Rotation speed, bad news for Red Planet pioneers

NaijaAgroNet:

A team of scientists from Holland, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK’s) University of Manchester have revealed the importance of a circadian body clock that matches the rotational speed of the earth in a new study, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to the Media Relations Officer, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Mr. Mike Addelman, these group of scientists studied animals in which variation in a single gene dramatically speeds up the natural circadian cycle from 24 to 20 hours.

“It is the first study to demonstrate of the value of having an internal body clock which beats in tune with the speed of the earth’s rotation,” he said.

The researchers, Addelman said, released animals with 24 hour or 20 hour clocks into outdoor pens, with free access to food, and studied how the proportion of animals with fast clocks changed in the population over a period of 14 months.

This, he said, allowed the team to study the impact of clock-speed in context of the “real-world” rather than indoors.

Mice with fast-running clock, experts said, gradually become less common with successive generations, so that by the end of the study, the population was dominated by animals with “normal” 24h clocks.

The research has potentially important implications for human health:  clock-disruption associated with abnormal work and lighting conditions, such as night shift work leads to health problems, such as increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The scientists pointed out that these studies now extended to the potential implications of space travel in the future, citing for instance, that the Martian day is 37 minutes longer than that on earth.

Professor Andrew Loudon, from The University of Manchester said the rotation speed of Mars may be within the limits of some people’s internal clock, but people with short running clocks, such as extreme morning types, are likely to face serious intractable long-term problems, and would perhaps be excluded from any plans National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has to send humans to Mars.

“The prospect of settling on Mars is a somewhat distant prospect. But if we ever do get to the Red Planet, I suspect we will be faced with body clock problems; those people with abnormally slow body clocks would be best suited to living there,” Prof. Loudon said.

Correctly, he pointed out that ticking body clock is essential for normal survival in the wild, and this has to be in phase with the rotation speed of the earth.

“Animals with clocks that do not run in synchrony with earth are selected against. Thus, the body clock has evolved as an essential survival component for life on earth,” he explained.

 Isaac Oyimah/GEE

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Allocating N4n to Aso Rock clinic is unrealistic – Rep Pondi

NaijaAgroNet:

The Honourable member representing Burutu Federal Constituency of Edo State at the Federal House of Representatives, Mr. Julius Pondi has said the budget would not be realistic, especially given the alleged fraudulent allocations quoted in the 2016 appropriation bill, reports NaijaAgroNet.

He cited for instance the allocation of N4bn to the maintenance of Aso Rock clinic, arguing that it does not make sense to vote such amount on Aso Rock clinic when at every little ailment those the clinic are meant for will be on their way for medical tourism.

NaijaAgroNet gathered that the sum of N3,889,015bn was initially budgeted for purchase of vehicles in the first budget, but this was changed downwards to N340m in the corrected version, while N3,914,197,062bn, which was not in the first budget document was now accommodated for purported annual maintenance of Villa facilities.

Pix: Hon. Pondi
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Syrian farmers need donors’ support

NaijaAgroNet:

The Syrian farmers need donors’ support now than ever, says the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), NaijaAgroNet reports.

The United Nations Agriculture agency made this disclosure in a press statement made available to NaijaAgroNet on Friday in Rome, noting that with the war in Syria now approaching its sixth year, agricultural production has plummeted and food supplies are at an all-time low, pushing millions of people into hunger. 

“FAO today called on governments to provide a boost in funding targeted at helping farmers keep their lands in production to prevent the situation from deteriorating even further,” part of the statement read.

The agency's appeal comes ahead of a 4 February international donors' conference in London being convened by the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Kuwait and the United Nations to mobilize support for humanitarian work in Syria.

"The conflict has decimated the agriculture sector, which has had a major impact on food supplies and markets. Currently over half of Syrians remaining in the country are food insecure, with one in three people unable to afford basic foods," said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.

NaijaAgroNet recalls that as national food production has collapsed, food prices in Syria have soared with prices in some markets for wheat flour and rice jumping by as much as 300 percent and 650 percent, respectively, over the past 18 months.

