Climate change and agricultural experts gather in California this week to search for the holy grail of global food security

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

Silhouette of a woman, by Vincent van Gogh,

Silhouette of a peasant woman digging carrots, by Vincent van Gogh, 1885, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (via WikiPaintings).

Experts working at the interface of climate change and agriculture are gathering at two venues in California this week to do the impossible: find ways to do ‘climate-smart agriculture’, specifically—use science to feed more of the world’s growing population and reduce world poverty while mitigating agriculture’s environmental harms the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the Earth.

First up is a CGIAR group looking to work better, with faster impacts, through so-called ‘social learning’. On Mon and Tue, 18–19 Mar 2013, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) is holding its annual science meeting, in Bodega Bay. This group of 70 or so people is Rethinking Science, Learning and Partnerships to Meet Development Outcomes: Reducing Poverty and Improving Food Security in the Context of Climate Change.

This CCAFS meeting is looking for ways to achieve better, bigger and faster impacts through engagement with a wide variety of communities. The participants see untapped potential in CGIAR and beyond for actors of diverse kinds to join forces in improving global food security in the light of climate change. They’re looking at innovative ways to democratize and co-create science for practical use. They hope to build on a legacy of social learning approaches and participatory work within CGIAR and to find ways to adapt these to address the complex challenges faced by hundreds of millions of small-scale food producers and sellers in developing countries.

Updates from the event are being shared on the CCAFS website and on Twitter (follow #2013CCSL).
For more information, go to CCAFS 2013 Science Meeting programme.

Among the CCAFS participants coming from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), in Nairobi, Kenya, are Philip Thornton, James Kinyangi, Mariana Rufino, Polly Ericksen, Wiebke Foerch, Maren Radeny and Ewen Le Borgne.

Three peasants at a meal, by Pablo Picasso (via WikiPaintings)

Three peasants at a meal, pencil sketch and study by Vincent van Gogh, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (via WikiPaintings).

Following the Bodega Bay meeting, a larger group of climate change and agricultural experts will meet at the University of California at Davis from Wed through Fri, 20–22 Mar 2013, for a global science conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture (and here).

With climate change occurring more rapidly than anticipated, an increase in extreme weather events is threatening global agriculture and food supplies. Existing technologies and institutional structures will be insufficient to slow climate change while feeding the growing human population sustainably. Participants at this conference will work to identify useful actions that are science-based, to use knowledge systems in new ways and to help strengthen the resilience of agricultural communities facing an uncertain future. They’ll look at new ways of integrating science and policy to transform land management and community action for food security. The overall aim is to link agricultural sciences with policies and practices so as to ensure a triple bottom line: food security, poverty alleviation and ecosystem services.

Many CCAFS staff will be participating in, or organizing sessions at, this conference as well.
For more information, visit the UC Davis website.

Experts take up two new director positions at ILRI, world’s leading pro-poor livestock research institute

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Susan MacMillan

ILRI’s new deputy director of research in integrated systems John McIntire.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) last November appointed two new deputy director generals of research at the institute. American John McIntire, formerly of the World Bank, will direct research on integrated livestock systems at ILRI while Suzanne Bertrand, a Canadian who has been working in the private sector in New Zealand, takes on directorship of ILRI’s biosciences research. This month they took up their new positions, where they also serve on ILRI’s senior management team, reporting to ILRI director general Jimmy Smith.

John McIntire, ILRI deputy director general for integrated systems research
John McIntire is a native Californian who graduated from Occidental College, where he was a member of the regional champion cross-country team, in 1972 with a BA in history. He worked in a pharmaceuticals factory until 1975, when he began graduate studies at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. In 1980, Fletcher awarded him a PhD in agricultural economics, based in part on fieldwork he had conducted near Segou, in central Mali, from 1977 to 1978. That work, done in collaboration with the West African Rice Development Association (now AfricaRice) and the Malian national research program, was one of the original farm-level studies of smallholder crop production done anywhere in francophone Africa and one of the first to study competition between rainfed and irrigated crops.

