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Showing posts with label Community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community. Show all posts

Saturday, July 15, 2023

Food shortage: Igbajo community embraces FG 500,000 hectares farmland policy - NaijaAgroNet

NaijaAgroNet: ... Linking agrobiz, sustainable environs, people & technology

The Igbajo Community in Osun State has embraced the Federal Government’s agriculture revolution policy geared at cultivating 500 hectares of farmland to tackle food shortages in the country.
Food shortage: Igbajo community embraces FG 500,000 hectares farmland policy - NaijaAgroNet
The presidency recently disclosed that 500,000 hectares of land have already been mapped to increase the availability of arable land for farming, having declared a state of emergency on food security in Nigeria.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

Pastoralists tenure rights key to community resilience - Study

A new Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) guide has offered pointers to protect a sustainable mobile lifestyle with special land-use skills, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to FAO, assuring adequate tenure rights to land is an important step in improving food security for millions of people in developing countries, but safeguarding tenure is not so straightforward when it comes to the way land is used by mobile pastoralist communities.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that over 500 million people on the planet rely on livestock herding, often steering their animals around various landscapes to reach water and pasture sources and avoid drought, animal disease and civil conflict.

In order to adequately address the inherently more complex needs of pastoralists, NaijaAgroNet reports that many of whom rely on covering vast territories in opportunistic ways, just as FAO, with the support of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Commission on Environmental Law and the Commission on Environment, Economic and Social Policy, has produced a technical yet accessible guide on how to establish viable tenure arrangements for the often-marginalized people who use around a third of the earth's surface.

The guide, NaijaAgroNet reports, posited that improving governance of pastoral lands is part of a series of publications offering insight on how to implement the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security, a landmark initiative whose global endorsement in 2012 was begun and brokered by FAO.

The coordinator of IUCN's Drylands Programme and lead author of the Technical Guide, Mr. Jonathan Davies, noted that the world's pastoralists engage in a wide variety of practices and include a great number of cultures in such diverse settings as Mongolia, Niger, Spain, Kenya, Norway and the United States of America.

Pastoralists, he said, inhabit rangeland areas, many of which are arid or semi-arid, and they employ a highly adaptable livelihood strategy that is poorly understood by outsiders, stressing that their adaptability relies on access rights that often jar with classical notions of property rights.

"Pastoralism is a system of livestock production that takes advantage of both the diversity and the seasonality of natural resources in the rangelands. It is based on large-scale, carefully planned movements of livestock, which demands high levels of coordination between multiple users. This has led to the emergence of customs and institutions that enable decisions to be effectively made and enforced by local communities," he said.

Progress in ecological science and increasing pastoral voices in global fora have galvanized increasing attention to ways of life now seen as flexible and resilient rather than obsolete.

Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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Friday, June 19, 2015

FAO launches digital one-stop-shop, lauds family farmers



The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva has reiterated that family farmers are crucial allies in the fight against hunger and rural poverty through feeding the community and taking care of the earth, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The Director-General speaking at the launch of a new digital platform that aims to become a "one-stop shop" for information, data and legislation on the sector that produces some 80 per cent of the world's food, NaijaAgroNet gathered, recognized the contributions of family farmers to food security and poverty eradication worldwide.

The new digitized platform would gather information on family farming from all over the world, cutting across public programs, national and regional legislation and academic researches, thus creating an enabling environment for governments to build stronger policies in support of family farmers and farmers’ organisations.

Reiterating this stand, Chief of the Advocacy Unit in FAO's Office for Partnerships, Advocacy and Capacity Development, Francesco Pierri, noted that there was a need to share knowledge on family farming on the different kinds of policies that governments have implemented and the numerous activities of family farmers and their organizations in the field.

“There is a lot of information available on the web, but it's scattered -- we wanted one single access point for all the information out there, for anybody working in this field to use," he said.

The platform NaijaAgroNet learnt, would benefit diverse international entities including governments, family farmers' networks, United Nation agencies, Non Gonvernmental Organisations and research organizations. 

