Participants at the award ceremony pose for a photo with the winners of the competition (seated, left to right): Perez Muchunguzi (3rd place), Rebecca Kalibwani (1st place) and Thanammal Ravichandran (2nd place) (photo credit: ILRI/Brian Kawuma). This article is written by Brian Kawuma, communications officer for ILRI in Uganda. From offering a legal precedent for … Continue reading
Category Archives: Humid Tropics
All flesh is grass (except in Nigeria, where it might be cassava peel)
Scientists are developing a way of transforming the mountains of cassava peels created every day in Nigeria, where cassava is a staple food, into a nourishing feed for smallholder farm animals. The several CGIAR centres involved include the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the International Potato Center (CIP). Also involved in this project are several CGIAR research programs—Livestock and Fish; Integrated Systems for the Humidtropics; and Roots, Tubers and Bananas—as well as the Global Cassava Partnership for the 21st Century (GCP21). Continue reading
CGIAR Innovation Platform Case Study Competition: And the winner is . . .
In Nov 2014, to better assess the efficiency of these innovation platforms and to document their successes and challenges in different developing countries, Humidtropics launched an Innovation Platforms Case Study Competition. In Feb 2015, twelve candidates were selected to participate in a writeshop focused on writing strong, reflective and cohesive case studies. Earlier this month (Jun 2015), jury members in an editors’ meeting reviewed all the final submissions and chose eight cases to be featured in a Humidtropics Anthology to be published by an academic publisher before the end of 2015; the jury also recommended that two cases be published separately. Continue reading
New paper explodes a ‘breadbasket’ myth: African food production for African people, please
‘Africa could be on the brink of an agricultural revolution. Political commitment to the sector is thankfully gaining momentum as an effective route to bring African populations out of hunger and poverty. But there is also talk that the region’s potential croplands should feed the rest of the world as well, in addition to providing vast quantities of biofuels. However, a new scientific paper released this week suggests African countries should cast global requests aside and instead focus on staple crop production to feed the continent first.’ Continue reading