Land blog posts

Enabling Africa to feed Africa will be the major theme of this year’s AASW—but this requires much more than just a Green Revolution. Achieving food self-sufficiency is complex and multi-faceted.

Over the past five years, the idea of sustainable intensification – of producing more food from the same area of land while reducing the environmental impacts – has been gaining traction in policy debate.

As gender gains attention in the agricultural world, data and information show women as major players in food production. But, development practitioners and policy makers have been slow to recognize women’s vital and diverse role in food security.

This blog is part of WLE’s participation in the conference on “Water in the Anthropocene: Challenges for Science and Governance. Indicators, Thresholds and Uncertainties of the Global Water System“.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we were all mobile. Movement was what enabled our ancestors to track resources that were here today, gone tomorrow. In parts of the world where water, pasture or good hunting are not constantly available, mobility is still the key that unlocks scattered resources.

As the discussion on farm size continues to grow from Stephen Carr's blog post on farm size, Carr responds to comments. "I find the snippets from pro large-farm comments lack an apparent awareness of the real issues..."

Will 2013 be pinpointed as the year in which Africa’s ‘Green Revolution’ finally took root? It marks the tenth anniversaries of the 2003 Maputo Declaration and the resulting Africa-led Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP)...

Whatever happened to jatropha? Is the wonder biofuel that crashed back on the up? And should we care? Last July, while visiting Liberia, I met a local man who said he was a “recruiter” of smallholder farmers to grow jatropha, the bush that could, if you believe the hype, deliver cheap biodiesel to the world.

The past six years have initiated an extraordinary period in history when slowly developing constraint on growth - the availability of land and water resources - shocked those responsible for food security. One of the worst-hit regions has been the Middle East...

Some consider Raj-anna a pioneer and entrepreneur of human waste. He always knew the potential for reuse of faecal sludge in agriculture, but he was a pioneer at intercepting ‘honey suckers.’

This week we are publishing thirteen CPWF outcome stories. Just a few days after the groundbreaking ceremony of the CGIAR Headquarters in Montpellier, where French authorities were told how the new CGIAR was “big, bold and beautiful”, these outcome stories may look small, even tiny. “Islands of success”in the middle of an ambitious “ocean of change”.