Author Archives: Susan MacMillan

The end of maize in Africa? A much warmer world calls for completely new ways of farming and consuming

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Philip Thornton, CCAFS/ILRI

A newscaster from Kenya Television Network Local interviews Philip Thornton on the impacts of climate change on the African continent (photo credit: ILRI).

A new publication, Agriculture-Climate Letters, published by the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program, this week highlight a paper published on the impacts of a 4ºC warmer world on African agriculture and food security. The lead author of the paper is Philip Thornton, an agricultural systems analyst with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI).

‘. . . The UK Met Office says a 4 degree [warmer] world is quite possible, and will plausibly be reached by 2070 or even 2060–in our children’s lifetimes. This will mean average temperature rises of a massive 15ºC in the Arctic, and 3-8ºC in the world’s most populated areas.

‘. . . Agriculture is highly sensitive even to a 2 degree scenario; a 4 degree world is beyond the bounds of both local and global knowledge, both modern and historical experience. . . .

‘A new paper, Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa in a four-plus degree world, by Philip Thornton, Peter Jones, Polly Ericksen and Andrew Challinor, foresees profound effects. . . . [E]nsembles of models suggest average yield drops of 19% for maize and 47% for beans, and much more frequent crop failures. . . . Africa-wide, a massive 1.2 million km2 may be forced to flip from typical mixed farms, with both crops and livestock, into pure rangeland. . . .

‘Thus a 4 degree world calls for adaptive capacity in agriculture that is not just about increasing the resilience of current systems, but about completely new ways of farming and consuming. . . . Thornton and colleagues highlight four areas for immediate policy attention:

  • supporting farmers’ own risk-management strategies
  • strengthening basic data collection in agriculture
  • investing seriously in genebanks
  • improving governance of food systems so that poor people can get affordable food

‘. . . Rapidly urbanising populations will need to eat nationally and regionally grown food. If +4 degrees signals the end to half a millennium of Africans eating maize, will the 21st century usher in a new era of indigenous urban foods, be they free-range hamburgers or drought-resistant yamburgers?

Read the whole article at AgClim Letters: Hamburgers and yamburgers? Four-degree futures for food in Africa, 1 November 2010.

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Read the science paper by Philip Thornton et al. in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal [Society] Series A: Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa in a four-plus degree world, 29 November 2010.

'The New Harvest' in Africa: Untapped potential or looming catastrophe?

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The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa_By Calestous Juma

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa, by Calestous Juma (photo credit: Harvard's Belfer Center).

Madeleine Bunting discusses in the Guardian's Poverty Matters Blog today (3 December 2010) a new report by Harvard academic Calestous Juma, The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa.

Bunting says: 'Rising food prices and terrible future scenarios of the impact of climate change on food production, are focusing minds on what is perceived as Africa's huge untapped potential for agriculture. This week yet another report from the International Food Policy Research Institute warns that climate change could push prices up by 130%, and calls for unprecedented human ingenuity to meet the challenge of feeding a burgeoning population. . . . Central to all the discussion is the assertion that Africa could produce far more food than it currently does. . . . On one side there is a powerful lobby which argues that biotechnology, massive investment in irrigation and mechanisation are the way forward, and on the other side are those who argue that these kinds of investments are usually tied up in big corporate deals in which local smallholder subsistence farmers lose out. . . . Juma and his prestigious panel of international experts have attempted to pick a politically feasible path between these two positions. . . . [W]hat will delight these very critics is Juma's championing of the smallholder farmer–not as an encumbrance to development but as central to its achievement. . . . China offers a fascinating model for Africa that is radically different from the western model of high-investment, export-orientated agriculture–the carnations from Kenya model. The key to China's success, argues Juma, is "a strong, competent, developmental state". . . .'

SciDev.Net reports today that experts in African food security gave Juma's report a cautious welcome.

'Bruce Campbell, head of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research's (CGIAR) programme on climate change, agriculture and food security, said: "While Juma's book is optimistic, one needs to recognise that there are tremendous challenges that are not very simple to solve". . . .

'And Philip Thornton, a senior scientist at International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, who led a recent study that concluded global warming could spell a catastrophe for Africa's agriculture, warned that "there are many [climate change] factors that are not under Africa's control".

'These will work in the opposite direction to improvements in yields and new crop varieties, he said. "I was a little surprised when reading the press release about the report as it doesn't make much mention of climate change."'

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, based in South Africa, and a member of ILRI's board of trustees, is a contributing author and member of the report's international advisory panel.

Read the whole articles at the Guardian's Poverty Matters Blog: How can Africa grow more food?, 3 December 2010 and at SciDev,Net: Africa could feed itself, says development expert, 2 December 2010.

ON RESILIENCE: Kenya’s rainfed food production vulnerable to more droughts and floods and shorter growing seasons

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Crop farmer in Western Kenya

Consolata James, a farmer in Western Kenya fighting striga, a ‘witches’ weed infesting her maize crop, will likely face shorter growing days and the arrival of new diseases with rising temperatures due to climate change (photo credit: CGIAR).

A research project on climate change adaptation strategies by smallholder farmers in Kenya, which kicked off in April 2009, has completed its first two reports. Below is a summary of a policy brief based on these reports developed by Mario Herrero, of the the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and other scientists at ILRI and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Main findings
Like many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya is highly vulnerable to climate change. The country and greater region already experience high temperatures and low but variable rainfall. Adoption of modern technology is low; poverty remains widespread; and infrastructure is under-developed.

Kenya’s highly variable rainfall is unreliable for rainfed agriculture and livestock production. The rainy seasons can be extremely wet, bringing floods and inundation. Even arid lands that comprise 80 per cent of the country are prone to floods. Therefore, they are prone to flood damages and turn to insurance claims. Visit the site to know more about LMR Public Adjusters and how they can help.

Kenya also experiences major droughts every decade and minor ones every three to four years. The damage caused by these droughts is spreading among the increasingly dense populations in these fragile arid and semi-arid lands, where pastoral communities are increasingly being marginalized.

With agriculture accounting for about 26 per cent of Kenya’s gross domestic product and 75 per cent of its jobs, the Kenyan economy is highly sensitive to variations in rainfall. At the same time, rainfed agriculture is, and will remain, the dominant source of staple food production and the foundation of livelihoods of most of Kenya’s rural poor.

Many parts of Kenya are likely to experience shorter growing periods in future; in some areas, the decreases may be severe. Some of the largest losses and gains are predicted for the country’s arid areas, which have too few growing days for crop production but remain important for pastoralists.

