Posts Tagged ‘africa’

Dudutech awarded funding for beans research from Agri-Tech Catalyst Fund Round 5

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Project title: Improving consistency of yields and quality of large-scale and smallholder bean production in Kenya by precision management of soil, water and pathogens

The fresh vegetable industry forms a vital part of Kenya’s economy. Kenyan growers export around 60,000 tonnes of fine and runner beans each year, worth £385M at retail sales value, with the UK receiving around 50% of the supply. A consortium made up of Flamingo Horticulture – Dudutech Division, Provenance Partners Ltd (UK), Vegpro Ltd (Kenya), NIAB EMR (UK) and WeatherQuest Ltd (UK) received funding for 3 years as part of the UK’s Agri-Tech Catalyst scheme. The project will deliver new science, technology, knowledge and training to accelerate sustainable intensification of large- and small-scale bean production in Kenya. Work on the project, which started in October 2016 and is to be completed by September 2019, focusses on:

  1. Developing and adapting irrigation infrastructure, scheduling tools and weather probability forecasting to improve soil water management, yields and consistency of quality;
  2. Quantifying the effects of soil water availability and continuous cropping on the incidence and severity of soil pathogens targeting bean crops;
  3. Identifying the effects of novel biocontrol agents on the soil/rhizosphere microbiome to guide the optimum combination of treatments;
  4. Adopting integrated biocontrol to improve yields, quality and shelf-life;
  5. Promoting and disseminating the benefits of precision irrigation and biocontrol via outgrower workshops led by Vegpro and Dudutech;
  6. Assessing the economic and social impacts of project outputs and developing and implementing extension services to outgrowers.

At the end of this project, the consortium expect to deliver a 12% increase in average yield and a 20% reduction in wasted crop, in order to increase food and job security and enhance soil management skills among Kenyan growers.

Agrichemicals and ever more intensive farming will not feed the world

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The Guardian

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The latest frontier is Africa, where there is a new scramble to spread the agroindustrial model of farming. It may well be in Africa, however, that a different, more ecological vision of the food future emerges. I had a glimmer of it on a trip to a large-scale horticultural export company based on Kenya’s Lake Naivasha.

The company, Flamingo Homegrown, has abandoned its long and heavy use of chemical pesticides, partly in response to a campaign highlighting their effect on workers’ health, but partly too in recognition that they were on a losing treadmill of spraying and pest resistance.

They have reinvented their agriculture in a way that makes the science of agrochemical use look as primitive as a blunderbuss. Instead they employ groups of highly trained African scientists to study and reproduce in labs the fungi and microrrhizae in healthy soil that form intricate links with plant roots. Rather than waging chemical war on the land, they are working to harness its immensely complex ecosystems. They have built vast greenhouses dedicated to breeding and harvesting ladybirds to control pests biologically rather than chemically.

There is an another route to food security – and it is the polar opposite of three agrochemical giants bestriding the world.

This article was amended on 3 October 2016. An earlier version referred to glyphosphate; that has been corrected to glyphosate.

Agricultural policies in Africa could be harming the poorest

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Agricultural policies aimed at alleviating poverty in Africa could be making things worse, according to research by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Published this month in the journal World Development, the study finds that so-called ‘green revolution’ policies in Rwanda – claimed by the government, international donors and organisations such as the International Monetary Fund to be successful for the economy and in alleviating poverty – may be having very negative impacts on the poorest.

One of the major strategies to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa is through policies to increase and modernise agricultural production. Up to 90 per cent of people in some African countries are smallholder farmers reliant on agriculture, for whom agricultural innovation, such as using new seed varieties and cultivation techniques, holds potential benefit but also great risk.

In the 1960s and 70s policies supporting new seeds for marketable crops, sold at guaranteed prices, helped many farmers and transformed economies in Asian countries. These became known as “green revolutions”. The new wave of green revolution policies in sub-Saharan Africa is supported by multinational companies and western donors, and is impacting the lives of tens, even hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers, according to the study’s lead author Dr Neil Dawson.

The study reveals that only a relatively wealthy minority have been able to keep to enforced modernisation because the poorest farmers cannot afford the risk of taking out credit for the approved inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers. Their fears of harvesting nothing from new crops and the potential for the government to seize and reallocate their land means many choose to sell up instead.

The findings tie in with recent debates about strategies to feed the world in the face of growing populations, for example the influence of wealthy donors such as the Gates Foundation, initiative’s such as the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in pushing agricultural modernisation in Africa. There have also been debates about small versus large farms being best to combat hunger in Africa, while struggles to maintain local control over land and food production, for example among the Oromo people in Ethiopia, have been highlighted.

Dr Dawson, a senior research associate in UEA’s School of International Development, said: “Similar results are emerging from other experiments in Africa. Agricultural development certainly has the potential to help these people, but instead these policies appear to be exacerbating landlessness and inequality for poorer rural inhabitants.

“Many of these policies have been hailed as transformative development successes, yet that success is often claimed on the basis of weak evidence through inadequate impact assessments. And conditions facing African countries today are very different from those past successes in Asia some 40 years ago.

“Such policies may increase aggregate production of exportable crops, yet for many of the poorest smallholders they strip them of their main productive resource, land. This study details how these imposed changes disrupt subsistence practices, exacerbate poverty, impair local systems of trade and knowledge, and threaten land ownership. It is startling that the impacts of policies with such far-reaching impacts for such poor people are, in general, so inadequately assessed.”

The research looked in-depth at Rwanda’s agricultural policies and the changes impacting the wellbeing of rural inhabitants in eight villages in the country’s mountainous west. Here chronic poverty is common and people depend on the food they are able to grow on their small plots.

Farmers traditionally cultivated up to 60 different types of crops, planting and harvesting in overlapping cycles to prevent shortages and hunger. However, due to high population density in Rwanda’s hills, agricultural policies have been imposed which force farmers to modernise with new seed varieties and chemical fertilisers, to specialise in single crops and part with “archaic” agricultural practices.

Dr Dawson and his UEA co-authors Dr Adrian Martin and Prof Thomas Sikor recommend that not only should green revolution policies be subject to much broader and more rigorous impact assessments, but that mitigation for poverty-exacerbating impacts should be specifically incorporated into such policies. In Rwanda, that means encouraging land access for the poorest and supporting traditional practices during a gradual and voluntary modernisation.

Find the full report here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002302