After receiving his PhD, McIntire took up a job as research associate at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in Washington, DC, where he published Food Security in the Sahel: Variable Import Levy, Grain Reserves and Foreign Exchange Assistance (1981). This report was one of the first papers to use a quantitative model of food supply and demand to investigate policies for improving food security in West Africa. In 1980, McIntire was appointed principal economist in the West Africa Program of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), where he was based at the Kamboinse Research Station, near Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. There he worked to identify constraints to improving millet and sorghum production in the sub-humid and semi-arid tropics of Burkina Faso, publishing work on village surveys, intercropping and animal traction. In 1981, he moved with ICRISAT to Niger, where he helped establish the ICRISAT Sahelian Centre at Sadore and conducted village-level studies on farmer-managed experiments with new millet-producing techniques involving improved cultivars, intercropping and mineral fertilizers.

McIntire left ICRISAT and Niger in 1984 to take up a position as principal economist at the International Livestock Centre for Africa (ILCA), one of ILRI’s two predecessors, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While at ILCA, he worked on the economics of ILCA’s priority setting, trypanotolerance (genetic resistance to the disease African animal trypanosomosis), smallholder cattle fattening, crop residue management, alley farming and crop-livestock integration. Based on his work at ILCA and ICRISAT, he published Crop Livestock Integration in Sub-Saharan Africa (1992), with Daniel Bourzat and Prabhu Pingali, a book still widely cited 20 years later.

McIntire joined the World Bank in 1989, where he worked until his retirement in 2011. There he developed and managed a National Agricultural Technology Program for Mexico, which was, at the time, the largest Bank investment in national agricultural research in the world. He later worked as country economist for Côte d’Ivoire, where he was instrumental in the reform of the national cocoa marketing institution and in restructuring that country’s international debt as part of the HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) Initiative. From 2000 to 2004, he was World Bank country director for Senegal, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea. From 2004 to 2007, he served as director for Agricultural, Environmental and Social Development in the Africa Region of the World Bank. His final Bank assignment was country director for Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi, where he managed a team of some 200 people that delivered one of the largest IDA (International Development Association) programs in the world. In 2011, he was the second person to receive both the Bank’s ‘Good Manager Award’ and ‘Green Award for Environmental Leadership’, the latter notably for his work in defending Serengeti National Park.

ILRI’s new deputy director of research in biosciences Suzanne Bertrand.

Suzanne Bertrand, ILRI deputy director general for biosciences research
Suzanne Bertrand’s background is a unique mix of science and managerial roles in government, academia and the private sector, with long interest and hands-on experience in international development. She has expertise in managing stakeholder and client relationships and in building project engagement strategies.

Bertrand earned a PhD in plant molecular biology at Laval University (French: Université Laval), in Canada’s Quebec Province and began her career as a scientist with Agri-Food Canada, working on forage plants. Her focus shifted rapidly from laboratory-based research to the application of modern agri-technology in the developing world. Her first overseas assignment was as a consulting plant physiologist for a Gansu Forest Nursery Project in the People’s Republic of China, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency; Bertrand served as director of this project for its last three years. She then went to North Africa, again as project director, to manage the installation and start-up of five tree nurseries in Tunisia, a project funded by the Nordic Development Bank and World Bank.

Bertrand spent six years in the USA, first as research assistant professor at North Carolina State University and then as a founding principal for a biotechnology start-up company. She was then recruited as group manager for innovation with Livestock Improvement Corporation (LIC), a large dairy breeding enterprise in New Zealand, where she managed LIC’s Research and Development Group, delivering science-based solutions in the areas of genomics, reproductive health, animal evaluation and commercialization to the dairy sector.

In 2008, Bertrand became director of international linkages for the New Zealand Ministry of Research, Science and Technology. In this role, she established an overarching framework for the ministry’s external engagement and developed an International Linkages Strategy for New Zealand science. She was most recently chief executive officer for NZBIO, an NGO representing the interests and supporting the growth of the bioscience sector in New Zealand. Membership in NZBIO spans the spectrum of agbiotech, human health, industrial, environmental and food bioscience, from start-up companies to Crown research institutes and universities to large corporates and multinationals.

Bertrand has a lifelong interest in fine cuisine, art history, all things gardening, and travel.

Taking Stock: Jul 2012 round-up of news from ILRI

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

JEFF HASKINS
Last month, we at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and within CGIAR and the wider agricultural development communities grieved over the sudden loss of American media guru Jeff Haskins, who had spent six years in Africa covering African agriculture news stories for the American PR firm Burness Communications. Haskins, who had just turned 32, died at the Kenya coast on 14 Jul 2012. See online tributes to him from the ILRI News Blog (with links to 25 major news releases and 20 major opinion pieces that ILRI produced with the help of Jeff and his Burness team over the last five years), Pictures of Jeff Haskins (ILRI Pinterest Board), Pictures by Jeff Haskins (ILRI Pinterest Board), Burness Communications Blog, Global Crop Diversity Trust, CGIAR, International Center for Tropical Agriculture, La Vie Verte and Jeff Haskins Facebook page.

