PGR News from the Pacific

2010-01-07T17:59:00.000-08:00

AGRICULTURE: KASTOM GADEN AT A CROSSROAD

From : Island Bussiness

Better farms, better income

Ivor Hanson

The dozen or so men and women sitting at the rough-hewn tables in a large leaf hut in Honiara pondered their worksheets, sketched pictures of crops, trucks, ships and markets, and carefully answered their questionnaires on value chains and cost reviews.
Earlier that morning, Heiko Bammann, an Enterprise Development Officer based in Rome with the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, had impressed upon this group of Solomon Islanders the link between better farms and better income, sharing information, and pinpointing every step taken from seed selection to final sale.
“What do farmers need?” Bammann had asked before detailing farmer-driven success stories in Papua New Guinea, Thailand and India. “They need to know what the market needs! They need to get their produce to the market!”
Welcome to the new Kastom Gaden Association. Or, rather, the new role this Solomon Islands NGO is fashioning for itself.
No longer just a resource to help its members get the best use of seeds, soil, crops and yields, KGA now emphasises marketing and sales margins as well.
And no wonder: with Solomons’ food trade recently estimated by the AusAid-supported Community Sector Programme at $800 million, and the country’s population due to double in the coming decades to 1.1 million, the demand for food will be increasing—along with the chance to profit from it.
At the two-day Value Chain Workshop last September—at which four provinces were represented—Kastom Gaden began implementing this new approach of getting farmer-members to regard their plots of land as a business. And themselves as not just producers but entrepreneurs.
As FAO’s Bammann made clear: “The farmer has to be at the center of it all.”
Founded in 1994 as a project of APACE, an Australian non-governmental organisation, 2009 marks 10 years since Kastom Gaden became one of this country’s first local NGOs.
Tasking itself with “promoting self-reliance”, Kastom Gaden has made “improving the lives of rural people” its direct if daunting mission.
And although the means by which Kastom Gaden seeks to achieve its goals—“strengthening food security and sustainable livelihood development”—echo mission statements adopted by other such players, what sets Kastom Gaden apart is its focus at the village level, what Tony Jansen, a founder of, and now an advisor to KGA, calls “our farmer-to-farmer approach.”
Johnson Ladota, a Taro farmer from northern Malaita who has worked with KGA since 2003, bears this out. When the Value Chain Workshop ended, he looked forward to spreading the word on entrepreneurship to the highlands.
Painful but necessary: “I see the chain,” Ladota said, “I see the market in a new way now. It is a new challenge for us, another challenge, but we can do it. We will organise ourselves.”
In its own way, Kastom Gaden has faced its own challenges and has organised itself as well.After recently experiencing what co-founder Jansen calls a “painful but necessary” re-structuring that did away with a fragmented “to-and-fro” management approach, KGA is now in a position where it can “make the projects fit the structure and not the other way round”.
Still, just as its members must now take on an entrepreneurial role to improve their incomes, so too must KGA to ensure its own future.
In its 15 years of existence, Kastom Gaden has grown from having a few hundred farmer-members and a handful of staff, to now having over 2000 members and a staff of 22.
In addition, it has 10 partner organisations in five Solomons provinces, works with the S.I. Planting Material Network, is a member of the Melanesian Farmer First Network, publishes newsletters, offers a library service, broadcasts nationally a weekly radio show—and has a budget of SB$4 million.
Although Kastom Gaden has had a long relationship with Australia’s Agency for International Development—AusAid funded the Australian NGO that established Kastom Gaden, and is currently KGA’s major donor. Both sides recognise the risk of being overly dependent on one source of funding, what Paul Greener, a Honiara-based AusAid Rural Development Advisor, calls a “moral hazard.”
Simply put, if an organisation wants to make the leap from being a donor project to becoming a social enterprise, it needs to broaden its funding base and open itself to various means of income.
In regards to Kastom Gaden, such possibilities exist. KGA could pursue having a range of donors, with KGA’s Clement Hadosaia mentioning New Zealand and the European Union as potential candidates, along with Oxfam and the ICCO, both of which recently funded projects with them.
Community Sector Programme Agricultural Livelihoods Advisor Grant Vinning cites successful marketing efforts by peanut, vegetable, and fruit growers, in particular a man known as Patterson the Pineapple Seller, who successfully covers his transportation costs by selling to shops, thereby making his sales at Honiara’s Central Market pure profit.
“Solomons farmers are entrepreneurs-in-waiting,” Vinning says, adding, “Food Security is not just about growing food, but having the money to buy food.”
KGA has bolstered its once vibrant, then faltering, fresh fruit and vegetables delivery business, “Farm Fresh”, by having Jennifer Kellie, a Honiara businesswoman who also runs a successful dried fruits company, take charge.
Indeed, KGA co-founder Jansen, sees the possibility of Kastom Gaden “incubating” other such businesses and then spinning them off to KGA members, with Kastom’s Hadosaia suggesting poultry, seedlings and seeds as likely candidates.
Hadosaia doesn’t seem too worried about his organisation’s future down the line.
“We’re serious about sustainability,” he says. “There are plenty of possibilities and we are exploring them as ways for us to make money.”
Hopefully Hadosaia’s take will turn out to be a case of well-placed confidence, and not of complacency.
It would be a shame if KGA’s less than perturbed outlook turns out to be an instance of so-called “Last Match In The Box” thinking, when a problem is only dealt with once it’s upon you, i.e. once you’ve run out of matches, run out of options.
Ideally, KGA will market itself successfully to a range of donors, foundations, even private companies; build up its Farm Fresh enterprise and spur others; complement even further its work with the Ministry of Agriculture.
Ideally, in other words, KGA has been going over its equivalent of a Value Chain.

2010-01-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

Famine Foods

Source : Crops for the Future

From Robert Freedman, Tucson, Arizona:

I am doing ethnobotanical research on a little-known category of underutilized plants – Specifically, the data I am coordinating documents food plants used throughout the world, during periods of drought-induced famine and food scarcity. These data are accessible, on the Web, at: http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/FamineFoods/ff_home.html

My intention, in coordinating these data, is to provide a resource, of proven drought-resistant food plants, some of which, because of known high nutrient content, have a potential for improvement, that would make possible the development of new crops, for populations relying on non-indigenous and environmentally at-risk spp.. This idea is articulated further, on the Web, at ‘Notes on the Famine Food Web Site’: http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/FamineFoods/faminefoods.html

Based on what is known of those famine food plants, which have been analyzed in the laboratory, these data also provide a large corpus of spp.., still in need of nutritional analysis, to ascertain which may have nexpectedly high nutritional values and thereby become candidates for growth trials and selection. I would like to contact other specialists, who have an interest in arid land subsistence; and development of underutilized food plants. If you could suggest any individuals and organizations whom I can contact, I will be most appreciative.

For more information please contact Bob Freedman at namdeerf@gmail.com

2010-01-07T12:19:00.000-08:00

American Samoa : Governor establishes Food Policy Council by executive order

From : Samoanews

By Fili Sagapolutele fili@samoanews.com
December 2009

Through an executive order, Gov. Togiola Tulafono established the American Samoa Food Policy Council, which will advise the governor on all aspects of the food system in the territory.

Creation of the council comes on the heels of the “ASIASIGA: a Conference on Food Security in American Samoa” held in February this year in which several issues were discussed including the direction of the future of food security and self-reliance in American Samoa.

It was at the conference that participants supported the establishment of the council because there is a need to strengthen food security in American Samoa. Given the territory’s vulnerability to risk factors related to the Territory’s geographic isolation, the limited opportunities to expand export earnings, declining land available for agriculture, the price of oil and dependency on imported food, it was considered essential.

According to the governor, a territorial food policy that is designed to produce a safe, sufficient, and nutritious food supply must also balance economic, environmental, political and social considerations important to the people of the Territory.

Additionally, there is a need for a lead entity to give sustained attention to food and nutrition issues in a comprehensive manner.

COUNCIL’S PURPOSE

The executive order states that the council advises the governor on all aspects of the food system in American Samoa with the overall objective to advise on the critical issue of access to good nutrition for all the people of American Samoa under all conditions.

Such advice shall include the territory’s baseline agricultural and fisheries production output; vulnerability of the Territory to food and nutritional insecurity because of the many risk factors; importance of food safety; the need to stockpile food supplies and seeds of essential crops; and the need to identify gaps in the territory’s emergency preparedness with respect to food security.

Additionally, rates of non-communicable diseases in American Samoa and their link to food and nutrition; strategies to promote local foods and engage young people; and the importance, in connection with food security, of protecting and maintaining our natural resources such as water quality, soil conservation, forestry health, air quality, and coral reefs will be included.

MEMBERSHIP

The council membership shall include, at the Governor’s discretion, the directors or their official designees from the American Samoa Community College (represented by the Director of the Land Grant program), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources, the Department of Health, the Department of Commerce, the President of the American Samoa Farmers’ Co-operative, and the Governor’s Senior Policy Advisor.

Within the Council are seven working groups: Basic Food Supplies; Nutrition and Health; Special Needs; Food Safety; Emergency Preparedness; Legislation group; and Monitoring and Reporting. The executive order outlines the functions of each working group.

Each group’s jurisdiction may be construed broadly enough to allow for the inclusion of other issues related to the group’s purview and to ensure that each issue is properly addressed, according to the executive order, adding that members may be drawn from the community in accordance with any special interests.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The director of the Land Grant program chairs the council, who elects their vice chair. Staff of the departments cited as council members are to provide support staff for the council, who shall ensure that it provides an effective forum for diverse stakeholders to work together to create positive changes in the local food system. They will do so by seeking common purposes, fostering collaborative decision making, sharing information whether in printed or electronic formats, adopting integrated approaches to local issues, and maintaining appropriate cultural sensitivity.

The council shall issue advisory reports to the Governor, upon request by the Chief Executive and no less than twice a year, on the first Monday of every June and December.

On behalf of the governor’s office, the council shall issue an annual summary report to the Legislature and Judicial branches. The council will, as needed, liaise with the Legislative and Judicial.

The order also states that the council shall identify specific roles that non-governmental organizations, private sector entities, and community entities can play in partnership with the Government with respect to the design, implementation, and evaluation of policies and strategies.

It can also explore cooperation with regional, national and international organizations in support of council goals.

2010-01-07T12:13:00.000-08:00

Socioeconomic Obstacles to Establishing a Participatory Plant Breeding Program for Organic Growers in the United States

From : Sustainability 2010, 2, 73-91
Ruth Mendum and Leland L. Glenna *

Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA; E-Mail: rmm22@psu.edu
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: llg13@psu.edu; Tel.: +1-814-863-8636; Fax: +1-814-865-3746.

Received: 3 November 2009 / Accepted: 24 December 2009 / Published: 29 December 2009

Abstract:

Proponents of participatory plant breeding (PPB) contend that it is more conducive to promoting agricultural biodiversity than conventional plant breeding. The argument is that conventional plant breeding tends to produce crops for homogenous environments, while PPB tends to be directed at meeting the diverse environmental conditions of the farmers participating in a breeding program. Social scientific research is needed to highlight the complex socioeconomic factors that inhibit efforts to initiate PPB programs. To contribute, we offer a case study of a participatory organic seed production project that involved a university breeding program, commercial organic seed dealers, and organic farmers in the Northeastern United States. We demonstrate that, although PPB may indeed promote agricultural biodiversity, several socioeconomic obstacles must be overcome to establish such a program.
Keywords: agricultural biodiversity; socioeconomic context; plant breeding

2010-01-05T13:02:00.000-08:00

International Year of Biodiversity

From : http://www.countdown2010.net/year-biodiversity

The UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB). Throughout the year countless initiatives will be organized to disseminate information, promote the protection of biodiversity and encourage organizations, institutions, companies and individuals to take direct action to reduce the constant loss of biological diversity worldwide.

Countdown 2010 works at governmental level by monitoring countries’ responses to the 2010 Biodiversity Target and at local level by mobilising local actors that take concrete actions. In only a few years of activity, Countdown 2010 has been able to mobilize an increasing number of actors ranging from local authorities and businesses to civil society organizations. With a powerful network of more than 900 Partners, Countdown 2010 is one of the leading initiatives mobilizing action for the 2010 Target.

Through its wide and well-established network, Countdown 2010 will be a key global actor for IYB in Europe and around the world. Countdown 2010 Partners will provide one of the main information channels and will be a major vehicle for reaching target groups worldwide.

Objectives of IYB

Raise awareness of the importance of conserving biodiversity for human well-being and promote understanding of the economic value of biodiversity

Enhance public knowledge of the threats to biodiversity and means to conserve it

Engage an increasing number of people

Celebrate the achievements by governments and Countdown 2010 Partners

Report on possible failures to achieve the Target

Use momentum to trigger even more action for biodiversity

Begin to communicate the post-2010 target(s).

Countdown 2010 celebrates IYB
Countdown 2010 is organising a number of events to bring Partners together to coordinate their actions, events and messages for the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) in 2010. Among the numerous initiatives planned for next year:

2010 Success Stories. Countdown 2010 Partners’ achievements in biodiversity conservation will be featured in a series of “2010 Success Stories” which will be featured in multimedia formats on the Countdown 2010 website.

Key international events. Countdown 2010 will participate in key international events and organize several events on the 2010 Target and the post-2010 framework. It will also actively support the Secretariat of the CBD (SCBD) for its events and the celebrations of international days in 2010. Countdown 2010 will be present at, among others:

Launch of IYB by COP 9 President, Berlin, Germany in January
Opening of the IYB, launch of the UNESCO exhibition, Paris, France in January
Trondheim conference, Norway in February
FIFA World Cup, South Africa in June
United Nations General Assembly, New York, USA in September
10th Conference of the Parties, Nagoya, Japan in October
Closing of the IYB, Kanazawa, Japan in December
2010 Biodiversity Year Schedule of Events. Countdown 2010 hosts a calendar of events happening in 2010 and beyond. The calendar will be linked to the SCBD calendar and will focus on public awareness events organized by partners and other stakeholders.

2010 Communications. Special publications and promotional merchandise will be produced for IYB. A targeted Ambassadors programme will be developed in cooperation with Partners. A mass action promoted by Countdown 2010 through its Partners will seek to engage people beyond the environmental community.

Engagement with business. Special projects will be developed with the Countdown 2010 business Partners. In addition, companies will be asked to undertake a specific 2010 commitment for biodiversity.

Mobilizing local authorities. Several events on local authorities’ contribution to the 2010 Target and post-2010 framework will be organized in partnership with Countdown 2010 Partners.

Global action for IYB. Countdown 2010 Multiregional Hubs in South America, Africa and Asia are planning their celebrations for IYB. They will replicate some of the initiatives carried out at European level and undertake several more of their own.
Days to the end of 2010

2009-11-22T19:04:00.001-08:00

The impact of the European Novel Food Regulation on trade and food innovation based on traditional plant foods from developing countries

From : ScienceDirect

Michael Hermann, a,

aBioversity International, c/o Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 413 St Jacques, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2Y1N9

Received 29 January 2009; revised 10 August 2009; accepted 15 August 2009. Available online 9 September 2009.

Abstract
The stringent food safety assessment for novel foods required by the European Union’s Novel Food Regulation (NFR) places a high burden of proof on those bringing traditional food products to the EU market not consumed in the EU prior 1997. The regulation has emerged as a non-tariff trade barrier for heritage foods from developing countries that are viewed as “exotic” from the EU perspective. We show how the regulation has discouraged investment in supply chains and market development, and how this negatively affects income generation and rural poverty alleviation in developing countries. Focusing on plant-derived foods, this paper proposes to recognize traditional exotic foods in current EU law as a food category sui generis with food safety evidence requirements being proportionate to the risks they may pose. We argue that development activities promoting export food chains must increasingly accommodate legitimate food safety concerns about neglected food species in project design and seek to generate data to enhance regulatory acceptance in target markets.

Keywords: Market access barriers; Traditional foods; Food safety; EU Novel Food Regulation; Neglected crops; Export supply chains

Article Outline
Introduction
New income opportunities for poor countries from traditional food products
The relevance of trade in traditional exotic foods to development and poverty alleviation
The EU Novel Food Regulation
Procedures and implementation since 1997
Implementation of the Novel Food Regulation from 1997 to 2008
Authorized applications
Noni juice and leaves
Baobab fruit pulp
Allanblackia
Denied applications of traditional foods under the NFR
Other traditional foods challenged by the NFR
Discussion
Adverse impact of the Novel Food Regulation on trade in biodiversity products
Need for the recognition of exotic traditional foods as a food category sui generis
Evidence requirements for traditional exotic foods
The need for enhanced scientific documentation of traditional foods
Acknowledgements
References

2009-11-22T18:54:00.000-08:00

USDA Highlights Specialty Crop Research and Extension

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Posted on: 19th November 2009

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that USDA has awarded more than $46 million through the Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) to solve critical specialty crop agriculture issues, address priorities and solve problems through multifunctional research and extension.

“Specialty crops are an important part of American agriculture, valued at nearly $50 billion every year,” Vilsack said. “This significant investment into research, education and extension will enable specialty crop producers to improve their products and increase their profitability.”

The Specialty Crop Research Initiative was established by the 2008 Farm Bill to support the specialty crop industry by developing and disseminating science-based tools to address the needs of specific crops in five focus areas: 1) improve crop characteristics through plant breeding, genetics and genomics; 2) address threats from pests and diseases; 3) improve production efficiency, productivity and profitability; 4) develop new innovations and technologies and 5) develop methods to improve food safety. Each of the focus areas received at least 10 percent of the available funds. The majority of the funded projects address two or more focus areas.

The projects funded in 2009 address research and extension needs for crops that span the entire spectrum of specialty crops production, from studying invasive mealy bug pests in west coast vineyards to developing biodegradable mulches for specialty crops produced under protective covers. Major projects were also funded to protect important specialty crops from invasive pests and to develop improved varieties.

Although 20 institutions will manage the research/extension grant funds from this program, each award includes an average of 8 principal investigators from three other states who will work together in a multi-disciplinary approach to solve problems. All of the awards required 100 percent matching funds from non-federal sources which will double the impact of the award dollars.

2009-11-22T18:42:00.000-08:00

agroBIODIVERSITY A NEW SCIENCE AGENDA FOR BIODIVERSITY IN SUPPORT OF SUSTAINABLE AGROECOSYSTEMS

From : http://www.agrobiodiversity-diversitas.org

Biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes affects not just the production of food, fuel, and fiber, but also a range of ecological services supporting clean water supplies, habitats for wild species, and human health. The world’s population of 6.3 billion people is projected to grow to 9 billion by 2050. To meet the increased demand for food, more land will be converted to agriculture, and agricultural intensification will increase, thereby increasing the pressure on biodiversity in natural ecosystems. Given the expected growth in human population and predicted environmental change, research is needed predicted effects on environmental change, research is needed that shows how the utilization and conservation of biodiversity can provide ecosystem services to satisfy both current
and future needs. The goal of the agroBIODIVERSITY science plan and implementation strategy is to establish the scientific basis needed to address the trade-offs between food production, biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services,
and human well being in agricultural landscapes. Three key research foci of the agroBIODIVERSITY Science Plan integrate the biological and social sciences:
(1) To assess biodiversity in agricultural landscapes and the anthropogenic drivers of biodiversity change; (2) To identify the goods and services provided by agrobiodiversity at various levels of biological organization, e.g., genes, species, communities, ecosystems, and landscapes; (3) To evaluate the socioeconomic options for the sustainable use of biodiversity in agricultural landscapes. Innovative biodiversity-rich farming systems can potentially be high-yielding and sustainable, and thus support persistence of wild species by limiting the adverse effects
of agriculture on habitats. Adoption of farming practices that utilize and conserve biodiversity may ultimately improve environmental quality and limit agricultural
expansion. Conservation of biodiversity and human knowledge from traditional agroecosystems is an urgent priority, to support human societies that rely on its cultural services, and for its potential for solving agricultural problems, now and in the future. Implementation of the agroBIODIVERSITY Science Plan will involve collaboration between geneticists, ecologists, anthropologists, and economists, to cross ecosystem boundaries to understand the environmental and social drivers of biodiversity change, ecosystem services provided by biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, and how to use this information for policy-relevant strategies to meet
human needs. Innovative methods for data handling and analysis across disciplines are required, as are protocols for integrating formal and informal knowledge. Workshops, publications, and projects by international networks of scientists will result in various scientific products that will increase useful knowledge for a variety of stakeholder groups.

Examples of activities will include:

Assemble and synthesize current knowledge,

Develop new approaches, methods, and models for
assessing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes, and for
determining issues that affect the sustainable use and
conservation of biodiversity in agriculture
Establish international networks that promote research
and capacity building among researchers involved in biodiversity
science in agricultural landscapes

Conduct research linking the biophysical and socioeconomic
sciences to develop new knowledge that will support
decisions for biodiversity utilization and conservation
in agricultural landscapes

Produce synthetic outcomes of research activities and
promote the development of policy-relevant materials related
to sustainable use of biodiversity

Lead outreach efforts to show the successful outcomes
of approaches that link biophysical and socioeconomic
sciences for sustainable use of biodiversity in
agricultural

2009-11-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

Recent Publications from UH-CTAHR's Office of Communication Services
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From : CTAHR

*** Free Publications ***
The publications listed below by their subject category are now available for downloading from the CTAHR free publications webpage. http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/freepubs
AgriBusiness
The economics of cacao production in Kona (with spreadsheet)
Kent Fleming, Virginia Easton Smith, Skip Bittenbender, AB-17 12 p.
Entrepreneur’s Toolbox
A profile of minority business owners
Diane Masuo, Y.L. Malroutu, ET-10 6 p.
Livestock Management
Swine health management for Hawaii
Halina Zaleski, R.D. Willer, E.S. Terway, LM-21 5 p.
Soil and Crop Management
Benefits and costs of using perennial peanut as living mulch for fruit trees in Hawaii
Ted Radovich, Linda Cox, Jari Sugano, Travis Idol, SCM-27 10 p.
Maximizing yields of corn for silage and bioethanol in Hawaii by increasing plant density
Jim Brewbaker, SCM-28 7 p.
Sustainable Agriculture
Small-scale lettuce production with hydroponics or aquaponics
Harry Ako, Adam Baker, SA-2 7 p.
Overview of organic food crop systems in Hawaii
Ted Radovich, Linda Cox, Jim Hollyer, SA-3 14 p.
*** Finding CTAHR Publications ***
Three databases are searchable by words in title, authors’ names, publication date, or publication series:
CTAHR Publications (1901 to present)
CTAHR Theses and Dissertations (current to 2001)
CTAHR Journal Series (faculty journal articles, book chapters; current to 2001)
ScholarSpace is a joint project with the UH Hamilton Library. It contains all the titles available at www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/freepubs that have been issued since about 1996, excluding some for-sale publications), plus some previously out-of-print publications that have been scanned for the project. These latter were published before our publications began to be made available in PDF digital format (see, for example, the Bulletin series, or the Research Extension Series).
To begin a ScholarSpace search, go to the CTAHR community home page. The search opportunity is far more robust than that available in the CTAHR databases listed above. Searches probe the entire text of all the documents in the collections. New CTAHR publications will be added to ScholarSpace as they are issued.
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2009-11-05T14:09:00.000-08:00

Managing genetic variation in tropical trees: linking knowledge with action in agroforestry ecosystems for improved conservation and enhanced livelihoods
Ian K. Dawson • Ard Lengkeek • John C. Weber •Ramni Jamnadass

From : CropWildRelativesGroup@yahoogroups.com
Abstract

Tree species in agroforestry ecosystems contribute to the livelihoods of rural
communities and play an important role in the conservation of biodiversity. Unless agroforestry landscapes are productive, however, farmers will not maintain or enhance the range and quality of tree species in them, and both income opportunities and biodiversity will be lost.
Productivity depends on both tree species diversity and genetic (intra-speciWc) variation, but research on the latter has until recently not received the recognition it deserves. Worse, when knowledge on tree genetic variation in agroforestry systems has become available, it has not generally been linked in any systematic way with management, indicating a disjunction between research and Weld-level practice. In this essay, we attempt to bridge this gap by considering three questions: why is genetic diversity important in tree species? What is our current state of knowledge about intra-speciWc variation in trees in agroforestry systems? And, Wnally, what practical interventions are possible to support the conservation of this diversity in agricultural landscapes, while enhancing farmers’ livelihoods? A wide genetic base in agroforestry trees is essential to prevent inbreeding depression and allow adaptation to changing environmental conditions and to altering markets for tree products. Recent evidence shows, however, that many species are subject to poor germplasm collection practice, occur at low densities in farmland, and are found in highly aggregated distributions, all of which observations raise concerns about productivity and sustainability. A range of germplasmaccess
based interventions is necessary to improve current management, including the
enhancement of community seed- and seedling-exchange networks, and the development of locally based tree domestication activities. Equally necessary, but more diYcult to address, isthe development of markets that support genetic diversity in tropical tree species; we discuss approaches by which this may be undertaken.

Keywords Agroforestry ecosystems • Biodiversity management • Genetic variation •
Tropical trees

Best regards

Dr. Nelli Hovhannisyan, PhD
Research Scientist, Lecturer
Department of Ecology and Nature Protection
Faculty of Biology
Yerevan State University
1 Alex Manoogian str., Yerevan, Armenia, 0025
Tel: (+37410) 57 21 19
Mob: (+37493) 30 82 18
E-mail: bionellibiotech@yahoo.com

2009-11-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Clean technology as a public good

From : SciDev Net

Clean technology to meet poor communities' needs must lie at the heart of any sustainable strategy to combat climate change.

A widely-held myth among climate change activists is that discussing the need for improved technology to mitigate or adapt to climate change detracts from political debates on who is to blame for unsustainable lifestyles — and who should pay for their consequences.

Like many myths, this one contains an element of truth. Purely technological responses to climate change have, on occasion, been proposed to avoid difficult political choices.

The United States' approach to the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate four years ago (see Asia-Pacific climate pact launched) is a notable example.

But the myth is also a dangerous one. It ignores the fact that any effort to combat climate change will only succeed if it can draw on technologies that do not, in the long run, add to the global burden of carbon emissions (see Climate change's technology transfer challenge).

The first political challenge — due to emerge at next month's UN Climate Change Convention (COP-15) in Copenhagen — is to ensure sufficient funding to urgently develop clean technologies.

The second is to guarantee that equal effort is devoted to ensuring that such technologies do not hinder the world's poorest communities from improving their standards of living through economic development.

Money matters

The good news is that the first of these challenges seems to have been taken seriously. Climate negotiators have long realised that developing clean technology and transferring it to developing nations are fundamentals of any global strategy to combat climate change.

But some assessments of the technological challenge ahead are sobering. A European Commission report emerging from pre-Copenhagen discussions, for example, estimates that the developing world will need up to US$150 billion over the next decade to cope with climate change.

One of the more ambitious, yet convincing solutions on the table next month is the G-77 plus China's idea of a UN-operated multilateral climate technology fund (MCTF).

Using a multilateral system to identify technological needs and priorities avoids the type of political trading that too frequently accompanies bilateral funding programmes, where donor's interests can be as influential as those of the recipient.

A free resource

But neither more money alone, nor an international mechanism to collect and distribute such funding, will be sufficient.

It is equally important to guarantee that a large part of the funded projects are directed at meeting the needs of the poor who are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

This will require political concessions from the developed world that are unlikely to be easily conceded at Copenhagen. In particular, the idea that clean technology should be a 'public good' — a resource free for everyone.

Such a commitment would significantly improve access to clean technology by those who need it most but are least able to pay. Similar to the thinking behind 'open access' to scientific research, the idea is that the easier it is to access clean technologies, the more widely the benefits will be felt.

But patents increasingly cover clean technologies — whether developed in the public or the private sector. And, despite calls for loosening patent protection, in practice the reverse is likely to happen as corporations and countries view the sale and export of green technology as a path to economic growth.

Markets not the answer

This is true for the developed and developing world alike. Countries such as China and India are already producing new technologies within a market perspective, developing them as a major future source of revenue rather than a free gift.

But, as long-argued by economists such as Nicholas Stern and increasingly accepted by governments around the world, climate change represents one of the biggest market failures of all time.