Most climate change scenarios show that four key staple crops in Kenya—maize, wheat, groundnuts, and irrigated rice—will experience country-wide losses due to increased evapotranspiration in large cropland areas while maize and bean production will increase modestly in the Kenyan highlands.

An increase in climate variability, leading to more than one drought every five years, could cause large and irreversible livestock losses in Kenya’s drylands.

Read the whole ILRI-IFPRI policy brief for a Kenyan Smallholder Climate Change Adaptation Project: Climate variability and climate change: Impacts on Kenyan agriculture, October 2010.

Prognosis for African food security in a 4ºC+ warmer world is bleak–Philip Thornton

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Philip Thornton, CCAFS/ILRI

Kenya Television Network interviews Philip Thornton on the impacts of climate change to the African continent (photo credit: ILRI).

Bottom line implication: A 4-degree warmer world calls for adaptive capacity in agriculture that is not just about increasing the resilience of current systems but about completely new ways of farming and consuming.

The Guardian this week quotes agricultural systems analyst Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), on the severe impacts that a 4ºC rise in temperature, now expected to occur within this century, will have on African livelihoods and food production.

'A hellish vision of a world warmed by 4ºC within a lifetime has been set out by an international team of scientists, who say the agonisingly slow progress of the global climate change talks that restart in Mexico today makes the so-called safe limit of 2ºC impossible to keep. A 4ºC rise in the planet's temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.

'"There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global surface temperature at below 2ºC, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary," said Kevin Anderson, from the University of Manchester, who with colleague Alice Bows contributed research to a special collection of Royal Society journal papers published tomorrow. "Moreover, the impacts associated with 2ºC have been revised upwards so that 2ºC now represents the threshold [of] extremely dangerous climate change.". . .

'Rachel Warren, at the University of East Anglia, described a 4ºC world in her research paper: "Drought and desertification would be widespread. . . . There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on [wild] ecosystems. Large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events."

'Warren added: "This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes [and] an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. In such a 4ºC world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world.". . .

'In sub-Saharan Africa, "the prognosis for agriculture and food security in a 4ºC world is bleak", according Philip Thornton, of Kenya's International Livestock Research Institute, who led another research team. He notes there will be an extra billion people populating the continent by 2050.

'"Croppers and livestock keepers in sub-Saharan Africa have in the past shown themselves to be highly adaptable to short- and long-term variations in climate. But the kind of changes that would occur in a 4ºC+ world would be way beyond anything experienced in recent times. It is not difficult to envisage a situation where the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people could simply be overwhelmed by events," Thornton's team concludes. . . .'

Read the whole article at the Guardian: Climate change scientists warn of 4C global temperature rise, 29 November 2010.

‘The limits of human–and natural systems–adaptations are likely to be exceeded’–Climate change researcher Rachel Warren

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A 4-degree C warmer world

Projections of global warming relative to pre-industrial for the A1FI emissions scenario—the one we’re currently on. Dark shading shows the mean ±1 standard deviation for the tunings to 19 AR4 GCMs [IPCC Fourth Assessment General Circulation Models]  and the light shading shows the change in the uncertainty range when . . . climate-carbon-cycle feedbacks . . . are included. Published in a Royal Society special issue on climate change, 29 November 2010 (graphic credit: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A, Special Issue, 29 November 2010).

An article in the highly regarded Climate Progress website names a paper by agricultural systems analyst Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), titled ‘Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa [SSA] in a 4°C+ world’, as one of the more important articles appearing in a current special issue on climate change of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A.

‘”In . . .  a 4°C [warmer] world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.”

‘One of the greatest failings of the climate science community (and the media) is not spelling out as clearly as possible the risks we face on our current emissions path, as well as the plausible worst-case scenario, which includes massive ecosystem collapse. So much of what the public and policymakers think is coming is a combination of:

  • The low end of the expected range of warming and impacts based on aggressive policies to reduce emissions (and no serious carbon-cycle feedbacks)
  • Analyses of a few selected impacts, but not an integrated examination of multiple impacts
  • Disinformation pushed by the anti-science, pro-pollution crowd

‘In fairness, a key reason the scientific community hasn’t studied the high emissions scenarios much until recently because they never thought humanity would be so self-destructive as to ignore their warnings for so long, which has put us on the highest emissions path (see U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised”—1000 ppm [A1FI]).

‘A special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, “Four degrees and beyond: the potential for a global temperature increase of four degrees and its implications,” lays out this 4°C (7°F) world. Warming of 7ºF is certainly not the worst-case in the scientific literature (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F—with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F and “Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year — and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!”).

‘But for the first time, “A hellish vision of a world warmed by 4ºC within a lifetime has been set out by an international team of scientists,” as the UK’s Guardian describes it:

‘A 4ºC rise in the planet’s temperature would see severe droughts across the world and millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.

‘These papers began as conference presentations . . . . In a must-read paper that is the source of the top figure, “When could global warming reach 4°C?” Betts et al. drop this bombshell:

‘”Using these GCM projections along with simple climate-model projections, including uncertainties in carbon-cycle feedbacks, and also comparing against other model projections from the IPCC, our best estimate is that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4°C relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4°C warming could be reached by the early 2060s in projections that are consistent with the IPCC’s ‘likely range’.”. . .

‘Another important Royal Society article is the concluding piece, “The role of interactions in a world implementing adaptation and mitigation solutions to climate change,” by Rachel Warren.  She makes a crucial point that is all too neglected in most discussions of adaptation — it is the interaction of impacts that is likely to overwhelm, particularly when you consider the very real risk of eco-system collapse over large parts of the Earth:

‘”… a 4°C world would be facing enormous adaptation challenges in the agricultural sector, with large areas of cropland becoming unsuitable for cultivation, and declining agricultural yields. This world would also rapidly be losing its ecosystem services, owing to large losses in biodiversity, forests, coastal wetlands, mangroves and saltmarshes, and terrestrial carbon stores, supported by an acidified and potentially dysfunctional marine ecosystem. Drought and desertification would be widespread, with large numbers of people experiencing increased water stress, and others experiencing changes in seasonality of water supply. There would be a need to shift agricultural cropping to new areas, impinging on unmanaged ecosystems and decreasing their resilience; and large-scale adaptation to sea-level rise would be necessary. Human and natural systems would be subject to increasing levels of agricultural pests and diseases, and increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.

‘”In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world. Hence, the ecosystem services upon which human livelihoods depend would not be preserved. Even though some studies have suggested that adaptation in some areas might still be feasible for human systems, such assessments have generally not taken into account lost ecosystem services. . . .

