Stories tagged: agriculture

Planting the Roots of Peace: Humanitarian Heidi Kühn wins 2023 World Food Prize for restoring agriculture to de-mined land in former war zones

Heidi Kühn of the United States will receive the 2023 World Food Prize for her farmer-focused development model that revitalizes farmland, food security, livelihoods, and resilience after devastating conflict. For more than two decades, she has shown more than a million people living in war-torn regions around the world a way forward for restoring peace and prosperity through agriculture. Continue reading →

Forward-thinking Farming: Regenerative agriculture in eastern Africa

Patrick Nyaga, Project Coordinator for Regenerative Agriculture at Farm Africa, explains how regenerative farming techniques can benefit farmers and the environment long term. 

It’s not easy being a farmer in eastern Africa. Those who rely on the land to make a living face many complex, overlapping challenges, from conflict in the region to the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and, above all, climate change.  Continue reading →

Saving Soils for People and Planet

Ebunoluwa Ijeoma Ajobiewe, Ambassador for the NextGen Ag Impact Network (NGIN) and advocate for youth in agriculture, underlines the importance of protecting soils for human and environmental health. 

World Soil Day on 5 December is an opportunity to reflect on the importance of soils to not only the environment but also human well-being. In a growing world where over two billion people are affected by food and nutrition insecurity and 95 per cent of our food comes from the soil, we can no longer afford to mismanage this earthly element. Fertile soils are a non-renewable resource that cannot be recovered within a human lifespan.  Continue reading →

Levelling the Playing Field: Seed access for farmers

Anastasia Mbatia, Senior Technical Manager for Agriculture, Farm Africa and author of Quality Declared Seed, unpacks how seed systems can be used to provide farmers with quality inputs, ultimately improving food security and livelihoods. 

Crop productivity in eastern Africa remains far lower than what it could be. Climate change and lack of investment have significant impacts, but seed systems are also majorly preventing farmers from growing to their full potential.  Continue reading →

Closing the Adaptation Gap: Harnessing the power of possibilities

Leanne Zeppenfeldt, Knowledge & Partnerships Officer and Bruce Campbell, Chief Innovation Strategist at Clim-Eat discuss how Earth Overshoot Day highlights the need to not only mitigate climate change but adapt to its effects.

By July 28th – Earth Overshoot Day – humans will have used more ecological resources and services this year than what our planet can regenerate.

The rate at which we are emitting greenhouse gases and using our clean water, healthy soil, oil reserves, and carbon-storing forests exceeds the Earth’s capacity. Despite the important role it plays to our lives and livelihoods, agriculture is also one of the largest drivers of planetary overshoot, and mitigation action to reduce our natural resource use and emissions is essential to #MoveTheDate of Earth Overshoot Day in the coming years.  Continue reading →

A Double Win: Revolutionising African agriculture to empower youth and sustain the continent’s development

Dr Dennis Rangi, Director General, Development at CABI, discusses the potential for Africa’s youth in agriculture.

An African agricultural revolution can not only help advance the continent’s development progress, but it can also solve the growing challenge of youth unemployment, especially in rural areas. 

Africa’s youth hold the key to the continent’s very survival and the burden to sustain wider global development. But we simply cannot rely upon young people to be only producers of food. Through upskilling and a digital ‘knowledge exchange’, they must also be involved across all stages of the value chain – starting from production.  Continue reading →