This report explores the potential to diversify intra-regional trade in Eastern and Southern Africa countries (Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Burundi), with special reference to the COMESA regional market. More specifically, three critical issues were analyzed. First, the current performance and the potential to trade has been examined using several regional trade performance indicators including the production and trade similarities, and the competitiveness of the sample countries in the regional trade.

Land degradation, declining soil fertility, and erosion continue to plague agricultural production in many developing countries. In response to these farm production constraints and environmental challenges, a range of soil conservation technologies and practices have been developed and disseminated to tackle soil nutrient and fertility declines. However, evidence on the association between soil conservation, farm performance, and smallholder welfare is scarce.

Achieving gender and social equality in agri-food systems can result in greater food security and better nutrition for all—and transform food systems to be more just, resilient and sustainable. Equitable food systems are essential to achieving SDG 5, whose gender equality goal is intrinsically valuable and whose achievement supports progress across all other SDGs. Current thinking has evolved from focusing on gender gaps to enabling gender-transformative change in agri-food systems, fostering gender and social equality and women’s empowerment.

Climate change affects every aspect of the food system, including all nodes along agrifood value chains from production to consumption, the food environments in which people live, and outcomes, such as diets and livelihoods. Women and men often have specific roles and responsibilities within food systems, yet structural inequalities (formal and informal) limit women’s access to resources, services and agency. These inequalities affect the ways in which women and men experience and are affected by climate change.

A third of the land on the Earth is composed of grasslands, mainly used for forage. Much effort is being conducted to develop tools to estimate grassland productivity (GP) at different extents, concentrating on spatial and seasonal variability pertaining to climate change. GP is a reliable indicator of how well an ecosystem works because of its close connection to the ecological system equilibrium. The most commonly used proxies of GP in ecological studies are aboveground biomass (AGB), leaf area index (LAI), canopy storage capacity (CSC), and chlorophyll and nitrogen content.

"Shamba Shape Up" is a popular television show in East Africa that focuses on agricultural education and improvement. The show features a team of experts who visit different farms, providing practical demonstrations and advice to farmers on various aspects of agriculture, such as livestock rearing, crop cultivation, farm management techniques, and sustainable practices. It aims to educate and empower farmers with valuable information and skills to enhance productivity, increase yields, and improve their livelihoods.

This perspective describes the opportunities and challenges of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management (genebanks and breeding) in the context of agricultural research for sustainable development in the Global South. Data-driven approaches build on larger volumes of data and flexible analyses that link different datasets across domains and disciplines. This can lead

Landraces are traditional crop varieties that often have special adaptations to the farming environment in which they have evolved and are therefore a valuable source of useful traits for plant breeders. In most agriculturally advanced countries, landraces of the main crops have generally been superseded by modern varieties. An exception to this in the United Kingdom is the cultivation on the Scottish archipelagos of Orkney, Shetland and the Outer Hebrides of three cereal landraces: bere, a 6-row barley (Hordeum vulgare), small oat (Avena strigosa) and Hebridean rye (Secale cereale).

Over the past 20 years, recurrent and violent conflicts between farmers and Fulani pastoralists have persisted in Northern Ghana. These conflicts mainly revolve around access to and utilisation of natural resources such as land and water. Conflicts of interest have led to the social marginalisation of the Fulani community, leading to their exclusion from formal landscape governance processes.

Acid tropical soils may become more productive when treated with agricultural lime, but optimal lime rates have yet to be determined in many tropical regions. In these regions, lime rates can be estimated with lime requirement models based on widely available soil data. We reviewed seven of these models and introduced a new model (LiTAS). We evaluated the models’ ability to predict the amount of lime needed to reach a target change in soil chemical properties with data from four soil incubation studies covering 31 soil types.