If, as with the financial crisis, it was the failure of global markets to stem excessive greed (in this case for energy) that triggered the current climate crisis, markets are unlikely to get us out of it. We need a massive public bail-out of precisely the type that the proposed MCTF represents and that governments have already provided for their financial institutions.

But those excluded from markets in the first place, including most of the world's poorest communities, need a different approach. It is here that the 'public good' approach to clean technology is most urgent.

If next month's climate talks in Copenhagen can enshrine such a commitment, it would be one of its most significant and long-lasting achievements.

David Dickson
Director, SciDev.Net

2009-11-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

Extinction crisis continues apace

From : Birdlife International

BirdLife International is the Red List Authority for birds and released the 2009 update for birds earlier in the year, listing 192 species of bird as Critically Endangered, the highest threat category, a total of two more than in the 2008 update. But the update did highlight some successes, including the downlisting of Lear's Macaw Anodorhynchus leari, from Critically Endangered to Endangered, as a direct result of targeted conservation action.

"In global terms, things continue to get worse – but there are some real conservation success stories this year to give us hope and point the way forward", said Dr Leon Bennun, BirdLife's Director of Science and Policy.

Of the world's 9,998 birds, 137 are Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, with 192 Critically Endangered, 362 Endangered and 669 Vulnerable.

The results of the full Red List update reveal 21% of mammals, 30% of amphibians, 12% of birds, and 28% of reptiles, 37% of freshwater fishes, 70% of plants, 35% of invertebrates assessed so far are under threat.

"The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting", says Jane Smart, Director of IUCN's Biodiversity Conservation Group. "January sees the launch of the International Year of Biodiversity. The latest analysis of the IUCN Red List shows the 2010 target to reduce biodiversity loss will not be met. It's time for governments to start getting serious about saving species and make sure it’s high on their agendas for next year, as we're rapidly running out of time."

Of the world's 5,490 mammals, 79 are Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, with 188 Critically Endangered, 449 Endangered and 505 Vulnerable. Eastern Voalavo Voalavo antsahabensis appears on the IUCN Red List for the first time in the Endangered category. This rodent, endemic to Madagascar, is confined to montane tropical forest and is under threat from slash-and-burn farming.

There are now 1,677 reptiles on the IUCN Red List, with 293 added this year. In total, 469 are threatened with extinction and 22 are already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild. The 165 endemic Philippine species new to the IUCN Red List include Panay Monitor Lizard Varanus mabitang, which is Endangered. This highly-specialized monitor lizard is threatened by habitat loss due to agriculture and logging and is hunted by humans for food. Sail-fin Water Lizard Hydrosaurus pustulatus enters in the Vulnerable category and is also threatened by habitat loss. Hatchlings are heavily collected both for the pet trade and for local consumption.

"The world's reptiles are undoubtedly suffering, but the picture may be much worse than it currently looks", says Simon Stuart, Chair of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. "We need an assessment of all reptiles to understand the severity of the situation but we don’t have the $2-3 million to carry it out."

The IUCN Red List shows that 1,895 of the planet's 6,285 amphibians are in danger of extinction, making them the most threatened group of species known to date. Of these, 39 are already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild, 484 are Critically Endangered, 754 are Endangered and 657 are Vulnerable.

Kihansi Spray Toad Nectophrynoides asperginis has moved from Critically Endangered to Extinct in the Wild. The species was only known from the Kihansi Falls in Tanzania, where it was formerly abundant with a population of at least 17,000. Its decline is due to the construction of a dam upstream of the Kihansi Falls that removed 90 percent of the original water flow to the gorge. The fungal disease chytridiomycosis was probably responsible for the toad’s final population crash.

The fungus also affected Rabb's Fringe-limbed Treefrog Ecnomiohyla rabborum, which enters the Red List as Critically Endangered. It is known only from central Panama. In 2006, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis was reported in its habitat and only a single male has been heard calling since. This species has been collected for captive breeding efforts but all attempts have so far failed.

Of the 12,151 plants on the IUCN Red List, 8,500 are threatened with extinction, with 114 already Extinct or Extinct in the Wild. The Queen of the Andes Puya raimondii has been reassessed and remains in the Endangered category. Found in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia, it only produces seeds once in 80 years before dying. Climate change may already be impairing its ability to flower and cattle roam freely among many colonies, trampling or eating young plants.

But it's not all doom and gloom, conservation does work and there are some great examples in this year's Red List. In Brazil, Lear's Macaw Anodorhynchus leari has been downlisted from Critically Endangered. Named after the English poet, this spectacular blue parrot has increased four-fold in numbers as a result of a joint effort of many national and international non-governmental organisations, the Brazilian government and local landowners.

2009-11-03T20:28:00.000-08:00

Woody plants adapted to past climate change more slowly than herbs

Source: ScienceDaily, 27 September 2009

Can we predict which species will be most vulnerable to climate change by studying how they responded in the past? A new study of flowering plants provides a clue. An analysis of more than 5000 plant species reveals that woody plants — such as trees and shrubs — adapted to past climate change much more slowly than herbaceous plants did. If the past is any indicator of the future, woody plants may have a harder time than other plants keeping pace with global warming, researchers say.
In a new study, biologists at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (USA) and Yale University (USA) teamed up to find out how flowering plants adapted to new climates over the course of their evolution. By integrating previously published genealogies for several plant groups with temperature and rainfall data for each species, they were able to measure how fast each lineage filled new climate niches over time.
When they compared woody and herbaceous groups, they found that woody plants adapted to new climates two to ten times slower than herbs. "Woody plants eventually evolved to occupy about the same range of climates that herbaceous plants did, but woody plants took a lot longer to get there," said lead author Stephen Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC.
The researchers trace the disparity to differences in generation time between the two groups. Longer-lived plants like trees and shrubs typically take longer to reach reproductive age than fast-growing herbaceous plants, they explained. "Some woody plants take many years to produce their first flower, whereas for herbs it could take just a couple months," said co-author Jeremy Beaulieu, a graduate student at Yale University.
Because woody plants have longer reproductive cycles, they also tend to accumulate genetic changes at slower rates, prior research shows. "If genetic mutations build up every generation, then in 1000 years you would expect plants with longer generation times to accumulate fewer mutations per unit time," said Smith. This could explain why woody plants were slower to adapt to new environments. If genetic mutations provide the raw material for evolution, then woody plants simply didn't accumulate mutations fast enough to keep up. "If woody and herbaceous plants were running a race, the herbs would be the hares and the woody plants would be the tortoises," said Beaulieu.
By understanding how plants responded to climate change in the past, scientists may be better able to predict which groups will be hardest hit by global warming in the future. Unlike the tortoise and the hare, however, in this case slow and steady may not win the race. "Woody groups are obviously at a disadvantage as the climate changes," Beaulieu explained.
Does this mean that ecosystems dominated by trees — such as rainforests — will be more likely to disappear? Possibly, "If we look to the past for our clues, chances are trees will continue to respond much slower than herbs — as much as 10 times slower," Smith said. "But if the rate of climate change is 100 times faster, then they could all be in trouble. The kind of change we're experiencing now is so unprecedented," he added. While this study focused on long-term change over the last 100 million years, most climate models predict significant warming in the next century, the researchers explained. "That time frame may be too quick for any plant," Beaulieu said.
For full story, please see: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090923121441.htm

Dr Danny Hunter

2009-11-03T12:57:00.000-08:00

Study on plant breeding education to be conducted at the University of California, Davis

From : Danny Hunter (Crop Wild Relative Group)

Plant breeding is currently under stress – the global demand for breeders is greater than the current educational system has been producing. Companies are having difficulty finding well trained plant breeders, slowing the progress of
agricultural research. The need to strengthen public plant breeding programs and educate more professional plant breeders is critical if we are to continue producing improved crop varieties to provide food for an increasing population.
Researchers at UC Davis are initiating a study aimed at gaining consensus on the most essential curriculum components for educating plant breeders. Through an iterative process, a diverse group of experts with highly specialized knowledge of plant breeding will be surveyed to elicit ideas and suggestions for educational program content. Over 250 participants from all over the world will be asked to complete the three rounds of this survey, with each round building on the responses gleaned through the prior round. This consensus-based approach will lead to a comprehensive analysis of content and practical experiences that will guide the design of modern plant breeding curricula. Following conclusion of the analysis, all results will be publically available to the international community.
"Plant breeders continually provide the world with necessary advances in crop varieties; however, their numbers are diminishing due to retirements and fewer educational programs offering plant breeding degrees," says Dr. Allen Van Deynze, Director of Research at the Seed Biotechnology Center and co-founder of the Plant Breeding Academysm. "The scope of this study provides every participant an equal voice to help improve the training experiences of future breeders and will result in a clear understanding of how to focus educational programs to get the best results."
Dr. Cary Trexler, a professor in the College of Education at UC Davis will lead this study in cooperation with the Seed Biotechnology Center. Funding for this study is being provided through the generous support of private companies, university departments, and individual contributors.

2009-10-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

Pacific Climate Change framework assessed by SPREP

21 OCTOBER 2009 MAJURO (SPREP) -----The implementation of the Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change (PIFACC) has been assessed in a report commissioned by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP).

The overview of the report was discussed on the first day of the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable (PCCR).

This particular framework is the overarching guidance for climate change policy in the Pacific islands region, and was endorsed by the Pacific leaders in 2005. It is at the forefront of work conducted by the Pacific Futures programme at SPREP.

”Threats from climate change are impacting upon everyone, there are projections that will effect the availability of safe drinking water, a loss of natural biodiversity as temperature conditions will see invasive species thrive, sea level rise threatening the sovereignty of Pacific islands peoples and a threat to food security as salt water inundation becomes a regular occurrence for some nations in the Pacific, said the report.

In order to ensure we address climate change together, in a coordinated manner, the PIFACC is a guide as to how we’ll actively adapt and mitigate climate change together.

“Findings show that there are a lot of climate change activities happening, but it has been identified that there is a need for more coherent and coordination,” said Espen Ronneberg the Climate Change Adviser for SPREP, he presented the overview of the assessment at the PCCR.

“This is largely to be a key task for the roundtable. It is something we need to work on to improve the operational structure of the roundtable process.”

Six recommendations were presented in the report.

An immediate consideration is the suggestion to conduct a mid-term review of the Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change. Any future direction for the PIFACC and the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable are to be discussed during the week.

“One suggestion from SPREP is to establish thematic working groups to assist in the review process.. There may be other options as to how we move forward on this assessment report but it’s really up to the countries to decide,” said Ronneberg.

The remainder of the recommendations includes those which focus on a database of climate change information. It is proposed to establish a single extensive data base of climate change and related projects with historical validity of information.

The assessment report also centers on the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable. It is recommended that the roundtable be convened at times and locations that make the most of coordination and integration opportunities, this also takes into consideration minimizing the greenhouse gas emissions through air travel.

The next recommendation looks at what takes place after the PCCR.

“In order to ensure that decisions made during the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable are carried out in a timely and effective manner, the report recommends that a person be appointed to provide leadership and oversee these actions.

A final recommendation looks at providing support for SPREP which is the secretariat to the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable and recommends that the University of the South Pacific establish a unit to provide technical and other support to SPREP.

“The next steps that we take, is really up to the countries to decide. I think if we can get some clear direction on what we should be doing to improve on the working arrangements then I would be happy with that,” said Ronneberg.

“But if we have to spend more time thinking about this and moving to have discussions with member countries then that’s the way that we’ll have to move forward on this. It’s up to the member countries.”..ends

2009-10-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

Charting a Multitude of Uses for Agrobiodiversity

Posted on October 15, 2009 by cgiar

A new Web-based tool is now available for collecting information about initiatives aimed at helping rural communities adapt to climate change through the use of agricultural biodiversity, or agrobiodiversity.

Made available by the climate change project of Bioversity International’s Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research, the tool is intended to facilitate dialogue between rural communities around the world and to build a knowledge base, which can be used to increase awareness of practices available to these communities for coping with climate change. Contributions will be synthesized for use in advocating stronger involvement of marginal groups in the climate change policy debate.

The term agrobiodiversity encompasses all of the plants, trees, animals, insects, microbes, pathogens and fungi occurring in agricultural systems. The world’s increasing dependence on modern crop varieties and animal breeds of just a few major species is among the forces driving erosion of such diversity, which limits the options open to researchers and farmers for improving agricultural production and adapting it to changing conditions.

The Platform for Agrobiodiversity Research was created during 2004 in recognition of the urgent need to arrest diversity loss. Providing a neutral space for exploring the often politicized issues associated with agrobiodiversity, the platform encourages members to engage in collaborative research, helps identify gaps in global knowledge about agrobiodiversity and raises awareness of the threats to this resource as well as the value of efforts to overcome them.

The platform is supported by Bioversity International, the CGIAR System-wide Genetic Resources Programme (SGRP) and the Christensen Fund (http://www.christensenfund.org/).

2009-10-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

Erosion of Crop Diversity Worrying

Harare — MALAWI and most other African countries need to come up with strategies and policies to promote agro-biodiversity conservation to minimise the impact of climate change and other natural disasters on the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers, a top Malawian plant breeder says.

In a wide-ranging interview in Lilongwe recently, Dr Moses Maliro, a plant breeder at the University of Malawi Bunda College of Agriculture, told this writer that the rapid loss of diverse cultivated crops and their wild relatives will affect the poor and threaten the future of agricultural development in Malawi and most other African countries.

"The impact of climate change and population is quite damaging to the livelihoods of the poor farmers.

"We need to strategise and come up with policies that promote agro-biodiversity conservation to enhance food security and help our poor farmers to cope with this looming climate change disaster," he said.

"Monoculture and the aggressive promotion of improved varieties have forced farmers to neglect their own landraces. Smallholder farmers' efforts to promote crop diversity must be supported by governments, international partners and local business community."

Dr Maliro said the preservation and use of crop diversity is important to the more marginal diverse agricultural environments where modern plant breeding has had much less success.

He said farmers in these areas tend to be poorly served by public research and extension system.

"Farmers are neglecting their own traditional crop varieties and their wild relatives in favour of monoculture (maize) and other market-driven crops such as cotton and others.

"But when there is a drought and other natural disasters, farmers survive on traditional tubers, wild species and other locally adapted crops," Dr Maliro said.

"Food aid normally comes late and is not enough, so the poor depend on these local traditional crops for survival. Why not promote them when they are so critical for our own food security?

"We should not impose improved varieties on farmers. Food security is not only about high yields, but is about sustainable production as well in case of unreliable weather conditions and climate change."

Malawi has lost a number of local crop varieties due to neglect, erosion of local indigenous knowledge systems, promotion of improved varieties, lack of incentives for locally adapted crops and other factors.

"People in Malawi used to grow a lot of sorghum and other small grains, but today you don't see the crops. You rarely see pearl millet and finger millet, you rarely see farmers growing the crops," Dr Maliro said.

He said agricultural research institutions, governments and NGOs need to promote the growing of sorghum, millets, bambara nuts, locally adapted varieties of cowpeas (nseula or khobwe), beans (mphodza -mung bean) and other wild crop relatives.

"The mphodza bean is there in the villages, but no research is being done nor any work to support farmers to grow it on a bigger scale.

"Only the elderly people have the knowledge of these crops that Malawi is fast losing.

"The young generation and our curricula in colleges and universities must be overhauled to promote indigenous food crops which are critical with this looming climate change crisis.

"If we don't anything to change our attitudes and support the farmers to grow these crops, the next generation will starve to death due to the damaging impact of climate change," said Dr Maliro.

"We need to conserve local crop varieties. These are very nutritious and we can use them, for example, cowpeas, to bake bread and fortify bread-making process.

"Roots and tubers are there in villages, but we are doing nothing to conserve them. Africa cannot afford to lose this diversity and the indigenous knowledge ingrained in these food crops."

Malawi and other African countries, he said, should adopt practical steps to promote small grains, roots and tubers to enhance food security, conserve crop diversity and enhance the capacity of smallholder farmers to cope with climate change-related risks.

Agricultural research institutions, he said, need support to scale up training in indigenous crops, crop seed back-up and plant breeding to help Malawi to be food secure in case of drought and other natural disasters.

Given that the majority of poor people in Africa live in villages or rely on agriculture, and that agriculture paves the way for economic growth in the poorer nations, agricultural and rural development remain a major driver for the achievement of Millennium Development Goals which seek to end hunger and extreme poverty.

Environmentally friendly agriculture such as the promotion of the growing of locally adapted indigenous food crops and rural development are key to this effort to attain MDGs by 2015.

The promotion of crop diversity tackles the malnourishment component in food security and helps the poor to escape poverty as they are able to learn, work and care for themselves and their family members.

If crop diversity issues are not addressed fully, hunger and over-reliance on food aid sets in motion an array of problems that perpetuates malnutrition, reduces the ability of adults to work and to give birth to healthy children, and erodes children's ability to learn and lead productive, healthy, and happy lives.

Lack of promotion of crop diversity can undermine human development and the potential of most African countries to attain the MDGs.

Africa, which is home to more than 50 000 known plant species, 1 000 mammal species and 1 500 bird species, is increasingly experiencing major losses of its large and diverse heritage of flora and fauna.

According to the 2007 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report, there are roughly a quarter million plant varieties available for agriculture but less than 3 percent of these are in use today.

The UN agency is concerned that with disuse comes neglect and possibly neglect of the continent's plant food resources.

FAO further points to another worrying trend -- that modern agriculture is concentrated on a small number of varieties designed for intensive farming.

This, according to the report, has dramatically reduced the diversity of crop plant varieties available for agriculture, leading to accelerated genetic erosion on the continent.

Supporting smallholder farmers to conserve crop diversity wherever possible and greater political commitment is vital to enhance food security in Africa.

This can, at least, help bring the continent a step closer to attaining MDGs by 2015.

2009-10-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

Food Safety training was a big hit with Majuro farmers .

The purpose of the training was to train farmers and their families on how to prepare, preserve and handle food properly (food safety practices). The week-long training program was held from September 14 to 18 and included both theoretical
and application sides of food processing and food safety. The first two days of the
training (Monday & Tuesday) were held at CMI’s Land Grant Arrak Campus focusing on Food Safety. From Wednesday to Friday the training was held at the Women’s Training Center in Food Training a Big Hit with Majuro Farmers Delap focusing on Food Processing. While most of the participants were Farmers, there were also representatives from Youth to Youth in Health (YTYIH), CMILand Grant and a few NGOs.
Because of the training’s success and popularity, the Ministry of R&D will be exploring with the SPC Office in Pohnpei about the possibility of having
another one before the end of the year. The training was conducted by Mrs. Mereseini Seniloli, the SPC DSAP Micronesia Coordinator, and Mrs. Apiame Cegumalua, Export Processing and Marketing Officer of SPC’s FACT Project. The Ministry of R&D extends
a big kommool tata to CMI and to the Ministry of Internal Affairs for allowing the
use of their facilities.

Republic of the Marshall Islands Ministry of Resources and Development
P.O. Box 1727 • Majuro, Marshall Islands MH 96960
Phone: (692) 625-3206/4020 • Fax: (692) 625-7471
Email: rndsec@gmail.com Uñare Peim

2009-09-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

Preserving the Bounty of Breadfruit

UBC Reports | Vol. 54 | No. 12 | Dec. 4, 2008

By Raina Ducklow and Bud Mortenson

Any way you slice it, breadfruit is a big deal.

A traditional Polynesian crop grown throughout the Pacific for more than 3,000 years, breadfruit’s diversity is now declining -- some varieties have already disappeared -- due to damage from tropical cyclones, climate change, and loss of cultural knowledge.

Susan Murch, Canada Research Chair in Natural Products Chemistry at UBC Okanagan, hopes to not only preserve breadfruit from further decline, she’s working on ways to make it much more abundant -- improving food security in tropical regions and creating new food products for North American tables.

“Every four seconds someone in the tropics dies of hunger. It is one of the biggest food security issues in the world at the moment,” says Murch. “Breadfruit is a tree that most people in North America have not heard of, but has huge value for food security. A single tree can produce 150 to 200 kilograms of food per year. But distribution of breadfruit to feed people who are starving has been limited by difficulties propagating and transporting the trees.”

Breadfruit, which reproduces through suckers or root cuttings, doesn’t do well in transport. Murch points to some infamous history that links the breadfruit tree to the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty.

“The whole point of the Bounty’s journey was to go out to Oceania, to collect trees and bring them back to produce food in the Caribbean,” she says. “Part of the reason for the mutiny was that the ship’s fresh water was being used for the breadfruit trees, rather than allowing the sailors to drink it.”

More than 200 years later, breadfruit continues to be a prized source of high-energy food, but it remains hard to reproduce and international quarantine requirements on root materials make distribution difficult. Only now is science beginning to make this invaluable tree easier to reproduce and send where it’s most needed.

At a field station at the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) in Maui, Hawaii, Murch is working with a collection of 230 70-foot-tall breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis) trees. The collection was established in the 1970s and 1980s by Diane Ragone, a world expert on breadfruit, and each tree is a unique variety collected from a different Pacific island, with different leaf shapes, nutritional composition and environmental requirements. It’s an important and rare collection, vulnerable to damage from a natural disaster such as one of the Pacific’s great cyclones.

Murch’s team is eagerly developing new ways to maintain, conserve, mass propagate, and distribute the most beneficial traditional varieties using modern techniques of plant tissue culture and biotechnology.

“My work is all about the nutrition in breadfruit, and the distribution of breadfruit,” Murch says, explaining that in Hawaii and at her UBC Okanagan lab, her team has learned how to grow the trees in bioreactors. Though many North American food crops are produced this way, Murch is the first to make it work with breadfruit, and this new way of reproducing breadfruit trees is already having a big impact on the plant’s distribution.

Last year, Murch’s lab donated 7,500 trees for food security to tropical nations but she was quickly swamped with requests for more trees than she could possibly produce in the research facility. To produce enough trees, Murch has partnered with the NTBG, the government of Western Samoa, and a commercial horticultural company -- Cultivaris in San Diego, California -- to mass-produce and distribute trees.

“If our research can have a positive impact on food security and provide food in regions where there isn’t enough food, that is a valuable contribution,” she says.

In addition to distributing breadfruit trees in the tropics, Murch is investigating how to use the plant to improve nutrition in North America. Breadfruit fruits can be dried and ground to produce gluten-free flour high in several vitamins and protein, making it potentially useful as a food additive, supplement or hypoallergenic alternative to wheat flour in North America.

Murch says that, overall, she wants to understand the role that plants play in human health. “Everything we eat comes from a plant or something that ate a plant,” says Murch. “The nutrients and phytochemicals we consume can greatly affect our wellbeing. Understanding the mechanisms of a plant has a huge impact on how human health will progress through the next 50 years and on how we can feed and care for the growing population in the world.”

Find out more about Susan Murch’s breadfruit research at: www.ubc.ca/okanagan/chees/faculty/susmurch.html or www.ntbg.org/breadfruit.

2009-08-04T14:29:00.000-07:00

Coconut Crab Conservation in Vanuatu

From : http://www.whl.travel/blog/?p=1291

In April 2001, John and Silvana Nicholls, today owners and operators of Vanuatu Hotels, arrived in Vanuatu to launch and manage the new White Grass Ocean Resort on the island of Tanna. It was their intention to ensure that it would operate according to strict environmental guidelines, so they immediately declared it a bird sanctuary, protecting fowl from the indigenous practice of hunting and eating them. Although a parallel ‘turtle emergency rescue’ program of buying turtles captured by locals as a step in saving them from the cooking pot unfortunately had to be discontinued as it created a new industry – the
capture of released turtles in order to sell them back – the resort nevertheless became the island’s de facto animal refuge, even providing veterinary assistance when need.

As part of their efforts, the Nicholls’ also banned coconut crab from their menu (see more information), a practical step in helping to building the first and only coconut crab habitat in Vanuatu.

“Instead of eating them, our guests could handle and photograph living crabs. The kids had a ball seeing, touching and hand-feeding these awesome creatures, which are coloured in beautiful greens and blues, rather than seeing them cooked red,” said John. “In order to immediately sensitise people to the unique, fun eco-experience in store for resort guests, I sometimes welcomed them with a giant coconut crab… a live one, that is!”

Although their efforts initially made little impact, and maintaining the habitat was no easy task – these largest land-living crustacean can cut themselves out of any corner with their powerful claws and easily climb any surface, like the coconut trees from which they take their name – John and Silvana persisted.

“When travelling to the capital, Port Vila, we were appalled to see coconut crabs sold in restaurants,” confirmed John. “The irony of it is that they are actually quite bland in flavour, hence inevitably covered with strong sauces to make them interesting to eat. There was quite a trade in coconut crabs and we knew this was not sustainable, as numbers were dwindling fast. When we contacted a few experts on the subject, our fears were confirmed: there was a real problem.”

Predictions were that if coconut crab consumption could not be curbed, a number of islands in Vanuatu would feast them into extinction. The problem was not specific to the resort’s island of Tanna; it was true of many other islands as well.

A White Grass Ocean Resort turtle emergency rescue program of buying turtles captured by locals had to be discontinued when released turtles were captured and sold back to the resort

2009-07-14T14:59:00.000-07:00

Nigeria:IITA begins preliminary on-farm trials of new yam growing technique

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in partnership with Nigerian farmers has begun preliminary trials of propagating yam through vine cuttings on farmers’ fields in Niger State, north central Nigeria.
The success of the trials and adoption of the new yam growing technique will substantially cut down the volume of yams used by farmers as seed yams. “The technology will definitely save farmers the cost and pains of acquiring seed yams,” says, Joshua Aliyu, a staff with Niger State Agricultural Development Project, who is also working on the trials. “It is actually a rebirth of yam cultivation in our community,” he adds.

The new yam growing technique has potential to eliminate the transmission of yam diseases (nematodes), which constitute considerable damage to yam tubers, according Dr. Hidehiko Kikuno, IITA’s Yam Physiologist and project leader.

On February 15, IITA and partners announced a breakthrough in the propagation of yams through vine cuttings via a research funded by the Japanese government (MOFA, MAFF), the Sasakawa Africa Association, Tokyo University of Agriculture and the International Cooperation Center for Agricultural Education, Nagoya University, Japan. Other partners in the research include the Tokyo University of Agriculture; National Root Crops Research Institute - Umudike, Nigeria; Crop Research Institute, Kumashi, Ghana and the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development, Cameroon.

The new yam growing technique makes use of vine cuttings planted in carbonized rice husk (CRH). After rooting and sprouting, the seedlings are transferred to the field or directly planted into nursery bed with CRH under shade.

Kikuno says the abundance and availability of rice husks—the growth medium – in rural communities makes the research relevant.
“This is because farmers can propagate the yam through vine cuttings by themselves,” he says.
In sub-Saharan Africa where the cost of planting materials (seed yams) account for about 50 per cent of the total cost, the new technology is seen as an option that will not only cut down the cost of production of yams but also make available more yam tubers for human consumption.

For more information, please contact:
Jeffrey T. Oliver, o.jeffrey@cgiar.org
Corporate Communications Officer (International) Godwin Atser, g.atser@cgiar.org Corporate Communications Officer (West Africa) Communication Office IITA - Headquarters Ibadan, Nigeria

IITA - Headquarters
Ibadan, Nigeria
URL: www.iita.org

2009-06-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

International consultation to chart way forward for Pacific coconut industry
Thursday, 18 June 2009

From : SPC

A roundtable on increasing trade in Pacific coconut products is being held over 17–18 June in Fiji. The Asia Pacific Coconut Community-SPC Roundtable will discuss the latest trends in coconut processing and market prospects.

During the official opening of the meeting, the Director of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community’s (SPC) Land Resources Division, Mr ‘Aleki Sisifa, acknowledged the political support of the governments of Fiji and Samoa and welcomed the Hon. Joketani Cokanasiga, Fijian Minister of Primary Industries, and Hon. Taua Kitiona, Samoa Minister for Agriculture. The meeting is being held at the Tanoa International Hotel in Nadi.

Mr Sisifa said that the Pacific region was experiencing unprecedented and accelerating change, with the population of Pacific island countries and territories having more than doubled over the last 50 years.