FAO maintained that with governments partnership, through the provision of large portion contents for the platform’s legal database that allows users to browse through a catalogue of family related policies and programmes per country, the UN agency aims at a second phase initiative to also host online policy dialogues after successfully establishing the platform.

Daniel Nsolibe/GEE
 

... Linking agrobiz, sustainable environs, people & technology

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Papaya mealybug attacks Tanzania

 NaijaAgroNet

The papaya mealybug, also called Paracoccus marginatus, has been detected in Tanzania’s coastal areas and in Zanzibar island; consequently igniting alarm among the region’s scientific and agriculture community, NaijaAgroNet.

 

Experts at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Tanzania fear that the endemic pest could put food security and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers in jeopardy.


“The climates of coastal West Africa and coastal East Africa are similarly tropical and humid, and these conditions clearly favour the pest.”

James Legg, an entomologist with the IITA in Tanzania, who is leading the pest control initiative, toldSciDev.Net in a chat which was also monitored by NaijaAgroNet said “It is most likely that the insects that came to Tanzania arrived from South Asia, since their occurrence has not been recorded in central African countries and there is significant trade between Asia and coastal East Africa.

 

He added: “It is true, however, that the climates of coastal West Africa and coastal East Africa are similarly tropical and humid, and these conditions clearly favour the pest.”

According to Legg, who first detected the pest in Tanzania, the insect could spread to other parts of the East African coast, including the Kenyan coast in the coming two years.

Another expert, Douglas Miano, a lecturer at
Kenya-based University of Nairobi’s Department of Plant Science and Crop Protection,NaijaAgroNet, suggested a way to help control the pest, which attacks the leaves, branches and fruits of the target plant: “Inspecting plant material would greatly help to control the spread of the pest,” Miano says.

Cyriacus Nnaji/ GEE

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Friday, April 24, 2015

200 dead as late rains, floods threaten food security – SADC





Executive Secretary, Southern African development Community, (SADC) Dr. Lawrence Stergomena Tax, has at a recent SADC Council of Ministers meeting held in Harare, Zimbabwe confirmed that late last year’s floods and rains of early this year, has threatened food security in the Southern Africa region, NaijaAgroNet reports.

NaijaAgroNet learnt that the food security situation in the region is expected to be less than satisfactory during the 2015/16 marketing year as a result of poor rains in most parts of the region, dry spells in some areas, and floods in other areas.

Dr Tax, NaijaAgroNet learnt, expressed dissatisfaction over the situation, noting that SADC would continue to monitor the situation and support early warning for food security and vulnerability assessments in the member states.

In a report on food security assessment presented at the 34th SADC Summit held in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe in August last year, NaijaAgroNet gathered that the region had recorded a cereal surplus of more than 670 000 metric tonnes during the previous agricultural marketing season year.

This, according to the report, was mainly attributed to good rainfall, better access to inputs such as seeds and fertilizer, as well as credit facilities and extension services.
NaijaAgroNet also learnt that the floods of which affected parts of Southern Africa between late last year and early this year, left 200 people dead and 500,000 displaced in Malawi, while in Mozambique, about 27, 838 households suffered losses in cash crops.

Meanwhile SADC during the council meeting, deliberated on innovative ways of dealing with problems associated with changes in weather patterns, NaijaAgroNet gathered that the Chairperson of the SADC Council of Ministers, Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, said it was now time for the region to seek ways to curb increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods which adversely affects key sectors of the regional economy including agriculture.

Mumbengegwi, who is also Zimbabwean Foreign Affairs Minister, told NaijaAgroNet that SADC to help deal with poor rains, would invest more in regional water infrastructure development such as irrigation, allowing the region to farm all year around and not only depend on climatic conditions to deal with poor rains.

As agriculture is the backbone of most economies in southern Africa, and more than 62 percent of the SADC region’s 277 million people are dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, NaijaAgroNet gathered that the Council of Ministers, would canvass for an increased budget allocations to agriculture as well as targeted subsidy programmes that would result in farmers accessing agricultural inputs and farm implements at cheaper rates.

Daniel Nsolibe/GEE 

... Linking agrobiz, sustainable environs, people & technology