Governance and policy blog posts

Rumour has it that planting cassava is inherently bad for the soil. But, cassava can apparently grow well in poor, degraded soils with no or very little fertiliser application at all.

Poor and marginalized populations are usually found to be the most affected by land and soil degradation. How can the scientific community ensure that land and soil degradation are included in the SDGs?

One of the major issues in realizing Africa’s food production potential is the lack of organic materials to adequately enrich the soils, making mineral fertilizers most crucial to replenish soil fertility. While there has been renewed interest in fertilizer subsidies, they remain controversial.

Currently the cost of land degradation reaches about US$490 billion per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it. To rectify this we should first get the basics right: credible quantitative information about current status, drivers, indicators, thresholds, and spatial variability.

In the least favored regions of the world, food production per capita remains at the same level as in the 1960s. There are many reasons, from a purely agronomic perspective, for such disparities. New inputs from science can support indigenous knowledge for landscape restoration and ecological intensification.

Land degradation is no longer a local problem. Increasing land scarcity means that smallholder farmers in Africa may find themselves competing for land in a global market that has seen an exponential rise in foreign investment in soil and water or ‘land grabbing’. Conversion of new lands contributes to climate change. What are we doing about it?

Precious little work directly addresses the corporate presence. Those who want effective policies to protect smallholders and promote sustainable landscapes need to do some serious thinking about how to handle agribusiness corporations.

One of several insights from the recently published Survey and Analysis of the Data Requirements for Stakeholders in African Agriculture is that people tend to feel their data is the best, the truest, the most suitable data for informing the decisions of others and that everyone else’s data is a bit suspect.

The Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog is one year old! Reflecting on the year and into the future: for researchers, it used to be “publish or perish”. Now I think it’s “blog or die”.

The First World Irrigation Forum in Mardin, Turkey, gives us a chance to take stock on how irrigated agriculture is performing and its role in meeting future demands for food. In agricultural water management, we often appear to be talking about the same issues as three decades ago...

At a recent meeting it was suggested that water markets could be the next big investment opportunity. I suggested the reality is much more complicated.

Recovering water, nutrients, energy and organic matter from otherwise wasted resources provides an opportunity for closed-loop business models to both generate revenue and make valuable resources available for use, for example in agriculture.