Hello, and welcome to a new edition of the IFPR-Kampala’s USSP news and research digest!
As
usual, this collection of recent news articles related to agriculture
is compiled from online news sources. We also include links to recent
publications on agricultural and policy-related research topics
pertinent to Uganda and the wider region.
In the news this week, we report on Gov’t releases UGX 16 billion for emergency relief food and on silk production becoming the new money-spinner. We also have a special report on OWC project: missed targets, lessons and way forward and point to a NYT article on how Millennials are making farming sexy in Africa.
Under research, we provide links to:
- Climate change has likely already affected global food production
- Climate change and developing country growth: the cases of Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia
- Agricultural Informatization and Technical Efficiency in Maize Production in Zambia
- Participatory plant breeding: Who did it, who does it and where?
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Happy reading
News:
Gov’t releases UGX 16 billion for emergency relief food
Independent
The Ministry of Disaster Preparedness and Refugees has started the
emergency procurement of food relief for at least 3.5 million people
facing starvation in different parts of the county. Severe dry
conditions from October-December 2018 and delayed rainfall between
January and March 2019 March led to crop failures and affected early
planting in areas of Acholi, Teso, Bukedi, Busoga and Karamoja. The
adverse weather also affected the large section of Uganda’s cattle
corridor dominated by pastoralists in areas of Nakasongola and Nakaseke.
Could silk production become farming’s new money-spinner?
Observer
The
farming activity of raising silkworms in order to obtain raw silk has
been practiced in Uganda since the sixties but it was abandoned in the
nineties due to lack of market and the complexity. However, the global
rise in demand for silk and the subsequent increase of the price
prompted government, through the National Agricultural Research
Organisation, to embark on new ways of tapping into the industry.
From a seedling to a cup: Uganda co-operative ensures its coffee travels the world
Medium
Elvanis Nkundwa reaches up and plucks red coffee cherries from the
branch of one of her coffee trees. She moves quickly and confidently
through her orchard, harvesting cherries by the handful. Narrow
footpaths cut between the trees; taller trees overhead provide shade and
a home for the numerous birds whose songs fill the mountain air.
Uganda and Denmark to work on food quality
New Vision
Ugandan chilies and vegetables are facing a ban from the EU market over
contamination concerns. Uganda and Denmark have agreed to come up with a
framework that will see an improvement in Ugandan agricultural products
for ease of access of the European Union market.
Pathways to resilience in the Karamoja cluster
Karamoja Resilience Support Unit
Proceedings and papers from a recent regional research conference on
research and policy options. It reaffirmed the need for stronger
evidence-based programming and policy making to improve the quality and
impact of investments in the cluster.
Budget to build grain storage facilities
Monitor
The lasting solution for such a problem is to put in place storage
facilities to help peasant farmers, who will hopefully have come
together in cooperative societies, to determine when to sell their
produce, and to who to sell. This is old-school economics that those in
government should be aware of.
The secretive traders fulfilling demand for a Chinese delicacy
The Guardian
Highly prized for its swim bladder – served in soups and stews – the
fish could disappear altogether from Africa’s Lake Victoria thanks to
the lucrative trade. A thriving trade in fish maw – made from the swim
bladders of fish – could lead to the extinction of the Nile perch fish
in east Africa’s Lake Victoria.
Coffee law to punish farmers over neglect
Monitor
Farmers who neglect their coffee will be punished, according to the new
Coffee Bill. The Bill, which is yet to be handled by Parliament, is
currently before the House committee on agriculture, animal industry and
fisheries.
OWC project: missed targets, lessons and way forward
Monitor
In
2001, donors, including the World Bank, International Fund for
Agricultural Development, European Union, Department for International
Development, Danish International Development Assistance, United Nations
Development Programme, Belgian Survival Fund, Netherlands and Irish
Aid, pumped billions of shillings into the National Agricultural
Advisory Services programme, then projected as a radical reform of the
country’s agricultural advisory (extension) services and a,
“paradigm-changing policy-shift, a radical move away from a traditional,
top-down government-led extension service to a privatised, demand-led,
one in which farmers were supposed to define their own requirements for
advice.”
The Uganda Coffee Roadmap is on the move
Global Coffee Platform
150 coffee experts gathered to the 12th Annual Stakeholder Meeting of
the Ugandan Coffee Platform to learn how the 15-year Uganda’s Coffee
Roadmap will will increase Uganda’s coffee production from the current
4.7 million bags to 20 million bags in 2030, and triple the income of
1.2 million smallholder coffee farmers.
Trees or sugar? Conservationists, traditional kingdom clash over Ugandan forest
East African
The National Forestry Authority says the sugar project will carve out 13
per cent of Bugoma, a state-owned forest reserve which is home to a
tenth of the country’s chimpanzees and is a growing eco-tourism
destination.
“We have nothing to eat”: further reflections on the famine in Turkana and the government’s food security policies
East African Review
Famine in Turkana and other Kenyan counties may not have yet caught the
attention of the international media, but domestic dissatisfaction with
the famine response may force the government to alter its food security
policies. The more likely scenario, however, is that this government
will, like most Kenyans, pray for the rains, and hope that the food
crisis will go away all on its own.
Kenyan farmers told not to use weed killers that may cause cancer
Nation
Kenyan
agronomists and coffee marketing agents have raised the red flag over
the use of weed killers suspected to cause cancer.
Millennials ‘make farming sexy’ in Africa, where tilling the soil once meant shame
New York Times
After he graduated from university in Ghana, Vozbeth Kofi Azumah was
reluctant to tell anyone — even his mother — what he planned to do for a
living. “I’m a farmer,” he said, buzzing his motorcycle between
freshly plowed fields on a recent afternoon. “Here, that’s an
embarrassment.”