“We have made our voices heard in international forums about the real threat of losing land, even whole islands, to sea level rise, and the potential for increasingly extreme events associated with climate change,” Mr Sisifa said.
He said land degradation and associated floods and soil erosion had resulted in serious siltation of rivers and coastal areas. Soils were becoming more saline, drier, poorer in nutrients and richer in pests as fallow periods shortened.

“People farm on steeper and more marginal land as industries and settlements are opened up on arable land. More than 70% of our bio-diversity has been eroded over the past 50 years.”

‘However, the coconut provides a sustainable and calming influence. It has been with us since we settled these islands and continues to be a distinctive characteristic of the Pacific landscape.’

“The coconut has always been, still is, and will continue to be regarded as the “Tree of Life” because of its multiplicity of uses. Its leaves, fruits, stems and roots provide shelter, food, handicrafts and other cultural and traditional uses, as well as income for communities living in rural areas and outer islands.”

Mr Sisifa said that the coconut forms the basis of robust and sustainable multilayer farming systems that have been developed in Pacific countries and territories over generations. Intercropping of coconuts with food and cash crops and running cattle and small animals under coconuts have proven to be sustainable types of land use suited to the geographic, climatic and socio-economic conditions of Pacific Islands.

Research and development on the coconut has been occurring since the colonial days. More recently, the focus has been on their cultivation and maintenance.

Helping countries and territories to increase their export trade is a new area of focus for SPC with work being carried out through its European Union funded FACT (Facilitating Agricultural Commodity Trade) project.

Mr Sisifa expressed SPC’s gratitude to the European Union for this assistance.

The FACT project aims to sustainably increase the quality and range of exports of Pacific agriculture and forestry products, and to contribute to the integration of the 14 Pacific ACP countries into the regional and global economy.

The meeting, which is being attended by 100 participants from around the region, will end with participants charting a way forward for the region’s coconut industry.

For more information, please contact lrdhelpdesk@spc.intThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

2009-06-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

14th Australasian Plant Breeding & 11th SABRAO Conference:
REGISTRATION CLOSING SOON!

Cairns Convention Centre, Cairns, Tropical North Queensland, AUSTRALIA
10-14 August 2009

Combined meeting of the 14th Australasian Plant Breeding Conference (APBC) &
11th Congress of the Society for the Advancement of Breeding Research in Asia and
Oceania (SABRAO)

The tropics are home to more than 50% of the world’s population and 80% of its
biodiversity. Tropical nations are growing at an unprecedented rate, between 5 and
10% annually, and food security and sustainable livelihoods are becoming
increasingly the most critical challenges facing the tropics. This conference brings
together international experts working to overcome these challenges, while focusing
on a main theme of “Contemporary Crop Improvement — A Tropical View.”
The conference will further focus on the following key themes:
Environmental challenges and opportunities
Food security for the Tropics
Tools for the Future (including Education and Training)
Tropical Livelihoods (including Healthy Foods and R&D Investment)
For more information and to register for the conference, please contact the conference managers:
W: www.plantbreeding09.com.au
E: info@plantbreeding09.com.au
T: +61 7 3858 5515

2009-06-21T14:20:00.000-07:00

Pacific region joins global system for conserving and using plant genetic resources for food and agriculture

From : SPC

Wednesday, 16 June 2009, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Suva, Fiji Islands — Recognizing that international cooperation and open exchange of genetic resources are both essential for food security, the Pacific region has placed the collections held by the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) in the Multilateral System of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA).
The Hon. Taua Kitiona, Samoa’s Minister of Agriculture, representing other ministers and the region, attended the 3rd Session of the Governing Body of the ITPGRFA in Tunis, and in the opening ceremony on 1 June formally placed these collections into the treaty system.
With the ITPGRFA, crops that produce our food – breads, curries, tortillas – are put into a common pool. The treaty facilitates access to those crops for all users and ensures fair and equitable sharing of benefits derived from their use.
The ITPGRFA is a global treaty for food security and sustainable agriculture, and is vital for ensuring the continued availability of the plant genetic resources that countries need to feed their people. Crop diversity is an essential tool for generating crop varieties that can help farmers manage climate change. Like all other nations of the world, Pacific Island countries and territories do not have enough crop diversity within their borders to sustain productive systems.
Outbreaks of new pests and diseases can wreak havoc with crops that do not include resistant varieties. This was dramatically illustrated in Samoa in the early 1990s when taro leaf blight totally destroyed taro production because of the susceptibility of the cultivar being used. Climate change is likely to bring other similar challenges.
In 1996, to address these challenges, Pacific Ministers of Agriculture attending a meeting hosted by SPC resolved to put in place policies and programmes to conserve, protect and use their plant genetic resources effectively for development. In response, SPC established a regional genebank in 1998, now known as the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT).
SPC’s work on genetic resources has not stopped with the establishment of the genebank. An active network – PAPGREN – was established in 2004 to strengthen capacity in the region for conservation and utilisation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture. Much has been achieved by both the Centre and PAPGREN in raising awareness of the importance of crop diversity in the region, especially in light of current challenges.
In their second regional conference in Samoa in 2008, Pacific Ministers and Heads of Agriculture and Forestry acknowledged that although the Pacific has significant diversity, there is no assurance that national biodiversity will be sufficient to sustain food production in the future, especially given the projected effects of climate change. The region must be able to access the global pool of genetic diversity, which can be achieved through ratification of the treaty. At the same time, the ministers also saw the importance of putting in place mechanisms to establish the key collections of the Pacific within the global system, enabling the region to contribute to global food security and be part of a global network that will support the sustainable conservation and use of these collections in the future.
“The signing of these agreements by SPC has been fully endorsed by the Pacific region, recognising we live in one world despite the miles between us. To survive the many challenges of this century, we need to work together, sharing our resources and importantly further recognising that the genetic diversity found in genebanks today may become the most important resource we have in shaping an effective response to climate change,” said the Hon. Taua Kitiona in his address to the governing body of the Treaty.
For more information, please contact lrdhelpdesk@spc.int

2009-06-21T14:02:00.000-07:00

Global Crop Diversity Trust enters into longterm
grant agreement with Secretariat of the Pacific Community to safeguard collections of yam and edible aroids. The agreement comes into effect as the Secretariat signs International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources and places collection into the Treaty’s multilateral system.

ROME, ITALY (June 4, 2009) - The Global Crop Diversity Trust recently entered
into a grant agreement with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) to
provide USD 50,000 annually, in perpetuity, towards the long-term conservation of
the important collections of yam and edible aroids (taro) held in-trust by the Centre
for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) on behalf of the Pacific region. This is the first long-term grant provided by the Trust to a collection outside the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The Trust and SPC are very
enthusiastic about this partnership and what it means for the sustainable conservation and utilisation of the region’s important crop diversity, and therefore food and nutritional security and economic growth in the Pacific region. The importance of crop diversity to sustainable development in the Pacific region is becoming more and more apparent, especially as farmers try to maintain and improve food production in the face of a changing climate.
SPC is highly committed to the long-term conservation of its region’s crop diversity.
A significant amount of funding has been made available for the construction of a
new storage centre, which will provide excellent facilities for long-term conservation of plant genetic resources. The centre will open in September 2009.
The grant agreement with the Trust came into effect when SPC member countries
signed the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
in April 2009, an event manifested by the Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries for
Samoa who symbolically placed the Pacific collections (held in-trust by SPC) into the
multilateral system of the Treaty in Tunis on June 1. “The signing of these agreements by SPC has been fully endorsed by the Pacific region, recognizing we live in one world, despite the miles that often exist between us all, and to survive the many challenges of this century we need to work together, sharing our resources and importantly further recognizing that the genetic diversity found in genebanks today may become the most important resource we have in shaping an effective response to climate change“, says Minister Afioga‐Taua Tavaga Kitiona Seuala in his address to the governing body of the Treaty. The germplasm will thus now be made available by SPC to the international community in accordance with the terms and conditions of the Treaty

2009-05-24T13:28:00.000-07:00

Seeds from Africa for research in Norway

From : The Citizen

By Ray Naluyaga

Over 5,000 samples of seed varieties are expected to be shipped from Nigeria to Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway next month.

The shipment, to be undertaken by Africa's leading Agricultural research partner, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), will be the second to be made to the facility in Norway in a move aimed at preserving the genetic resources of African crops.

"This year's shipment will involve about 5,000 seed samples of soybean, maize, bambara nut, cowpea, and African yam bean, in more than 10 seed boxes,"said Dr Dominique Dumet, head of IITA's Genetic Resources Center.

In a statement released in Dar es Salaam by IITA regional office, Dr Dumet said the whole aim of the shipment to Svalbard is about conservation of genetic resources and agro biodiversity for humanity.

According to the statement, agro-biodiversity is a term that captures all forms of life directly relevant to agriculture, from crop varieties to crop wild relatives, livestock, and many other organisms such as soil fauna, weeds, pests, and predators seen to be disappearing faster than any time since the demise of the dinosaurs.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme's 4th Global Environment Outlook report, the ongoing loss of biodiversity will restrict future development options for rich and poor countries with negative impacts on food security.

To stem the loss of agro biodiversity, the IITA Genetic Resources Center, located in Ibadan, Nigeria, has over the years, conserved more than 28,000 accessions of IITA mandate crops.

The centre houses the world's largest collection of cowpea-a key staple in Africa, offering an inexpensive source of protein- with over 15,000 unique varieties from 88 countries around the world.

The Svalbard Seed Vault is another safety net designed to hold duplicated genetic resources.

"It actually serves as a backup for genetic diversity. For instance, there are some genes in the seeds that we are conserving now that might solve problems of future generations, such as lack of resistance to diseases or tolerance for drought," Dr Dumet explained.

2009-05-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Hunt for 'climate-ready' crops accelerates as organizations search seed collections worldwide

From : FirstScience-UK

- 21 May 2009
By Burness Communications
Amid Predictions that Climate Change Will Create Hostile Growing Conditions, partners Look to Crop Collections for future varieties
ROME, ITALY (22 May 2009)—The Global Crop Diversity Trust announced today numerous new grant awards to support scientists to explore the millions of seed samples maintained in 1,500 crop genebanks around the world. They will search for biodiversity critically needed to protect food production from the ravages of climate change.

The awards support a wide range of innovative projects, including a search in Southeast Asia and the Pacific for bananas that are resistant to banana streak virus, which will likely become more problematic with climate change; transferring traits from a wild to a cultivated variety of potato that convey resistance to a soil-borne pathogen responsible for bacterial wilt; a search for novel traits with tolerance to heat and drought stresses in Chilean maize crop collections; a project in India to find pearl millet that can handle scorching temperatures; and a project to increase the ability of maize to cope with erratic rains, while increasing its nutritional quality for small-scale, marginal farms in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Working together with the Trust in the effort will be the Generation Challenge Programme (GCP) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Global Partnership Initiative for Plant Breeding Capacity (GIPB).

"We want to support scientists to probe crop genebanks for natural traits that will allow farm production to stay one step ahead of climate change," said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust. "The data are now clear that rising temperatures, radically altered precipitation patterns and new infestations of plant pests are on the near horizon, and we need to look to our crop genebanks for the traits that will help us avoid a crisis."

By the turn of the century, scientists now predict that temperatures during growing seasons in the tropics and subtropics are destined to be even hotter than what are now considered extreme temperatures. New data also show steadily dryer conditions in many regions. But there is widespread concern, particularly in the developing world, that plant breeding efforts are not moving fast enough to develop new varieties that can withstand these stresses and enable farmers to avoid steep drops in food production

2009-05-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

Negotiating Climate Change

19 MAY 2009 APIA (Pacnews) ----- Ensuring that the voice of Pacific Island countries is heard at the international level is critical for the success of the climate change negotiations. This was one of the many lessons stressed during a week of negotiation training and consultations at SPREP Headquarters in Apia, Samoa.

The world is now only six months away from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 15th Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP15) in Copenhagen, where a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol is slated for adoption. In preparation for the meeting, Pacific Island countries party to the UNFCCC received in-depth training in negotiations strategy and techniques.

Dr Ian Fry, a prominent climate change specialist and a negotiator for the Government of Tuvalu conducted sessions to help prepare participants for key issues that will be addressed at COP 15.

SPREP’s Climate Change Adviser Espen Ronneberg is pleased that this training has brought many new faces to the climate change negotiations table. He feels it will help strengthen the capacity of the Pacific at the negotiating table by providing additional trained negotiators that will have a strong understanding of the issues to be discussed.

“The training component provided valuable inputs in negotiation techniques, as well as expert knowledge on preparation for the very complex meeting arrangements at the international level. In addition, the Pacific has had an opportunity to also discuss the key issues that are still under negotiation, which will allow them to gather information back home to address concerns arising from those key issues,” Ronneberg said.

The training is an important component of activities planned during the 2009 Pacific Year of Climate Change. “Our Century’s Challenge, Our Pacific Response” is the theme of the year, which hopes to build momentum in the Pacific before December’s meeting of the COP in Copenhagen.

Ronneberg believes that strengthening the climate change negotiation skills of Pacific island country parties to the UNFCCC will also contribute to greater participation in climate related discussions at both the national, regional and international level.

In addition to the negotiations training, the Pacific held consultations with the European Commission on the implementation of the Pacific-EU climate change declaration in the Pacific Islands. This represents a new and additional financing opportunity for climate change work in the region, and could expedite action on the ground in the Pacific on responding to the adverse effects of climate change.

The training was held 11 – 15 May at the SPREP Compound in Apia. …PNS (ENDS)

For more details please contact SPREP's Climate Change Adviser Espen Ronneberg E: espenr@sprep.org T: (685) 21929 F: (685) 20231 W: www.sprep.org

2009-05-18T13:02:00.000-07:00

Impacts of modernisation on traditional food resource management and food security on Eauripik atoll, Federated States of Micronesia
via Food Security on 4/28/09

Abstract This paper discusses the changes that are occurring in the management of food resources in a remote Pacific community due to modernising influences, such as the introduction of imported food and outboard motors as well as contemporary trends, such as emigration and greater population mobility. The paper focuses on several social circumstances observed during a seven month fieldwork period, many of which drive consumption of imported goods. Noting parallels to other isolated communities in the region, generalised observations are made and conclusions reached on the importance of understanding the social effects of ‘modernising’ projects for community food security.
• Content Type Journal Article
• Category Original Paper
• DOI 10.1007/s12571-009-0022-2
• Authors
o Andrew Scourse, Valley View 278a Turleigh, Bradford-on-Avon Wiltshire BA15 2HH UK
o Corinne Wilkins, 213B Norwood Road London SE24 9AG UK
o Journal Food Security
o Online ISSN 1876-4525
o Print ISSN 1876-4517

2009-05-18T12:32:00.000-07:00

Bitter gourd: High value, high input

From : The World Vegetable Center Newsletter

Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) is regarded as one of the world’s major vegetable crops and has great economic importance. It also is a promising candidate as a remedy
that can help millions in the developing world who suffer from metabolic disorders such as type-2 diabetes. These positive features may make bitter gourd look like an
all-purpose crop; however, to be successful on a global scale, this indigenous crop requires attention from breeders as well as production system specialists.
A traditional vegetable grown throughout tropical and subtropical Asia, bitter gourd is planted on more than 60,000 ha annually—but major insecttransmitted diseases such as Cucurbit aphid-borne yellow virus (CABYC), Papaya ringspot virus (PRSV), and Zucchini yellow mosaic virus (ZYMV) are spreading quickly, causing significant yield
reductions. Fusarium wilt, powdery mildew, and bacterial wilt also cause considerable damage. “Breeding bitter gourd with resistance or tolerance to diseases is a promising approach,” says Dr. Zhanyong Sun, who is leading AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center’s cucurbit program. Through disease resistance breeding, private sector researchers in the Philippines were able to develop ‘Namamarako,’ a variety
resistant to CNM, a new emerging virus that is a strain of CABYV. This hybrid yields well even during times of high virus incidence. “With 302 accessions listed in its
current inventory, AVRDC’s Momordica collection is of interest for research cooperation with partners in the private sector,” says Dr. Sun. “But it’s important to carry out broader research. We simply don’t know enough about the diseases and insects that affect bitter gourd, the most successful cultural practices, and the most promising pest management strategies.” As Dr. Sun can attest, researching indigenous vegetables is an exploration of the unknown and involves a lot of pioneering work. Together with AVRDC’s Asian Regional Center in Bangkok, Dr.
Sun hopes to conduct an in-depth survey and analysis in the region to identify varieties that are disease resistant and adapted to different agroecological conditions. Researchers will not have to be concerned about one issue: climate
change. Bitter gourd performs even better under hot tropical conditions.

2009-05-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

New Pacific Partnership
South Pacific Odyssey, Part I

From : The World Vegetale Center

Dr. Dyno Keatinge (Director General) traveled to five Pacific Island nations,Australia and New Zealand to explore new partnerships and collaborations.

PNG
Dr. R. Ghodake, Director General of the Papua New Guinea National Agricultural esearch Institute (NARI) invited Dr. Keatinge to discuss potential projects along with other partners including the Fresh Produce Development Association (FPDA). Mr. A.K. Benjamin, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture and Livestock, noted that approximately 85% of the country’s population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods; he welcomed AVRDC’s initiatives to promote agricultural development,
especially for vegetables. Dr. Keatinge toured the NARI Dry Lowlands Research Station with Prof. Udai Pal and Dr. Rosa Kambuou, the country’s senior plant genetic resources specialist. A courtesy call was paid on Mr. Chen Shan-Lin, Representative of the Trade Mission of the Republic of China (Taiwan) in Papua New Guinea and a keen supporter of agricultural development through the Taiwan Technical Mission based
at Lae. Slippery cabbage (Abelmoschus manihot) goes by many names in the South Pacific, including aibika, bele, pele, and others. The germplasm diversity of this popular and nutritionally important indigenous vegetable is currently threatened, and it is hoped Center staff will be allowed to collect and preserve specimens in the AVRDC genebank. It will not be an easy task, as most current A. manihot
lines are propagated vegetatively. Green leafy vegetables are an important part of the local diet in PNG, but malnutrition remains an issue, as consumption of vitamin Arich foods is limited. Opportunities to grow vegetables abound in highland areas and NARI is successfully introducing new species to farmers in this region. However, getting the harvest to larger markets such as in Port Moresby is difficult due to a lack of appropriate infrastructure and refrigerated transport. Increasing crop diversity, germplasm preservation, improving postharvest handling, and market chain issues are all areas of future collaboration between AVRDC and PNG institutions.
Papua New Guinea Planning future partnerships: Prof. Udai Pal, NARI (far left); PNG Secretary of Agriculture Mr. A.K. Benjamin (third from left); Dr. Keatinge (fourth from left); NARI Director General Dr. R. Ghodake (fifth from left); members of senior ministries and the Fresh Produce Department Association. Dr. Rosa Kambuou (l) and Mr. Chen Shan-Lin (r) at Taiwan’s Trade Mission in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Solomon Islands
The Honorable Mr. Selwyn Riumana, Solomon Islands Minister of Agriculture and Livestock Development, toured AVRDC HQ in Taiwan on 14-17 January 2009 and invited Dr. Keatinge for a reciprocal visit. Fierce Solomon Island warriors greeted the DG on the tarmac at Honiara International Airport—an event captured on the front page of
the daily newspaper, the Solomon Star News. Dr. Keatinge, Dr. Jaw- Fen Wang, AVRDC Global Theme Leader-Production, and Dr. Ravi Joshi, AVRDC senior scientist in the
Solomons, met the Prime Minister of the Government of the Solomon Islands, the Honorable Mr. Derek Sikua. Vegetable consumption is low in the Solomon Islands and malnutrition is a severe problem. A lack of seed, limited crop diversity, and
production difficulties are being addressed under AVRDC’s project funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR). All seed
available in the Solomons is imported hybrid seed from Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. It is difficult for farmers to obtain good seedling material of indigenous vegetables such as slippery cabbage; the project is collecting and preserving germplasm. Local NGOs such as Vois Blong Mere Solomons and the Kastom
Garden Association have been staunch project supporters; through their excellent network, more than 650 women turned out to attend a talk by Dr. Keatinge on the
importance of vegetables in combating malnutrition in children. The talk was given at the Taiwanese Technical Mission HQ in Honiara through the good offices of His
Excellency Mr. George Chan, Taiwanese Ambassador to the Solomon Islands, and Mr. David Huang, the leader of the mission. The following day Mr. Chan and Dr.
Keatinge addressed a gathering of more than 200 secondary school children touring vegetable plots at the Kastom Garden Association HQ. Organic farmer Mr. Joini Tutua, a well-known figure in the Solomons, gave the tour. All the women and schoolchildren
took home an eggplant seedling and seed of yard-long bean, both of which have been successful AVRDC introductions to the Solomons. This well-planned giveaway also made
headlines in the Solomon Star News.

Fiji

In Fiji, Dr. Keatinge consulted with the new ACIAR Regional Representative for the South Pacific, Dr. Richard Markham. ACIAR’s generous support funds our current Solomon Islands project. AVRDC also proposed an agreement for collaboration with
the Secretariat of the South Pacific Community and their network of 22 South Pacific states. The Memorandum of Agreement was signed by Dr. Aleki Sisifa, Director of the SPC Land Resources Division. The agreement gives AVRDC formal status for collaboration with SPC’s Regional Germplasm Center and other associated germplasm networks such as the Pacific Agricultural Genetic Resources Network (PAPGREN). The Regional Germplasm Center has good skills in tissue culture and genetic resources, which are coordinated by Dr. Mary Taylor and Mr. Tevita Kete.Dr. Keatinge visited the
Fijian National Agricultural Research Station in the Sigatoka Valley. This beautiful
location, the vegetable production center of Fiji, was ground zero of the devastating banana disease, black sigatoka, which swept the world and brought severe
hardship to communities in sub- Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Vegetable introductions from AVRDC in collaboration with the Fijian NARS and the Taiwan
Technical Mission are faring well in this region.

2009-05-12T15:46:00.000-07:00

Forget A Better Mousetrap: Save The Forest

From : Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2006) — The most cost-effective way to stop non-native rats and mongoose from decimating highly endangered species on larger tropical islands is not by intensive trapping, but instead by preserving the forest blocks where wildlife live, according to a study by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other groups.

The study, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Conservation Biology, found that rats and mongoose in the Fiji Islands rarely penetrate the forest interior, preferring instead to forage along the forest edges.

The study holds potential good news for species like the pink-billed parrotfinch, banded iguana and Fijian land snails which live deep within Fiji's remaining forests. By using bait stations designed to attract rats and mongoose, the researchers discovered that stations over five kilometers (approximately three miles) from the forest edge were rarely visited.

"Protection of the few remaining large blocks of natural forests on Pacific islands may be the most cost-effective approach for conserving many rare species threatened by rats and mongooses," said WCS researcher David Olson, lead author of the study.

Though the authors are unsure on exactly why rats and mongoose seem to shy away from deep forests, they theorize that natural forests have poorer habitats for reproduction for these invasive species than agricultural areas or secondary forests.

The authors warn that even low levels of rat and mongoose penetration into forest areas can be sufficient over time to cause the decline of native species. Also, the occurrence of logging roads or even the proximity to rivers can allow rats and mongoose to colonize areas where endangered species occur.

"Remote forest areas that function as refuges for threatened island species are increasingly rare and should receive the highest priority for conservation on the larger islands of the Pacific," said David Olson, who said that similar forests exist in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Hawaii and tropical islands in the Caribbean. Authors from the University of the South Pacific also contributed to the study.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adapted from materials provided by Wildlife Conservation Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS

2009-05-12T15:35:00.000-07:00

Biological Diversity: Islands Beat Mainland Nine To One

From : Science Daily

ScienceDaily (May 11, 2009) — Rare and unique ecological communities will be lost if oceanic islands aren't adequately considered in a global conservation plan, a new study has found. Although islands tend to harbor fewer species than continental lands of similar size, plants and animals found on islands often live only there, making protection of their isolated habitats our sole chance to preserve them.

Many conservation strategies focus on regions with the greatest biodiversity, measured by counting the number of different plants and animals. "Normally you want to focus on the most diverse places to protect a maximum number of species," said Holger Kreft, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, San Diego and one of the two main authors of the study, "but you also want to focus on unique species which occur nowhere else."

To capture that uniqueness, Kreft and colleagues at the University of Bonn, UC San Diego and the University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde used a measure of biodiversity that weights rare species more than widespread ones. They carved the terrestrial realm into 90 biogeographic regions, calculated biodiversity for each, then compared island and continental ecosystems. By this measure, island populations of plants and vertebrate animals are eight to nine times as rich.

The southwest Pacific island of New Caledonia stands out as the most unique with animals like the kagu, a bird with no close relatives found only in the forested highlands that is in danger of extinction, and plants like Amborella, a small understory shrub unlike any other flowering plant that is thought to be the lone survivor of an ancient lineage.

Fragments of continents that have broken free to become islands like Madagascar and New Caledonia often serve as a final refuge for evolutionary relicts like these. The source of diversity is different on younger archipelagos formed by volcanoes such as the Canary Islands, the Galápagos and Hawaii which offered pristine environments where early colonizers branched out into multiple related new species to fill empty environmental niches. The new measure doesn't distinguish between the two sources of uniqueness, which may merit different conservation strategies.

Although islands account for less than four percent of the Earth's land area, they harbor nearly a quarter of the world's plants, more than 70,000 species that don't occur on the mainlands. Vertebrate land animals – birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals – broadly follow this same pattern.

"Islands are important and should be part of any global conservation strategy," Kreft said. "Such a strategy wouldn't make any sense if you didn't include the islands."

Threats to biodiversity may also rise faster for islands than for mainlands, the team reports. Scenarios based on a measure of human impact projected to the year 2100 warn that life on islands will be more drastically affected than mainland populations.

"That threat is expected to accelerate particularly rapidly on islands where access to remaining undeveloped lands is comparatively easy" said Gerold Kier, project leader at the University of Bonn and lead author of the study. Expanding farmlands, deforestation, and other changes in how people use land are among the alterations expected to cause the greatest damage.

The researchers also considered future challenges posed by climate change and report mixed impacts. Rising sea levels will swamp low-lying areas and smaller islands, but the ocean itself is expected to moderate island climates by buffering temperature changes. "Although disruptions to island ecosystems are expected to be less severe than on the continents, climate change remains one of the main threats to the biodiversity of the Earth," Kier said. "If we cannot slow it down significantly, protected areas will not be much help."

"We now have new and important data in our hands, but still have no simple solutions for nature conservation," Kreft said. "In particular, we need to answer the question how protected areas with their flora and fauna can complement each other in the best way. The part played by ecosystems, for example their ability to take up the green-house gas carbon dioxide, should be increasingly taken into account."

Co-authors included Tien Ming Lee and Walter Jetz of UC San Diego; Pierre Ibisch and Christoph Nowicki of the University of Applied Sciences Eberswalde; and Jens Mutke and Wilhelm Barthlott of the University of Bonn.

The Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, the Wilhelm Lauer Foundation, and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funded the research. Holger Kreft holds a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Journal reference:

Gerold Kier, Holger Kreft, Tien Ming Lee, Walter Jetz, Pierre L. Ibisch, Christoph Nowicki, Jens Mutke & Wilhelm Barthlott. A global assessment of endemism and species richness across island and mainland regions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 11, 2009 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810306106
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - San Diego, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

2009-05-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

Children taught need to grow own food

From : Fiji Times

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Green finger ... Suva Multiple Intelligence Centre student Zion Semaan harvests cabbage outside his school yesterday.

TEACHER Sofia Koroi and her students at Suva's Multiple Intelligence Centre excitedly harvested two plots of English cabbage yesterday.

They planted the crop five months ago and will sell the cabbages to their parents.

"This is part of the school program to teach our students the importance of growing our own food," Mrs Koroi said.

"We started two years ago, planting all year around and selling our harvests to the students' parents."

The school plants cucumber, beans, pawpaw, sugar cane, bele and other vegetables.

There are 50 students in the school, who each day spend about 30 minutes taking care of their gardens with the help of the teachers. Yesterday's harvest was from the gardens of Class Three and Four students.

