To escape the flooding in Pakistan, spiders create megawebs in trees (photo on Flickr from M1K3Y; more images on the Nej Lon Blog). More than 150,000 cattle have died in Pakistan as a result of the recent flooding, which, just 12 months after the last massive flooding in the country, has washed away fodder resources and … Continue reading
Feed scarcity in smallholder systems is a key constraint to improved livestock production in developing countries. However, development efforts which have taken a narrow technology-focused approach to dealing with feed scarcity have had limited success. The IFAD-supported ‘Fodder Adoption Project’ ran between 2007 and 2010 and aimed to address issues around inadequate livestock fodder at … Continue reading
This week’s Rome AgriKnowledge ‘share fair’ included a session on ‘innovation platforms’ as vehicles for rural change. It highlighted some experiences of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Crops Research Institute for the Tropics (ICRISAT), and the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF). The innovation platforms discussed in the session grew … Continue reading
The march of the West Nile virus (illustration on Flickr by A J Cann: Present and future arboviral threats. Antiviral Res. 2010 85[2]: 328–345). Laurie Garnett, a scientific consultant on Steven Soderbergh’s new film ‘Contagion’, wrote the popular science book The Coming Plague in the 1990s. In a piece on CNN last week, she warns that … Continue reading
‘A competitive, international fund for research on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from pastoral farming is now open for applications. ‘Agriculture Minister David Carter announced the NZ$25 million Fund for Global Partnerships in Livestock Emissions Research at the inaugural ministerial meeting of the Global Research Alliance in Rome in June. ‘The Fund draws on the NZ$45 … Continue reading
Owen Barder at the opening of an ‘AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair’ held at the Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, campus of the International Livestock Research Institute in Oct 2010 (photo credit: ILRI/Apollo Habtamu). Owen Barder writes in his blog of an interesting recent meeting held on ‘the future of aid’ by the World Bank London office. He … Continue reading
An opinion piece by Mark Tran in the Guardian‘s Poverty Matters Blog yesterday (12 Sep 2011) argues that the G20 faces obstacles in its efforts to spread good farming practices, and that a lack of coherence among agricultural research bodies is a major obstacle. ‘Spreading good ideas and practices in farming sounds like a simple enough … Continue reading
Livestock is an important sub-sector within Ethiopia’s economy in terms of its contributions to both agricultural value-added and national GDP. Between 1995/96 and 2005/06, it averaged 24% of agricultural GDP and 11% of national GDP. At the household level, livestock are crucial to the lives of pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, and smallholder farm households; they help to … Continue reading
Elephants and livestock both need water on a regular basis (photo of Kenya elephant on Flickr by Shawna Nelles). CNN reports that ‘As the Horn of Africa suffers its worst drought for 60 years, there are reports of growing conflict between people and wildlife over the region’s limited resources. ‘. . . Jan de Leeuw, … Continue reading
A woman holding her young malnourished baby queues for food at the Badbado refugee camp, in Mogadishu, Somalia (photo on Flickr by United Nations/Stuart Price). The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net) and the Food Security and Analysis Unit (FSNAU) report that in Somalia, in addition to the five areas where famine has already been … Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 