MAPPING ZOONOSES
Before his untimely death, Jeff Haskins in early Jul orchestrated major and widespread media coverage of a groundbreaking report by ILRI revealing a heavy burden of zoonoses, or human diseases transmitted from animals, facing one billion of the world’s poor. Some 60 per cent of all human diseases originate in animal populations. The ILRI study found five countries—Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, India and Nigeria—to be hotspots of poverty and zoonoses. The study also found that northeastern United States, Western Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Brazil and parts of Southeast Asia may be hotspots of ‘emerging zoonoses’—those that are newly infecting humans, are newly virulent, or have newly become drug resistant. The study, Mapping of Poverty and Likely Zoonoses Hotspots, examined the likely impacts of livestock intensification and climate change on the 13 zoonotic diseases currently causing the greatest harm to the world’s poor. It was developed with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID).

An opinion piece by the main author of the study, ILRI veterinary epidemiologist Delia Grace, wearing her hat as a member of the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, appeared this Jul in The Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog.

ILRI AWARD
Azage Tegegne, of ILRI and the Improving Productivity and Market Success of Ethiopian Farmers (IPMS) project, was awarded an honorary doctorate of science degree by Ethiopia’s prestigious Bahir Dar University.

ILRI STAFF
ILRI bid goodbye to Bruce Scott, who served ILRI as a director for 13 years, the last decade as director of ILRI’s partnerships and communications department. Bruce is moving only down the road in Nairobi, from Kabete to Westlands, where he is taking up the position of deputy director of a new initiative of Columbia University (USA): Columbia Global Centers ⁄ Africa.

ILRI & FODDER AT RIO+20
We compiled links to ILRI inputs to the Rio+20 conference, including how to ‘turn straw into gold’ with dual-purpose crop residues and, with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), how livestock feed innovations can reduce poverty and livestock’s environmental ‘hoofprint’.

POLICY BRIEF
ILRI produced a policy brief on ‘Preventing and controlling classical swine fever in northeast India‘.

VIDEO INTERVIEWS
We film interviewed ILRI director general Jimmy Smith on ILRI’s evolving new livestock strategy and on ILRI’s role in providing evidence about the ‘bads’ as well as ‘goods’ of livestock production, marketing and consumption. And we interviewed ILRI scientist Joerg Jores on his research results, which, as reported in Scientific American, show that the pathogen that causes cattle pneumonia (CBPP) arose with domestication of ruminants ten thousand years ago, but only ‘heated up’ and began causing disease relatively recently.

VIP VISITORS
An Australian contingent visited ILRI this month and launched a new initiative, the Australian International Food Security Centre, to improve food security in Africa. The centre, which falls under the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), will spend USD33.8 million over four years to support food production in Africa as well as in Asia and the Pacific region.

PROJECT NEWS
We reported on the signing of a memorandum of understanding by ILRI and Korea‘s Rural Development Authority (RDA) for laboratory work in Kenya, innovative platforms in an imGoats project in India and Mozambique, and training sessions on controlling zoonoses conducted by the Vietnamese members of an ILRI-led project known by its acronym EcoZD (‘Ecosystem Approaches to the Better Management of Zoonotic Emerging Infectious Diseases in Southeast Asia’).

SELECTED RECENT PRESENTATIONS
Azage Tegegne Livestock and irrigation value chains for Ethiopian smallholders (LIVES) project, Addis Ababa, Jun (256 views).
Danilo Pezo Smallholder pig value chain development in Uganda, Wakiso, Jun (1186 views).
Derek Baker Livestock farming in developing countries: An essential resource, World Meat Congress, Paris, Jun (874 views).
Derek Baker Interpreting trader networks as value chains: Experience with Business Development Services in smallholder dairy in Tanzania and Uganda, ILRI Nairobi, Jun (1879 views).
Peter Ballantyne Open knowledge sharing to support learning in agricultural and livestock research for development projects, Addis Ababa, Jun (1589 views).
John Lynam Applying a systems framework to research on African farming systems, CGIAR drylands workshop, Nairobi, Jun (1884 views).
Bernard Bett Spatial-temporal analysis of the risk of Rift Valley fever in Kenya, European Geosciences Union Conference, Vienna, Apr (1164 views).
Nancy Johnson The production and consumption of livestock products in developing countries: Issues facing the world’s poor, Farm Animal Integrated Research Conference, Washington DC, Mar (542 views).

