The workshop provided overview on the food systems landscape in Kenya, and to identify opportunities to inform inputs on crop diversification, livestock, land use expansion, and irrigation. It also contributed immensely into policy and stakeholder mapping exercise in Kenya.
Plant genetic resources (PGR), including collections held in national and international gene banks, provide access to a wide array of genetic diversity and are critical to genomics research, conservation efforts, and applied breeding. Yet, there is a general lack of awareness in the research community about the rules and treaties that govern the use of PGR, about access and benefit sharing obligations contained in international treaties and/or national laws, and about how best to comply with potentially applicable requirements.
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 In most agriculturally advanced countries, landraces of the main crops have generally been superseded by modern varieties.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.
The Innovation for Africa Climate Risk Insurance, InACRI project, addresses the current poor performance and uptake of index-based crop insurance products in Kenya. As part of the outputs to improve adoption the project developed a farmer guide to provide them with information on crop insurance such as the advantages of crop insurance, types of crop insurance, what to consider when choosing an insurance policy, the claims process, and the costs associated with crop insurance.
The Call for Applications resulted in a total of 849 applicants, out of which 288 met the high-quality standards for prequalification. The accelerator program successfully attracted women-led or co-led agribusinesses, with 69% of applicants featuring at least one woman in the founding team. The majority of applicants (72%) indicated that they were targeting smallholder farmers in their business model, and 52% claimed to have a digital innovation, highlighting the potential for technology in transforming the food systems sector.
Atelier de réflexion sur l’outil Holistic Localized Performance Assessment (HOLPA). Cet atelier a réuni les chercheurs des institutions suivantes : CIRAD, CIRDES, INERA, IRSAT, ICRAF et ISRA (la liste des participants est annexée au présent compte rendu). Cet atelier s’inscrivait dans le cadre de l’initiative intitulée "Agroécologie transformationnelle à travers les systèmes alimentaires, de gestion des terres et de l'eau" ou plus simplement "Initiative Agroécologie" qui a été lancée en 2022 et pilotée par le Groupe consultatif pour la
We organised an inception Workshop in March with the Agriculture Consultative Forum (ACF), and FANRPAN to introduced iFEED to workgroup memebers and identify policy opportunities in Zambia. The outcome of the workshop led to subsequent meetings with the seperate working group mebers on crop diversifciation, irrigation and livestock and landuse change to make inputs into iFEED results and provide directions for avenues to integrate iFEED outputs in specific country policies.
The training manual on cage fish farming supported the training of the aquaculture youth groups in the selected pilot communities.