‘. . . [T]here are several important articles, like “Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa [SSA] in a 4°C+ world,” which concludes:

‘The prognosis for agriculture and food security in SSA in a 4°C+ world is bleak. Already today, the number of people at risk from hunger has never been higher: it increased from 300 million in 1990 to 700 million in 2007, and it is estimated that it may exceed 1 billion in 2010. The cost of achieving the food security Millennium Development Goal in a +2°C world is around $40–60 billion per year, and without this investment, serious damage from climate change will not be avoided. Currently, the prospects for such levels of sustained investment are not that bright. Croppers and livestock keepers in SSA have in the past shown themselves to be highly adaptable to short- and long-term variations in climate, but the kind of changes that would occur in a 4°C+ world would be way beyond anything experienced in recent times. There are many options that could be effective in helping farmers adapt even to medium levels of warming, given substantial investments in technologies, institution building and infrastructural development, for example, but it is not difficult to envisage a situation where the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people in SSA could simply be overwhelmed by events. . . .

Read the whole article at Climate Progress: Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world—which we may face in the 2060s!, 20 November 2010.

Scientists warn of farm failures and climate migrants in Africa in a 4-plus degree world

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Maize farming in Mozambique

Smallholder maize and livestock farm in Pacassa Village, in Tete Province, Mozambique (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

As climate change negotiations begin this week in Mexico, a new study published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series A, examining the potential impact of a four-degree temperature increase on food production in sub-Saharan Africa, reports that growing seasons of much of the region’s cropped areas and rangelands will be reduced in length by the 2090s, seriously damaging the ability of these lands to grow food.

Painting a bleak picture of Africa’s food production in a 'four-plus degree world,' the study sends a strong message to climate negotiators at a time when they are trying to reach international consensus on measures needed to keep average global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Centigrade in this century. The study calls for concerted efforts to help farmers cope with potentially unmanageable impacts of climate change.

In most of southern Africa, growing seasons could be shortened by about 20 per cent, according to the results of simulations carried out using various climate models. Growing seasons may actually expand modestly in eastern Africa. But despite this, for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, a temperature increase of five degrees by the 2090s is expected to depress maize production by 24 per cent and bean production by over 70 per cent.

'Africa’s rural people have shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to climate variability over the centuries,' said lead author Philip Thornton, with the Kenya-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which forms part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). 'But temperature increases of four degrees or more could create unprecedented conditions in dozens of African countries, pushing farmers beyond the limits of their knowledge and experience.' 

It seems unlikely that international climate policies will succeed in confining global warming to a two-degree increase, and even this will require unprecedented political will and collective action, according to the study.

Many options are already available that could help farmers adapt even to medium levels of warming, assuming substantial investment in new technology, institution building, and infrastructure development, for example. But it is quite possible that the adaptive capacity and resilience of hundreds of millions of people in Africa could simply be overwhelmed by events, say the authors.

The rate of cropping season failure will increase in all parts of the region except Central Africa, according to study results. Over a substantial part of eastern Africa, crops already fail in one out of every four years. By the 2090s, higher temperatures will greatly expand the area where crops fail with this frequency. And much of southern Africa’s rainfed agriculture could fail every other season.

'More frequent crop failures could unleash waves of climate migrants in a massive redistribution of hungry people,' said Thornton. 'Without radical shifts in crop and livestock management and agricultural policies, farming in Africa could exceed key physical and socio-economic thresholds where the measures available cease to be adequate for achieving food security or can’t be implemented because of policy failures.'

'This is a grim prospect for a region where agriculture is still a mainstay of the economy, occupying 60 per cent of the work force,' said Carlos Seré, Director General of ILRI. 'Achieving food security and reducing poverty in Africa will require unprecedented efforts, building on 40 years of modest but important successes in improving crop and livestock production.'

To help guide such efforts, the new study takes a hard look at the potential of Africa’s agriculture for adapting successfully to high temperatures in the coming decades; the study also looks at the constraints to doing so.

Buffering the impacts of high temperatures on livestock production will require stronger support for traditional strategies, such as changing species or breeds of animals kept, as well as for novel approaches such as insurance schemes whose payouts are triggered by events like erratic rainfall or high animal death rates, according to the study.

However, Thornton says that uncertainty about the specific impacts of climate change at the local level, and Africa’s weak, poorly resourced rural institutions, hurt African farmers' ability to adopt such practices fast enough to lessen production losses. Moreover, governments may not respond to the policy challenges appropriately, as demonstrated by the 2008 food crisis, when many countries adopted measures like export bans and import tariffs, which actually worsened the plight of poor consumers.

The study recommends four actions to take now to reduce the ways climate change could harm African food security.

1.     In areas where adverse climate change impacts are inevitable, identify appropriate adaptation measures and pro-actively help communities to implement them.

2.     Go 'back to basics' in collecting data and information. Land-based observation and data-collection systems in Africa have been in decline for decades. Yet information on weather, land use, markets, and crop and livestock distributions is critical for responding effectively to climate change. Africa’s data-collection systems could be improved with relatively modest additional effort.

3.     Ramp up efforts to maintain and use global stocks of crop and livestock genetic resources to help Africa’s crop and livestock producers adapt to climate change as well as to the shifts in disease prevalence and severity that such change may bring.

4.     Build on lessons learned in the global food price crisis of 2007–2008 to help address the social, economic and political factors behind food insecurity.

The CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership recently embarked on the most comprehensive program developed so far to address both the new threats and new opportunities that global warming is likely to cause agriculture in the world’s developing countries. The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security program assembles relevant experts to work with decision makers at all levels—from government ministries to farmers’ fields—to translate knowledge into effective action.

The ILRI study underlines the urgency and importance of that research. It will inform the discussions of some 500 policy makers, farmers, scientists and development experts expected to attend an ‘Agriculture and Rural Development Day’, on 4 December, which will be held alongside a two-week United Nations Conference on Climate Change taking place in Cancún, Mexico. Participants at the one-day event will identify agricultural development options for coping with climate change and work to move this key sector to the forefront of the international climate debate.

'A four-plus degree world will be one of rapidly diminishing options for farmers and other rural people,' said Seré. 'We need to know where the points of no return lie and what measures will be needed to create new options for farmers, who otherwise may be driven beyond their capacity to cope.'

For more information on the program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, visit www.ccafs.cgiar.org

With no ‘Marshall Plan’ for transiting to a non-carbon economy, we need research to develop ways to adapt to a warmer world

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Setting out to weed a sorghum crop in Niger

A youth sets out with his weeding tool to tend to his family's crop of sorghum in Katanga Village, near Fakara, in Niger (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

Along with many other major media, Discovery News reported yesterday on a collection of research papers just published that agree that our world is likely to warm by four degrees Centigrade by the end of this century. Among the scientists quoted in these media reports is agricultural systems analyst Philip Thornton, of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), on what the likely impacts will be on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers concur that research to develop new means to adapt to a warmer world are critically needed. Publication of these science papers comes at the start of the United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Cancún, Mexico.