2009-05-05T19:39:00.000-07:00

Swine flu science: Who's writing what on the virus

1 May 2009

From : SciDev

C. S. Goldsmith and A. Balish, CDC
As swine flu spreads around the globe, scientists are seeking to build their understanding of the virus — particularly the likelihood that it will mutate. From the wealth of information in the media, SciDev.Net has selected some of the best articles considering the science behind swine flu.

According to Wendy Barclay — professor of influenza virology at the UK-based Imperial College London — swine flu, now known as A(H1N1), is a 'triple reassortment' virus. It is made up of segments from human, swine and avian viruses, Barclay told New Scientist in an expert analysis.

Speaking to Science for an article on swine flu mutation, Kennedy Shortridge — a virologist at the University of Hong Kong — warned that as the virus spreads further this mixture is likely to increase: "… the farther the virus spreads, the more chance it will mix, or reassort, with other flu viruses in circulation and turn into something more lethal".

He said that there are human strains of the virus in areas that are resistant to the current treatment Tamiflu and urged the sequencing of as many viral samples as possible to help predict changes in the virus.

In an attempt to predict the virus's spread, Ira Longini and colleagues at the US-based University of Washington are trying to acquire as much data as possible on the virus's basic reproductive number, R0, a variable that reveals the number of new infections caused by each infected person. Longini told Science in the same article that this is the key factor in determining the virus's spread.

Scientists are also eager to find out "whether a virus must mutate to move from pigs to humans and whether, as is the case with bird flu in humans, a specific mutation makes it more virulent," Science reports.

A strategy to postpone the emergence of resistance is to "hold off using your primary drug until the cumulative number of cases reaches a sufficiently high number," says Joseph Wu of the University of Hong Kong. He told New Scientist that stockpiling just one drug would encourage resistance.

One mystery is the virus's origins.

UK newspaper The Guardian reports that UN scientists are trying to determine whether La Gloria, Mexico, is the virus's source. The village is suspected because samples acquired from a five-year-old there provide the earliest confirmed case of the disease. Other theories include migrant workers bringing the virus to Mexico from California, or that the earliest source is a 39-year-old woman in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Scientists are also investigating why sufferers outside Mexico have experienced comparatively mild symptoms, Barclay told New Scientist. As yet there is no evidence that the genetic makeup of the Mexican strains differ from those in the United States, for example, says Barclay.

BBC Online reports that preliminary analysis of the virus suggests that it is "a fairly mild strain". In a summary of what is known about swine flu, scientists say further mutation is required to cause mass deaths, but future evolution of the virus remains unknown. UK scientists will begin work today (1 May) on samples of the virus sent from the US. The research is essential in order to work out the structure of the virus, its origins and its propensity to spread.

Barclay told BBC Online that "initial indications suggest there is nothing about the genetic makeup of the new virus which is a cause for particular concern".

Preliminary "guesswork" has found that H1N1 attaches itself to the upper respiratory tract, spreading easily via coughing and sneezing but causing only mild infection. This is unlike the H5N1 avian influenza virus, which binds further down in the lungs and causes more severe illness, even though human transmission is rare.

But it will take "weeks and months of biological analysis" to fully determine H1N1's potential, reports BBC Online.

2009-05-05T19:26:00.000-07:00

Coconut palms - the timber of the future
News release

From : SPC
________________________________________
We see them along our beachfronts and in many streets and gardens, but the iconic palm tree may soon have a new place in the Queensland lifestyle as a high-quality building product.
Research conducted by Queensland Primary Industries and Fisheries (QPIF) has found that cocowood, produced from coconut palm tree trunks, is suitable for use as high-value flooring, bench tops, kitchen cabinets and furniture.
QPIF senior technician Gary Hopewell said the latest findings from the three-year $520,000 cocowood project showed that processed coconut palm wood was actually superior to many other commercially available timbers.
"A number of Australian flooring product manufacturers are evaluating the material for their domestic manufacturing operations," he said.
"Timber industry representatives from Australia, Fiji and Samoa, including flooring market and production specialists and potential suppliers and processors, are studying drying and processing technologies to ensure strict quality control of the product.
"Even medium-density palm logs can be processed to make attractive veneers and plywood.
"The positive results achieved to date support development of palm stem processing in Pacific island countries of origin, with value-added flooring and other products produced in Australia."
Many Pacific island nations including Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu have large but ageing coconut palm plantations, where there is declining coconut and copra crop production.
Mr Hopewell said the project was looking at opportunities to use these plantations to generate new timber industries, and create new Australian export and consumer markets, while providing a new source of income for Pacific island peoples from a locally available resource.
"With strong demand for flooring products in Asia, America and Europe, cocowood products could be very lucrative for Queensland and our Pacific neighbours," he said.
"By developing a cocowood industry to provide a range of timber products, we could help reduce the demand for timber from old-growth forests in Pacific island nations."
This year the project enters a new stage with the further refinement of cocowood processing for commercialisation and entry to domestic and international markets.
The cocowood project is co-funded by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural research (ACIAR). QPIF is a partner agency with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), the Fiji Coconut Industry Development Authority, (CIDA), Fiji Ministry of Fisheries and Forests, Samoan Ministry for Natural Resources and Environment and Strickland Brothers, Samoa.

With Kind Regards

Mr Vinesh Prasad
Information Communication Technology Assistant
Facilitating the Agricultural Commodity Trade in Pacific
Phone: (679) 3370733 ext 375
facsmile: (679) 3370021

2009-05-05T18:59:00.000-07:00

A world without biodiversity?

From : IUCN

Diversity-biological as well as social, linguistic and cultural diversity-is the lifeblood of sustainable development and human welfare. It is key to resilience-the ability of natural and social systems to adapt to change and is essential for nearly every aspect of our lives.

That’s why, in the run-up to the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, with its theme A Diverse and Sustainable World the latest issue of World Conservation is going ‘back to basics’.

It asks the question: How can we expect to tackle poverty and climate change if we don’t look after the natural wealth of animals, plants, microorganisms and ecosystems that make our planet inhabitable?

The articles look at the scientific, social, economic and cultural case for keeping diversity, showing how biodiversity supports our health and physical security, food production, medical research, livelihoods, tourism, artistic expression and cultural life.

2009-05-05T18:53:00.000-07:00

Sixty: Is time running out?

From: IUCN

IUCN is 60. To help celebrate this remarkable milestone, we’ve produced a special double issue of World Conservation: looking back over 60 years of conservation and ahead to the
next 60.

What are the issues, approaches and ideas that will influence conservation in the coming decades? Several prominent figures including IUCN's Presidential candidates outline their vision for the environment.

We profile some of the people who are instigating change from the ground level to the international policy arena. We also take a look at some of the big issues up for discussion at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona which kicks off on 5 October.

2009-04-28T13:42:00.000-07:00

Bits and pieces from the just -ended G8 Agriculture Ministers meeting in Italy (18-21 April 2009

From : PAR

Agriculture ministers from the G8 called for increased agriculture production as a way to combat world hunger. They together with also representatives from key emerging and developing countries, called for a study into setting up a global system to stockpile essential foodstuffs. In their final declaration, they called on the relevant international institutions to examine whether a system of stockholding would be effective in dealing with humanitarian emergencies or as a means to limit food price volatility.

Read more on this article

G8 Ministers pledged to use every means at their disposal to lessen the negative impact of the financial crisis on poverty and hunger, to back and encourage sustainable food production and to increase investment in agriculture and research.

“Humanity faces great challenges: to feed a growing population and reduce hunger and malnutrition in a world that also needs to protect the environment and to address climate change,” said Emile Frison, Director General of Bioversity International. “I urge the Agriculture Ministers to ensure that agricultural biodiversity can play a greater role in ensuring real food security.” Read the article

G8 Agriculture Ministers’ Meeting: Final Statement

Find out more about the G8 meeting by visiting this website: http://www.g8agricultureministersmeeting.mipaaf.com

2009-04-27T21:28:00.000-07:00

FAO urged Governments urged to step up disease surveillance in swine

28 APRIL 2009 ROME (Pacnews) ---- Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is mobilizing its teams of experts to help ascertain if the new strain of H1N1 virus, which already killed many people in Mexico, has a direct connection to pigs.

FAO is also deploying a team of experts of the FAO OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health) Crisis Management Centre – Animal Health (CMC-AH), to Mexico this week to help the government assess the epidemiologic situation in the pig production sector.

Full alert

The UN agency has also requested its technical staff around the world be on full alert, immediately report any influenza-like illness in swine stocks and forward specimens to FAO/OIE reference laboratories.

At present, transmission seems to be occurring solely from humans to humans; so far evidence that the new strain of influenza A virus has entered the human population directly from pigs has not been established. Further analysis is planned to gain better insight into the situation.

No food chain threat

“There is no evidence of a threat to the food chain; at this stage it is a human crisis and not an animal crisis, but we have to be alerted and prepared,” said FAO Chief Veterinary Officer Joseph Domenech.

“The first actions FAO and others must take are to ascertain if the new strain is circulating in pigs, establish if there are any direct linkages between the illness in the human population and animals and explain how this new virus has obtained genetic materials from human, bird and pig influenza strains,” he said.

Governments urged to step up surveillance

FAO is working in close coordination with the World Health Organisation and OIE and other national and international actors involved at all stages of the organization’s operations to ensure maximum efficiency in this worrying turn of events.

FAO urges Governments and the international community to step up disease surveillance in swine……PNS (ENDS)

2009-04-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

Climate change: Indigenous peoples outraged

From : Carbon Based

eGovMonitor, via Global Justice Ecology: At the first global gathering of Indigenous Peoples on climate change, participants were outraged at the intensifying rate of destruction the climate crisis is having on the Earth and all peoples.

Participants reaffirmed that Indigenous Peoples are most impacted by climate change and called for support and funding for Indigenous Peoples to create adaptation and mitigation plans for themselves, based on their own Traditional Knowledge and practices. Indigenous Peoples also took a strong position on emission reduction targets of industrialized countries and against false solutions.

The majority of those attending looked towards addressing the root problem - the burning of fossil fuels - and demanded an immediate moratorium on new fossil fuel development and called for a swift and just transition away from fossil fuels.

"While the arctic is melting, Africa is suffering from drought and many Pacific Islands are in danger of disappearing. Indigenous Peoples are locked out of national and international negotiations," stated Jihan Gearon, Native energy and climate campaigner of the Indigenous Environmental Network. "We're sending a strong message to the next UN Framework Convention on Climate Change this December in Copenhagen, Denmark that business as usual must end, because business as usual is killing us. Participants at the summit stood united on sending a message to the world leaders in Copenhagen calling for a binding emission reduction target for developed countries of at least 45% below 1990 levels by 2020 and at least 95% by 2050."

…Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network's Executive Director, commented, "We want real solutions to climate chaos and not the false solutions like forest carbon offsets and other market based mechanisms that will benefit only those who are making money on those outrageous schemes " He added, "For example one the solutions to mitigate climate change is an initiative by the World Bank to protect forests in developing countries through a carbon market regime called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or REDD." He concluded, "Don't be fooled, REDD does nothing to address the underlying drivers of deforestation."

2009-04-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

Asian bee a threat to Solomon Islands commercial honey

27 APRIL 2009 HONIARA (Pacnews) ---- Following discovery of the lethal Asian bees in 2003, Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (MAL) has immediately embarked on suppressing the bees before they would spread and cause disruption to Solomon Islands’ commercial honey, reports Island Sun newspaper.

“Research is continuing as to how best to contain the spreading of Asian bees,” Solomon Islands Permanent Secretary (PS) of Agriculture and Livestock, Henry Pika, revealed last week.

Mr Pika said at the moment farmers, particularly on the Guadalcanal plains, are banned from producing honey due to initial discovery of Asian bees at Tenaru.

“We fear Guadalcanal farmers might help to spread Asian bees to other places since the bees were initially discovered at Tenaru in 2003,” Mr. Pika said. Based on this understanding, Ministry has temporarily halted production of honey from Guadalcanal plains farmers, Mr Pika confirmed.

Mr Pika said there are installments of equipments at sites said to be affected and agriculture officers are monitoring how to contain the spread of it and possibly, a total suppression of it.

“Overseas agencies are assisting in terms of provision of specialized equipments to combat the Asian bee,” Mr Pika affirmed.

Mr. Pika said Asian bees are highly mobile, therefore, it is important that farmers and the ministry must work together to devise a proper means of stopping them from spreading.

“The best we can do is suppressed it,” Mr Pika reiterated.

Mr. Pika urged farmers to work closely with the ministry in a concerted effort to suppress Asian bees.

Asian bees carry a parasite called “Varon Jacobsoni” that can destroy larva of the commercial honey bee. The destruction of larva can cause negative impact on the overall production of honey.

Meanwhile, Mr.Pika also reaffirmed that eradication of giant African snail is still on.

Mr. Pika said Ranandi where giant African snail was initially found is showing signs of reduction of it. ….PNS (ENDS)

2009-04-26T20:10:00.000-07:00

Can “Sustainable” Palm Oil Slow Deforestation?

From : Worldwatch Institute

by Ben Block on April 24, 2009
This is the third feature in a three-part series on palm oil development in Indonesia. Read Part 1: Global Palm Oil Demand Fueling Deforestation and Part 2: Oil Palm Industry Takes Land, Promises Livelihood.

Oil palm plantations yield four tons of oil per hectare, on average. Experts predict that higher yields are necessary for Indonesia to avoid removing wide swaths of its tropical forests.Malaysia-based United Plantations marked the beginning of a new era for the controversial palm oil market last November with its first certified "sustainable" shipment.

The purchaser, Unilever, greeted the oil with a welcoming ceremony at the Dutch port of Rotterdam. A refinery in the United Kingdom received the palm oil a few days later, churned it into edible cooking oil, and shipped it to Sainsbury's, a leading UK grocery chain.

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia are also lining up for certification, hoping to demonstrate to buyers that ecologically rich tropical forests were not cleared to grow their crop. Industrial producer PT Musim Mas received the country's first certificate in February, and at least four other companies, such as Cargill-owned PT Hindoli, have followed.

More companies and governments, particularly in Europe, are requiring that the palm oil they source meet rigorous sustainability standards. Under a new European Union biofuel policy [PDF] finalized earlier this month, any palm oil biodiesel imported to the region must, over its full life cycle, demonstrate a 35-percent savings in greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuel diesel, and the feedstock cannot be grown in areas with high biodiversity value or a high stock of carbon.

These demands have led the main global certification body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), to become a major player in the future of palm oil production.

Nearly 40 million tons of palm oil was produced in 2007, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Indonesia leads global production and is expected to supply more than half the palm oil that the world will demand in the coming years for cooking, cosmetics, and biofuel.

Despite the global recession, the country plans to establish about 1.4 million hectares of new oil palm plantations by 2010. This will likely require clearing additional large swaths of tropical forest, contributing to the loss of indigenous lands and further threatening the habitat of endangered species such as the orangutan.

It would also increase Indonesia's contribution to global climate change. The country already emits more greenhouse gases than any other nation besides China and the United States, due primarily to the clearing and burning of tropical forests.

Sustainability Criteria Remain Controversial

In response to these environmental and social concerns, conservation group WWF teamed up with the palm oil industry to launch the RSPO, a multi-stakeholder body, in 2004. One of the body's top mandates has been to define what "sustainable" palm oil production entails, and to develop a credible standard to reflect this. The standard was released in 2005.

To meet the new standard, growers and processors must apply eight principles, containing 39 specific criteria [PDF], to their operations. The principles include a commitment to transparency on environmental, social and legal issues; environmental responsibility with regard to waste, resource use, and climate; and responsible consideration for workers, individuals, and communities affected by palm oil production.

Producers are beginning to implement the RSPO criteria: as of last year, members included 72 firms worldwide, more than half of them from Indonesia. About 1.5 million tons of palm oil was certified last year.

Although relatively few companies have been certified, villagers and non-governmental organizations in Indonesia are already using the RSPO's criteria to demand better treatment for communities displaced by plantations, according to Norman Jiwan, a researcher with the Indonesian human rights group Sawit Watch. "By using the criteria, indigenous people in local communities can stop the companies' aggression on the ground," Jiwan said.

But the rules are not without loopholes.

New plantations are allowed to remove forest as long as the land is not deemed "high-value conservation forest." With RSPO members from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific islands, the body has allowed each country to interpret "high value" based on its unique situation.

Instead, the RSPO plans in upcoming meetings to tighten its rules for how much greenhouse gas a new plantation may release. The maximum amount of gases released by new plantations would be based on the forest's original biomass. Areas with dense, old-growth trees or carbon-rich peat, would rank higher on the biomass standard than new growth forests.

"Defining a ‘high value conservation forest' is a vague process. It's subject to opinion," said Tim Killeen, who represents the environmental group Conservation International on the RSPO. "But a biomass standard is not going to be subject to interpretation."

The RSPO criteria also state that oil palm trees planted before 2005 are exempted. On average, the oil palm requires about seven years to bear fruit, so the "high value conservation forest" requirements do not pertain to the recent palm oil shipments that received RSPO certification.

The environmental groups Greenpeace International and Wetlands International argue that such loopholes allows palm oil firms to join RSPO and improve their image despite the fact that very little palm oil has yet been produced according to the sustainability criteria.

The Jakarta-based Center for Orangutan Protection has directly opposed the certification scheme. The group said last year that it found two RSPO member companies clear-cutting forests that were home to orangutans, sun bears, and Borneo gibbons. "It has been six years after RSPO was put into operation but forests are still cleared and orangutans are continually killed," said Novi Hardianto, the Center's habitat program coordinator, in a press release. "All criteria on sustainable palm oil and certification process are merely public lies."

For Killeen, the potential for oil palm to become an environmentally sustainable, high-income crop is too great to ignore. If the RSPO can address its shortcomings, the certification system can become a key tool in reducing deforestation across Indonesia, he said.

But without a larger share of the market demanding sustainable palm oil, any progress made by the RSPO may not halt the damaging effects of expanded oil palm production.

"The RSPO controls the market exporting to Europe, basically. China doesn't care. India doesn't care. Domestic consumption in Vietnam, Korea, they don't care," Killeen said. "Don't expect the RSPO to stop the problems."

Beyond Certification

In order for Indonesia to continue developing its lucrative oil palm industry without devastating tropical ecosystems, the industry will need to increase yields on land that has already been cleared, according to Michael Shean, a global crop analyst with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

On average, plantations yield about four tons of oil per hectare, but some producers, often larger commercial estates, have managed yields as great as 10 tons per hectare, Shean said.

"There need not be such a drive to open new acreage at the expense of tropical forests if the average Indonesian producer - that means both commercial and smallholders - were to actually invest a greater amount of capital in yield improvements," Shean said.

Without regulations that place strict limits on expanding plantations, however, producers do not have enough incentive to invest in boosting their yields, Shean said.

Proponents of international carbon offset programs view the successor climate change treaty to the Kyoto Protocol as an opportunity to finance yield improvements.

Negotiators will decide at December's U.N. summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, whether to include a policy that pays landowners to keep forests intact. Although specifics of the approach, known as "reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation," or REDD, remain undefined, Indonesia has applied for funds from both the U.N. and the World Bank for pilot projects that could pay oil palm plantations to avoid clearing dense forests.

The Nature Conservancy, one of several conservation groups exploring the use of REDD, predicts that an international carbon price of roughly $6 per ton would make conserving Indonesia's forests economically competitive with oil palm development.

"The strategy is to direct oil palm to areas already degraded," said Greg Fishbein, director of the group's conservation finance division. "The benefit of REDD is that you show up with a bunch of money."

A study in the journal Conservation Letters last month estimated that if REDD is included in a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions, payments for "avoided deforestation" could range between $1,500 and $11,800 per hectare, depending on when the carbon credits are allocated and sold. In comparison, the oil palm market was estimated to generate a net present value between $3,800 and $9,600 per hectare over a 30-year period.

The carbon market offers the potential to expand RSPO criteria to a larger share of oil palm plantations. But the success of the REDD approach depends on how the funding, which is expected to be significant, would be allocated.

"If REDD is spent providing for jobs in old, deforested landscapes, it might be effective," Killeen said. "If REDD is spent by NGOs or consultants or governments on silly things that are not investments in productivity [and] not investments in people, [then] people will still cut down the forest."

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

This article is a product of Eye on Earth, Worldwatch Institute's online news service. For permission to reprint Eye on Earth content, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

2009-04-26T19:26:00.000-07:00

Call for Papers:Intl Conference on Positive Plant Microbial Interactions in Relation to Plant Performance and Ecosystem Function, 15-16 December, 2009

International Conference on Positive Plant Microbial Interactions in Relation to Plant Performance and Ecosystem Function

in conjunction with the

Botanical Society of Scotland
at
Olde Barn Hotel, Grantham, UK
on 15-16 December 2009

The organizers invite the offer of papers or posters within the framework â€˜Positive Plant Microbial Interactions in Relation to Plant Performance and Ecosystem Functionâ€™. Accepted papers and posters from the Conference will be published in a volume of Aspects of Applied Biology, which will be available to delegates at the Conference. Selected authors will be encouraged to submit full papers for consideration for publication in Annals of Applied Biology or Plant Ecology and Diversity.

Abstracts of papers can be submitted online via our web site at http://www.aab.org.uk. Click on ABSTRACTS in the left-hand column, then the title of Conference. Once you have registered as a user you can upload your details. Please indicate if your offer is for a poster or a platform presentation. Please ensure that your pop up blocker is off, or your offer may not upload.
DEADLINE FOR CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS IS 30 JUNE 2009

For any clarifications or questions, please contact:

Dr. Mitchell Andrews
University of Sunderland,
UK

2009-04-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Asia and the Pacific
Sixty-fifth session of the Commission
23-29 April 2009, Bangkok

From : UN ESCAP

The impact of food insecurity on the Asia-Pacific region and how to deal with it is the focus of an ESCAP study entitled Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Asia and the Pacific. The study examines the environmental, economic and social challenges that are the roots of the region’s food insecurity and suggests a regional framework of action to be taken by governments and the international community in order to create greater food security.

Access to food and not the supply of food is central to food security. Thus, over the short term, Governments need to develop and strengthen social protection programmes. Governments also need to improve the availability of food at the national and local levels. In the medium term, it is critical to support the revitalization of small-scale sustainable food production. This involves ensuring that soils retain vital nutrients and farmers and others protect biodiversity and regenerate natural resources of soil and water. Climate change holds the potential to radically alter agroecosystems in the coming decades and there is already evidence of devastating crop failures. Predictions concerning food production vary. However, even if overall production were to remain high, declines in certain parts of the Asia-Pacific region may be expected. Over the long term, adapting and mitigating impacts from climate change will have to be a top priority for all countries in the region. For the complete study

2009-04-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

RECENT PUBLICATIONS FROM UH-CTAHR'S
OFFICE OF COMMUNICATION SERVICES-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-

*** Free Publications ***

The publications listed below by their subject category are now available for downloading from the CTAHR free publications webpage, http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/freepubs

Unless a publication is indicated to be Web only, printed copies, when available, are circulated to departments and Hawaii libraries, and copies for starter inventories are sent to CES offices.
Place orders for additional quantities of printed copies of free publications by e-mail to ocs@ctahr.hawaii.edu.

Background Paper

CTAHR and taro

http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/CTAHR_and_taro.pdf

Food Safety and Technology

Avoid contracting angiostrongyliasis (rat lungworm infection):
Wash fresh fruits and vegetables before eating!

Aurora Saulo, FST-35, 3 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-35.pdf

Best on-farm food safety practices: Documenting trace-back
and trace-forward of harvested produce

Jim Hollyer, Luisa Castro, Lynn Nakamura-Tengan,
Albert Louie, FST-36, 2 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-36.pdf

Pasture and Range Management

Management of production risk for Hawaii ranchers

Mark Thorne, Linda Cox, Glen Fukumoto, PRM-5, 8 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PRM-5.pdf

Plant Disease

Rhizopus soft rot of sweetpotato

Scot Nelson, PD-68, Web only
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PD-68.pdf

Popular Press (Home Garden) (articles by Jayme Grzebik)

The green-friendly garden: conserving water
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-01.pdf

Trees can offset your carbon footprint and make you greener!
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-02.pdf

Sunflowers
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-03.pdf

Plant needs
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-04.pdf

Integrated pest management
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-05.pdf

Using fresh culinary herbs
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-06.pdf

Popular Press (Turf Management) (articles by Jay Deputy)

Turf establishment
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-07.pdf

'El Toro' zoysiagrass vs. seashore paspalum
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-08.pdf

Fertilizer care for the home lawn
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-09.pdf

Removing thatch from your lawn
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-10.pdf

Environmental benefits of lawns
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-11.pdf

Instant, foolproof lawn repairs with turfgrass sod
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-12.pdf

Lawn renovation
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-13.pdf

Installing a new lawn
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PP-14.pdf

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2009-04-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

Pacific adaptation to climate change programme underway

16 APRIL 2009 APIA (Pacnews) ---- After several years of planning and preparation, a US $13.1million climate change adaptation project is now underway in the Pacific region.

The Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change (PACC) project is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as its implementing agency and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) as implementing partner.

The project is scheduled to be conducted from 2008 to 2012.

PACC will cover 13 Pacific islands countries and help develop three key areas that will build resilience to climate change in Pacific countries: food production and food security, coastal management and water resource management. Adaptation projects will be implemented nationally, and were selected after an intensive consultative process with the implementing agencies

Under the project, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands will focus on food production and food security. Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Samoa and Vanuatu are developing Coastal Management capacity and Nauru, Niue, Tonga and Tuvalu are looking at strengthening their water resource management.

“The Pacific countries have continued to indicate at the regional and international forums, the problems they are already facing from climate change, like salination of underground water, inundation of low lying areas and coastal erosion," said Taito Nakalevu of SPREP, who began his new role as the PACC Project Manager on 6 April.

“These are already impacting on the livelihoods of our Pacific people and the very resources they actually depend on. This project is part of the answer to help assist them in addressing this problem,” Mr Nakalevu added.

An inception workshop for the region wide project will be staged in June to build the capacity for countries to be able to fulfil the administrative requirements of the Project and to introduce other technical backstopping support.

Mr Nakalevu is currently working with countries bilaterally to help establish project management units that will coordinate PACC on the ground in the Pacific.

“Climate change is an important issue, it just won't go away. We have to adapt, we don't have any other option.” …PNS (ENDS)

2009-04-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

FOOD POLICY COUNCILS

From : Prof. George Kent

George Kent
University of Hawai’i
(Draft of January 31, 2009)

In many places there is no lead agency that gives sustained attention to food and nutrition issues in a comprehensive way. Permanent local Food Policy Councils could help. According to World Hunger Year,

A food policy council (FPC) brings together stakeholders from diverse food-related areas to examine how the food system is working and propose ways to improve it. A FPC may be an official advisory body on food systems issues to a city, county, or state government, or it may be a grassroots network focused on educating the public, coordinating non-profit efforts, and influencing government, commercial, and institutional practices and policies on food systems (WHY 2008).

A good example is the Toronto Food Policy Council in Canada, which has served as a leader in the worldwide movement to create such councils (Toronto 2008). The idea is catching on. Googling on Food Policy Council yields about two million hits, and Food Security Council yields a similar number. Most are in the United States, but they could play important roles anywhere, including less wealthy countries and communities. They could be organized and operated in many different ways. Suggestions are offered here on the design and operation of these councils, but of course adaptations would be have to be made to accommodate specific local circumstances and interests.

The councils are commonly referred to as Food Policy Councils (FPCs), but some are called Food Security Councils or Nutrition Policy Councils. No matter what their names might be, they should deal with all aspects of food and nutrition in a comprehensive way. They should provide a locus for providing sustained attention to, and dialogue on the issues, and for providing recommendations to relevant policymakers.

If food sovereignty is taken to mean the right of all people to participate in the shaping of food policy, then FPCs could be understood as a locus for its exercise. Here, food sovereignty means that everyone has a voice, and no one may exclude others or claim priority over others. Perhaps a better term would be food democracy.

FPCs may be governmental or quasi-governmental. Where governments do not provide a mandate for creating FPCs, local people could organize them on their own initiative.