Scientific assessments needed by a global livestock sector facing increasingly hard trade-offs

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Paul Karaimu

New technologies and innovation systems need to take into account, and allow poor people to manage effectively, the many and increasingly hard tradeoffs resulting from increasing global demand for livestock products (photo credit: ILRI/Stevie Mann).

Scientists from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and elsewhere say increases in income and urbanization in developing countries are increasing demand for nutrient-rich foods, particularly food from livestock. This demand is projected to more than double meat and milk consumption in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia from the turn of the century to 2050.

In a presentation made at a Farm Animal Integrated Research Conference in Washington DC in March 2012, Nancy Johnson, an ILRI agricultural economist with expertise in assessing the impacts of agricultural interventions, warned that the growth opportunities for the world’s poor livestock keepers offered by this rising demand for livestock products also pose ‘threats that will require context-specific decisions’ for effectively managing the livestock sector. ‘Institutional and technological innovations will play critical roles in the sustainable growth of the sector and in successfully addressing some major challenges,’ said Johnson.

Among those challenges, Johnson named the following:

Better managing the risks from the many diseases livestock and livestock products transmit to people
Better managing livestock so that they help conserve rather than harm land, water, biodiversity resources, and global climate
Ensuring that livestock development empowers women
Helping pastoral herders and other livestock keepers transition to non-agricultural livelihoods
Stemming overconsumption of fatty red meat and other livestock foods in richer communities and countries, while increasing consumption among undernourished people.

Meeting these challenges, Johnson said, will require much more integrated cross-sectoral attention and work. More efficient livestock value chains and markets, for example, and greater access by the poor to those chains and markets, will be crucial in coming years to develop of smallholder livestock enterprises. But markets alone will not be sufficient to balance the tradeoffs. Smart policies support by efforts to raise knowledge and awareness will also be needed. Together, improvements in livestock livelihoods can provide pathways to better lives for hundreds of millions of livestock keepers now living in severe poverty and chronic hunger. With the appropriate interventions and support, the ILRI scientist said, we can also significantly improve the resilience of pastoral communities now living in the world’s great drylands and facing greater climate threats due to climate change.

What will be key to the success or failure of livestock development projects, Johnson said, is whether we can come up with innovations and technologies that take into account—and allow poor people to manage effectively—the many and increasingly hard tradeoffs faced by the poor but with consequences for society and the planet. Should farmers use their crop residues for mulch on their croplands or for feed for their farm animals? Should households intensify livestock production to earn more income, even though health risks may increase in the short term? Should communities deforest an area for cattle grazing or attempt to improve common degraded pastureland? Should landowners put fences to keep out wild animals or keep their lands unfenced to protect diminishing wildlife populations? Should countries formalize marketing systems to increase production and gain access to new markets at risk of marginalizing poor women producers and sellers?

These are hard choices, Johnson emphasizes, without quick and easy answers. We’re going to need new technologies, new innovation systems and new incentive structures, she says, to help developing countries and their many livestock keepers make the best decisions—decisions that wherever possible serve several ‘goods’, from poverty reduction to better nutrition to environmental protection. What that will demand, Johnson concludes, is the very best scientific knowledge available.

Download the presentation, ‘The production and consumption of livestock products in developing countries: Issues facing the world’s poor’, by Nancy Johnson, Jimmy Smith, Mario Herrero, Shirley Tarawali, Susan MacMillan and Delia Grace.

Turning defeat into new destiny–Going beyond food aid in the Horn of Africa

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Susan MacMillan

A massive die-off of livestock across the great pastoral drylands of the Horn of Africa in 2011 threatened the livelihoods of more than 13 million people, most of them in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya, and killed tens of thousands of the most famished and vulnerable people. This—what is believed to have been the worst drought in the region in six decades—combined with civil strife in Somalia has generated nearly 100,000 refugees and sent untold numbers of people into absolute—and, for many, everlasting—poverty (photo of cow carcass in northern Kenya, credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT).

