West Africa

This review focuses on livestock-related climate smart agriculture options in West Africa looking at herd management, feed, grazing management, animal breeding strategies, manure management, and policy options. Recent analysis suggests that developing world regions contribute about two thirds of the global emissions from ruminants, with sub- Saharan Africa a global hotspot for emissions intensities, largely due to low animal productivity, poor animal health and low quality feeds. »

This book by The Technical Centre for Agriculture and Rural Cooperation (CTA) is offering 14 best practises and policies that increase agricultural productivity and farmers’ resilience to climate change. Key ingredients for success can be distilled out of these cases, such as active farmer participation and youth attraction. Projects which involve high levels of initial investment or drudgery, fail to attract young people, and are costly in terms of time and labour are unlikely to be successful. »

This brochure (PDF) by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), focuses on how to make 500 million farmers climate-resilient in 10 years while also reducing their agricultural emissions. It includes lessons learnt from five years of CCAFS work. »

This report by Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment describes a current indigenous soil management system in West Africa, in which targeted waste deposition transforms highly weathered, nutrient- and carbon-poor tropical soils into enduringly fertile, carbon-rich black soils, hereafter “African Dark Earths” (AfDE). AfDE provide a model for improving the fertility of highly degraded soils in an environmentally and socially appropriate way, in resource-poor and food-insecure regions of the world. The method is also “climate-smart”, as these soils sequester carbon and enhance the climate-change mitigation potential of carbon-poor tropical soils. »

In this article on the CGIAR website, Michael Halewood of Bioversity International reports on the workshop ‘Mutual Implementation of the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol in the context of wider policy goals’, held Nov. 16-20 in Addis Ababa. The meeting focused on how countries can identify and access diversity they need and share associated benefits. »

In this column, Christian Timmermann and Georges Félix claim that we need to focus our attention on creating innovations that can be reproduces with spare local parts and as little external inputs as possible, to ensure that the innovations reach the neediest. The authors argue that to address the human right to adequate food in the upcoming years and decades, policy-makers have assigned the globalized knowledge economy the task to deliver the necessary technological solutions. However, this approach fails to include the inventive capacity and active involvement of smallholders. »