The Kenya agricultural carbon project is breaking new ground in designing and implementing climate finance projects in the agricultural sector. The project is regarded as an innovative example for climate-smart agriculture within and outside the World Bank. For the first time, while increasing productivity and enhancing resilience to climate change, smallholder farmers in Africa will receive payments for greenhouse gas mitigation based on sustainable agricultural land management. Quantification of carbon sequestration is monitored based on a newly developed carbon accounting methodology.

Poverty reduction is a long-standing development objective of many developing countries and their aid donors, including the World Bank. To achieve this goal, these countries and organizations have sought to improve smallholder agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as part of a broader rural development agenda aimed at providing a minimal basket of goods and services in rural areas to satisfy basic human needs. These goods and services include not only food, health care, and education, but also infrastructure.

This study, competitiveness of the value chain of the agricultural sector in Cameroon, aims to help the Government achieve its objectives for the rural sector. The main objective of this study was to provide information on the potentials, investment and growth policies of commercial agriculture in Cameroon. It gives an overview of the constraints and analyzes the national, regional or international competitiveness of six value chains of the agricultural sector. This paper examines family and large agro-industrial farms from different regions of Cameroon.

This country note briefly summarizes information relevant to both climate change and agriculture in Ecuador, with focus on policy developments (including action plans and programs) and institutional make-up. Like most countries in Latin America, Ecuador has submitted one national communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with a second one under preparation. Land use change and forestry are the largest contributors to greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in the country.

Farmers in Asia like to grow cassava because the crop will tolerate long dry periods and poor soils, and will produce reasonable yields with little inputs. Most farmers realize, however, that cassava production on slopes can cause severe erosion, while production without fertilizer inputs may lead to a decline in soil productivity. Research has shown that cassava yields can be maintained for many years with adequate application of fertilizers, and that there are various ways to reduce erosion.

Coordinated formal efforts to generate technologies for enhancing agricultural development in Ethiopia was mainly rooted in formal research and development institutions up to very recently. A number of improved technologies have been generated wlth the efforts made so far and the superiority of some of the technologies over the traditional practices has already been proved, at least for the major commodities.

The livelihoods of mountain farmers are often constrained by poor access to markets and limited entrepreneurial skills for adding value to produce. Research and development organizations have now recognized that improving market access and enhancing the ability of resource-poor mountain farmers to diversify their links with markets are among the most pressing challenges in mountain agriculture.

The poster was prepared for Tropentag 2012: Resilience of Agricultural Systems against Crises, Gottingen, Germany, 19-21 September 2012. It briefed the objective, approaches, achievements and lessons of the Improving Productivity and Market Success (IPMS) project.

On 15 November 2012, as part of the IFAD East and Southern Africa regional meeting in Addis Ababa, ILRI was asked to convene and facilitate a 1 hour session on ways that CGIAR and IFAD could collaborate. The session drew on contributions from different CGIAR centres; it involved speakers from ILRI, IWMI and ICARDA. It provided a very good, but short, opportunity to make connections between some CGIAR staff and IFAD and project staff; several individual follow up conversations were triggered. 

The presentation (www.slideshare.net/ILRI/cgiar-and-ifad-sharing-and-scaling-up-innovations) reflected on current collaboration experiences between IFAD and the CGIAR, it introduced the ‘renewed’ research for development focus of the CGIAR and its multi-center Research Programs and it explored ideas for future collaboration.