An animated 3-minute video clip by the University of Minnesota’s Institute for the Environment. Justin Gillis has published an interesting piece this week in the Green Blog of the New York Times on a big study just published in Nature by Jon Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. … Continue reading
A young boy herds a flock of goats on the road to Wajir from Garissa in northeastern Kenya (photo on Flickr by Ann Weru/IRIN). Debora MacKenzie writes in New Scientist this week that low-key projects keep Horn of Africa famine at bay. ‘Drought in the Horn of Africa threatens 13 million people with starvation and is … Continue reading
Watch this 6-minute ILRI film about a previous drought that devastated much of East Africa in 2008–2009. In Kenya, the Kitengela Maasai pastoral rangelands south of Nairobi, and the hot and dry crop-livestock farming district of Kitui further east, experienced many of the worst effects, including reports of the deaths of up to half of … Continue reading
Kenya refugee camps, July 2011 (photo on Flickr by IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation/Turkey). The International Agriculture and Development Blog reports that ‘The [famine] crisis continues to unravel in the Horn of Africa. . . . In an excellent commentary from Project Syndicate, Sam Dryden, the Director of the Agricultural Development Program at the Bill and … Continue reading
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
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
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
John McDermott, currently deputy director general-research of the International livestock Research Institute has been appointed head of CGIAR Research Program 4, on Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health (photo credit: ILRI/Susan MacMillan). Shenggen Fan, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) announced on 6 Sep 2011 that John McDermott has been named … Continue reading
ILRI Clippings 