'Since the late 1990s, many researchers and policy makers have held a two-degree Celsius (3.6-degree Fahrenheit) global temperature increase relative to pre-industrial times as a benchmark limit for global warming, saying that keeping warming below this threshold increases the likelihood that catastrophic changes can be avoided.

'But we are hardly on track to meet that target, researchers say, and an average global warming of four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of this century is more likely than two.

'In a collection of papers published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, researchers paint a picture of what a four-degree warmer world might look like, including changes in agriculture and water supply, ecosystems, sea level rise and the displacement of populations.

'"People are talking about two degrees but the chances of actually delivering on that are pretty slim," said Mark New of Oxford University, United Kingdom, one of the researchers who compiled the collection.

'"If we had a kind of a Marshall Plan to transform every major economy to a non-carbon based economy over the next 15 years, it's doable. But that's not going to happen. A lot of work suggests that the most likely outcome is between three and four (degrees increase) with it very likely to be more than four."

'Four degrees would only be a global average. Air over land will warm more than over the oceans, and some places will warm more than others.

'Dry areas are likely to get drier, according to a study of water supply done by New and others, which could have severe implications for agriculture.

'A team led by [Philip] Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute used models to project the effect of a four-degree temperature increase on crop production in sub-Saharan Africa.

'"The rate of crop failure in southern Africa increases to nearly one in every two years," New said of the study. "You can't continue to rely on your existing crops or practices. There's going to have to be some kind of a transformation."

'"Most of these countries have low capacity to adapt," he added. . . .

'"Some of the impacts could be overcome if society takes adaptive action, but the difference between adapting at two degrees and at four degrees is very different," New said. "There needs to be research into technologies to assist adaptation just as much as we need research into technology for moving out of a carbon based transportation system." . . .'

Read the whole article at Discovery News: The world: Four degrees warmer, 29 November 2010.

Read Philip Thornton’s science paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Agriculture and food systems in sub-Saharan Africa in a 4 ° C + world, 29 November 2010.

Helping African herders cope with climate change

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The worm-resistant red Maasai sheep of East Africa

Research groups at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) are helping Maasai livestock herders in East African to retain their native 'hairless' (non-wool producing) red Maasai sheep, which are genetically resistant to infections with gastro-intestinal worms (photo credit: ILRI). 

Half of the world's livestock herders live with their animals on the vast rangelands of Africa, which comprise half of Africa's surface. Herders have always adapted to variable weather, but over the next 50 years, pastoralist areas will face more and more changes.

What’s the future for Africa’s 50 million livestock herders who live on lands too marginal for cropping as our climate changes, becomes less predictable, heats up? How can scientific research help remote pastoral communities? 

Among the poorest of the world’s poor, herders supply milk and meat not only for themselves but for large numbers of other poor people. Although their animals produce few of the greenhouse gasses harming the earth, these people will be among those most hurt by the climate changes we expect. 

Population growth and land degradation are already causing problems over much of the continent’s traditional rangelands. Many herders, having lost all their animals to droughts, are facing the end of their way of life. 

Research-based approaches for adapting to climate change, however, offer options that can help herding communities sustain at least some aspects of their pastoral livelihoods.

These options include:

  • using satellite imagery to provide the first-ever drought insurance for pastoral herders in Africa's remote regions
  • cross-breeding an indigenous disease-resistant sheep breed kept by Maasai communities with higher-producing exotic sheep to get the benefits of both
  • helping communities shift from keeping grazers, such as cattle and sheep, to browsers, such as camels and goats
  • supporting pastoralists to take advantage of local opportunities, such as shifting from herding ruminant animals to raising fish in ponds.  

The experiences in this film, alongside other initiatives will be presented by Mario Herrero, a scientist with ILRI, at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico from 29 November to 10 December 2010, to show how ILRI is applying research to help livestock-based communities cope with the effects of climate change.

Watch this new 10-minute ILRI film, Heat, Rain and Livestock: Impacts of Climate Change on Africa's Livestock Herders, to find out more.

See more of ILRI's films.

Find out more about the 2010 United Nations Climate Change conference.

See related article: New partnership launched to keep climate change from crippling food production in Africa and Asia, 19 November 2010.

New partnership launched to keep climate change from crippling food production in Africa and Asia

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Fishermen and goats at the Niger River

In much of sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, people rely on both crops and animals for their livelihoods; to cope with a warmer and more variable climate, these farmers will need crop varieties and livestock breeds that can withstand droughts and floods and new diseases; where cropping becomes risky, people will rely more on their livestock than on their crops to feed themselves and make a living; on drying rangelands, many people will switch from cattle- and sheep-keeping to goats and camels, which can remain productive where there is scarce feed and water (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

A new research program on 'Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security' (CCAFS) was launched this week.

It will link much of the best climate-related agricultural research for development work going on at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and 14 other centres in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) with the best global environmental change research being undertaken within the global Earth System Science Partnership.

ILRI is a key partner in this initiative, hosting the new program’s facilitator for the East Africa region, James Kinyangi. ILRI is also home to two CCAFS scientists-–Philip Thornton, who leads the ‘Integrating Knowledge for Decision Making’ theme at CCAFS, and Wiebke Foerch, an agricultural and social scientist working on food security, vulnerability and resilience of smallholders to global change. In addition, Mario Herrero, who leads ILRI’s Sustainable Livestock Futures research area, has been instrumental in supporting CCAFS as it makes the challenging transition from a CGIAR Challenge Program as originally envisioned, to this innovative and large new research program of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres.

This new program is the most comprehensive to date seeking to ensure that food security is not crippled by climate change. The leaders of the new program say that urgent action is needed to help poor people adapt to climate shifts that have ominous implications for Africa and Asia.

Amidst growing alarm that climate change could deal a catastrophic blow to food security in poor countries, a partnership of the world’s premiere experts on agriculture, climate, and the environment today announced an intensive global response to confront the impacts of shifting weather patterns on crop and livestock production and their dire consequences for food security.

By 2020, the effort aims to reduce poverty by 10 per cent in the targeted regions; reduce the number of rural poor who are malnourished by 25 per cent; and help farmers in developing countries contribute to climate change mitigation by either enhancing storage or reducing greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to 1,000 million tons over a decade, compared with a 'business-as-usual' scenario.

