Blog and news
Don’t you think it is amazing that joint replacement operations are possible? Or that pneumonia and tuberculosis are not a death-warrant diagnosis? Anyone who has ever had a bad gastro-intestinal infection would agree: the discovery of antibiotics is one of the most extraordinary achievements in medical science.
The ASEAN countries are looking to scale up and diversify their efforts to build resilience in the agriculture sector, which faces increasingly frequent crop failures. If Thailand wants to continue to be one of the world’s top rice producers, it will need to help farmers withstand the shock of more-frequent crop failures. This is where agricultural insurance comes in.
Ever heard of Kibera vertical farms? These are not perhaps the designer skyscraper greenhouses you might imagine, but rather sacks filled with soil. However, Kibera dwellers are able to grow tomatoes, spinach and kale in those sacks which, together with ugali and eggs, from Kibera-kept chickens, make a nutritious meal.
Policy recommendations provided by the World Committee on Food Security (CFS) are not legally binding; implementation is up to country members. But let’s skip the talks about why this should be done at all and imagine that all politicians agreed to actively take the CFS recommendations forward.
Power distribution and poverty are important reasons of why El Niño and other natural phenomenon become “disasters” in some places but not in other.
Many development initiatives have limited impact. Educational curricula are developed, but children do not learn. Nurses are trained, but clinics lack staff. Governments adopt reforms, but institutional practices remain the same and citizens experience little change.
Lisa Westholm, Focali member and PhD candidate in rural development at Swedish Agricultural University (SLU), will organize a panel at next year’s IUFRO forestry congress in Freiburg, Germany. The theme for the 2017 congress is “Interconnecting Forests, Science and People”.
Matthew Fielding is the Communications Manager at the Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative (SIANI). Established in 2008, SIANI aims to enhance collaboration among international development actors with a focus on reducing poverty through sustainable agricultural production.
Is it OK to keep eating meat? Or even milk, cheese and eggs? It’s almost guaranteed that this topic will come up whenever dinner table conversation turns to sustainability. Livestock production has been implicated in many of our biggest environmental challenges, from climate change to deforestation to the critical state of many coastal ecosystems.