This study assessed intermediate results of an investment intended to support climate change adaptation and resilience-building among farmers’ cooperatives in Rwanda. The assessment was based on a purposive sampling survey of farmers’ perspectives conducted in sites in 10 programme intervention districts of the country’s 30 districts.
Climate variability and change threaten and impact negatively on biodiversity, agricultural sustainability, ecosystems, and economic and social structures – factors that are all vital for human resilience and wellbeing. To cope with these challenges, embracing sustainability in food production is therefore essential. Practising sustainable agriculture is one way of ensuring sustainability in pro-poor farming communities in low-income countries.
CCAFS (through the International Livestock Research Institute and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society) and the Africa Climate Policy Center sponsored a workshop on ‘Strengthening Regional Capacity for Climate Services in Africa’, held on 27th October 2015 at Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
Background: Up to now, efforts to help local communities out of the food-insecurity trap were guided by researcher (or other actors)-led decisions on technologies to be implemented by the communities. This approach has proved inefficient because of low adoption of the so-called improved technologies. This paper describes the strategic approaches to the development of a climate-smart village (CSV) model in the groundnut basin of Senegal.
This issue of Sustentabilidade em Debate brings together three studies that complement each other with the aim of answering the same question: can the adoption of good management practices for production, conservation of natural resources and working conditions be justified economically? In other words, is the adoption or pursuit of sustainability a good deal for farmers? This question stems from a mismatch between common sense and the experience of Sebrae-MG’s Educampo Program, Rabobank and Imaflora with a large number of farmers.
The Africa Leadership Training and Capacity Building Program (Africa Lead), aims to support the capacity building program of the US Government’s Feed the Future Initiative, which aligns US Government development assistance with Africa-owned agriculture development plans that are, in turn, aligned with the African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program.
The increasing demand for agricultural commodities is a major cause of tropical deforestation. However, pressure is increasing for greater sustainability of commodity value chains. This includes the demand to establish new crop plantations and pasture areas on already deforested land so that new forest clearing for agriculture is minimized. Where tree crops are planted as part of agroforestry systems on deforested land, this amounts to a form of re-agro-forestation which can generate environmental benefits in addition to crop production.
Brazilian agriculture is facing another expansion cycle to the Cerrado region, more specific in the Northeast. The first agriculture expansion cycle to the Midwest was in seventies encouraged and developed by Brazilian Government with farmers from southern and southeast Brazil, which were traditional small farmers with some experience, low budget and a remarkable determination. All of these efforts after 20 years resulted in an outstanding development of a part of the country with economy based on agribusiness (soybean, corn, cotton, livestock, poultry, swine, etc.).
Providing food and other products to a growing human population while safeguarding natural ecosystems and the provision of their services is a significant scientific, social and political challenge. With food demand likely to double over the next four decades, anthropization is already driving climate change and is the principal force behind species extinction, among other environmental impacts. The sustainable intensification of production on current agricultural lands has been suggested as a key solution to the competition for land between agriculture and natural ecosystems.
Findings from a survey on sources of income and land allocation outcomes of 578 households from 26 communities with diverse ethnic composition at distinct environmental settings in Ucayali (Peruvian Amazon) are used to contrast livelihood strategies featuring high forest and high agriculture dependency, examining whether agricultural intensification can be linked to lower deforestation. A typology of households based on their land use allocation profile was used to assess current and cumulative cleared land.