Food Policy Councils span the usual boundaries of governmental agencies, cutting across the usual “silos” of governance (the separate ministries and departments), and providing a place for much needed dialogues. They should operate on the basis of openness and broad participation, and operate democratically, grounding their recommendations mainly on clear analysis and compelling principles.

FPCs should facilitate dialogue on nutrition-related activities not only horizontally, across particular levels, but also vertically. FPCs could be organized in layers, with small FPCs in local jurisdictions (e.g., cities, villages), medium-sized ones at intermediate levels (e.g., states, provinces), and larger ones at the national level. There could also be regional ones, housed in appropriate regional organizations. There could be one at the global level as well. At the global level, the Committee on World Food Security based in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and also the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition, have roles comparable to those of FPCs.

FPCs at different levels would work differently, but with good coordination among them they could complement and support one another. The FPCs at higher levels should not provide instructions to those at the lower levels, but should provide support services such as technical advice and coordination services according to the wishes of the lower level FPCs. The ones at lower levels could provide information and recommendations to those at higher levels.

This layering has not yet been worked out in an orderly way anywhere, but the potential is there.

FOOD SECURITY

According to the Plan of Action of the World Food Summit of 1996, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life (FAO 1996, para 1).” It is comprised of three major elements: availability, access, and utilization:

Food availability in a country, region or local area means that food is physically present because it has been grown, processed, manufactured, and/or imported.

Food access refers to the way in which different people obtain available food. Normally, food is accessed through a combination of means. This may include: home production, use of left-over stocks, purchase, barter, borrowing, sharing, gifts from relatives, and provisions by welfare systems or food aid.

Food utilization is the way in which people use food. It is dependent upon a number of interrelated factors: the quality of the food and its method of preparation, storage facilities, and the nutritional knowledge and health status of the individual consuming the food (International Federation 2007).

The challenge is not simply to ensure adequate food supplies, but to ensure that everyone is well nourished. Thus, attention needs to be given not only to food supply but also to issues such as eating habits and child feeding. The overall objective should be to ensure good nutrition for all, under all conditions. These bodies could be called Nutrition Policy Councils to highlight the point that they are concerned with nutrition in all it dimensions, and should not limit their focus to food supplies.

The FPCs main task would be to give recommendations and to facilitate the operations of other agencies, and not to undertake field operations themselves. They would not have a fixed pot of money to allocate, but their recommendations could influence the allocations made by others. Similarly, the pool of human resources that are available is not fixed, but could grow in response to the FPCs’ encouragement. The people who are drawn in to work on improving infant feeding practices, for example, would be different from those who want to promote homestead food production, and they would draw from different pools of resources.

Participants in FPCs would be expected to have a shared high level goal, the assurance of good nutrition for all people under all conditions. However, as a diverse group, the participants would have different interests in how to approach it. Different interests do not necessarily mean conflicting interests. The assumption here is that malnutrition must be addressed on many fronts at once, and there needs to be a division of labor in doing that. FPCs should facilitate all approaches, and help the groups that are involved to harmonize their work.

TASK FORCES

FPCs could organize their work in terms of Task Forces that cover all the major dimensions of food issues. Their mandates could be divided into groups something like this:

Basic Food Supplies
Agriculture and fisheries are important means for maintaining livelihoods for the producers and for meeting nutritional needs of consumers. This Task Force would focus on the contributions of agriculture and fisheries, and also food imports, to the nutrition of local people. It should cover not only commercial operations but also homestead food production and non-commercial food harvesting in natural settings. It could promote community gardens of various forms. The Task Force should give special attention to the need for a balanced mix of local production, imports, and exports, giving attention to costs, environmental concerns, and vulnerability to changing circumstances.

Nutrition and Health
The Task Force on Nutrition and Health would consider ways in which diets could be modified to improve people’s health. It would give attention to all nutrient needs, and give special attention to problems of excess fat, sugars, and salt. It would propose policies that would help to reduce overweight and obesity, and thus reduce associated non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Special Needs
This Task Force would consider the needs of particular groups such as infants and young children, people with low income, people who are disabled, and the elderly. It would also give attention to the nutrition of people in schools, hospitals and prisons. In addition to its discussions with various agencies, this Task Force should discuss the issues directly with these vulnerable people and their representatives. Some should be included in the Task Force.

Food Safety
This Task Force would monitor and propose means for improving food safety in all contexts, including markets, restaurants, and homes.

Resilience
Resilience may be defined as:

The ability of natural or human systems to survive in the face of great change. To be resilient, a system must be able to adapt to changing circumstances and develop new ways to thrive. In ecological terms, resilience has been used to describe the ability of natural systems to return to equilibrium after adapting to changes. In climate change, resilience can also convey the capacity and ability of society to make necessary adaptations to a changing world -- and not necessarily structures that will carry forward the status quo. In this perspective, resilience affords an opportunity to make systemic changes during adaptation, such as addressing social inequalities (Worldwatch 2009).

On this basis, the FPC Task Force on Resilience should focus on food and nutrition issues under possible future changes in conditions, including both rapid changes such as disasters, and slower changes such as climate change or price inflation. This would include possible changes in policies of various external agencies.

Legislation
The Task Force on Legislation would work with all the other Task Forces in the preparation of comprehensive laws and regulations regarding food and nutrition. This would include establishing a clear framework of rights, obligations, and accountability.

Monitoring and Reporting
The Task Force on Monitoring and Reporting should support each of the other Task Forces in preparing their annual reports, and also use those reports to prepare an annual FPC report to the government and the public at large. All of the Task Forces should report on nutrition issues in their particular domains, describe the status of implementation of their past recommendations, and describe their impacts. The comprehensive annual report from the FPC to the government and to the community is an important tool for sustaining public attention to the major nutrition security issues. It should set the agenda for future work, not only for the FPC, but also for the government and for the community as a whole.

These Task Forces could be combined and renamed in various ways. However, it is important to assure that all important issues related to food and nutrition are given attention by at least one of the FPC’s Task Forces. The titles and descriptions of the Task Forces could be modified to align with the functions of the relevant departments of government, and possibly nongovernmental organizations as well. Each Task Force should have its own agenda that it works on continuously, perhaps with different subgroup addressing particular issues.

While the leaders of these Task Forces should be members of the FPC, their members could be drawn from the local community, in accordance with their special interests. It would be important to get representation from diverse sectors of the community. In some cases Task Forces might create temporary Working Groups to deal with specific issues.

DESCRIBING FOOD SYSTEMS

FPC Task Forces could organize their efforts into an ongoing cycle of steady improvement, based on three distinct phases of work: describing existing food systems, critically assessing them, and, based on these foundations, improving them.

FPCs could serve any defined place in which people live, such as villages, cities, islands, territories, prisons, countries, or regions. Their first job would be to understand the place’s current food system. Information should be collected about patterns of food production in that place, and its imports, and exports. Attention should be given not only to foods that are marketed, but also to homestead food production, foods that are harvested in nature, and locally bartered or gifted food.

Prevailing “food ways” should be described, regardless of whether they are judged to be good or bad. This account should distinguish ways of feeding special groups such as children, the elderly and the ill, and it should also describe what is usually done when food supplies fall below their normal levels in terms of quantity or quality. In some places, attention should be given to the ways in which the shift from traditional to modern foods might have affected people’s well-being. In this descriptive phase of the work, the focus would be on what is the case. Attention would be given to what could be or should be in later phases.

In describing local food situations, it is important not to limit attention to aggregates and averages, especially where there is great diversity. The conditions of the general population, or what might be called its middle class, are likely to be very different from the conditions of those who are especially poor or who are marginalized in other ways. The middle class may be doing quite well, but there is always a less visible group that has difficulty getting adequate food on a regular basis. The undernutrition of those who are marginalized makes them especially vulnerable to serious infectious diseases.

Nutrition concerns are not only about the needs of people at the bottom. There may be a middle class group that is significantly malnourished, demonstrated mainly by overweight and obesity. This often results in serious non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and Type 2 diabetes. There are also concerns about child feeding practices, food safety, and the need for reliable food supplies in emergency situations. All of these issues need to be considered.

The study of food systems should include a review of the legal and policy frameworks that shape them. What are the roles of local government, national government, local businesses, multinational corporations, etc.? What roles do regional and global organizations play?

Government-sponsored social service programs, including those not centered on food, might play a significant role in assuring good nutrition for all. Similarly, remittances of money from abroad might have an important influence on the local nutrition situation.

It is important to understand the legal status of the place under study. What is the role of higher levels of governance on the local nutrition situation? Who gets to make what decisions? How are those decisions made?

Within that legal framework, one should ask wehther people have clear legal rights relating to food and nutrition, whether the corresponding obligations of the relevant agencies are clearly spelled out, and whether there are there effective mechanisms of accountability in place to assure that those obligations are carried out properly (Kent 2005).

ASSESSING FOOD SYSTEMS

Assessment is the task of determining whether the patterns that have been described should be judged as good or bad, with emphasis on the question, what needs to be improved? Views may differ, depending at least in part on how the viewer is positioned in the system. The person who runs the local food market is likely to see the advantages of importing food more clearly than the disadvantages, while health workers take the opposite stance. Sometimes discussion can lead to agreement on more nuanced assessments. Maybe it is only the imports of particular foods that are problematic.

In some cases the linkages between food distribution patterns and malnutrition may not be obvious. The harms that follow from bad diets are not immediately evident. The linkages may need to be explained, based on solid evidence.

Food systems should be assessed to determine how well they serve various subgroups. It might be found that people in the urban center do better on some aspects of food security while those in more remote areas do better on others. There might be some people whose income is so low that they cannot manage on their own and need help. There might be some groups that suffer from discrimination and thus cannot provide for themselves adequately. Young children might show signs of malnutrition, perhaps by being underweight or short compared to the norms for their age and gender.

In addition to looking at how well food systems operate from day to day in normal times, it is important to also ask how resilient the system would be under various kinds of shocks. What would happen if the trucks or ships that normally bring in food did not come? What would happen if the local food supply were to be contaminated, whether accidentally or deliberately? What would happen if some sort of disease or climate disturbance interrupted local food production?

There is a need to consider how the system would cope with sudden disturbances and also with slow disturbances. There are possibilities not only for tsunamis but also for slow sea level rise. Fuel prices could increase slowly and steadily to the point that imported foods become unaffordable. How would the existing food system deal with such contingencies?

Attention should be given to how local and higher levels of government might—or might not—assist under various contingencies. What would happen if some current support programs, such as social welfare programs, were to be discontinued? Such changes in policies might seem unlikely, but the possibility cannot be excluded, especially during times of economic stress.

If there were sudden and serious food shortages in the place under study, what would the different layers of government do to help? What would private agencies do? Are the answers based on assumptions or written agreements? What is there to assure that written agreements will be honored, especially under difficult conditions?

What stocks of food are maintained in the place under study? How long would they last if supplies from outside were cut off? What policies are in place to manage the stocks under the various difficult contingencies that could be imagined?

IMPROVING FOOD SYSTEMS

Systematic assessments help in identifying the ways in which food systems need improvement. What are the current food and nutrition problems? What are the vulnerabilities regarding future contingencies? In addressing these questions, there are might be serious cultural issues that must be addressed. Work on strengthening local food security should begin with identification of the main issues that need to be addressed. This should be done in close consultation with the local population, with other levels of government, and with outside experts.

Many different kinds of improvement should be considered. Some don’t require detailed prior analysis to justify them. For example, knowledge about how to produce food around the home could be encouraged simply by arranging to have people with experience in homestead food production share their knowledge with others who are interested. Simple things like that don’t cost much and do not involve any serious risks.

In many places there is excessive consumption of fat, sugar, and salt. Things could be done to make fatty, sugar, and salty foods less available, and healthier foods such as fruits and vegetables more readily available. Health-based pricing could be used, taxing bad foods and subsidizing good foods. In New York City, it is now illegal for restaurants to use trans-fats. In Samoa, importing fatty turkey tails is now prohibited. Various jurisdictions are considering ways to limit salt intakes (Economist 2008). The governor of New York State has proposed a special tax on sugary drinks. Efforts are underway worldwide to control food and beverage advertising that is targeted to children (International Obesity Task Force 2008). Some interventions might go against ingrained food habits, but when health problems become serious enough, it makes sense to press for changes in those habits.

The World Health Organization says:

As a global public health recommendation, infants should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life to achieve optimal growth, development and health. Thereafter, to meet their evolving nutritional requirements, infants should receive nutritionally adequate and safe complementary foods while breastfeeding continues for up to two years of age or beyond (WHO 2003).

Child feeding practices are sub-optimal in many places. One of the simplest and cheapest methods for improving child health would be to improve breastfeeding practices. Several organizations have developed good programs for doing that.

Attention should be given to the most glaring weaknesses of the food system, but at the same time thought should be given to ways in which the overall system might be strengthened. For example, methods might be found to help policymakers track its current status.

If policymakers want to ensure continuing improvement in nutrition status, they should monitor it. Various tools could be used for that purpose, as suggested in the United States Department of Agriculture’s discussion of food security measurement (USDA 2008). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has a Special Programme for Food Security that offers a variety of resources on the issue (FAO 2008). These agencies offer many good ideas, but they would have to be adapted for the situations in the location of concern.

Collecting new data could be expensive and difficult to sustain over time. FPCs should make full use of data that are already collected on a regular basis. Public health data generally include indicators that relate to nutrition status. In some cases the regular data gathering practices might be adjusted to gather more nutrition-related information.

A few approaches to nutrition issues have been mentioned here for illustrative purposes. Each Task Force should dig deeply, locally, nationally, and globally, for the best knowledge and ideas relating to the concrete issues that they address.

CONCLUSION

In many places, there is little systematic attention to local food systems and their impacts on people’s nutrition, and practically no planning for them. Yet these systems always need improvement. The issues will not be dealt with adequately if policymakers imagine that they can simply undertake a burst of activity and finish the work.

Moreover, no locality should rely on outside agencies to look after its nutrition situation. No one has as much concern for the well-being of local people as they themselves do. Without that, the issues are likely to be neglected, and forces of change that originate elsewhere will shape local conditions.

Thus, there is always a need for a central place in which nutrition issues could get the attention they require. Every locality should have a Food Policy Council, a permanent, broadly representative, well-supported agency whose primary responsibility is to ensure steady improvement in nutrition in all its dimensions. Creating such a council could be the single most important action taken to ensure good nutrition for all over the long run.

REFERENCES

Economist 2008. “A Pinch Too Much.” Economist. October 31. http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12536485&fsrc=nwl

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) 1996. Rome Declaration on World Food Security and World Food Summit Plan of Action. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/003/w3613e/w3613e00.htm

FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) 2008. Special Programme for Food Security. Rome: FAO. http://www.fao.org/spfs/en/

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2007. Long-term Food Security: Investing in People and Livelihoods. Five-year Strategic Framework on Food Security for Africa. Geneva: IFRC. www.ifrc.org

International Obesity Task Force 2008. The Sydney Principles: Guiding Principles for Achieving a Substantial Level of Protection for Children Against the Commercial Promotion of Goods and Beverages. Sydney: IOTF. http://www.iotf.org/sydneyprinciples/

Kent, George 2005. Freedom from Want: The Human Right to Adequate Food. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Full text available at http://press.georgetown.edu/pdfs/9781589010550.pdf

Toronto Food Council 2008. Website at http://www.toronto.ca/health/tfpc_index.htm

USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) 2008. Food Security Measurement. Washington, D.C.: USDA. http://www.fns.usda.gov/fsec/Measurement.htm

WHO (World Health Organization) 2003. Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding. Geneva: WHO. http://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/global_strategy/en/index.html

WHY (World Hunger Year) 2008. Food Policy Councils. Food Security Learning Center. World Hunger Year. http://worldhungeryear.org/fslc/faqs/ria_090.asp?section=8&click=1

Worldwatch 2009. “Climate Change Reference Guide and Glossary.” In State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World. Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute.

2009-04-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

Call for adapting to climate change in PNG

From : Didinet

Papua New Guinea requires a multi-pronged strategy to adapt to climate change and mitigate its impacts on agriculture and food security in the country. NARI Director-General Dr Raghunath Ghodake says PNG must look after its own interests against the backup of global uncertainty and financial recession now that the world is going through global climate change along with food shortages and the worldwide economic crisis.

Speaking at the 19th National Agriculture Council meeting in Madang on March 24, 2009, Dr Ghodake said the phenomenon of climate change is a definite process and is a fact of life with a complex manifestation in terms of its impacts on agriculture and food security and PNG has to prepare and adopt a multidimensional strategy.

“The country requires a multi-pronged strategy in the areas of agricultural research for development, policy and resource support, and strategic and effective implementation.”

He therefore called on the public sector and donor agencies to participate and help support the development and implementation of medium to long term efforts in this area.

In his joint paper with Dr John Bailey on ‘Challenges of Climate Change on Agriculture and Food Security and Strategies to Reduce Impacts in Papua New Guinea’, Dr Ghodake said PNG, situated on the western rim of the tropical pacific, is already suffering from the effects of rising sea levels, which have eroded land and contaminated water supplies, to the extent that some small island communities have already had to evacuate. He said the country is also vulnerable to extremes in rainfall intensities linked to La Nina Southern Oscillation events.

“The most widespread food shortage in PNG has resulted from drought conditions brought on by El Nino events; the event of 1997 triggering the worst drought in living memory. Scientific evidence suggests that this event in the strongest on a series of ever strengthening El Ninos that are now recurring every 10-15 years with another major event being likely around 2012.”

He said warmer and moister conditions, which climate models predict for the humid tropics, are likely to increase threats to food and cash crop production posed by pests and diseases. Already there appears to be an intensification of pest and disease problems in PNG, including those caused by late blight on potato and leaf scab on sweet potato, said Dr Ghodake.

“Warmer temperatures are also causing increased incidences of malaria in the PNG highlands”.

Dr Ghodake also highlighted that in response to the threat of climate change, a series of projects are being jointly implemented and/or developed by various Australian and PNG institutions and NARI. He said the strategy associated with the projects has five main parts which tackle different aspects of the climate change problem in PNG. They include early warning system, crop and genotype diversification, biotechnology targeting of pests and disease, dissemination and adaptation of drought-coping strategies, and sustainable water supply.

Dr Ghodake said PNG must take the initiative and urgently address the imminent impacts of climate change on the nation’s food and water security, and in particular the need to put in place sustainable water supply facilities for vulnerable rural communities. He also stressed that PNG must make a strategic investment by accepting and implementing agriculture as a development agenda for the well-being of the people and prosperity of the nation.

2009-04-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

NARI to host 2009 Agricultural Innovations Show

From : Didinet

The annual Agricultural Innovations Show will be staged at NARI’s Sir Alkan Tololo Research Centre at Bubia, Morobe, on May 5, 2009. This will be the third year of this “information exchange and knowledge sharing” event in which partner and collaborating organisations in agricultural and rural development will display and exhibit their innovations and improved technologies and interact with farmers and the general public.

The theme for this year’s occasion will be “Adapting PNG Agriculture to Climate Change”.

The Chief Guest will be the Minister for Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology, Michael Ogio. Other specially invited dignitaries are also expected on the one-day occasion.

All NARI research programmes throughout PNG will demonstrate and disseminate many of their new and improved research innovations, technologies and information. Among them will be research activities and outputs on food crops, emerging food and cash crops, stallholder livestock and resource management issues. Farmers will have the opportunity to see live plant specimens and learn from posters and other publications.

The new Alan Quartermain Multi-purpose Hall at Bubia will be the arena of the occasion and will be open free to the public.

2009-04-08T15:42:00.000-07:00

UN's State Of The World's Forests Reveals Deforestation Is Speeding Up

By Angelique van Engelen, filed under Global Warming News

Despite the alarming conclusions of the UN's latest State of the World's Forests, the mainstream media has devoted surprisingly little attention to the report. Snowed under by other news developments as it may have been, global deforestation is by no means insignificant. It's taking place at shocking rates, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)'s bi-annual report reveals.

Despite people's awareness that forests are key to the survival of the planet and the human race, deforestation rates are ever increasing. The expansion of large palm oil and soy plantations has been the main reason why forests are disappearing and the world's biodiversity resources are shrinking.

The potential for large-scale commercial production of cellulosic biofuel will have unprecedented impacts on the forest sector," the report indicates.

Illegal logging is also a real headache. Around 20% of the world's forests are being illegally chopped down, a trend at its worst in Africa. The continent has lost around four million hectares of forests annually between 2000 and 2005, representing one-third of all global deforestation. Given the fact that Africa only hosts 16% of the world's forests, this is a devastating rate. And growth in Europe's need for wood (for use as biomass, among others) will likely stimulate the practice.

The numbers for Asia and the Pacific, although seemingly positive, also tell stories of reduced biodiversity resources. The continent's 2005 total forest size of 734 million hectares was bigger than its 2000 level but the increase was mainly due to China's reforestation plantations. Natural forests are still being logged, only the practice is invisible!

All Latin American countries showed deterioration during 2000-2005 except Uruguay and Chile, because of plantation programs similar to those in China.

The global financial crisis won't make matters any better either in the short term. The FAO says that forests run the risk to be negatively impacted by the global economic crisis because of reduced demand for wood and wood products which in turn leads to investment in forest-based industries and, by dint of investor rationale, forest management.

A general concern is that some governments may dilute previously ambitious green goals or defer key policy decisions related to climate change mitigation and adaptation as they focus on reversing the economic downturn," the report reveals.

Friends of the Earth International and the Global Forest Coalition, two activist organizations, reacted to the report by calling on world governments to take immediate action to halt the spread of biofuel plantations in former forests, recognize the rights of indigenous peoples, ban illegal logging and related trade, implement immediate deforestation moratoria, and support forest management and restoration schemes. These are all items which Poznan failed to settle.

Isaac Rojas, who heads up the Forest and Biodiversity Program of Friends of the Earth International believes that plantations in rainforests destroy the lands and livelihoods of local communities and indigenous peoples, biodiversity and water resources. A big factor in all this is that plantations are monocultures and do not store nearly as much carbon than the forests they replace.

Global Forest Coalition said that monoculture tree plantations, something the FAO itself promotes, are also a major cause of rural depopulation and a further shifting agricultural frontiers.

They are causing the destruction of forests elsewhere," said Simone Lovera, managing coordinator of the Global Forest Coalition.

The report's longer term economic angle is less negative because it predicts that jobs in the forestry sector will grow. Investment in sustainable forest management has the potential to create 10 million new green jobs.

The dual challenges of economic turmoil and climate change are bringing the management of forests to the forefront of global interest," observes the FAO.

The U.S, for instance is including forestry in its economic stimulus package. Specific areas where jobs will be created are singled out as forest management and agro-forestry, jobs to improve management of forest fires, development and management of tracking trails, and the creation and maintenance of recreation sites.

It might take a lot longer before we see similar stimulus packages in the Third World. At the moment, around one billion people around the globe are working in forestry jobs related to averting climate change. Forests are estimated to host 70% of the world's biodiversity resources.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries which are host to rainforests have not been given any incentives to abandon clearing forests. The practice of clearing rain forests is a big contributor to carbon emissions, contributing around 20% of global CO2 output. This could change if these emissions are included in a future climate protocol but chances are very slim in the wake of the GOP14 talks in Poznan.

If carbon trading takes off, deforestation might even get worse because of the demand for bioenergy. It makes clearing forests for agricultural land more profitable. It will be very difficult to get people in the Third World who run lucrative palm oil plantations to change their mind on this issue. One hectare of a palm oil plantation yields nearly 6,000 liters of crude oil. At a price of USD54 per barrel (2007 figures), this is competitive with oil.

The amount of palm oil that actually ends up in biodiesel production is still small but as profitability is so attractive, farmers in Amazon and Congo basins need real incentives to abandon plans to also start palm oil farming.

In addition to a price on the carbon emissions from deforestation, other and stronger protection measures will still be needed," said Martin Persson, a Swedish researcher and expert in rainforests recently.

Persson carried out this study which shows that clearing tropical forests for palm oil plantations will remain highly profitable even when faced with a price on the carbon emissions arising from deforestation.

2009-04-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

Biodiversity conservation: Accounting for the diversity of values in nature and society
by Franz W. Gatzweiler February 2009, Zentrum für Entwicklungsforschung (Center for Development Research University of Bonn)

From : http://www.climate-agrobiodiversityplatform.org/wp_main/?p=257

Some interesting findings in the policy brief :

Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation have led to economic losses which dwarf the losses of the current financial crisis. Biodiversity loss involves high risks and irreversibilities for current and future generations. Adequate attention must therefore be given to questions of whose values count and how to take these values into account.
The “economic compass” is not defective but works in the way it has been designed, based on a simple mechanistic view of man interacting with nature, excluding the complexities of both. Biodiversity loss cannot be solved in the framework of an economic system which defined the very rules and incentives which caused it.
Market failure is just one reason for biodiversity loss along with institutional and policy failure. The economic values of ecosystems and biodiversity therefore need to be socially contextualized by integrating them in societal decision-making systems which are part of the policy process. It is not only since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report that we are aware of the negative consequences of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. The Millennium Assessment, however, has brought the topic back to the top of the agenda of public concern. Those 150 countries that have ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are especially concerned. They signed up to conserve, sustainably use and share the benefits of using the earth’s biodiversity.
Re-defining the relationship between man and nature, by other than only economic value articulating institutions, will allow for the accounting of other than just monetary values and designing an economy which takes man’s and nature’s household into account beyond mere chrematistics.
Deliberative decision tools, like citizen juries and roundtables, are complementary to economic and multi-criteria decision support tools and enable society to engage in stewardship strategies for biodiversity loss, guided by norms and principles.

Download the document

2009-04-07T15:51:00.000-07:00

Nutrition not priority for older Maori, Pacific

From : Scoop

Tuesday, 7 April 2009, 4:10 pm
Press Release: NZ Nutrition Foundation

MEDIA RELEASE
7 April 2009

Nutrition is not a priority for older Maori and Pacific people

Promoting optimum nutrition is a key goal for supporting people as they age. However, it is critical to first acknowledge the roles and value of food to those we wish to nourish - Nutrition may not be at the top of their list.

The New Zealand Nutrition Foundation is concerned about the lack of awareness of the common problem of poor nutrition in older Maori and Pacific people. The Foundation recently provided an opportunity for community health workers and caregivers of older Maori and Pacific People to hear from influential health professionals from these (Maori and Pacific) ethnicities. Foundation CEO, Sue Pollard says “The purpose of the seminar was to provide caregivers and others working in this area with practical strategies they can use to improve the nutritional status of those in their care.”

Dietitian Sian Warriner and Leonie Matoe from Te Hotu Manawa Maori both emphasised the great importance of food to Maori people. ‘He Mahi kai te taonga’ – obtaining food is the prized accomplishment for Maori, who ‘once were gardeners’, and hunters and fishermen. However, survey figures tell us:

* only about one-third of Maori households could afford to eat a balanced nutritious diet

* almost another third felt stressed when they could not provide kai for special occasions

* 45% said that their budget limited the variety of food they could choose to buy.

For Maori, these issues are often of far more concern than optimum nutrition, so those promoting healthy nutrition must acknowledge the overriding relationship Maori have with food, acknowledge the mana of Kaumatua, and work with the whole whanau.

Healthy Lifestyle Coach, Ranui Hapi, and Green Prescription Coordinator, Amiria McGarvey, explained that promoting healthy lifestyles to Kaumatua and Kuia requires an understanding of Te Ao Maori and its value system. Ranui’s presentation focused on her guiding principles of humility, reciprocity, openness and flexibility in building a relationship with older Maori. Again the emphasis was on involving the whole family in healthy eating.

Amiria has developed a Green Prescription physical activity programme for Kaumatua that takes account of the traditions from Te Ao Maori. As well as keeping the message simple, everyone, including the instructors, participates together: “Nau te rourou, naku te rourou, ka ora ai te Iwi” - From your contribution and my contribution, the people will be well.

Amiria says, “The reward for me is watching whanau grow in self esteem, confidence and happiness. Overcoming barriers and obstacles in life is a huge success for many of our whanau. I am merely the guide to help them achieve this and physical activity and healthy kai options are the vehicles I use to make it happen.”