With the news cycle generated by the United Nations Conference of the Parties (CoP 17) climate change conference in Durban in Dec 2011 now over and the rains having arrived in central and southern Somalia, easing both the drought and the famine there, it appears to be an appropriate time to revisit the underlying causes of the hunger and famine that swept across these lands in the second half of 2011. This was the first famine to be declared in the Horn by the United Nations in nearly 30 years. In a 34-page policy paper published recently (18 Jan 2012), Oxfam and Save the Children estimate that between 50,000 and 100,000 people died between April and August 2011, more than half of them children under five.

The following opinion piece by Jimmy Smith, director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), explores what it will take to prevent such a tragedy from happening again in this region.

Opinion piece by ILRI’s Jimmy Smith
The ongoing famine in southern Somalia, and the hunger elsewhere in the Horn of Africa, is a catastrophe that has been hard to look at and hard, for most of us in our wired and networked 21st century, even to absorb.

But face it we must. None of us hearing the horror stories of tens of thousands of refugees fleeing villages broken by several years of crippling drought, which turned lands and livestock alike to dust, and then, with the arrival of seasonal rains, to mud, can fail to be aware of our own part in this still-unfolding tragedy. For we together have failed to provide the livestock herders and crop farmers who inhabit these marginal lands with even the minimal resources they need to keep their environments productive.

In the opinion of some, our alternating neglect and wholesaling of East Africa’s vast and once productive dryland ecosystems has helped turn them into fragmented wastelands, dotted with refugee camps.

We may tell ourselves that there is little we can do about political strife in countries such as Somalia, but we cannot say the same thing about our perennial under-investment in small-scale rain-fed food production, an activity that remains the over-riding business of virtually every person living in the Horn today. Rich and poor nations alike have systematically failed to deliver this support, support that is usually promised in our meetings, support that is needed to build and sustain Africa’s own food production capacities.

What Africa’s rural farming and herding communities have needed, above all else, is increased agricultural research and development, with concomitant investments in rural roads, power, irrigation, clinics and schools. By failing to maintain sufficient levels of scientific as well as financial resources, we have failed to help local communities take up and adapt more sustainable and profitable herding and cropping practices.

The desiccation that devastated the Horn’s dry rangelands last year has parallels with that which occurred in the semi-arid grasslands of North America’s heartland some 70 years ago, creating a vast Dust Bowl across 19 states. The immense dust storms that blew the topsoil off the Great Plains throughout the 1930s made millions of acres of land useless and forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes for other regions. Some people died of malnourishment, hundreds of thousands of people entered years of penury and joblessness, and by 1940 a total of some 2.5 million people had been dislocated and forced to migrate, like nearly 100,000 mostly Somali people in the Horn today.

In the wake of the American disaster, and in spite of a Great Depression then crippling the country—a financial crisis even deeper than that we’re facing today—a critical mass of agricultural expertise and ideas was brought to bear on those issues underlying the crisis. That mattered because the Dust Bowl was caused primarily not by several years of drought but rather by several decades of unsustainable farming, by a ‘carelessness of plenty’, with American entrepreneurs encouraged, by the availability of big farm machinery and easy credit as well as a period of unusually wet seasons, to plough the prairie sod to excess, as well as to overgraze it, which destroyed the prairie grasses and laid the land bare.

Americans set about transforming this by investing heavily in better farming. The federal government, for example, began an aggressive campaign to teach farmers soil conservation methods, and actually paid farmers to practice these methods. It set up a Drought Relief Service that bought cattle in emergency areas at better-than-market prices and then used the cattle for food distributed to hungry people nationwide. And it advised families remaining in the prairie states to shift from crop and wheat production to livestock and hay production, a more appropriate use of degraded lands.

Finally, and critically, America’s network of land-grant universities was mobilized not only to help feed people in the emergency but also to find lasting solutions for rebuilding the productivity and resilience of the nation’s prairies. The idea was to bring the scientific knowledge of land-grant colleges to American farmers. The idea worked.

Today, international, regional and national research and development groups, working together in well-coordinated ways and tied to local conditions and priorities, have an opportunity to make a similar difference in the Horn, helping its homeless and hungry people to reclaim their lands and livelihoods. It is, therefore, gratifying to see the donor community and governments mobilizing financial and technical resources to respond to the lessons just learnt in the Horn.