The CCAFS program will be formally launched on 4 December at Agriculture and Rural Development Day at a United Nations climate change meeting. It is the most comprehensive effort undertaken thus far to address the interactions between climate change and food security, livelihoods and environmental management. Emerging from new collaboration between the CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), the program brings together strategic research carried out by the CGIAR, ESSP and their respective partners in a collective effort to be coordinated by the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

The launch of CCAFS marks the beginning of a long-term endeavor with an initial 3-year budget totaling US$206 million. By building on current research for development and funding and by attracting new scientific collaboration and financial support, the program will go far toward its goal of achieving sustainable food security in the face of climate change.

Research finds that stressed agriculture systems in Africa are highly vulnerable, with studies predicting climate shifts could dramatically reduce crop yields and incomes with smallholder farmers in struggling developing countries bearing the brunt of the impact. In Asia, there are studies warning of changes in monsoon, glacier and snowmelt in areas already facing stiff competition for water resources. In Asia’s populated and intensely-farmed coastal zones, rising sea levels threaten the viability of fertile croplands.

CCAFS partners will identify and test climate change adaptation and mitigation practices, technologies, and policies that are suitable for poor, smallholder farmers and other stakeholders affected by climate change.

They will also identify 'hot spots' where intervention is urgent and conduct vulnerability assessments. In addition, they will refine models that predict the impacts of a changing climate on agriculture and livelihoods, and identify ways to select crop varieties and livestock breeds with essential traits and novel farming and food systems suitable for future climate conditions.

Partners will further help farmers deal with changes in plant, pest and disease pressures, which are particularly likely in areas where temperatures are rising, and—in collaboration with other critical actors in the food system—they will conduct research on adaptation and mitigation policies that can enhance food security.

Much of the work on the ground will begin in 2011 with an initial focus on East and West Africa and the agricultural regions of south Asia known as the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

Early 'wins' include securing a major role for agriculture in the post-2012 international climate change regime and establishing a global network of data collection sites that can help identify options for adapting to climate change.

To be held alongside the United Nations Conference on Climate Change taking place in Cancún, Mexico, Agriculture and Rural Development Day will convene some 500 policymakers, farmers, scientists and development experts who will seek to identify climate change solutions in agriculture and move this key sector to the forefront of international climate debate.

QUOTES
LE PAGE: 'Farmers have shown a remarkable ability over the centuries to adapt to climate uncertainty, but rapidly rising temperatures and associated unpredictable weather could push more vulnerable small farmers beyond their current ability to cope with the coming changes in crop cycles and in disease, insect and weed pressures,' said Lloyd Le Page, chief executive officer of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres. 'That’s why we’re bringing together the world’s best scientists, and finding new ways for them to work together with farmers and decision-makers to deliver innovation and knowledge that will help solve these challenges.'

ANDERSEN: 'This new collaborative program represents a bold and innovative response to the challenge of adapting agriculture to climate change and variability while realizing the opportunities open to farmers for mitigating global warming,” said Inger Andersen, CGIAR Fund Chair and Vice President for Sustainable Development at the World Bank. 'It goes far beyond current activities, marking a new phase in our efforts to cope with climate change in agriculture through cutting- edge collaborative science.'

CAMPBELL: 'The CGIAR centers have always worked to help farmers in poor countries cope with challenging conditions by providing drought-tolerant crops or better soil and water management strategies,' said Bruce Campbell, CCAFS Director. 'But climate change threatens to alter growing conditions so rapidly and dramatically as to require an intensive effort that draws on the combined talents of all of our centers and partners. We want to bring a sense of urgency to finding and implementing solutions and attracting more support for this effort.'

LEEMANS: 'The collaboration between the CGIAR scientists and the ESSP scholars is unique in bringing together two different and separate but highly skilled research communities that cover basic and applied research on development, sustainability and environmental change,' said Rik Leemans, chair of the scientific steering committee of the ESSP. 'Sharing and joining our resources will unquestionably result in innovative ways to mitigate and adapt to climate change and simultaneously provide successful incentives to advance development.'

Listen to a news conference with the leaders of the CCAFS program.

Visit the CCAFS website and blog.

ABOUT CCAFS
The program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is a strategic partnership of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). CCAFS brings together the world’s best researchers in agricultural science, development research, climate science, and Earth System science, to identify and address the most important interactions, synergies and tradeoffs between climate change, agriculture and food security. For more information, visit www.ccafs.cgiar.org.

ABOUT CGIAR
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for sustainable development with the funders of this work. The funders include developing and industrialized country governments, foundations, and international and regional organizations. The work they support is carried out by 15 members of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, in close collaboration with hundreds of partner organizations, including national and regional research institutes, civil society organizations, academia, and the private sector. www.cgiar.org – http://cgiarconsortium.cgxchange.org.

ABOUT ESSP
The Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) was established in 2001 to promote cooperation for the integrated study of the Earth system, the changes that are occurring to the system and the implications of these changes for global sustainability. Brings together global environmental change researchers worldwide, the ESSP comprises four international global environmental change research programmes: DIVERSITAS, specialising in biodiversity and agro- biodiversity; the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), specialising in institutional, socioeconomic and human security issues related to global environmental change and the policies to address it; the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP), specializing in the physical, chemical and biological processes that define Earth system dynamics; and the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), specializing in climate science.

If pigs could fly: Reducing the ‘gender asset gap’ in agricultural development–the beginnings of a ‘transformative gender’ paradigm shift?

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RED CARPET WELCOME: His Excellency Mwai Kibaki, President of the Republic of Kenya, generously allowed his presidential red carpet to be briefly used for a photograph of a group of pro-women agricultural scientists this month at the International Livestock Research Institute (photo credit: ILRI/MacMillan).

Unusually, and, if truth be said, thrillingly, the Nairobi headquarters of the International Livestock Research Institute and BecA—a Biosciences eastern and central Africa Hub that ILRI hosts and manages—have, within the space of 12 months, been visited by two very seriously important persons: Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in early December 2009; and Mwai Kibaki, president of the Republic of Kenya, early this month (November 2010).

Biotech men
Both VIPs expressed excitement in, and support for, BecA’s recently launched state-of-the-art biosciences facilities, which they happily toured, donning crisp white lab coats to inspect BecA’s ultra-modern, super-molecular laboratories, including a half-million-dollar ‘454’ DNA sequencer, a space-agey-looking biosafety containment facility and a shiny brand-new greenhouse.
 

Bill Gates visits the BecA Hub at ILRI in December 2009

BILL GATES, Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and former CEO of Microsoft, toured the ultra-modern laboratories of BecA at ILRI last December (2009) (photo credit: ILRI/Ouma).
 