Pacific people likewise have a holistic notion of health and it is a family and community concern, rather than an individual matter. Soana Muimuiheata, a Pacific (Tongan) dietitian working in the Counties Manukau area, told seminar participants that food is central to all Pacific cultures. “For many Pacific people, the value of food is context-specific - from a resource of simple sustenance through to a symbolic observation of respect, love and appreciation, hospitality and the honouring of guests” said Soana. Food is something to enjoy rather than a source of nutrients. Barriers to achieving optimum nutrition are based around priorities of tradition, beliefs, family and community obligations. Therefore, when promoting optimal nutrition, it is important to target the whole households and provide practical recommendations taking into account the family socio-economic situations.

Over 130 people attended the seminar - the latest in a regular stream of events offered by the Nutrition Foundation. Previous seminar topics have included barriers to good nutrition in older people and the prevention of falls and injury.

ENDS

The New Zealand Nutrition Foundation is a non-profit organisation which works pro-actively in the nutrition and food sectors with the food industry, Ministry of Health, other health promotion agencies, schools and the media. Its mission is “to enhance the quality of life of New Zealanders by encouraging informed, healthy and enjoyable food choices.” This seminar was arranged by the Foundation’s Committee for Healthy Ageing, in partnership with Te Hotu Manawa Maori, the Pacific Island Food and Nutrition Advisory Group and the Auckland branches of the New Zealand Dietetic Association and the New Zealand Association of Gerontology.

2009-04-05T16:12:00.000-07:00

Parties To UN Treaty On Biodiversity Meet
Friday, 3 April 2009, 1:10 pm
Press Release: United Nations

Parties To UN Treaty On Biodiversity Meet To Draft Plan For Access, Benefit Sharing

New York, Apr 2 2009 5:10PM Some 500 participants gathered in Paris today to begin talks aimed at finalizing a pact which will allow international researchers and scientists access to plant and animal genetic resources, in compliance with the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The CBD had a 2010 target date for achieving a significant reduction in the rate of loss of the world’s plant and animal species at the global, regional and national level, and is the international framework for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the equitable sharing of its benefits.

The CBD, which is signed by 191 States, recognizes the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources, and parties to the Convention have the authority to determine physical access to genetic resources in areas within their jurisdiction.

Parties also have the obligation to take appropriate measures to ensure the sharing of benefits derived from the use of their genetic resources.

Access to these resources in exchange for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits can contribute to further research and development with a positive impact on human well-being through the use of genetic resources in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, agriculture among other sectors.

The seventh meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Access and Benefit-sharing, which concludes on 8 April, is the first of three mandated by the Conference of the Parties to the CBD to finalize the negotiation of the international regime before their next meeting in October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan.

ENDS

2009-04-05T15:12:00.000-07:00

Bill banning GMO taro introduced by councilor

From : The Maui News

County Council Member Bill Medeiros has introduced a bill banning genetically engineered or modified taro in Maui County.

The proposal received strong support Friday from Native Hawaiians, taro farmers and critics of GMO technology when it was introduced at the regular Maui County Council meeting. It was referred to committee for future discussion.

Proponents of developing genetically modified taro have said research could help the plant resist modern pests and diseases.

But critics said genetic experimentation still hasn't been proved to be safe, and natural strains of the plant could be contaminated through pollination. They also point out taro's cultural and spiritual significance to Hawaiians.

"That's sacred," said taro farmer Alex Bode. "Leave our taro alone."

The environmental issues affecting taro farmers won't be solved by genetic modification, he added.

"It's a sacred, perfect food," said advocate Angie Hoffman. "It just needs good soil and water."

She added that there haven't been enough studies done to show genetic modification is safe.

Maui Nui Botanical Gardens Executive Director Lisa Schattenberg-Raymond said developing genetically modified strains of taro would create a "Pandora's box" because farmers couldn't prevent the new types from cross-pollinating with their pure, traditional varieties.

"Any genetic modification of kalo (taro) is a threat to Native Hawaiian resources," she said.

2009-04-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today ( French Translation also included)

From : UNESCO

The loss of their specialised knowledge of nature is a grave concern for many indigenous communities throughout the world. Education, as it is understood in a Western context, occupies a pivotal role in this process, highlighted by many as both a major cause of the decline of indigenous knowledge, and also as a potential remedy for its demise. Commendable efforts are being made to better align educational curricula with indigenous realities and to incorporate local knowledge and language content into school curricula, but the interrelationship and balance between these two different ways of learning remain delicate. These issues, and attempts to address them, are explored within the UNESCO publication Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today.
The book is organised into three sections. The first addresses the link between indigenous knowledge and indigenous language, and explores the opportunities this interconnection provides for understanding and countering declines in both. The second section examines how the loss of indigenous knowledge due to insensitive school programmes may be countered by integrating indigenous knowledge and languages into school curricula. The third section explores the need for the revitalisation of indigenous ways of learning, generally outside of a classroom environment, and how this may be practically viable in modern contexts.
The book will be launched on 2 April 2009 in Bonn, Germany, on the occasion of the ‘UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development - Moving into the Second Half of the UN Decade’ (31 March - 2 April 2009). This conference takes place five years into the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) for which UNESCO is the lead agency.
UNESCO, 2009, Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today. Edited by P. Bates, M. Chiba, S. Kube & D. Nakashima, UNESCO: Paris, 128 pp.
To order a copy, email links@unesco.org
Download the full publication
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001807/180754e.pdf [.PDF 7.5Mb]
________________________________________
Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today
(L'apprentissage et les savoirs dans les sociétés autochtones d'aujourd'hui)
De nombreuses communautés autochtones à travers le monde s'inquiètent sérieusement du risque de perdre leurs savoirs spécifiques sur la nature. L'éducation, prise dans un contexte occidental, occupe un rôle pivot dans ce processus de disparition. Elle est décrite par beaucoup à la fois comme la raison majeure du déclin des savoirs autochtones, mais aussi comme un remède potentiel à leur disparition. Des efforts louables sont déployés pour mieux harmoniser le curriculum éducatif avec les réalités autochtones, ainsi que pour incorporer les contenus des savoirs et langues autochtones dans le curriculum scolaire. Mais l’équilibre entre ces deux formes distinctes d'apprentissage reste délicat à trouver. Ce sont ces questions et la manière de les aborder qui sont explorées dans la publication de l'UNESCO intitulée "Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today" (L'apprentissage et les savoirs dans les sociétés autochtones d'aujourd'hui).
L'ouvrage est divisé en trois sections. La première aborde le lien entre savoirs autochtones et langues autochtones et explore les opportunités offertes par cette interconnexion pour comprendre et empêcher leur disparition. La deuxième section examine comment lutter contre la perte des savoirs autochtones causée par des programmes scolaires inadaptés et propose d'intégrer les savoirs et langues autochtones dans le curriculum éducatif. La troisième section explore le besoin de revitaliser les formes d'apprentissage autochtones qui ont généralement lieu en dehors des salles de classe, ainsi que la manière dont ils pourraient être appliqués dans un contexte moderne.
Le lancement du livre aura lieu le 2 avril 2009 à Bonn, en Allemagne, à l'occasion de la "Conférence mondiale de l'UNESCO sur l'éducation pour le développement durable – S’engager dans la seconde moitié de la Décennie" (du 31 mars au 2 avril 2009). Cette conférence a lieu à mi-parcours de la Décennie des Nations Unies pour l'éducation au service du développement durable (2005-2014 , DEDD), pour laquelle l’UNESCO est l’agence chef de file.
UNESCO, 2009, Learning and Knowing in Indigenous Societies Today.Compilé et révisé par P. Bates, M. Chiba, S. Kube & D. Nakashima, UNESCO: Paris, 128 pp.
Pour commander un exemplaire, écrire à links@unesco.org
Téléchargez la publication complète
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001807/180754e.pdf [7.5Mb]

2009-04-05T14:44:00.000-07:00

United Nations Environment Program to protect bees, pollinators

From : CropWildRelativesGroup

Source: Farming UK, UK, 9 January 2009

The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) announced that it will implement a new initiative, to better protect bees, bats, birds and others that are vital to crop development, production and biodiversity.
The plan is for five years and is costing US$26 million, it will reintroduce natural pollination, that has been killed off, by the use of insecticides and fertilizers.
The scheme is being financed, by the Global Environmental Facility(GEF) and coordinated by FAO. This is good news for Argentina, who is the world’s largest producer of honey.
For full story, please see: www.farminguk.com/news/United-Nations-Environment-Program.9879.asp

2009-03-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

TaroPest : an illustrated guide to pests and diseases of taro in the South Pacific by Carmichael, A., Harding B., Jackson, g., Kumar, S., Lal, S., Masamdu, R., Wright, J., and Clarke, A. (2008)

From : Land Resources Division, SPC

TaroPest is a computer based information and diagnostic package for taro pests in the South Pacific.

This project combined the expertise of researches from Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Australia initially, later expanding to include expertise from across the region.

As a summary of knowledge on the regional pests and diseases of taro, this monograph is an outcome of the TaroPest project, which itself built on many earlier taro pest-management projects. It is an illustrated guide to pests and diseases of taro in the South Pacific and it captures the work and knowledge of many researchers and field officers.

TaroPest is a joint collaboration between Papua New Guinea National agricultural quarantine and Inspection Agency, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community Plant Protection Service and the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

Core Funding was provided by the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).

For more information, please contact lrdhelpdesk@spc.int

2009-03-30T14:02:00.000-07:00

29.01.09 Indigenous Knowledge for Disaster Risk Reduction

From : UNESCO Bankok

Even before we came up with high technology based early warning systems, or standard operating procedures for response, numerous local communities worldwide have prepared, operated, acted, and responded to natural disasters using indigenous methods passed on from one generation to the next. The publication "Indigenous Knowledge for Disaster Risk Reduction: Good Practices and Lessons Learned from experiences in the Asia-pacific Region", produced with the assistance of the European Union, aims to build awareness for indigenous knowledge as an effective tool for reducing risk from natural disasters. By improving the understanding of indigenous knowledge and providing concrete examples of how it can be successfully used, this publication can help all practitioners and policy makers to consider the knowledge hold by local communities and act to integrate this wealth of knowledge into future disaster-related work. Download the

Links:
http://www.unisdr.org/eng/about_isdr/isdr-publications/19-Indigenous_Knowledge-DRR/Indigenous_Knowledge-DRR.pdf

2009-03-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

No easy road to success
Monday, March 23, 2009

From : Fiji Times

ALONG the Savusavu highway Jugun Kishore's house cuts a demanding presence on a hillside with smoke constantly billowing from a huge copra dryer right beside it.

Late at night when the world is in slumber, Jugun can be found stoking his copra dryer with firewood.

"I just mix myself a basin (yaqona) to keep me awake and sometimes I have friends over for company," he said.

It's a cutthroat business when almost every second family along the highway depends on it.

Consistency and hard work are the key Jugun believes one needs to keep ahead in the game.

Every one of the villagers surrounding Belego Estate area where Jugun lives knows him by name - from the young to the old.

It's no wonder then that he's had a strong rapport and business relationship with them on a daily basis.

"I drive around buying green coconuts from 10 villages on a daily basis and over the seven years I've lived here, I have also come to know them all by name, their families, who's this one's father, who's the chief of this village and that," he said

"They sell me copra and I supply Copra Millers."

But 'Keni', as he is sometimes called, never grew up a copra farmer.

His life began on a rice farm, hundreds of miles away at Tabia in the Natewa Bay area.

Life as the son of a small scale rice farmer at Tabia in the1960s was difficult with less value placed on education than knowing the intricacies of rice farming from a pretty early age.

"I can remember by the time I was four years old, I was required on the farm," he said.

"When I was in Class One, I would help my father on the farm before I went to school.

"Sometimes I would be still helping my father when I would see other children walk by to school about two kilometres away."

"Then after I was done, I would quickly have my shower and run after the other children and most times they would be already in classes.

"My younger brother was the brains of the family, so they wanted him in school while I only went up to Class Eight and then worked on the farm to help pay for his education."

That responsibility didn't make him bitter, instead it taught him about hard work and to want something better for his children.

Seven years ago he sold off the farm at Tabia and moved to Belego because he wanted his children to achieve the highest level of education and afford a comfortable life, far from the back-breaking labor of farming.

Today his estate is spread over 16 acres of freehold land at Belego, he has a shop running, a yaqona farm booming. He is a leading copra entrepreneur and his children are tertiary qualified.

He shared parts of his story in Fijian and his mastery of the language was amazing.

"Ka bibi meda cakacaka vakaukauwa ena veivanua kece ga ni cakacaka eda veiqaravi kina," he said which roughly translates as 'hard work is important regardless of the kind of work'.

Although not very old in the copra business, something else this 49 year old man had to share was the importance of maintaining enduring relationships with his suppliers who are mostly villagers.

"I've lived my life with mostly indigenous Fijians and I know that 'ka bibi' ga na veilomani'," he said.

"Always maintaining good relations not only means I get a good supply of copra but I also have fewer problems on my hands."

"And it all takes hard work, working hard on my copra business, working hard on the farm, working hard putting my children through school and working hard at being good to others.

"Hard work is wealth," he said.

2009-03-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

Put water centre stage, says UN report
Naomi Antony

From : SciDev
12 March 2009

Unless water occupies a more central role in decisions regarding crises such as climate change and food security, a global water shortage could ensue — leading to political conflict and insecurity, says a new report.

It summons leaders in government, the private sector and civil society to put water at the heart of their thinking, stressing water's essential role in achieving sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals.

The report, 'Water in a Changing World', is an assessment of global freshwater resources prepared by the World Water Assessment Programme under the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

It says that awareness of the potential severe water shortages has not diffused into the wider political community. It also highlights a major research gap in understanding water resources, particularly in developing countries, and warns that incomplete data is leading to incorrect predictions.

If water is not linked to other problems such as the food crisis "other crises may intensify and local water crises may worsen, converging into a global water crisis and leading to political insecurity and conflict at various levels", the report says.

It urges policymakers who are responsible for key decisions on development objectives and financial resources to act immediately on such grounds.

The report also calls for a more holistic approach to predicting future pressures on global water resources, branding existing predictions "outdated, incomplete or sectoral".

All external threats to global water resources — including natural forces such as climate change and human factors such as population dynamics, increasing international trade in goods and services, and individual lifestyle changes — should be incorporated into predictions, it says.

"Drivers should not be considered in isolation of related socioeconomic and political factors or of other drivers."

More complete data on water quantity and quality is also required if water resources are to be properly managed and future needs accurately estimated, according to the report. It says that while technologies such as remote sensing and modelling have made significant advances, these gains are hampered by an inadequate ability to validate observations on the ground.

"There is little doubt that global hydrologic data are inadequate in both spatial coverage and frequency of observations. Moreover hydrologic observation networks are worsening in many countries because of changing national investment priorities and declining human capacity," the report says. "Synthetically-generated data cannot substitute for real-world observations."

And policy and security issues, a lack of protocol and limited physical access to data means that data are not being shared — hindering regional and global projects that rely on shared datasets, and causing observational gaps.

The report, presented today (12 March), is accompanied by a series of case studies on selected countries including Cameroon, Sudan and Swaziland.

2009-03-17T19:07:00.000-07:00

Renewable energy's role 'underestimated'
Imelda V. Abano

From : SciDev

COPENHAGEN] Renewable energy could play a much larger role in supplying the world's energy needs than previously estimated — but it won't come cheap, according to a new study.

The research, presented at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark, this week (11 March) says that renewable energy could supply 40 per cent of the world's energy needs by 2050.

The new estimate is considerably higher than previous projections, which put renewables' share at only 12 per cent by 2030, said Peter Lund, an author of the research from the Laboratory of Advanced Energy Systems at Finland's Helsinki University of Technology.

If renewable technologies were given the same government attention and financial backing as nuclear energy was in the 1970s and 80s wind energy and solar power would cost the same as traditional electricity generation by 2020–2025 and 2030 respectively, said Lund.

But such ambitious targets require substantial financial investment, Lund warned. The technologies would require global support of US$12.8 billion to US$25.5 billion per year and without this backing wind and solar energy would contribute less than 15 per cent of the world's energy output.

"What we need is a complete transformation in the way we produce, consume and distribute energy," Lund told SciDev.Net.

Erik Lundtang Petersen, head of the Risø STU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy's wind energy division in Roskilde, Denmark, said that for the wind sector to deliver its full potential it must focus on efficiently delivering, installing and connecting large amounts of wind power to the grid.

But Joyashree Roy, an economics professor at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India, who has been involved in producing reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says that these targets are too ambitious.

She says that as the technologies are already available the key issue is deployment — which requires money. But investing in carbon capture and storage, nuclear technologies and biofuels is leaving less money for renewables — an issue that governments need to consider

2009-03-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

Sea level rise 'will surpass worst-case scenario'

From : SciDev

[COPENHAGEN] Global sea levels will rise much higher than predicted by the end of this century, climate experts have warned — a scenario which could have dire consequences for millions of people in the developing world.

Just two years ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted a worst-case scenario rise of 59 centimetres. But the accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland caused by faster warming means the worst case is now put at 1.2 metres.

A sea level rise of one metre or more is predicted to have a devastating effect on major coastal cities, island states and populous delta areas such as those in Bangladesh and Myanmar.

A panel of experts speaking yesterday (10 March) at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark, warned that without efforts to curb the rise of greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise would expose most parts of the world to greater storm surges — increases in local sea level caused by the winds of storms — threatening lives and infrastructure.

John Church, a scientist at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research in Tasmania, Australia, and lead speaker at the session, explained that the most recent satellite and ground-based observations show that sea levels are continuing to rise at three millimetres or more per year since 1993 — a rate well above the average in the twentieth century.

"It is becoming increasingly apparent from our studies of Greenland and Antarctica that rising temperature has contributed significantly to the observed sea level rise through thermal expansion of sea water and widespread loss of land ice," said Church. He said that further warming could trigger polar ice cap melting.

"We cannot prevent all sea level rise. We will have to mitigate and adapt to avert the most extreme scenario. The least developed nations are at most risk," Church told SciDev.Net.

Stefan Rahmsdorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany said that by 2200, the sea level will have increased by an estimated 1.5 to 3.5 metres.

"Ice sheets are melting faster, and sea level rise is a huge threat unless we stop the warming," Rahmsdorf told the press.

2009-03-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Rise in coconut yield, farming area put India on top

From : The Finanacial Express

Kochi: Coconut production in the nation is set to take a quantum jump thanks to a rapid increase in productivity. Increased yield from a more or less stagnant farming area has also placed India as the number one nut producer in 2006-07, with a production of 1,584 crore nuts. India has pushed Indonesia and Philippines to the second and third spots respectively. India ranks number one in productivity among other coconut growing countries in the world. The average productivity of coconut in the country is 7,608 nuts per ha (2005-06) and 8,165 nuts per ha in 2007-08. Among the four major coconut growing states, Tamil Nadu has the highest productivity (13,133 nuts/ha), Andhra Pradesh has a productivity of 8,577 nuts/ha, followed by Kerala (7,046 nuts/ha) and Karnataka (3,139 nuts/ha).

The area under cultivation has more or less stagnated over the years, and with coconut oil prices decreasing, it is unlikely to show an improvement in the short-run, traders say. In 2003-04, 1,933,700 hectares were under coconut cultivation and in 2005-06, the area under cultivation improved marginally to 1,946,800 hectares. Kerala is the main coconut growing state, with an area of 897,800 hectares, followed by Tamil Nadu (370,600 hectares) and Karnataka (385,400 ha). Sources say that Tamil Nadu is likely to emerge the largest producer within a short span of time, given that the area under cultivation is decreasing in Kerala. Production has become unviable in Kerala, while productivity gains have helped Tamil Nadu stay profitable despite the lowering of coconut oil prices.

A study by the Kasargode-based Central Plantation Crops Research Institute (CPCRI) forecasts that the nut production will increase by 31.38% in 2007-08 over the base year 2003-04. Production for 2003-04 is recorded at 12.17 billion nuts. Production increased to 14.8 billion nuts in 2005-06, an increase of 21.62% over the base year. Interestingly, the rapidly increasing supply falls short of the long-term demand for nuts. A forecast study reports that the demand for coconut is expected to be 21,795 million nuts by 2025, while the supply is expected to be only 15,734 million nuts. There is a gap of 6,061 million nuts. As there is no scope for area expansion in India given the demand for land for various purposes, there is a need to increase the productivity further. The competitiveness of the sector will largely depend on the productivity of the crop. Today, one ha of coconut produces...

2009-03-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

Vegetables prices drop

3/16/2009

From : Fiji Sun

Root crops and vegetable prices have become cheaper than immediately after the flood, says a market vendor.
Premila Devi Singh, a vegetable vendor and middleman at the Namaka Market in Nadi said prices had reduced greatly since the time of the flood.

“At least now we can afford to buy vegetables compared to the period just after the flood. At that time 25 kg sack of eggplant cost up to $70 and now it’s only $25. Right now, long bean is the expensive vegetable and tomatoes and cabbage are still out of season,” she said.

Rajendra Kumar said prices were still expensive for certain vegetables that were not in season.

“At the moment, pumpkin, cucumber and kheer are not in season so it’s rather expensive. The more expensive the vegetable or root crop, the less profit we make because we cannot increase the prices too much that it becomes unaffordable for the customers,” he said.

He said sometimes they were barely able to make profits from selling non-seasonal vegetables but they still chose to buy it for the sake of consumers.

2009-03-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

New yam-growing technique promises more food, income for farmers15 February 2009

From : IITA

Ibadan, Nigeria - Yam farmers across Africa could look forward to better days ahead with the development of a tuber-less yam propagation technique by IITA and partners.

In this innovative approach, yam is propagated through vine cuttings, with carbonized rice husks as the growth medium. By eliminating the use of tubers, more yam is made available for food or for sale while signficantly lowering the risk of nematode infestation akin to using tubers as planting material. The technique also promotes faster multiplication and better and more uniform crop quality.

In the traditional system, tubers used as seed take up 30 to 50 per cent of the production cost. It is also quite inefficient: the resulting multiplication rate is only about 1:5-10. By comparison, cereals, for instance, have a propagation ratio of about 1:300.

“Our goal is to reduce the amount of yam tubers invested as seeds so that farmers will have more food and make more money,” says Dr Hidehiko Kikuno, IITA Yam Physiologist and project leader. He adds, “Another good thing about this technology is that the propagation medium - carbonized rice husks - could be obtained by farmers cheaply, even for free”.

The technology, which offers mass, rapid, clean and cost-effective method of multiplying yam, could effectively address the need for fast and wide distribution of high-quality improved varieties in order to meet the increasing demand for the crop.

Yam is a major staple in Africa. Average daily consumption per capita are highest in Bénin (364 kcal), Côte d’Ivoire (342 kcal), Ghana (296 kcal), and Nigeria (258 kcal). According to the FAO, in 2005, an estimated 48.7 million tons of yam were produced worldwide, with sub-Saharan Africa accounting for 97 per cent of this figure. The dietary and economic importance of the starchy tuber crop is also on the rise in a number of countries in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Oceania.

The research is funded by the Japanese government, the Sasakawa Africa Association, Tokyo University of Agriculture and the International Cooperation Center for Agricultural Education, Nagoya University, Japan. Partners include the Tokyo University of Agriculture, National Root Crops Research Institute - Umudike, Nigeria, Crop Research Institute, Ghana and the Institute of Agricultural Research for Development, Cameroon.

2009-03-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

Workshop looks at food safety issues

Thursday, 12 March 2009

From: Solomon Start News

A WORKSHOP aimed at addressing food safety issues is being held in Honiara this week at the Ministry of Health.

It looks at food production, processing, storage and distribution.

The workshop expects to come up with a national policy on food safety, security and nutrition.
The Integrated Food Safety, Nutrition and Food Security workshop was organised to look into a draft food safety policy the cabinet endorsed in June 1998.

Participants will assess what has been achieved and what has not in order to improve food safety issues in the country.

They expect to come up with a Food Standard Regulation that local industries will follow.
Under Secretary Ministry of Health Dr Cedric Alependava said the country needs to consider how best to increase the local capacity to grow traditional food.

He said to enhance food safety, improvement of agriculture practices must be considered.
“Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Ministers of Agriculture of the Pacific have recognised the importance of taking action on food security,” he said.

He said this will be an issued Pacific island leaders will consider this year during the Leaders Forum in Australia.

Dr. William Adu-Krow of World Health Organisation (WHO) said malnutrition is currently increasing in the Pacific due to rapid growth, inadequate diets, parasites and diarrhea.

He said to attain food safety, agriculture, health, food industry and trade sectors must work together to ensure the production is safe and well observed.

The workshop will explore current food safety and security in the country, pathways forward for food safety, identifying principles, aims and strategies to be included in the policy.

Reps from the Government, private sector and other stakeholders are attending the workshop.

By TRIXIE CARTER

2009-03-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

Is H2O the new CO2?

From : Triple Pundit

When it comes to urgent environmental crises, water is clearly in a class of its own. Few other issues have the same far-reaching impact on human health and well-being, economic sustainability, or national security. After all, you can live without oil; you can’t live without water. So it’s no surprise that many of the latest environmental campaigns along with a growing media debate are posing the question, “Is water the new carbon?”

Up to this point, oil and resulting C02 emissions have gotten most of the attention, but many experts warn that declining water supply and failing water infrastructure globally may soon become the world’s next major crisis if meaningful action isn't taken soon.

2009-03-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

The Good Food Revolution

From : Prism Webcaster News

Thursday, March 12, 2009
Posted in Health | Tagged Health

The lush landscape of Hawai‘i once offered abundant food. What can these islands teach us about food and sufficiency? The island of Kaua‘i is one of the most beautiful and fragile places on earth. From above, it looks like a vibrant green flower, lush and pulsing with life, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian tourist industry calls it “The Garden Isle,” comparing it to the Garden of Eden. The image of Hawai‘i has always been sold as a “paradise.” But there is another side to life on this island, one that visitors rarely see.
The west side of this tiny island is home to the U.S. military’s Pacific Missile Range and testing grounds, part of the longstanding military occupation of the Hawaiian islands, and to the headquarters of giant agrochemical corporations Syngenta and Dupont. These corporations test and produce genetically modified crops on former sugar plantation lands here and throughout Hawai‘i, along with toxic herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. It is the very worst of America’s “agrochemical military industrial complex,” imposed on the ancient homelands of a rich traditional farming and fishing culture, in the midst of some of the world’s most precious biodiversity.
When I visited the west side of Kaua‘i in 2006, the local newspapers were full of reports of children from Waimea Canyon School who had been sickened by chemicals used on nearby test plots. As many as 60 people were affected, including teachers and staff. It happened again in 2007, with school children suffering nausea, headaches, and dizziness. In 2008, for the third time in three years, chemicals being tested for industrial agriculture sickened children and adults and sent them to clinics and the emergency room with tears in their eyes, holding their heads in their hands, or vomiting. The corporations responsible for the tests deny any role in the incidences. But the open air testing of chemicals and genetically modified crops is a now a persistent worry for people living in this small rural community. Local activists have suggested that the welcome sign at the Kaua‘i airport be changed to warn tourists of what is going on there: “Welcome to the Mutant Garden Island.” Instead of being a source of health and well-being for the land and people, the American system of industrial agriculture has become a source of problematic food and even fear.
The connection to the military is the key to understanding how this tragedy came about. Most of the toxic chemicals used in agriculture came from the implements of war, such as nerve poisons and defoliants developed during World War II. And our military has been repeatedly used to impose our system of industrial agriculture on other lands, depriving traditional farmers of their livelihoods and redirecting their natural resources to the use of U.S. business interests. American plantation owners used the military to force the monarchy of Hawai‘i out of power. The takeover of Hawai‘i-the imposition of plantation agriculture on Hawai‘i’s traditional system and the conversion of the Hawaiian people to a Western lifestyle-is a case history and a warning for all of us concerned about the future of food. We are facing an urgent problem: Given global warming, growing populations, and declining natural resources, how will we feed ourselves?
Before colonization, Hawaiians had a sophisticated system of land, water, and ocean resource use that fed populations equal to or even greater than those on several of the islands today (excluding the urban populations of O‘ahu). Now, residents of Hawai‘i import 85 percent of their food. The descendants of the first Hawaiians, like most native peoples who have been colonized, suffer from some of the worst poverty and diet-related health problems of anyone living in the United States.
The food being imported into Hawai‘i is produced, processed, packaged, and transported using enormous amounts of fossil fuels. By one measure, the current U.S. food system uses 10 times more energy than it produces in the form of food calories. Even if you like industrial agriculture, its built-in obsolescence is a problem. When oil production peaks, and prices rise again, as they inevitably must, food in Hawai‘i will become unaffordable. What will happen when the gas pumps and grocery store shelves are empty? This is a question all of us will face, sooner or later, since we are all on what David Brower called “Earth Island,” a small planet floating in a sea of space.