We’ve seen that unsustainable prairie cropping in North America and unsupported livestock-based agricultural production systems in the Horn, when combined with lengthy and severe drought cycles, are toxic mixes. But if America’s earlier tragedy teaches us anything, it’s that we can turn defeat into new destiny by applying the best of science—smart, innovative and conservation-minded agricultural research—and promoting those agricultural practices that will make the biggest and most enduring difference to poor people and their environments.

Americans said ‘never again’ about the Dust Bowl—and they made good on their promise. We can, and should, say the same thing about hunger and starvation in the Horn of Africa.

Notes
(1) The Guardian‘s Global Development Blog started the new year with a chat discussion on the food crisis in the Horn of Africa, where famine was officially declared on 20 Jul 2011.

As the Guardian‘s Jaz Cummins reports, on 13 Dec 2011, the UN made an appeal for USD1.5 billion to support projects in Somalia in 2012—a figure 50% higher than in 2011.

The Guardian this January recommends the following background reading it published last year:
Madeleine Bunting blogs on the role conflict and natural disasters have played in Somalia, 11 Sep 2011
Conflict with Kenya, 18 Nov 2011
The World Bank’s Vinod Thomas on how the Horn of Africa can be better prepared for recurrent drought, 11 Aug 2011
Pascal Lamy, director general of the World Trade Organisation, on the key ingredients to tackle food crisis, 21 Nov 2011
Liz Ford on the long-term strategy Africa’s latest food crisis needs, 4 Jul 2011

(2) Is A Food Crisis Brewing in the Sahel?
A meeting to be held on 25 Jan 2012 in Washington, DC, will assess whether a similar food crisis is brewing in the Sahel—and the best ways of ensuring that resources to deal with it are not squandered in ‘band-aid treatments’ but rather used to build resiliency in the region. The meeting is being organized by The Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Africa Program, in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET).

While African nations and the donor community struggle to mitigate famine in the Horn of Africa, fears are growing that drought in the Sahel will trigger a similar food crisis in West Africa by the spring of 2012. However, experts have cautioned against misdiagnosing the food situation in the Sahel, for fear that excessive band-aid treatments of emergency food assistance will squander energy and scarce resources that would be better utilized in treating pockets of severe food insecurity and building resiliency in the region. With input from US and African experts on the Sahel, this event will explore the true nature of the emerging crisis in the Sahel and seek to identify effective responses, including regional trade and resilience-building through agricultural development.

(3) PAEPARD (Platform for Africa-European Partnership in Agricultural Research for Development) Seminar: Preventing a New Famine in the Horn of Africa: The role of the EU in building resilience
Ann Waters-Bayer, a pastoral expert and senior advisor at ETC EcoCulture, was a panel member at a seminar put on for European Development Days 2011, 15–16 Dec 2011, in Warsaw. The panelists, comprising practitioners and policymakers, discussed how to prevent another crisis of this scale and the role that the EU can play in reaching long-lasting sustainable solutions.

Speaking on the panel, Waters-Bayer reminded her audience that pastoral modes of production are often the most appropriate uses of these and other of the world’s great drylands.

‘We’re ten years late in trying to support development which is appropriate to the Horn of Africa and other dryland ares. I think a lot of people in Europe don’t realize what are the most appropriate food production systems in the very dry and variable areas. Often the kinds of development support provided in these drylands are those more appropriate to Europe or better-watered areas.

‘I found it striking that in the film we’ve seen on how to prevent famine from happening again in the Horn of Africa, pastoralism was not mentioned. Pastoralism is the production system practiced in the largest part of the Horn of Africa. Pastoralism is the production system most appropriate for this type of environment. Pastoralism takes advantage of what crop farmers would regard as a constraint, a challenge, a problem—this variation in availability of vegetation, caused by the variability of rain, of water. Pastoralists take advantage of this variability by moving with their animal herds.

One of the big problems in this dryland region has been that a lot of the development and a lot of the policies for this region, especially policies dealing with use of communal resources and acquisition of so-called ‘unused land’, are policies confining pastoralists and making it impossible for this very appropriate production system to continue to operate.

‘Land grabbing has really become a big issue in the Horn of Africa and other parts of Africa. Land grabbing, or land acquisition, supposedly for more productive uses of the land, is going on without people realizing what production systems are actually using that land and how productive those systems are.

If there had been more research done on alternative ways of using land and real feasibility studies conducted on what can actually be done with this land, they would realize that the existing production systems, especially the very very flexible and resilient pastoralist system, is often the best way to use these very dry areas.’