BecA official opening, 5 November 2010

HIS EXCELLENCY Kenya President Mwai Kibaki on a tour of the same labs this November (2010), led by BecA Hub Director Segenet Kelemu (third from left) (photo credit: ILRI/Masi).
 
The feminization of biotech
While the entourages of both Gates (who was on a private visit) and Kibaki (on a State visit) were mostly male, BecA’s director, Ethiopian Segenet Kelemu; as well as a key initiator and supporter of BecA, Australian Gabrielle Persley; and some half the students and African scientists the VIPs met and interviewed while they toured the labs, were female. On both visits, our male VIPs appeared impressed by the high 'girl power' in these high-tech labs. And so they should have been, both VIPs coming of age (Gates is 55 this year, Kibaki, 79) when such visible expression of the closing of the gender gap was rare.

BecA official opening, 5 November 2010

POLITICIANS AND SCIENTISTS: Segenet Kelemu, director of the BecA Hub at ILRI, explains to President Kibaki the significance of a metal and glass sculpture of a DNA helix unveiled by the president at the official opening of the Hub earlier this month (5 November 2010) (photo credit: ILRI/Njuguna).
 
Closing the gender gap
Fortuitously and aptly, then, on the morning of President Kibaki’s visit to ILRI on 5 November 2010 to officially open the BecA Hub, another meeting, arranged by research groups much earlier than the State visit was arranged, was starting in another venue on the same ILRI campus, far from the imposing presidential dais, marching band, schoolgirl choir and guest and refreshment tents erected and assembled down the hill, in front of ILRI’s Mara House office building.
 
Back up the hill, then, in a meeting room adjacent to a quiet quad and out of the fray, a group of (mostly) women experts on gender and agriculture in developing countries opened an ‘inception’ workshop for a new scientific project aiming to reduce inequalities between men and women (and boys and girls) in agricultural development.
 
We know that Bill Gates supports this work, because his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is funding the project. And we suspect that President Kibaki would also be supportive. (Upon learning that a schoolgirl choir, standing near the presidential dais, had awaited his arrival from the labs for several hours to sing for him, Kibaki admonished his staff that the girls ought to be in school, this being a Friday, and instructed them to have all the schoolgirls immediately seated under the tents.)
 

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GIRL POWER: A schoolgirl choir walks past one of several red carpets laid out in honour of a visit to BecA and ILRI by President Mwai Kibaki (photo credit: ILRI/MacMillan).
 
Historic beginnings for closing the gender gap in agricultural projects
The gender research project being quietly kicked off in ILRI’s N’Dama Lounge was, in its way, as much an historic beginning as the advanced labs being opened further down the hill. Scientists at ILRI and elsewhere have known for years that more—much, much, much more—should be done to address women’s issues in agricultural development. And they have struggled for years to incorporate women’s issues into their research programs. With little success.
 
Women continue to have fewer assets than men
If small-scale agriculture remains the backbone of most developing-country economies, women remain the stuff that makes up that backbone. Across nationalities, cultures and religions, women more than men tend to invest their time and energy and income in the stuff that matters most to most of us, with the greatest benefits provided to the greatest numbers of poor. Yet women have fewer assets than men—whether we look at land, natural resources and other tangible assets or less tangible ones like human capital. This gap between men’s and women’s assets not only reduces agricultural productivity, but also restricts women’s decison-making power, which affects such vital matters as sustainable food production, children’s nutrition and education, and economic development. 
 
That’s what we know. Not what we do. And the disconnect between what we know to do in ‘gender’ issues in agricultural development and what we do do has been getting bigger and more glaring every year.
 
When pigs fly, we used to say, not so long ago, we will all be working to help women help the rest of us in development—just because that’s what women tend to do, regardless of their material circumstances. The disjunct between what women do for agriculture and what we in agricultural research and development do for them, we said, was a disgrace. And then we would sigh and crawl back into a ‘what to do?’ cynicism. What our staff lacked, we said, was the training and technical assistance needed first to identify and then to address disparities in agricultural development and in assets. That’s now changing. At ILRI the change is due to the institute’s recent hiring of people who know what to do—and are ready to do it.
 
These new staff and positions include some of the best scientists in the world who are champions of gender research in agricultural development. These relatively new ILRI staff include Jemimah Njuki, a Kenyan leading sociologist in gender and agriculture studies; Nancy Johnson, an American agricultural economist and poverty analyst; and Canadian Patti Kristjanson, a long-term ILRI economist who just two years ago launched a 'Women and Livestock Challenge Dialogue'. (In January of this year, Kristjanson moved to the World Agroforestry Centre, across town from ILRI, to lead a research team that is part of a new global climate change initiative involving all 15 centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, to which ILRI belongs.) These three women formed a Gender, Poverty and Impacts research team which, despite starting only one-and-a-half years ago, has already created the momentum across ILRI for re-focusing on gender and agriculture.
 

10GenderWorkshop_AtPresidentialRedCarpet_JohnMcDermottAndJemimahNjuki

ILRI PUTS WOMEN'S ISSUES FRONT AND CENTRE: Jemimah Njuki, a Kenyan expert in gender and agriculture and impact analysis working for ILRI, waits with ILRI's deputy director general-research John McDermott, a Canadian veterinary researcher, beside the red carpet laid down at ILRI's entrance for the presidential visit happening at the same time, in front of an office building down below (photo credit: ILRI/MacMillan).
 
Can a few women make a difference?
Can a few committed women and some supportive men make a big difference in gender research for development? With institutional support, we're betting on it. ILRI’s seriousness about, and new serious expertise in, empowering women farmers and marketers got the attention of other groups working toward the same goal. The ILRI group has joined forces with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) team of Ruth Meinzen-Dick and Agnes Quisumbing, long-time researchers on gender and agriculture.
 
This inception workshop for the ‘Gender, Agriculture and Assets Project,’ held from 5–7 November 2010, is a 3-year initiative of IFPRI and ILRI funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The overall aim of the initiative is to improve rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia by helping agricultural development programs significantly reduce inequalities, including disparities in assets, between men and women.
 
The workshop brought together research and development partners from different organizations. In addition to IFPRI and ILRI, these included BRAC, CARE Bangladesh, East Africa Dairy Development project, Fintrac Inc, Grameen Foundation, Helen Keller International, International Rice Research Institute, Kickstart International, Land O’Lakes, Rural Development Institute, Tropical Soil Biology and Fertility initiative at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and the World Vegetable Centre (AVDRC), as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the United States Agency for International Development.
 