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2009-03-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

CBD Secretariat Reports on Workshop on Mainstreaming of Biodiversity and Integration of Climate Change

From : CLIMATE-L.org

3 March 2009: The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) circulated its monthly bulletin of activities, including a brief report on the Capacity Development Workshop for the Pacific on National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), the Mainstreaming of Biodiversity and the Integration of Climate Change, held from 2-6 February 2009, in Nadi, Fiji.

The Workshop brought together over 30 participants, who shared experiences and built capacity on the development, implementation and review of NBSAPS and the mainstreaming of biodiversity into broader national, local and regional policies and strategies. Participants highlighted the urgent need to enhance the integration of climate change considerations within NBSAPs and appreciated training in tools, including application of the ecosystem approach, strategic environmental assessments and risk management techniques, and communication education and public awareness. [February 2009 Monthly Bulletin Of Activities] [Workshop Website]

2009-03-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

School canteen

From : Fiji Times

ALL school food services, including canteens and dining rooms, must comply with the schools' nutrition policy to reinforce messages on healthy eating. Interim Education Minister Filipe Bole said the nutrition policy must be aligned to the ministry canteen guidelines. Junk food should be avoided at all costs because the magnitude of nutritional problems has led to high levels of overweight and obesity, iron deficiency anaemia and high blood pressure in all age groups.

2009-03-09T21:35:00.000-07:00

Taro security bill passes House committee hearing in Hawaii

From : Radio New Zealand International

Posted at 22:29 on 06 March, 2009 UTC

A bill that seeks to retain the cultural integrity of taro by protecting it from genetic modification unanimously passed it’s House Agriculture Committee hearing in Hawaii this week.

During the debate this week researchers said science could shield taro from devastating diseases while Native Hawaiians sought to keep taro pure and safe from tampering.

The taro security bill is setting out to protect the cultural integrity of taro as part of the heritage of the Hawaiian people and the State, but the bill still allows for genetic alterations of non-Hawaiian taro varieties in a laboratory.

But some taro farmers voiced concerns to legislators that genetically modified taro varieties could still cross-pollinate with Hawaiian varieties.

It now heads to a vote before the full House.

This is the third straight year that lawmakers have tried to pass a law protecting Hawaiian taro, which is used to make the starchy food poi and revered as an ancestor of the Hawaiian people.

News Content © Radio New Zealand International
PO Box 123, Wellington, New Zealand

2009-03-09T21:28:00.000-07:00

NMC-CREES to host banana workshop

From : Saipan Tribune

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

NMC-CREES to host banana workshop

The Northern Marianas College Cooperative Research Extension and Education Services program will be conducting a two-day Banana Workshop on the islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Rota. The workshop, which is open to the general public, will highlight the disease management, maintenance, and care of the varieties of bananas in the CNMI.

The workshop will also host University of California at Davis professor Dr. Ivan Buddenhagen as the guest speaker. Buddenhagen, who holds a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology from Oregon State University, has dedicated most of his long career to promoting plant disease resistance and management as well as production and crop improvement of bananas and other tropical crops.

The Banana Workshops will be held on Saipan at the Pacific Islands Club on March 16-17, on Rota at the As Paris Restaurant on March 18-19, and on Tinian at Classroom D at the NMC-Tinian Campus on March 20-21. A registration fee of $5 is required to attend both days of the workshop session, which will run from 8am to 4:30pm each day. The workshop sessions will consist of presentations in the morning and a field trip to banana farms for a hands-on experience in the afternoon for both days.

For more information about the Banana Workshop or other CREES events and programs, log on to www.nmcnet.edu or www.crees.org or call 234-5498 ext. 1707. (NMC)

2009-03-03T17:50:00.000-08:00

Philippine Coconut Authority test viability of 20% Coco-Diesel Fuel

From : PCA
The government is carrying out testing on the technical viability of a 20 percent mix of coconut methyl ester (CME), popularly bio-diesel, with petroleum fuel in an aim to help ease down fuel price.

Philippine Coconut Authority Deputy Administrator Carlos Carpio said PCA is conducting technical tests of the higher mixture of CME with petroleum-based diesel particularly as requested by the local government of Lucena City, Quezon.

"We need to study the technicalities in using it without engine modification. We will also study (benefits) like (increased) mileage," he said.

Mayor Ramon Talaga, Jr. wants his local government or the entire Quezon province to be the bio-diesel capital of the Philippines, hence the tests. Quezon province may really be the right province to pursue a higher CME mix as it is one of the Philippines' biggest coconut producers, producing higher than the whole of Bicol Region.

The 20 percent mix will be a big leap from the present one percent mandated mix of CME with diesel. The Biofuels Act mandates the higher mix of two percent by 2009, but that is still way below Lucena City's objective.

Manila Bulletin
June 26, 2008

2009-03-02T18:53:00.000-08:00

Salt tolerant plants a step closer

From :Science Alert

Monday, 02 March 2009
University of Tasmania

Salinity costs the farming industry billions
of dollars.

Chief investigator Associate Professor Sergey Shabala said salination causes multi-billion dollar losses to the crop farming industry.

Up to seven per cent of the total land surface is saline and about one-third of the world’s irrigated land suffers from secondary-induced salination, he said.

Previously plant breeding for salt tolerance has achieved only a limited success, mainly due to the physiological and genetic complexity of salinity trait.

“Traditionally, plant breeding for salt tolerance followed two main avenues”, Assoc Prof Sergey Shabala said.

“One was to make sure that plants don’t take up sodium, and another one – to synthesise some chemicals to help them to withstand the water stress imposed by salinity. Unfortunately, neither of them was efficient enough”.

Now Assoc Prof Shabala and his team at the School of Agricultural Science believe they are getting close to solving this problem.

In a project funded by the Australian Research Council and Grain Research and Development Corporation, the scientists have explored some other mechanisms contributing to salinity tolerance in plants.

One mechanism, related to plant’s ability to keep a constant level of potassium within its tissues, seems to be crucial to make plants salt tolerant.

“It appears that we have found a ‘missing link’ in this puzzle”, Assoc Prof Shabala said.

“As far as plants are capable to keep potassium high, they are happy. And all other mechanisms discovered so far appear to be complimentary to this one”.

The National Land and Water Resources Audit estimates that somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of currently arable land could be out of production by 2020. So creating salt tolerant varieties is critical for both reclaiming already salinised land and for minimising the overall cost of dryland salinity in Australia which may exceed $1 billion by 2100.

Assoc Prof Shabala and his team believe that targeting potassium in plant breeding for salt tolerance opens new and exciting prospects to overcome salinity problem and create tolerant varieties.

“Given the large amount of contributing components, it’s a painfully slow process,” he said.

“But the knowledge is in place, so it’s simply a matter of time and appropriate techniques to get it all working in the field.”

2009-03-02T18:26:00.000-08:00

Rare crops seen as key to food crisis

From : NZ Herald

Monday Mar 02, 2009
Richard Gray

Rare crops found in the Pacific islands and former British colonies should be grown in much larger quantities to help the world avoid food shortages, a leading expert on plants has warned.

Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, said people needed to start eating rare crops like breadfruit, cowpea and Bambara groundnut.

He said cultivating species such as breadfruit, grown on trees native to the South Pacific islands, and bulrush, whose roots were a popular carbohydrate among indigenous Australian aborigines, could also help preserve biodiversity.

He argued that the world was too reliant on a handful of key species of edible plants for food, warning that the combined threat of disease, climate change and lack of diversity in commercial crops had left the dozen staple species that provide the bulk of the global food supply - such as wheat, maize and barley - increasingly vulnerable.

Professor Hopper predicted that crops such as breadfruit, a fruit grown in British colonies in the 18th century as a cheap foodstuff for slaves, Barbados cherries, Bambara groundnuts, cowpeas and pigeon peas were among the crops that had potential to become future staples.

Famine has become an ever more frequent condition facing the world, particularly in heavily populated but marginal desertifying lands most susceptible to global warming.

"Food shortages are inevitable in such circumstances and will be exacerbated as the human population increases globally.

"The world is currently fed primarily from just a dozen species - around 80 per cent of the world's food comes from those few plants used in commercial agriculture. Yet there are more than 30,000 edible plants known on the planet, so it is baffling we are so reliant on so few species.

"Diversifying the range of crop species is a sensible approach and could ensure food is available from alternative crops should staples fail in any given season."

Professor Hopper spoke out after giving a speech about biodiversity to business and government officials at the 2009 Sustainability Summit organised by the Economist magazine in London in February.

He said industrialised agriculture mass produced crops such as wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats and potatoes, which were the main staple forms of food around the world, at the expense of other types of plants that were cleared to make way for these crops.

As global temperatures increase, many areas that grow these crops will become unable to sustain them. Low genetic diversity in these staple food crops through generations of breeding has left them vulnerable to disease and pests.

2009-03-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

Water plan helps sinking Kiribati stay afloat

From : PACNEWS 1: Tues 03 March 2009

Water plan helps sinking Kiribati stay afloat

03 MARCH 2009 CANBERRA (Pacnews) ---- A group of Australian scientists is helping to save a tiny central Pacific island nation from a dangerous byproduct of rising sea levels.

Kiribati is slowly being swamped by salt water, shrinking the land mass and threatening the islanders' precious supply of fresh water stored in underground reservoirs.

A team of experts from the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra has devised a plan to help the small nation of 100,000 secure its water supply against seawater and other contamination.

“They're living in a precarious situation in terms of their water resources,” said project leader and environmental expert Professor Ian White.

“They don't know how much they've got, and what they do have is in danger of mixing with salt water as the sea level intrudes and making people very sick.. “In that sense, it was vital to come up with a plan to help protect it and therefore the population who rely on it.”

Kiribati is made up of 33 atolls, almost all of which sit just six metres or less above sea level.

The nation, which has strong ties to Australia and uses the Australian dollar, is considered one of the most vulnerable to climate change in the world, along with Tuvalu and the Maldives.

It was one of the first countries selected by the Global Environment Facility to trial new strategies to adapt to climate change, but a recent survey showed water supply was the biggest and most pressing concern.

Prof White said investigations revealed the underground water supply was in danger of being tainted with salt water or becoming polluted as reservoir areas became more built up.

This was particularly true in urban areas with a density of 12,000 people per square kilometre, significantly more than in Sydney's Kings Cross.

“They have very limited land areas and they're all living over the fresh water reserves and because these atolls are very porous, things get in the water very quickly,” Prof White said.

“As a result, the health issues they face are among the worst in the world in terms of infant mortality to water-borne diseases.”

The new water policy, developed in partnership with Fiji and France, aims to conserve water through sustainable use and efficient management.
Climate change experts have warned that countries like Kiribati have just 50 to 100 years before they lose large areas of land to the sea and salt water renders other land useless for living and farming ….PNS (ENDS)

2009-03-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

Papua New Guinea creates its first natural preserve

From : PACNEWS

03 MARCH 2009 PORT MORESBY (Pacnews) ---- Papua New Guinea (PNG) has created a nearly 190,000-acre preserve to protect tree kangaroos and other endangered species, after years of criticism for turning a blind eye to environmental issues, a conservation group said Tuesday, reports AP

The Pacific nation, where illegal logging is rampant, has recently tried to overhaul its image in the conservation community, taking the lead on such issues as getting tropical forest protections included in a U.N. climate pact.

The plan for a conservation area stemmed from an unusual agreement between the government and 35 indigenous communities to protect the 187,800 acres of remote tropical forest, coastal reefs and mountains on the island of New Guinea.

Leaders representing the 10,000 villagers living in the YUS Conservation Area, named for the Yopno, Uruwa and Som rivers that run through it, have agreed to prohibit hunting, and development such as logging and mining. In exchange, the Seattle-based Woodland Park Zoo and the Virginia-based Conservation International will provide as much as US$2 million for health and education programmes.

“By creating the country's first national conservation area, the PNG government and people have established a much-needed safe zone for the irreplaceable biodiversity it contains,” said Lisa Dabek, the field conservation director at the Woodland Park Zoo and one of the world's top experts on the tree kangaroo.

Ms Dabek and other researchers said the agreement would go a long way toward ensuring the survival of the Matschie's tree kangaroo, a leaf-eating mammal the size of a raccoon that looks like a cross between “a bear, kangaroo, koala and monkey.”

“They are completely adapted to living in the rain forest and trees, which is not what you think of when you think of kangaroos,” said Ms Dabek. He has spent more than 20 years studying the animal, which is found only on the island but is related to tree kangaroos found in Australia.

Other rare species in the area include the long-beaked echidna — an egg-laying mammal that looks a bit like a hedgehog — and the Huon Astrapia, a bird of paradise.

Until now, their habitat was under significant threat. A study last year in the journal Biotopica found that nearly a quarter of Papua New Guinea's rain forest had been damaged or destroyed between 1972 and 2002 — mostly due to illegal logging to extract timber that is made into flooring and furniture in Chinese factories and sold in the United States and Europe.

But many of Papua New Guinea's forests, including the new reserve, are still untouched, and researchers have hope the unique arrangement will find success.

Unlike government-run parks that often exist in name only in many parts of Asia, the land committed for the project is all owned by local clans. Conservationists are counting on the locals to bring a unique commitment to protecting their homes.

Researchers said the reserve is also a good first step toward reducing global emissions: The trees in the reserve absorb 13 million tons of carbon each year while deforestation globally represents about 20 percent of carbon emissions.

“Hopefully, other tropical forest nations will follow this example of simultaneously combating climate change and conserving the ecosystems on which people depend,” Conservation International President Russell Mittermeier said in a statement.

Conservation International said the agreement has been approved by the government. A spokesman for the prime minister's office did not respond to a request for comment Monday…..PNS (ENDS)

2009-03-02T12:56:00.000-08:00

Open access papers used more in developing world

From : Sci Dev

Carla Almeida

24 February 2009

Scientists in developing countries are making the most of open access papers

WHO/TDR/Crump
[RIO DE JANEIRO] Making articles freely available online can widen the participation of developing world scientists in global science, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Chicago in the United States measured the extent to which making papers available on an open access basis affected how many times those papers were cited, and by whom.

Using Thompson Scientific's Citation Indexes and Fulltext Sources Online, they surveyed 26 million articles from more than 8,000 journals, their associated citations from 1945–2005 and online availability from 1998–2005.

They compared the number of citations scientific papers received when available only in print with the number received by the same articles once they became freely available online. The researchers found that online availability increased citations of recently published articles by around eight per cent.

But they also found variation in the rates of citations from different countries, based on a country's per capita gross national income — with the impact of open access more than twice as strong in developing countries than in developed countries.

In England and Germany, for example, open access increased citations of articles by around five per cent, while in India the increase was almost 25 per cent and in Brazil it was close to 30 per cent.

"Our study shows that people who have access to journals in poor countries use them," says James A. Evans, the leading author of the research, published in Science last week (20 February). "If they weren't freely available they wouldn't use them with the same frequency, and they may not be able, as a result, to themselves publish in top journals."

The researchers also found that the influence of open access dipped back to 12–16 per cent in very poor countries, such as Afghanistan, Uganda and Nepal.

Evans believes limited electronic access in these countries explains part of the figures, but it represents just one of the issues limiting their participation in science. "The low average income also means that it is hard to get an education and to become a scientist

2009-02-25T19:36:00.000-08:00

UN calls for Green revolution to prevent food crisis

From : Food Navigator.com

By Sarah Hills, 19-Feb-2009

Related topics: Sustainability, Science & Nutrition

A major change is needed in the way food is produced, handled and disposed of in order to feed the world's rising population and protect the environment as prices are expected to remain volatile, according to a new UN report.

The factors blamed for the current food crisis - drought, biofuels, high oil prices, low grain stocks and in particular speculation in food stocks - may worsen substantially in the coming decades unless more intelligent and creative management is brought to the world's agricultural systems, said the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said: “We need a Green revolution in a Green Economy but one with a capital G."

Green revolution, with a lower-case g, is a term that usually refers to the spread of new agricultural technologies since World War Two.

However Steiner has a different idea in mind:

“We need to deal with not only the way the world produces food but the way it is distributed, sold and consumed, and we need a revolution that can boost yields by working with rather than against nature.”

He added: “Over half of the food produced today is either lost, wasted or discarded as a result of inefficiency in the human-managed food chain.

“There is evidence within the report that the world could feed the entire projected population growth alone by becoming more efficient."

Last year food manufacturers faced soaring commodity costs, as prices for key raw materials such as corn and wheat reach unprecedented figures, putting intense pressure on company balance sheets.

The report called: “The Environmental Food crises: Environment's role in averting future food crises” warned that food prices may increase by 30-50 per cent within decades. At the same time, 25 per cent of the world’s food production may become lost due to 'environmental breakdowns' by 2050 unless action is taken.

Recommendations

To reduce the risk of hunger and rising food insecurity, it recommends a seven point plan

In the short-term it suggests re-organizing the food market infrastructure to regulate prices and generate food safety nets for those at risk. This would be backed by a global, micro-financing fund to boost small-scale farmer productivity in developing countries.

It also suggests the removal of agricultural subsidies and the promotion of second generation biofuels based on wastes rather than primary crops.

In the medium-term is recommends reducing trade barriers and improving infrastructure to increase trade and improve market access.

It also suggests replacing the use of cereals and food fish in animal feed with post-harvest losses and waste and offering support for more diversified and ecologically-friendly farming systems.

Long term recommendations include steps to limit global warming with climate-friendly agriculture production systems and raising awareness of the pressures that consumption and population trends put on sustainable ecosystems.

Opportunities and markets

Last week another UN report said that despite the economic crisis, the organic market will grow so countries such as Africa need to grow and export more organic produce to help tackle issues of food security and sustainability.

However, this latest UNEP report said that increasing growth and power of international food corporations is affecting the opportunities of small agricultural producers in developing countries.

It added: “While new opportunities are being created, the majority are not able to utilize them because of the stringent safety and quality standards of food retailers, hence barring market entry.”

2009-02-25T19:26:00.000-08:00

Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting holds two panel discussions in consideration of agriculture, rural development
Source: United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC)

Date: 24 Feb 2009

From : Relief Web

Commission on Sustainable Development Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting 3rd & 4th Meetings (AM & PM)

The Intergovernmental Preparatory Meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development today held two expert panel discussions on policy options to address barriers and constraints to agriculture and rural development.

Convened to lay the foundation for the Commission's seventeenth session, which is slated to take place from 4 to 15 May, the Meeting aims to highlight obstacles, best practices and lessons learned across six thematic priorities: agriculture, drought, desertification, land, rural development, Africa and interlinkages and cross-cutting issues.

Norman Uphoff, Professor of Government and International Agriculture at Cornell University, kicked off the morning's panel on agriculture by emphasizing that the present model of "modern agriculture" might not be sustainable in the twenty-first century. Among the reasons was that a projected 50 per cent growth in demand for food by 2050 faced several overwhelming constraints, including shrinking arable land, a general increase in adverse climate conditions and the likely rise in the costs of energy and petrochemical products.

As an alternative "post-modern" model, he suggested "agro-ecology" as a means to promote the growth of root systems while focusing on increasing the abundance of soil organisms. By taking a management-oriented approach, agro-ecology practices seek to capitalize on the existing genetic potential of soil and plants to produce higher yields at lower costs. Already available, those methods could make sustainable improvements in livelihoods and raise production levels at the same time.

Sara Scherr, President and Chief Executive Officer of ECOagriculture Partners, underlining the potential of ecologically oriented agriculture to enhance rural livelihoods, said "eco-agriculture" could also conserve or restore ecosystems and biodiversity. As a system of managing agricultural landscapes, it boosted ecosystem services by creating or expanding conservation areas and minimizing agricultural pollution in production areas. Farming systems could also be modified in ways that contributed to climate-change mitigation.

To protect agriculture sustainability in 2009, she said it was critically important to ensure that the agreements coming out of the climate change conference scheduled for Copenhagen in December placed high priority on land-use systems for mitigation and adaptation. A global summit to frame a long-term "green strategy for food security" should also be convened, while national facilities should be established to help farming communities plan for agriculture, the environment and climate resilience.

During the ensuing discussion, a number of speakers said that recent volatility in food prices had demonstrated the urgency of moving towards sustainable agriculture and rural development. Several delegates pointed out that direct partnerships provided critical targeted support in the absence of major changes to international trade agreements, and due to the failure to eliminate harmful agricultural subsidies in the developed world.

While some delegates emphasized the value of niche crops, particularly organic ones, a representative of the business and industry major group suggested that, while organic agriculture might open niche export markets to farmers, it could not feed 9 billion people in a sustainable way without incurring intolerable environmental costs. Meanwhile, India's representative said her country had learned that an optimal combination of organic cultivation and fertilizers was extremely useful in enhancing overall crop production.

Opening the afternoon panel on rural development, Tim Hanstad, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Rural Development Institute (RDI), stressed that among the four elements of successful rural development -- basic health, basic education, infrastructure and pro-poor land policies -– the latter played an outsized role. Access to land largely determined food security, status, wealth and power in rural communities, and land policies should strive for relatively egalitarian access to and distribution of land, secure tenures and the empowerment of local communities and governments. Done right, the formalization of land rights increased the value of land, putting money in the pockets of its owners and encouraging investment by farmers. That in turn fostered higher economic growth in general across an entire society.

Representing Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN), panellist Rosalud de la Rosa said the challenge ahead was to create an integrated approach to sustainable rural development for all policymakers to follow. To do that, gender equity was vital in expediting sustainable development and a significant human right for women worldwide. Even though a high price was paid when gender issues were neglected, there was little political will to achieve gender equality in agriculture and rural development.

With women comprising a substantial majority of the agricultural workforce in many low-income countries, however, such attitudes were themselves unsustainable, she said. Women farmers must be at centre stage and partnerships must be formed to make that happen. Greater collective action among women was also needed. To that end, WOCAN had developed a rural women's leadership course and was collaborating with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Heifer International in an attempt to restore agricultural to the development agenda.

Responding to those presentations, some speakers underlined the importance of water systems and energy services in rural development and others called for the integration of rural development into national and international stimulus packages aimed at addressing the global economic and financial crises. Alongside developing countries like Namibia, developed ones such as the United States emphasized the need to address disparities between rural and urban areas with a view to reducing rural-to-urban migration, particularly among young people.

Several speakers suggested that empowering rural people and communities to manage their own social and economic destinies through strong institutions would enhance development efforts. Many delegates, like the representative Tonga, who spoke on behalf of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), also underlined the need to integrate traditional cultural knowledge and land-tenure systems into rural development strategies.

Gerda Verburg ( Netherlands), Commission Chairperson, chaired both the morning and afternoon panel discussions.

In the panel discussion on agriculture, the Commission also heard from representatives of Sudan (on behalf of the "Group of 77" developing countries and China), European Commission (on behalf of the European Union), Senegal (on behalf of the African Group), Jamaica (on behalf of AOSIS), Papua New Guinea (on behalf of the Pacific Islands Developing States), Oman (on behalf of the Arab Group), United States, Indonesia, Canada, China, Federated States of Micronesia, South Africa, Switzerland, Mexico, Republic of Korea, Pakistan, Netherlands, Norway, Malawi, Argentina, Algeria, Iran, Russian Federation, Nigeria, Japan, Chile, Libya, Fiji, Kazakhstan, Marshall Islands, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Barbados, Cambodia and Namibia.

The Permanent Observer for Palestine also made a statement.

2009-02-25T19:23:00.000-08:00

SPC’s Land Resources Division creates helpdesk to assist Pacific Island Countries & Territories

24 FEBRUARY 2009 SUVA (Pacnews) --- The Secretariat of the Pacific Community Land Resources Division (LRD) has established an email based Helpdesk system to provide technical advisory support to Pacific Island Countries & Territories (PICTs).

Technical advisory will be provided in the areas of Animal Health & Production, Biosecurity & Trade Facilitation, Crop Production, Genetic Resources, Forests and Trees, Forestry & Agriculture Diversification, Information & Communication and Extension, Plant Health, and Agriculture & Forestry Policy Advice.

This email based facility receives processes and responds to queries from clients and stakeholders. It operates on a ticketing platform where incoming queries are tagged with a ticket number, and an auto-response message is sent to the requestor to confirm that the message has been received and opened.

Last year (2008) the LRD management decided to merge the SPC Biosecurity Helpdesk with the LRD helpdesk to centralize all incoming LRD queries. Messages sent to the Biosecurity Helpdesk will now be delivered at the LRD Helpdesk.

Query response turnaround is 24 hours and 2 weeks for those requiring research and technical staff input.

The LRD helpdesk can be contacted at lrdhelpdesk@spc.int

SPC’s 26 member countries and territories include American Samoa, Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji Islands, France, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, United States of America, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna……PNS (ENDS)

2009-02-25T13:29:00.000-08:00

Hamburgers are the Hummers of Food in Global Warming: Scientists

From : AFP

CHICAGO - When it comes to global warming, hamburgers are the Hummers of food, scientists say.