Did the Dutch steal this African food?
BBC
It is hard to believe, but despite injera’s popularity throughout
Ethiopia, the patent for the processing of teff flour and related teff
products ended up in the hands of a company in the Netherlands.
Scientists have identified a biological weapon that could end the devastating effect of the fall armyworm in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sci Dev Net
According to the FAO, fall armyworm has already spread across
Sub-Saharan Africa since its detection in the region in 2016, affecting
millions of hectares of maize and sorghum. Fall armyworm threatens the
food security of about 200 million people in Africa. The biological
weapon, known as Telenomus remus, is a parasitoid — an insect that
completes its larval development within the body of another insect
leading to the death of its host. It is being used to augment control of
fall armyworm in the Americas, experts say.
Personal reflections on the Green Revolution’s narrative and myths
IDS
Getting
to grips with the Green Revolution: I set out in the field research
focused on seeds and agricultural extension. I had a GR mindset myself:
it was seeds which could offer a breakthrough in rice, and agricultural
extension could transfer to farmers’ new more productive technology. I
found agricultural extension difficult to research. But our village work
hit us between the eyes with the primacy of water management.
Research:
Climate change has likely already affected global food production
Deepak K. Ray, Paul C. West, Michael Clark, James S. Gerber, Alexander V. Prishchepov, Snigdhansu Chatterjee – PlosOne, 2019
Crop yields are projected to decrease under future climate conditions, and recent research suggests that yields have already been impacted. However, current impacts on a diversity of crops subnationally and implications for food security remains unclear. Here, we constructed linear regression relationships using weather and reported crop data to assess the potential impact of observed climate change on the yields of the top ten global crops–barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat at ~20,000 political units. We find that the impact of global climate change on yields of different crops from climate trends ranged from -13.4% (oil palm) to 3.5% (soybean). Our results show that impacts are mostly negative in Europe, Southern Africa and Australia but generally positive in Latin America. Impacts in Asia and Northern and Central America are mixed. This has likely led to ~1% average reduction (-3.5 X 1013 kcal/year) in consumable food calories in these ten crops. In nearly half of food insecure countries, estimated caloric availability decreased. Our results suggest that climate change has already affected global food production.
Climate change and developing country growth: the cases of Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia
Arndt, C., Chinowsky, P., Fant, C. et al. – Climatic Change, 2019
We consider the interplay of climate change impacts, global mitigation policies, and the economic interests of developing countries to 2050. Focusing on Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, we employ a structural approach to biophysical and economic modeling that incorporates climate uncertainty and allows for rigorous comparison of climate, biophysical, and economic outcomes across global mitigation regimes. We find that effective global mitigation policies generate two sources of benefit. First, less distorted climate outcomes result in typically more favorable and less variable economic outcomes. Second, successful global mitigation policies reduce global fossil fuel producer prices, relative to unconstrained emissions, providing a substantial terms of trade boost of structural fuel importers. Combined, these gains are on the order of or greater than estimates of mitigation costs. These results highlight the interests of most developing countries in effective global mitigation policies, even in the relatively near term, with much larger benefits post-2050.
Agricultural Informatization and Technical Efficiency in Maize Production in Zambia
GE Mwalupaso, S Wang, S Rahman, EJP Alavo, X Tian – Sustainability, 2019
The cropland productivity gap between Africa and the rest of the world is widening. Fortunately, increasing farmers’ access to useful agricultural information reduces the costs of searching for information, thereby leading to higher agricultural productivity and sustainability. This study investigates the association between the adoption of mobile phones to collect agricultural information and farmers’ technical efficiency (TE) in Zambia. Different from previous studies, we focus on the actual use of mobile phones by farmers rather than mere ownership. Farmers were selected using a two-stage sampling procedure, and the Cobb-Douglas (CD) production function is adopted to estimate the association using two approaches—the conventional stochastic production frontier (SPF) and propensity score matching-stochastic production frontier (PSM-SPF) model. In both cases, we found that the use of mobile phones is significantly and positively associated with farmers’ TE. However, the conventional SFP model exaggerates the TE scores by 5.3% due to its failure to mitigate biases from observed variables. Regarding the agricultural growth indicators (income and output) related to TE, a close inspection reveals that increasing mobile phone use to close the TE gap between the two groups could result in a 5.13% and 8.21% reduction in severity of poverty and extreme poverty, respectively. Additional research is essential to corroborate the findings and analyze the potential causal mechanisms. Our study provides strong evidence to promote mobile phone use in agricultural production in rural Zambia.
Participatory plant breeding: Who did it, who does it and where?
S Ceccarelli, S Grando – Experimental Agriculture, 2019
The paper provides an overview of institutions, scientists, and practitioners involved over the years in the various ways in which participatory plant breeding (PPB) is implemented, with indication of the crops involved and the countries in which it took place, or is still taking place. This might help creating a better awareness of the scope (both geographical and crop wise) of the different methodologies as well as of their advantages, disadvantages, applicability, and limitations. Through a literature survey, we found 254 publications showing that over a period of 36 years participatory approaches in plant breeding have been used in 69 countries (10 developed and 59 developing) with 47 crops including self-pollinated, cross-pollinated, and vegetatively propagated crops, by several Institutions including CGIAR centers, universities, and NGOs. We argue that there are no obvious scientific or technical reasons limiting the use of PPB, and we interpret the limited institutionalization as a difficulty to accept the paradigm shift that participation implies.
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