709-00100, Nairobi Kenya; e-mail: recruit-ilri@cgiar.org by 31st January 2010 or until the position is filled. The title and reference number of the position for which the application is made should be clearly marked on the application. For more information on the position, contact b.gerard@cgiar.org

To find more about ILRI and SLP, visit our Websites at www.ilri.org and www.vslp.org

Big emitters: how growth in consumption drives climate change (IIED briefing, Dec 2009)

It seems obvious that the more people there are on the planet, the more the pressure on planetary resources and the larger the emissions of greenhouse gases. So it also seems obvious that population growth must be a major driver of global warming. But it is just as obvious that very poor households contribute very little to greenhouse gas emissions. So if most of the world’s population growth is among very poor households, population growth is not the culprit. The greatest human driver of global warming is the number of consumers on the planet and their consumption level. Individuals and households contribute to global warming by consuming goods and services that cause greenhouse gas emissions – for instance, by owning a refrigerator or a car. Through this they are responsible for all the fossil fuels that go into making, distributing, advertising, selling, using and disposing of it.

For the full brief, go to IIED webpage

Bruno Gerard, Coordinator of the CGIAR Systemwide Livestock Programme (SLP) introduces the SLP and a major topic of discussion at the December 2009 meeting of its Livestock Programme Group: Researching tradeoffs between the uses of residues for livestock and for soil improvement.

The meeting is “very much on pressure on biomass use in systems.” It looks especially at tradeoffs in the use of crop residues – they can be used to feed livestock, or to sustain soils and prevent erosion. It concerns choices in investment between the immediate return of using residues to feed livestock and longer term sustainability returns.

View the video:

Venue: ILRI-Addis Info Center

11:00 Improving Water Productivity of Crop-Livestock Systems of Sub-Saharan Africa [presentation] T. Amede
11:30 Improving the value of maize as livestock feed to enhance the livelihoods of maize-livestock farmers in East Africa [presentation] D. Friesen
12:00 Lessons learnt from feed innovation approaches. Experiences from IFAD/FAP and DFID/FIP projects [presentation] A.Duncan and R. Puskur
12:30 Realizing the benefits of cover crop legumes in smallholder crop-livestock systems of the hillsides of Central America: Trade-off analysis of using legumes for soil enhancing or
as animal feed resource [presentation]
M. Peters
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Conservation agriculture, livestock and livelihood strategies in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia: Synergies and tradeoffs [presentation] O. Erenstein
14:30 Balancing Livestock Needs and Soil Conservation: Assessment of Opportunities in Intensifying Cereal-Legume-Livestock Systems in West Africa [presentation] T. Abdoulaye
15:00 Modeling approaches to address crop-residue tradeoffs in mixed crop-livestock systems [presentation] M. van Wijk, M. Rufino and L. Claessens
15:30 Coffee Break
16:00 Harmonization of the regional case studies and research plans, gaps and needs for enlarging partnerships and synergies O. Erenstein, S. Homann, T. Abdoulaye, T. Amede, B. Gérard
16:45 Discussions
17:30 End of Day 1

Peter Hobbs has consolidated the responses to Giller et al. paper that took place on the FAO Conservation Agriculture Community of Practice forum, and has placed the Blog at: http://conservationag.wordpress.com/ken-gillers-paper-on-conservation-agriculture/

Giller et al. review article ‘Conservation agriculture and smallholder farming in Africa: The heretics’ view’ published in 2009 in Field Crops Research is certainly worth reading

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