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Save & Grow adoption encourages ecosystem-based farming

NaijaAgroNet:

A new book from the stables of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has shown that eco-system-based farming has come of age, through the adoption of Save and Grow initiative, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The new FAO book launched Wednesday in Rome, takes a close look at how the world's major cereals maize, rice and wheat - which together account for an estimated 42.5 per cent of human calories and 37 per cent of our protein - can be grown in ways that respect and even leverage natural ecosystems. 

Drawing on case studies from around the planet, the new book illustrates how the "Save and Grow" approach to agriculture advocated by FAO is already being successfully employed to produce staple grains, pointing the way to a more sustainable future for farming and offering practical guidance on how the world can pursue its new sustainable development agenda.

"International commitments to eradicate poverty and tackle climate change require a paradigm shift towards a more sustainable and inclusive agriculture able to produce higher yields over the longer term," said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.

The two recent landmark global agreements, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - which require eradicating hunger and putting terrestrial ecosystems on a sound footing by 2030 - and the Paris Climate Change Agreement (COP21), only underscore the need for inclusive innovation in food systems, he adds. 

While the world's cereal harvests may be at record levels today, their productive base is increasingly precarious amid signs of groundwater depletion, environmental pollution, loss of biodiversity and other woes marking the end of the Green Revolution model. Meanwhile, global food production will need to grow by 60 percent - mostly on existing arable land and in the face of climate change  - to feed the future population in 2050,  making it all the more urgent for the smallholders who grow the majority of the world's crops to be enabled to do so more efficiently and in ways that don't further increase humanity's ecological debt.

Save and Grow is a broad-based approach to environmentally friendly, sustainable agriculture aimed at intensifying production, protecting and enhancing agriculture's natural resource base and reducing reliance on chemical inputs by tapping into the Earth's natural ecosystem processes, and to increase farmers' gross income. As such it is an approach intrinsically crafted to contribute to the SDGs and foster resilience to climate change.

Viable Save and Grow practices range from growing shade trees that shed their leaves when  adjacent maize crops most need sunlight, as tried with success in Malawi and Zambia, to scrapping tillage and leaving crop residues as soil surface mulch, a method applied on a massive scale by wheat farmers on the Kazakhstani steppe and increasingly by innovative slash-and-mulch practices adopted by farmers in the highlands of Central and South America. 

The time has now come for ideas that have proven themselves in farmers' fields to be upscaled in more ambitious national programmes, FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva says in the foreword to Save and Grow in Practice in Practice: A Guide to Sustainable Cereal Production, a book he described as "a contribution to creating the world we want."  

Isaac Oyimah/GEE
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FAO sets $50m emergency fund for Ethiopia drought

NaijaAgroNet:

The amount of drought witnessed at the end of 2015 and cross over to 2016 is giving the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) a lot of concern, hence it voted the sum of $50m for emergency in the drought-ridden Ethiopia, reports NaijaAgroNet.

The droughts attributed to the strongest El Niño weather episode in the last several decades, FAO said, has caused repeated crop failure, decimated livestock herds and driven some 10.2 million people across Ethiopia into food insecurity.

FAO revealed this to NaijaAgroNet in its emergency response plan to urgently protect livestock and rebuild crop production in the Horn of Africa nation. 

According to the FAO Representative for Ethiopia, Mr. Amadou Allahoury, the outlook for 2016 is very grim, adding that "After two consecutive seasons of failed crops, the success of the main cropping season that starts now will be critical to preventing conditions from worsening."

Mr. Amadou equally said that continued drought throughout the beginning of 2016, also means pasture will become even more scarce, which will negatively impact livestock keepers that rely on those grazing lands and water points for their food security.

"Food overall will become harder to access if we continue to see prices rise, food stocks deplete and livestock become weaker, less productive, and perish," he said. 

The El Niño phenomenon is associated with the abnormal warming of sea surface temperature in parts of the Pacific Ocean that has severe effects on global weather and climate patterns - leading to reduced rainfall and drought in some regions and heavy rains and flooding in others. 

Under the current El Niño, crop production in Ethiopia has dropped by 50 to 90 per cent in some regions and failed completely in the east. The drought resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of livestock.

Isaac Oyimah/GEE +Naija AgroNet @FAO News
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