As part of the initiative, the team will evaluate some 10 agricultural research and development projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and others to identify the impacts of these projects on women’s assets and to clarify which strategies have been successful in reducing gaps between men and women in access to, and control of, assets.
 

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THINKING BIG: IFPRI's Ruth Meinzen-Dick gives an overview of the ambitious aims of the Gender Assets Gaps project (photo credit: ILRI/MacMillan).
 
The project is based on several premises: (1) that control over, and ownership of, assets is a critical component of well-being, (2) that increasing control or ownership of assets does more to help create pathways out of poverty than increasing incomes or consumption alone and (3) that the different kinds of assets addressed by a project—whether tangible or intangible, for example, or whether defined as natural, physical, financial, human, social or political ‘capital’—matter. Project staff are investigating the control of assets because who controls assets in households matters a lot. Household members typically do not pool all resources or agree on what their scarce resources should be used for. The benefits of policy changes in any given household or community are determined largely by who in the household or community is the main beneficiary of the new resources. And we now have evidence from many countries that increasing the resources under the control of women not only improves the nutrition and health of children, but also increases agricultural productivity and household incomes.
 
Astonishingly, although women make a significant contribution to agriculture in developing countries and are much more likely than men to use their (scarce) resources to improve the nutrition, welfare and well-being of their families, they are still neglected in most agricultural research and development programs. At a Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development, held in Montpellier, France, last March (2010), IFPRI’s Ruth Meinzen-Dick argued that accounting for gender in our research and development work is not an option but a necessity if we are going to reduce world poverty and feed the world’s growing populations (which are expected to peak at mid-century, falling after that): ‘Changing agricultural research and development from male-dominated to gender-equitable is not merely an issue of political correctness or ideology; it is a matter of development effectiveness that can benefit everyone.’
 
Although getting reliable, accurate and timely statistics disaggregated by gender remains a formidable challenge for most countries (in 2010, the United Nations found that no census had been carried out in the last three decades in 41 per cent of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa), what we know is probably enough to be getting on with. The following should give a flavour of the depth and scope of the issues.
 
More women than men:
  • own no land
  • are poor and hungry
  • are illiterate
  • are refugees
  • are living with HIV (in Africa)
  • are caring for those living with HIV/AIDS.
Most women:
  • work longer hours than men
  • work in jobs with lower pay, status, power and authority than men
  • get paid less than men for doing the same work
  • provide most of the family labour and are unpaid for that labour
  • bear double responsibility for household and farm work
  • receive a fraction of the agricultural extension and support services provided to men
  • have half the education levels of men
  • have less access to health care services than men
  • have fewer legal rights than men.
Flying pigs?
Fortunately, as detailed and dissected in this inception workshop, projects from South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Nepal) and sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, DR Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Zimbabwe) have potential to address such asset disparities.
 
These projects are working across the spectrum of women’s rural livelihoods and concerns in these regions, from animal husbandry to vegetable genetics, from nutrition and sociology to agricultural economics and development management. An enumeration of some of the more obvious specific topics tackled in the projects presented at this workshop gives some idea of the broad disciplinary expertise demanded by those working to help women use agriculture to better their lives. These include dairy development, land transfer to girls, vegetable production, development and dissemination of nutrient-rich foods such as orange-fleshed sweet potatoes, value addition and processing, market information systems, high-value horticulture, crop management and irrigation.
 
Some of the opportunities described in overviews of these projects include the following.
  • Fully 94 per cent of the vendors in vegetable markets in sub-Saharan Africa are women.
  • Twice as many women as men in Uganda cultivate sweet potatoes, most sweet potato traders in towns as well as villages are women, and women tend to be less risk-averse in crop choice than men.
  • Contrary to previous reports, information tips delivered by mobile phone delivery of market and other agricultural information in Uganda show female farmers are very interested in receiving, and acting on, timely market information.
  • Legumes, once considered a 'woman's crop in much of Africa, can directly benefit the nutrition of poor households.
  • With increasing migration of men from rural to urban areas in South Asia, the roles of women are shifting from unpaid farm labourers to de facto farm managers.
  • Seedling nurseries are an opportunity for women because they require relatively little labour and can be established close to homesteads.
  • East African women dairy producers have most control of the milk they sell informally in the evening.
According to this group of scientists, the gender research areas in greatest need of addressing are:
  • Training in methods to integrate gender and asset-based approaches in agriculture development programs.
  • Evaluating agriculture development programs to understand what works and what does not work in building women’s assets and scaling out those strategies that work.
  • Collecting gender-disaggregated data. 
  • Initiating, and training in, gender-sensitive monitoring and evaluation work. 
  • Expanding measurements of income and consumption to include evaluations of how projects build assets.
 

Village food seller in Nigeria

THE TARGET, THE BENEFICIARY, THE HOPE: A young girl sells food to villagers outside Kano, Nigeria (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).
 
The gender and agricultural assets initiative wants to learn from the most promising successes in these projects so as to help redress imbalances in power. The project leaders are dreaming and thinking big. They aim no less than pushing a ‘paradigm shift’ in agricultural development programming from ‘gender exploitive’ to ‘gender accommodating’ to ‘gender transformative’. This will of necessity mean taking on a lot, including ‘challenging the ideological, socio-cultural, economic, political and institutional frameworks and structures that create and recreate gender inequalities’. The project leaders are well aware of the danger that such targeting, if not done well, can lead to a backlash that further marginalizes rather than supports poor women. And they recognize the role of men in achieving gender equality.
 
This project will train teams of experts in how to use tools to assess the assets held by men, women and households as a whole and in how to integrate and measure the effectiveness of strategies for increasing the assets of women. To this end, IFPRI’s Ruth Meinzen-Dick proposed a conceptual framework for analyzing assets while ILRI’s Jemimah Njuki presented different strategies for addressing gender in agricultural programs, explaining why and how to complement quantitative tools in monitoring and evaluation with qualitative tools. IFPRI’s Dan Gilligan described methods for evaluating quantitative impacts and ILRI’s Nancy Johnson and IFPRI’s Agnes Quisumbing discussed different types of assets, data needs and data collection instruments. Project implementers and evaluators in this initiative are expected to work hand in hand over the life of the selected projects, using both qualitative and quantitative methods  to assess and document changes from baselines in levels of control and ownerships of assets.
 
And pigs, then, will perhaps have a chance to start to fly.
 