US-Kenyan team developing vaccine to protect African cattle against deadly East Coast fever

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Susan MacMillan

Staff of ILRI’s Tick Unit dissect ticks to extract the parasite Theileria parva, which causes East Coast fever in cattle (photo credit: Brad Collis).

A vaccine that protects cattle against East Coast fever, a deadly disease in eastern and central Africa, is being developed by scientists in Kenya working for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) jointly with scientists at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Animal Disease Research Unit in Pullman, Washington, which is part of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). ARS is the USDA’s chief intramural scientific research agency. This research, which looks at combination vaccines for tick-borne diseases, supports USDA’s priority of promoting international food security.

Scientists are focusing on the tick that transmits the parasite responsible for East Coast fever. Because this host tick and its parasite are similar to the tick and parasite that cause babesiosis, commonly called Texas cattle fever, in the United States, developing a vaccine for East Coast fever could lead to a vaccine for Texas cattle fever, which is a serious illness for wild and domesticated animals, especially cattle.

In an initial study, scientists developed a polymerase chain reaction test that detects parasite DNA in ticks. They used tick populations that were produced at ILRI to have different susceptibilities to infection with the parasite. Two different strains of ticks—Muguga and Kiambu—were compared. The Muguga ticks had a low level of parasitic infection, whereas the Kiambu ticks were highly susceptible.

Understanding genetic differences between these two tick populations could lead to the identification of proteins that might be good targets for a vaccine to help control East Coast fever.

This international partnership is part of a global community effort to control diseases that limit food and fiber production. Although East Coast fever isn’t currently a problem in the United States, this collaborative research aids in keeping the US and other countries free of the disease. Results of this collaborative research may be applied to help control similar parasitic diseases.

Findings from this research were published in Gene and in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

Read more at the United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service: Partnership focuses on developing East Coast fever vaccine, 4 Oct 2011.

Read more about this research in the October 2011 issue of Agricultural Research Magazine.

Read more about this project on ILRI’s website.

World Bank president says it’s time to push the CGIAR agricultural research agenda

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Susan MacMillan

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank (image on Flickr by International Monetary Fund).

Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, spoke today (6 July 2011) at the 40-year-anniversary celebrations of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) at the World Bank in Washington, DC. His presentation followed a film about the historical beginnings of the CGIAR, including interviews of Norman Borlaug and Robert McNamara.

‘Both Norman Borlaug and Robert McNamara believed that it is possible to defeat hunger,’ Zoellick said. ‘They both worked to boost food production through science. And they both died within a few months of each other in 2009.’

Zoellick said that agriculture is a subject of strong personal interest for him; he grew up around farm families in the American midwest. And he said few things were as satisfying for him as speaking to farm families that had doubled, tripled or quadrupled their incomes through improved farm practices, which in turn rely on agricultural science.

Zoellick said that high food prices today are pushing 44 million people into poverty, and the global population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050.

‘We’ll have to increase food production by 70% to feed everyone by mid-century,’ he said. ‘And we’ll have to do that with the rate of production increases dropping and in the face of climate change, which is predicted to decrease crop yields in Africa by 28%.’

Zoellick reported on some of the great achievements of the CGIAR over the last four decades. Among them, he cited the following work by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its partners, including the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute.

There is now a vaccine for East Coast fever, which kills 1 cow every 30 seconds in 11 countries of Africa. The vaccine is expected to save more than a million cattle, with benefits worth up to USD270 million a year in the countries where the disease is now endemic.

‘I’ve been urging the G20 to put food first this year,’ said Zoellick. ‘One of my key messages at both G8 and G20 is the need to support agriculture and agricultural research.

“I see a 5-step challenge for the CGIAR,’ said Zoellick.
(1) Donor agencies increase funding to the CGIAR from USD670 million last year to USD1 billion by 2013.
(2) Donor agencies commit to multi-year predictable funding.
(3) Research institutions place greater focus on research to reduce post-harvest food losses (which can make up 20–50% of yields).
(4) Developing countries themselves increase their investments to agricultural research and development.
(5) Researchers and their supporters stand up for science and fight the current trend of cloaking ignorance in fashionable causes.

The moment is right to push the agricultural research agenda, Zoellick said. ‘The agricultural sector is fertile for innovation. And we can demonstrate the intimate links between this work and two of the big issues of our day—food security and climate change.’

Given the ammunition, he said, he’ll push this agenda forward.

ILRI news

Better lives through livestock

Category Archives: USA