Dan Chirwa explaining to Patrick Mphaka how the water of Lake Malawi is a natural birthright for all Malawians.

The food security crisis, international "land grabs,? and new markets for environmental services have drawn renewed attention to the role of natural resource competition in the livelihoods of the rural poor. While significant empirical research has focused on diagnosing the links between natural resource competition and (violent) conflict, much less has focused on the dynamics of whether and how resource competition can be transformed to strengthen social-ecological resilience and mitigate conflict.

Reviews various approaches and techniques used in a number of sub-Saharan African countries to collect and analyze data on large-scale ecological changes with particular reference to remote sensing and monitoring techniques in resource inventory; suggests ways to build more effective data bases.

A report from northern Tanzania featuring staff of a coffee estate and smallholder farmers, who describe how they are either succeeding or failing to cope with reduced rainfall.

Men and women interact with water resources and landscapes in different ways, and there are frequent criticisms that little research is undertaken across disciplines to address this issue. Biophysical scientists in particular struggle with how to integrate “gendered” water uses into models that are necessarily based on prevailing laws and equations that describe the movement of water through the hydrological cycle, independent of social constructs.

The papers in this proceedings provide a cross section of science research in international agricultural research centres (IARCs), where the objectives and research foci within the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) have changed substantially in the 1990s. The book is divided in five sections. The first explores priority setting and research evaluation of commodity programmes. The second looks at institutional issues. The third explores issues related to commodity policies and food security.

CIAT - International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Production in Haiti. In collaboration with international and local partners to assist with Haiti’s severe food production constraints in three major areas:

Seed Solutions for Food Security

Improved seeds of staple crops are a major leverage point for change in agriculture. By giving higher and more stable yields, they offer short-term benefits, which open the way toward a more profound transformation.

Resilient System Solutions for Sustainable Growth