For more information, visit, the following:
The Gender Assets Gap project’s blog:
 
ILRI’s Gender & Agriculture blog:
http://agrigender.wordpress.com/
 
All slide presentations given at the workshop:
http://www.slideshare.net/genderassets/slideshows
 
Pictures of the workshop:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ilri/sets/72157625322903538/
 
News of a forthcoming ILRI-organized workshop on ‘Gender and Market-Oriented Agriculture’, 31 Jan to 2 Feb 2011 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia:
http://agrigender.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/workshop-on-gender-and-market-oriented-agriculture-revised-dates/
 
Announcement of a forthcoming TEDx event at IFPRI, on 14 Devember 2010, in Washington, DC, with talks by ILRI’s Jemimah Njuki and IFPRI’s Agnes Quisumbing and Ruth Meinzen-Dick on gender as the ‘missing ingredient’ in many development policies and programs:
http://genderassets.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/upcoming-tedx-event-on-gender/
 
A filmed presentation by ILRI’s Jemimah Njiki making the case that animal agriculture can be used to help redress skewed resources available to rural women worldwide (in societies where women are unable to own anything else, farm animals provide women with incomes; and when those women’s incomes rise, the health, nutrition and education of their whole families also rise, with everybody winning):
http://ilri.blip.tv/file/3418393/

Canadian vaccine research leader Lorne Babiuk joins the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute

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Vish Nene and new ILRI Board Member

ILRI biotechnology director Vish Nene (left) and new ILRI board member Lorne Babiuk (right) at the November 2010 meeting of the ILRI Board of Trustees (photo credit: ILRI/MacMillan).

Lorne Babiuk, a leader in Canadian vaccine research and vice-president for research at the University of Alberta, Canada, joined the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) this month (November 2010), when he attended his first board meeting, held at ILRI’s headquarters, in Nairobi, Kenya.

As vice-president of research, Babiuk facilitates the University of Alberta’s research, builds research consortia and strengthens the university’s international research links and collaborations. In 2010, the university opened the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, an institute created through a combined gift of $25-million from the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation and $52.5-million from the Government of Alberta. The donation—the largest cash gift in the university’s history—will provide a state-of-the-art home to some of the world’s very best researchers in virus-based diseases. The new institute is working to attract significant private-sector collaboration with multinational pharmaceutical and life sciences companies.

Since 2005, Babiuk has also served as principal investigator on a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates ‘Grand Challenge in Global Health’ program, in which he and his team are developing vaccines against whooping cough (pertussis) in infants and young children, to be delivered in a single dose, without use of a needle. Children now need five doses of the vaccine to be fully protected and few children in the developing world get all the boosters.

Babiuk also supports Albertan research initiatives such as the Pan Albertan Neuroscience Network. As vice-president, he established an annual event that celebrates the breadth and depth of the university’s research in all disciplines—from social sciences to the arts, humanities, medical, agricultural, natural sciences and engineering. He has consistently fostered research that crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries by, for example, supporting collaborations between social scientists and medical, agricultural and engineering researchers. And he helped develop the infrastructure needed by researchers in all fields to be more successful in individual and team grants.

Before moving to the University of Alberta, Babiuk built up a research institute—the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO), at the University of Saskatchewan—which became internationally recognized as a leader in new vaccine development. In 2005, he completed a US$19.4 million expansion of VIDO, and just before leaving VIDO, he assembled the funding needed to build a $140-million level-three bio-containment facility for work on infectious diseases.

Earlier in his career, Babiuk was part of a research consortium that developed and began testing a vaccine for SARS (sever acute respiratory syndrome) within 18 months of its outbreak in Canada. In addition to SARS and whooping cough, Babiuk has led research into the herpes virus and the respiratory syncitial virus and created a vaccine against rotavirus in calves, which allowed researchers later to develop a vaccine for rotavirus in children.

After completing a master’s degree in soil microbiology, Babiuk earned a PhD in virology from the University of British Columbia and a DSc from the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Veterinary Microbiology. He has mentored over 90 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and published over 500 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 100 book chapters or reviews. He holds 28 issued patents and has 18 patents pending.

New project to help Vietnamese and other farmers conserve their native livestock breeds

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Hmong girl hold native black chicken of Viet Nam A native black pig of Viet Nam

Left: A Hmong girl, 13-year-old Hi Hoa Sinh, holds a native black chicken in the village of Lung Pu, northern Viet Nam; Right: One of Viet Nam’s native black pigs on the farm of Ma Thi Puong, near the northern town of Meo Vac (photo credit: ILRI/Mann).

A project funded by the Global Environment Facility has selected Vietnam, a country with a wealth of livestock diversity, as one of four countries in which to implement a project to conserve livestock genotypes.

The diversity is deteriorating due to the popularization of new breeds together with the commercialization of livestock production. To preserve indigenous livestock breeds, the Global Environment Facility and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) have selected 4 countries—Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka—to implement the project ‘Developing and applying supporting tools on the conservation and sustainable utilization of the genetic diversity of livestock and their wild relatives.’

Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has made the National Institute of Animal Husbandry as the Vietnamese partner in the project.

The project aims to enhance livestock keepers’ awareness of the importance of the genetic conservation of indigenous livestock while helping them to raise their incomes through adoption of indigenous livestock breeds. The project is being implemented over 4 years (2010–2012) in Vietnam’s Son La and Bac Ninh provinces, with a focus on indigenous chicken and pig breeds. The project will train farmers on survey methods and data collection; on ways to maintain their use of indigenous animals; on livestock management; and on business skills in such areas as as tourism with traditional cuisine and cultural activities.

Basic information about valuable indigenous breeds and representative animals is needed, as is the capacity to prioritize, monitor and manage them at both scientific and farm operational levels. Stakeholder groups need to be empowered with knowledge and conducive operational environments in which they can make decisions that work best for them.

Agriculture in the partner countries in this project contributes 20 to 26% of gross domestic product, of which livestock contributes approximately 15 to 20% in terms of income, insurance, food (meat, milk, eggs), hides/skin, traction and manure. It is mostly smallholder farmers who are dependent on indigenous breeds. These animals have evolved in diverse tropical environments and possess valuable traits such as disease resistance, adaptation to harsh environments, including heat tolerance and ability to utilize poor quality feeds, attributes essential for achieving sustainable agriculture in low-input production systems. However, it is still largely unknown which breeds hold significant genetic diversity or specific genes that should be targeted for conservation and/or incorporation into breeding programs. In the meantime, crossbreeding with exotic breeds is increasing and indigenous breeds are being lost.

The development objectives of this project are to help conserve the indigenous livestock of the partner countries for future generations and to help increase the contribution these native breeds make to the livelihoods of poor people. The first goal of the project is to develop and to make available effective tools to support decision making for the conservation and sustainable use of indigenous farm animals and their wild relatives in developing countries.

For more information, see the project’s description on ILRI’s Biotechnology Theme webpage.