Agroforstwirtschaft | Agroforstwirtschaft, Agroforstsysteme in Europa

The Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change report was released recently by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. Containing seven key recommendations, the report stresses the importance of assisting vulnerable populations to adapt to climate change and food security issues. According to the report, multi-benefit farming systems like agroforestry should be encouraged to enable more productive and resilient livelihoods and ecosystems. Such practices are said to empower marginalized food producers to increase productivity when combined with strengthened land and water rights.

Among the statistics presentedin the report are that1.3 billion tonnes of food produced for consumption is wasted annually while losses due to events such as droughts are estimated at around 8 billion US dollars. Commissioner Chair, Professor John Beddington, says he is dismayed that despite the level of wastage, 1.5 billion people are still forced to depend on degraded land.

“We’ve seen in the last two or three years significant price spikes, following on decades of declines in real food prices. And those spikes have really presented real problems, exacerbating poverty. Something of the order of a hundred million people went into poverty following the 2007/8 price spike – another 40 or so million went into poverty after the 2010/11 price spike,” said Beddington.

With the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP 17) less than two weeks away, the Commission says economic incentives will encourage smallholder farmers to partake in sustainable intensification of agriculture. Combined with stronger land tenure rights, the incentives are seen as important steps towards the prevention of further loss of forests and grasslands.

The Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change report can be downloaded from here.

A model farmer does not effectively train other farmers on new innovative farming methods if they do not possess appropriate dissemination skills, a recent study has found

Farmer trainers should be selected based on their interest and ability to teach others rather than on their successes in implementing farming techniques, shows a new study led by Steve Franzel, a scientist at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).

In the study by Franzel, Charles Wambugu and Tutui Nanok, 126 adopters of fodder shrubs, fast-growing leguminous shrubs for feeding dairy cows, in Kenya took part in the study that found that 40% of expert farmers were not effective disseminators.

About 225,000 smallholder farmers in East Africa are growing fodder shrubs to increase their milk production. The overall impact of the shrubs in terms of additional net income from milk is high, at US$19.7 million to $29.6 million in Kenya alone over the past 15 years.

In most extension projects the model farmer is selected based on their expertise and how successfully they have been in attaining and in some cases superseding the desired results.

“This finding has great implications on how extension is practiced,” said Franzel. “It means that choosing a farmer to demonstrate and teach other farmers will only be as effective as their skills in passing on the information.”

The results of the study suggest that extension programs that choose farmer trainers on the basis of their farming expertise will not promote dissemination as effectively as those that choose trainers on the basis of their dissemination skills.

“I have helped my fellow farmers in improving their farming methods because I have been able to show them how much more milk I am producing thanks to the fodder shrubs. I have also been able to teach them how to increase milk production on their farms because I have had training on how to teach other farmers,” said Rose Wanjiku, one of the farmers who was part the study.

“Changing how we choose farmer trainers in this way would see more extension projects reap the full benefits of their work,” said Franzel, who was speaking at the ongoing, Innovations in Extension and Advisory Services: Linking Knowledge to Policy and Action Conference underway in Nairobi, Kenya.

This major international conference organized by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) seeks to bolster faltering support for government agencies, private operators, and individuals who collectively provide a critical link in the field between agriculture knowledge holders and policy makers and millions of struggling smallholder farmers, in developing countries and more particularly in Africa.