Sub-Saharan Africa has huge potential to become a global food basket, but it is far from being realised. The region is estimated to have 60% of the globally available and unexploited arable land yet it remains food deficient.
Even when arable land is cultivated, hurdles such as limited irrigation, small sized …
B4FA Fellow Michael Ssali writes:
Most of our farmers work on small plots of land and can be described as family farmers, smallholders or just peasants. This kind of farming provides employment to about 70 per cent of our adult population.
Typically a peasant farmer uses a hand hoe and a machete, …
A solution to help farmers to grow crops in dry areas or during stretches of drought may depend on breeding and cultivating plants that protect themselves with a thicker layer of leaf wax, a new study shows.
Sarah Feakins, a scientist at USC who has studied leaf wax in the context …
Inclusive agriculture is defined as agricultural markets and value chains that are inclusive of the world’s half-billion smallholder farmers. Such models link these farmers with larger economic actors, ultimately improving agricultural productivity, expanding markets and trade, and increasing the economic resilience of vulnerable rural communities.
A recent review by the Initiative …
Rising rice production is one of the few positives of Nigeria’s recession, which is the West African country’s worst in 25 years. Today about 5.7 million tonnes of rice are being produced every year – three times as much as a decade ago.
“We are now living a white gold revolution,” …
No matter how hard we work at stopping it, some human-driven climate change is inevitable. It’s already happening, and it will continue to happen even if we drawdown carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This means that there are certain adaptations we need to make in order to make it through the …
Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, Minister of Food and Agriculture, has called on African governments to embrace and invest in science and technology to transform the agricultural sector.
Dr Akoto said there was no way to develop agriculture without science, adding that it was imperative forAfrican continent to prioritise the role of …
To develop drought tolerant maize by conventional breeding method takes a very long number of years, in fact, scientists will tell you that every year, they can increase yield through conventional breeding under drought by just 1-1.5 per cent. This means, to develop and come out with drought tolerant maize …
Relocating coffee areas, along with forestation and forest conservation, to higher altitudes to cope with climate change could increase Ethiopia‘s coffee farming area fourfold, a study predicts.
The study, published in Nature last month (19 June), suggests that moving Ethiopian coffee fields to higher ground because of climate change could increase …
Africa itself has a land problem. The continent seems so vast and the land so open. The awesome sense of space is an inextricable part of the beauty here — the unadulterated vistas, the endless land. But in a way, that is an illusion.
Africa itself has a land problem. The …
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