Simply switching from steak to salad could cut as much carbon as leaving the car at home a couple days a week.
That's because beef is such an incredibly inefficient food to produce and cows release so much harmful methane into the atmosphere, said Nathan Pelletier of Dalhousie University in Canada.
Pelletier is one of a growing number of scientists studying the environmental costs of food from field to plate.
By looking at everything from how much grain a cow eats before it is ready for slaughter to the emissions released by manure, they are getting a clearer idea of the true costs of food.
The livestock sector is estimated to account for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and beef is the biggest culprit.
Even though beef only accounts for 30 percent of meat consumption in the developed world it's responsible for 78 percent of the emissions, Pelletier said Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
That's because a single kilogram of beef produces 16 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent emissions: four times higher than pork and more than ten times as much as a kilogram of poultry, Pelletier said.
If people were to simply switch from beef to chicken, emissions would be cut by 70 percent, Pelletier said.
Another part of the problem is people are eating far more meat than they need to.
"Meat once was a luxury in our diet," Pelletier said. "We used to eat it once a week. Now we eat it every day."
If meat consumption in the developed world was cut from the current level of about 90 kilograms a year to the recommended level of 53 kilograms a year, livestock related emissions would fall by 44 percent.
"Given the projected doubling of (global) meat production by 2050, we're going to have to cut our emissions by half just to maintain current levels," Pelletier said.
"Technical improvements are not going to get us there."
That's why changing the kinds of food people eat is so important, said Chris Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania.
Food is the third largest contributor to the average US household's carbon footprint after driving and utilities, and in Europe - where people drive less and have smaller homes - it has an even greater impact.
"Food is of particular importance to a consumer's impact because it's a daily choice that is, at least in theory, easy to change," Weber said.
"You make your choice every day about what to eat, but once you have a house and a car you're locked into that for a while."
The average US household contributes about five tons of carbon dioxide a year by driving and about 3.5 tons of equivalent emissions with what they eat, he said.
"Switching to no red meat and no dairy products is the equivalent of (cutting out) 8,100 miles driven in a car ... that gets 25 miles to the gallon," Weber said in an interview following the symposium.
Buying local meat and produce will not have nearly the same effect, he cautioned.
That's because only five percent of the emissions related to food come from transporting food to market.
"You can have a much bigger impact by shifting just one day a week from meat and dairy to anything else than going local every day of the year," Weber said.
For more information on how to eat a low carbon diet, visit www.eatlowcarbon.org.
Mary Taylor(Dr)

2009-02-16T13:53:00.000-08:00

REDD - hot topic for climate change [Posting 9]
Lead article for the topic: REDD

Can't see this article correctly? Go to: http://www.climatefrontlines.org/en-GB/node/169

Climate change is not only occurring, it is accelerating. Deforestation accounts for almost 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The United Nations Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in Developing Countries Programme (UN-REDD) seeks to reduce this figure by giving forests a monetary value based on their capacity to store carbon and thus reduce greenhouse gases. REDD may eventually lead to developed countries paying developing ones to reduce emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation. According to a UNEP press release: “The UN-REDD Programme is aimed at tipping the economic balance in favour of sustainable management of forests so that their formidable economic, environmental and social goods and services benefit countries, communities and forest users while also contributing to important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions”.1
While there is general agreement that deforestation must be reduced, the recent UN Framework Convention on Climate Change discussions in Poznan, Poland, highlighted numerous concerns, including the implications of REDD schemes for forest-dependent communities, many of which are indigenous.
For some observers REDD offers a better alternative than current forest use and management: “Unless a mechanism is put into place that makes forests worth more alive than dead, deforestation will continue until the world’s tropical forests are completely destroyed. (…) In the absence of large-scale incentives for conservation, an enormous number of the world’s species of plants and animals and the resource base of millions of indigenous peoples and forest communities will ultimately go up in smoke”.2
REDD could provide political and financial support to indigenous peoples if governments decide that local forestry practices contribute to storing carbon: “If instituted in a manner consistent with indigenous interests, reduced deforestation could help to protect the biodiversity of plants and animals, help to secure indigenous lands and livelihoods, and provide for the ongoing culture and community of indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples”.3
But indigenous peoples and other observers have also expressed concern about possible negative impacts. If forests are given monetary value under REDD schemes, many fear that - where land tenure rights are unclear and decision-making remains top-down - new conflicts could arise among indigenous and local communities and between them and the state.4 REDD mechanisms might exclude local populations from implementation and benefit-sharing processes, and possibly even expel them from their own territories: “The increased monetary value placed on standing forest resources and new forest growth, opens the door for corruption in countries where this is already rife in the forest sector. Centralized planning (…) where the national government creates plans, receives payments and disburses the new funds only adds to the marginalisation of forest people”.5
These concerns are reinforced by the difficulties experienced by indigenous peoples in accessing international climate change debates, even though many REDD projects will take place within indigenous territories. In the Poznan negotiations, “indigenous peoples were shocked to see the final version of the draft conclusions on ‘REDD’. This Document removed any references to the rights of indigenous peoples and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples”.6 Indigenous peoples and civil society representatives responded by declaring: “This is totally unacceptable (…) as the forests which are being targeted for REDD are those which indigenous peoples have sustained and protected for thousands of years”.7
It is widely recognized that REDD “(…) could contribute to strengthening and formalising the international forest regime” 8 and that this could represent “an opportunity to push for policy and legal reforms on forests and indigenous peoples' rights”.9 However, there is also growing concern that indigenous peoples and local communities are “unlikely to benefit from REDD where: they do not own their lands; there is no culture of free, prior and informed consent; their identities are not recognised; or they have no space to participate in political processes”.10
How do you think REDD might affect your community? Will REDD lead to new opportunities or negative impacts?
Please send your views and comments to peoples@frontlines.org
Also continue to send us your observations on Topic 1: Early impacts of climate change and Topic 2: Adapting. Your inputs will appear on the Forum website immediately.

REDD - Sujet brûlant pour le changement climatique [Message 9]
Article de référence relatif au thème : REDD
Si le texte ne s’affiche pas correctement allez à : http://www.climatefrontlines.org/fr/node/171
Le changement climatique n’est pas seulement en marche, il accélère. La déforestation contribue à quasiment 20% des émissions globales de gaz à effet de serre selon le Groupe d’experts intergouvernemental sur l’évolution du climat (GIEC). Le Programme des Nations unies sur la réduction des émissions résultant du déboisement et de la dégradation forestière dans les pays en développement (UN-REDD) vise à réduire ce chiffre en attribuant aux forêts une valeur financière basée sur leur capacité de stockage de carbone, et ainsi réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de serre. À terme, REDD conduirait les pays développés à payer les pays en développement dans le but de réduire les émissions causées par la déforestation et la dégradation des forêts. Selon un communiqué de presse du PNUE: « Le programme REDD vise à faire pencher la balance économique en faveur de la gestion durable des forêts afin que leur biens et services économiques, environnementaux et sociaux profitent aux pays, aux communautés et aux utilisateurs des forêts tout en contribuant aux réductions importantes des émissions de gaz à effet de serre.» 1
Bien que l’on s’accorde sur le fait que la déforestation doit être réduite, les récentes discussions de la Convention-Cadre des Nations unies sur les changements climatiques (CCNUCC) de Poznan, Pologne, ont soulevé de nombreuses préoccupations, y compris les implications du plan REDD pour les communautés dépendantes des forêts, dont beaucoup sont autochtones.
Pour certains observateurs, REDD offre une meilleure alternative que les actuels modes d’exploitation et de gestion des forêts: « A moins de mettre en place un mécanisme qui valorise davantage une forêt vivante que morte, la déforestation durera jusqu’à ce que les forêts tropicales soient entièrement détruites (…) En l’absence d’incitations à grande échelle pour la préservation, un nombre colossal d’espèces végétales et animales à travers le monde ainsi que les ressources de millions de peuples autochtones et de communautés forestières partiront en fumée».2
Si les gouvernements estiment que les pratiques forestières locales contribuent au stockage du carbone, le plan REDD pourrait offrir un soutien politique et financier aux peuples autochtones: « Si l’on aménage la réduction de la déforestation de manière cohérente avec les intérêts autochtones, celle-ci pourrait favoriser la préservation de la biodiversité végétale et animale, garantir la protection des terres et des moyens de subsistance autochtones et enfin servir les cultures et les communautés de peuples autochtones ou de ceux qui habitent les forêts ».3
Cependant, les peuples autochtones et d’autres observateurs ont aussi exprimé leurs inquiétudes envers d’éventuelles répercussions négatives. Si l’on attribue aux forêts une valeur financière sous le programme REDD, nombreux sont ceux qui redoutent l’émergence de nouveaux conflits parmi les communautés autochtones et locales autant qu’entre elles et l’Etat4 car les droits fonciers ne sont pas toujours clairement définis et le pouvoir de décision reste très hiérarchisé. Les mécanismes de REDD risquent d’écarter les populations locales des procédés de mise en œuvre et de partage des bénéfices, voire de les expulser de leurs propres territoires : « La valeur financière accrue accordée aux ressources des forêts existantes et nouvelles ouvre la voie à la corruption dans des pays où elle est chose commune dans le secteur forestier. La planification centralisée (…), par laquelle le gouvernement national crée des plans, reçoit des paiements et débourse les nouveaux fonds, ne fait qu’accroître la marginalisation des peuples de la forêt ».5
Les difficultés que rencontrent les peuples autochtones à accéder aux débats internationaux sur le changement climatique renforcent ces préoccupations, bien que de nombreux projets REDD devraient avoir lieu au sein même des territoires autochtones. Au cours des récentes négociations de Poznan, « les représentants des peuples autochtones ont été choqués devant la version finale du projet de conclusions concernant 'REDD'. Ce document exclut toute référence aux droits des peuples autochtones et à la Déclaration des Nations unies sur les droits des peuples autochtones.» 6 Les représentants des peuples autochtones et de la société civile ont répondu en déclarant: « Ceci est totalement inacceptable (…) car les forêts visées par REDD sont celles que les peuples autochtones ont entretenues et préservées depuis des milliers d’années.» 7
Il est largement reconnu que REDD « (…) pourrait contribuer à renforcer et réglementer le régime forestier international »8 et qu'il offre « une opportunité de réclamer la mise en place de réformes politiques et légales en faveur des forêts et des droits des peuples autochtones ».9 Cependant, une inquiétude persiste, à savoir que les peuples autochtones et les communautés locales « pourraient ne pas profiter des avantages de REDD s'ils ne sont pas propriétaires des terres qu'ils occupent; si le consentement libre, préalable et informé n'est pas respecté; si leurs identités ne sont pas reconnues ; ou bien encore si l'on ne leur permet pas de prendre part aux processus politiques ».10
Dans quelle mesure croyez-vous que REDD puisse toucher votre communauté ? Le programme REDD va-t-il introduire de nouvelles opportunités ou générer des impacts négatifs ?
Merci d’adresser vos points de vue et commentaires à peoples@frontlines.org
Continuez aussi à nous envoyer vos observations sur les Thème 1 : Les premiers impacts sur la ligne de front et Thème 2 : Adaptation. Vos contributions apparaîtront immédiatement sur le site du forum.
Les références pour cet article figurent en bas de page de ce message.
________________________________________
Toutes vos réponses seront diffusées sur le site du forum au terme de la discussion 'REDD', rendez-vous sur : http://www.climatefrontlines.org
Pour s’inscrire au forum suivre ce lien : http://www.climatefrontlines.org/lists/?p=subscribe
Si vous souhaitez être retiré de la liste de diffusion, allez à : http://www.climatefrontlines.org/lists/?p=unsubscribe
________________________________________
References / Referencias / Références
1 UNEP (24/09/2008)
2 Nepstad et al. 2008. Getting REDD Right. WHRC-ED-IPAM
3 Barnsley, I. 2008. REDD : A guide for Indigenous Peoples. UNU-IAS
4 Ravels, S. 2008. REDD myths: a critical review of proposed mechanisms to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries. Friends of the Earth
5 Dooley et al. 2008. Cutting Corners: World Bank’s forest and carbon fund fails to forest and peoples. FERN-FPP
6 Press statement of Victoria Tauli-Corpuz on Human Rights Day
7 Indigenous peoples, local communities and NGOs outraged at the removal of rights from UNFCCC decision on REDD
8 Karsenty et al. 2008. Summary of the Proceedings of the International Workshop “The International Regime, Avoided Deforestation and the Evolution of Public and Private Policies Towards Forests in Developing Countries” held in Paris, 21-23rd November 2007
9 Global Indigenous Peoples Consultation on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) Baguio City, Philippines 12-14 November 2008
10 UNPFII-Statement Poznan

2009-02-16T13:40:00.000-08:00

Workshop to Benefit Local Farmers

From : Solomon Times ONLINE

BY JOY BASI

A workshop to enhance skills and knowledge in the fields of production, processing and saving of vegetable seeds and floral biology of selected crops will benefit many local farmers of Solomon Islands.
The Training Workshop on Vegetable Seed Production is being coordinated by Dr. Ravi Joshi who is Coordinator of the Asian Vegetable Resource Development Centre (AVRDC) in the Solomons.

AVRDC is one of the very prestigious international agricultural research institutions famous for research, development and improvement of tropical vegetable crops.

The training workshop includes members form the Ministry of Agriculture, NGO's and local farmers from the provinces.

Ambassador of the Republic of China (Taiwan), H.E. George Chan, said ROC (Taiwan) devote its efforts continuously to introduce advanced agricultural knowledge and skills to Solomon Islands in order to provide quality and continuity of food supply.

He said the achievement of "rich supplies of vegetables and fruits in the markets" are the achievements of hard work from government officials, donors, NGOs like AVRDC and local farmers.

The "week-long meaningful event" is part of a four-year project, Integrated Crop Management Package for Sustainable Smallholder Gardens, in Solomon Islands with the support of Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), AVRDC-SI.

This involves researchers and development specialists in the disciplines of crop and soil management, socio-economics, extension, plant protection and plant breeding.

The goal of the project is to increase the economic status and potential income generation opportunities for Solomon Islands' farmers by development and promoting integrated and improved crop management packages.

2009-02-16T13:36:00.000-08:00

In Vanuatu, food self-sufficiency is founded on crop diversity\

From : CIRAD

12 February 2009

The root and tuber crop panel of ten villages in Vanuatu comprises more than 1000 varieties of thirteen species. the primary aim of farming in this volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific is to ensure food self-sufficiency.

In Vanuatu, a volcanic archipelago in the South Pacific, root and tuber crops ensure the subsistence and self-sufficiency of the islands' inhabitants. Be they taro (Colocasia esculenta) or the greater yam Dioscorea alata, which are traditional crops introduced by the first sailors to have travelled to the islands some 3500 years ago, or other plants that have been grown for some time or were introduced more recently, root and tuber crops, which are propagated vegetatively, replanted and propagated by cuttings, are the mainstay of the Melanesian diet. However, it is the maintenance of the diversity of these plants that lies behind the food security strategy adopted by the islands' inhabitants. Melanesian gardens are a prime example of this: by mixing crops, they provide protection against pathogens, ensure better use of soils and sunlight, make certain plants more drought-resistant, allow harvests to be spread over time, and provide a more varied diet.

The root and tuber species grown in Vanuatu were inventoried in ten villages representative of the communities in the archipelago. Five primarily grow taro, the other five yam, for both cultural and climatic reasons. With more than 1000 varieties of thirteen species, the inventory confirmed the varietal diversity of the crops grown. The archipelago's agro-biodiversity comprises three types of plants: plants that arrived naturally, for instance on the wind, those imported by the first immigrants - taro and greater yam in this case - and those introduced recently, also by man, in particular cassava.
In most of the villages, notably those attached to their traditions, ancestral crops are predominant. However, in villages subject to severe environmental constraints (acid rain or ash showers due to active volcanoes, cyclones, etc), there are more either local or newly introduced crops. These crops bolster food security by making the cropping systems more resilient.

In other Pacific archipelagos, such as New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands, the introduction by the Europeans of new root and tuber species, combined with the arrival of a market economy, has totally disrupted the existing systems. Ancestral species have disappeared and food crop production has become uniform, making the production systems more fragile and reducing the quality of the local diet. Conversely, in Vanuatu, while the local populations are increasingly accepting and growing new plants, those plants have had to fit into the existing agro-biodiverse systems without adversely affecting the other species grown. In the most fragile zones, they even help to overcome the shortages resulting from the seasonal nature of traditional crops. The food production strategy in Vanuatu is not yet under threat, as culturally speaking, owners set great store by their Melanesian gardens, which is continuing to maintain their characteristic agro-biodiversity, despite the growing role played by cash crops grown for export.

These results were obtained under a project on the agro-biodiversity of root and tuber crops in Vanuatu, joint-funded by the Fonds français pour l’environnement mondial (FFEM), CIRAD and the Ministry of Agriculture, Quarantine, Forestry and Fisheries in Vanuatu.

[ Contact ] Julie Sardos, julie.sardos@cirad.fr

Marie-France Duval, marie-France.duval@cirad.fr
Genetic Improvement of Vegetatively Propagated Crops Research Unit

[ For further information ] On the Internet

Root Crops Agrobiodiversity in Vanuatu Project website

2009-02-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

BOUGANVILLE – CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES:

From : PACNEWS 1: Fri 13 Feb 2009

First 40 families move to main Bougainville Island

13 FEBRUARY 2009 BUKA (Pacnews) --- The first batch of families from the Carterets Island in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville are soon to be moved to the mainland, reports Post Courier.

This is to be a test run. The success of the adaption of these families will pave the way for the moving of the rest of the islanders.

The Bougainville administration says the relocation of the first 40 families on the mainland will be watched closely.

If successfully, the Carterets islanders will have scored a world first.

The will have become the world’s first climate change batch of refugees to be permanently resettled outside their place of origin

The Bougainville administration is so quiet about the relocation plans and no comments could be solicited from officers in the administration.

But Regional MP Fidelis Semoso last week took the administration to task to explain where K2 million (US$741,000) earmarked for the Carterets relocation program had gone to or how it was spent

Mr Semoso said yesterday that he had just purchased K1 million (US$370,000) worth of housing materials, food supplies and clothes for the islanders who are now currently facing a food shortage.

Carterets Islanders have been hard hit by the current high tides which has hit many coastal parts of Papua New Guinea.

Mr Semoso said he had received reports that the islanders were hungry and de needed shelter and clothes.

He visited the Carterets Islands on Monday to see the status of the area and how the people were coping.

He stressed that these people were neglected and advised recently that he had also helped in cash and kind for more than 3000 people of Manouv village, North Bougainville, who were displaced by the recent high tides. Mr Semoso said he would make sure these islanders were accorded the respect and treatment they deserved in their time of need…..PNS (ENDS)

2009-02-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

IFAD Prepares for Governing Council Meeting Against Backdrop of Food, Fuel and Financial Crises and Impacts of Climate Change

From : IFAD

12 February 2009: The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is preparing for its 32rd Governing Council meeting, to be held from 18-19 February 2009, in Rome, Italy. The meeting will feature three roundtables on challenges for smallholder farmers focusing on: unpredictable markets and high price volatility; the risks and opportunities arising out of the growing demand for land; and research and innovation needs in the context of a rapidly changing climate.
The third roundtable will discuss how agricultural research can enhance the ability of smallholder farmers to cope with the challenges of climate change and how the research agenda can combine the objectives of resilience, adaptation to local changes, and higher productivity based on a discussion paper prepared by IFAD.
The paper outlines the effects of climate change on resource-poor farmers and pastoralists, and discusses the role of agricultural research for smallholder farmer adaptation to climate change, including the potential of improved varieties, animal breeds and aquatic varieties, and integrated farming systems and management of natural resources. The paper also describes opportunities for smallholder farmers to benefit from carbon trading by mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, and lays out the organizational and financial challenges for increasing investment in international research and sharpening its focus on the challenges faced by those most vulnerable to climate change.
Discussion Paper on Agricultural Research

Governing Council delegates will also elect a successor to IFAD President Lennart Båge, who is concluding his second and final four-year term as IFAD’s President. [IFAD Press Release] [32rd Governing Council Documentation

2009-02-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

Green Revolution turns brown

From : Land and People

The UN agencies have finally admitted that the traditional agricultural knowledge and practices were sustainable as well as environment and farmers friendly. According to the below mentioned UN report, often argued need to follow the agro-industrial “Green Revolution” model using crops that require chemical fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation for increased yields have actually damaged the environment, caused dramatic loss of agrobiodiversity and associated traditional knowledge, favored wealthier farmers and left some poorer ones deeper in debt.

Please find below a link to a new policy brief by UNCTAD which is quite vocal against the “Green revolution” rhetoric and advocates in favor of organic agriculture. It is also attached for your assistance:

Policy Brief No. 6 - "Sustaining African Agriculture - Organic Production"

http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/presspb20086_en.pdf

Posted by Rami Zurayk at 6:44 PM

2009-02-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

Climate resilience at Africa’s grassroots

From : ASNS News

Sunday, 08 February 2009
Rural Africans are observing clear trends in local climate across a range of environments from humid to semi-arid.

They are already adapting to climate change with or without external support.

This information is contained in a paper written by Sonja Vermuelen and Duncan Macqueen of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), Everhart Nangoma (EU), Krystel Dossou, Organisation des Femmes pour la gestion de l’Energie, de l’Environnement et la promotion du Développement Intégré (OFEDI-Benin) and Dominic Walubengo (Forest Action Network-Kenya).

They say that for communities dependent on natural resources, adaptation involves a mix of technical solutions (such as different crops or planting patterns) and institutional solutions (such as new means of sharing information).

Local adaptations include responses to specific trends (such as fishing with finer-meshed nets), but also building of capacity and resilience say through savings groups and diversified agriculture to cope with future uncertainties.

Supporting local initiatives and institutions may be the most effective way to support climate change adaptation.

Climate change is often seen as a global problem demanding global solutions. But for poor people hit hard by the impacts, climate change is a not a boardroom abstraction, but day-to-day reality.

Faced with local shifts in weather patterns and natural resources, they are forced to find ways of coping that are locally relevant.

This kind of experience, gained at the grassroots, boosts resilience as no top-down initiative can. Three case studies from rural communities in Benin, Kenya and Malawi show how it is done.

“For communities that cope across Africa, climate change could herald lean and thirsty times. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that by 2020, yields from rain-fed agriculture in some countries could halve, and agricultural production and access to food may be severely compromised. Up to 250 million Africans could face water shortages,” the authors write. In the face of such shifts, what builds resilience and capacity to cope?

Three case studies from rural communities in very different ecological contexts — in Benin, Kenya and Malawi — reveal a range of responses.

But generally, all these communities have adjusted to an increasingly volatile environment with a two-pronged approach: using available natural resources more efficiently and raising capacity to cope with unpredictable future changes.

People in the three communities have observed significant changes in their local climates — in particular, more variability in the intensity and seasonality of rainfall.

Data from local meteorological offices partially support these observations, but have yet to demonstrate statistically significant trends.

In all the case studies, growing seasons were found to be less predictable and available surface water less abundant than two or three decades ago.

These changes are partly due to changing local climates. Meanwhile, growing human populations and large-scale land use change, such as the spread of industrial plantations, add to environmental pressures that could, for instance, affect water availability.

People’s adaptations to environmental change combine technical fixes (such as faster-maturing crop species and varieties) with institutional support, via social networks and more formal organisations.

"For some years, when rains begin, rains suddenly interrupt for more than two weeks; seeds are unearthed by rats, and consumed by bugs. Some years, seeds germinate and with the irregular rains, small plants can’t grow.’

During a field visit to Benin in July last year that was sponsored by Media21 of Geneva, Switzerland, farmers observed that climate change appeared about 20 years ago, when after three relatively stable decades, weather patterns shifted and the rains began to come later.

In most of Benin, people’s livelihoods depend on careful management of agricultural biodiversity.

For many generations people have fished, harvested wild produce from forests and mangroves, kept pigs, and grown crops of maize, cassava, beans, peanuts, leafy vegetables, palm and coconuts.

Some of the swamp forests have dried out. At the same time there have been other major changes in the country, such as significant expansion in large-scale plantations.

How have people been responding to perceived changes in rainfall and natural resources? The authors of the publication report that fishers reported using finer-meshed nets in the drier rivers, while acknowledging that the practice exacerbates local fish shortages.

People have also started to plant fast-growing crops in the dried-out areas of swamp forest to ensure they gain a harvest within the shorter reliable growing season.

Many have switched from building with local afitin logs to using concrete pylons as a way of cutting down on wood use while simultaneously building flood resistance.

To boost people’s environmental capacity and resilience, local organisations have drawn on cultural traditions.

They have adopted the local practice of using songs and dance, proverbs and riddles to share knowledge about sustainable management of agrobiodiversity in the face of today’s threats.

It was also observed during the field trip in Julyby this writer that many farmers have switched to growing bio-diesel plants like Jatropha curcas.

They said that they can get two crops of the plant in a year where they can get only one of maize “These days we do not know what is happening. Either there is too much rain or none at all. This is not useful to us. When there is too much rain, the floods that result cause us harm. When there is not enough rain, the dry conditions do us harm,” says Mama Fatuma, a butcher and long-term resident of Njoro Division in Rift valley, Kenya.

The semi-arid forest of Njoro Division lies on the eastern edge of the Mau Complex, Kenya’s largest wooded area that is at the centre of a major controversy following a decision by the Kenya Government to evict people from the forest after years of severe deforestation and encroachment

Until about 10 years ago, the people of Njoro depended on saw-milling, farming and cattle. Now they have diversified into selling firewood, charcoal and water.

The population has grown during this time, and agriculture has expanded into the forest.Njoro’s people observe that rainfall has become much more unpredictable.

Water resources have changed dramatically: perennial rivers have become seasonal and boreholes have dried up or become saline.

Echoing Mama Fatuma’s remarks, university lecturer Geoffrey Tunya, who has lived in Njoro for over 30 years, said, ‘Rain does not come regularly and when it does, it comes in torrents. There are extended droughts. Rivers are drying.’

“The change in climate is confusing farmers in Njoro, but they have formulated an array of adaptive strategies. They are switching from wheat and potatoes to quick-maturing crops such as beans and maize, and planting any time it rains because there is no longer a regular growing season. People plant fewer live hedges, because they grow too slowly, but are planting more trees on their farms in the hope that these will ‘attract rain’. Cattle keepers who used to rely on farm-grown fodder now take their livestock to remote pastures,” says Walubengo.

He adds that community groups have built rain-harvesting tanks and set up savings groups. Local government agencies are restricted by their top-down policy remits, but nonetheless have proven helpful to farmers and foresters in recommending new species and new cultivation techniques to cope with the new climate.

“From January to June every year, there were heavy rains in Mulanje and the hot dry season lasted from August till October, when the first rains, known as chizimalupsya [the fire extinguisher], started.

Chizimalupsya no longer precedes the main rains since the rainy season starts late, sometimes as late as December. June and July were extremely cold months with frequent fogs, but it is now difficult to tell between the cold and hot seasons. Many rivers that rise from Mount Mulanje never dried up, most of them with large pools; they are frequently drying now as early as June,” says R. Seveni, long-term resident, Mulanje District Malawi’s Mulanje District borders the conservation area of the Mulanje Mountain Forest Reserve.

In this region of montane forest, locals make a living from cultivating tiny plots of land, typically smaller than 0.1 hectare.

They supplement this by selling forest produce. Local population growth, however, is increasing pressure on the land and natural resources.

Fields are encroaching on the forest reserve, and rivers are silting up due to high run-off from the new agricultural plots.

The people of Mulanje have noted major changes in recent decades, particularly in the seasonality of rainfall and temperature, as pointed out by Seveni.

Local meteorological data are not sufficiently detailed to back up these observations, but do suggest an upward trend in mean annual temperature in recent decades. The late rainy season has meant changes in the agricultural calendar.

Farmers have switched to fast-maturing cultivars of favoured crops. These are expensive, and also represent a threat to local landraces. But there is a positive side to the adaptations.

Farmers are now planting a minimum of two crops in their gardens, mixing cereals with pulses and tubers, often intercropping with nitrogen-fixing pigeon peas.

Diverse crops and relay-cropping through the rainy season are effective means of ensuring at least some harvest.

Community organisations have also developed partnerships with the local tea industry and development NGOs to manage wetlands, construct small-scale irrigation and experiment with wood-efficient stoves.

For further information see also;

Community Based Adaptation Exchange (www.cba-exchange.org)The Coordination Unit for the Rehabilitation of the Environment (Malawi) (www.mca.edu.mw/enviro/ ngo/cure/index.html) Forest Action Network (Kenya) (www.fankenya.org)Organisation des Femmes pour la gestion de l’Energie, de l’Environnement et la promotion du Développement Intégré (Benin) (www.benin.africa-web.org)Further reading:Full country studies at www.iied.org/NR/forestry/forestsandclimatechange.html IPCC (2007) Fourth Assessment Report (see www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-syr.htm).

2009-02-08T12:33:00.000-08:00

FAO encourages Pacific root crop flour production

From : Radio New Zealand International

Posted at 03:25 on 05 February, 2009 UTC

The United Nations Food Agriculture Organisation says it is encouraging more Pacific states to manufacture their own flour from traditional root crops, instead of importing it.

A company in Samoa, Natural Foods International Limited, is now exploring the possibility of producing flour for the domestic and international market.

The FAO’s Food and Nutrition Officer in Apia, Dirk Schulz, says it’s an ideal product for Pacific countries to develop.

He says certification shouldn’t be difficult given many staple crops are grown organically in the islands, and that root crops can be utilised in so many ways and turning them into flour is catching on.

“Root crops grow very well in the islands. And there is one small setback to root crops that is, after they are harvested, their shelf life is very short so they tend to spoil very quickly and you need to eat them shortly after harvest. So one of the methods of overcoming that, is to dry them and turn them into flour which of course is very popular at the moment because of the rising prices of imported flour and rice, so its certainly one way you can add value.”
Mr Schulz says apart from Samoa and the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu has been exploring the use of cassava to make flour and Kiribati is experimenting with breadfruit.

News Content © Radio New Zealand International
PO Box 123, Wellington, New Zealand

2009-02-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

Only sustainable farming will help meet growing food demand, says UN expert

Friday, February 6, 2009

From : http://worldunreality.blogspot.com/

4 February 2009 – Only by switching to more sustainable farming methods will the world’s farmers be able to grow enough food to meet the demands of a growing population and respond to climate change, the top crop expert with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said today.

An essential part of that change is moving away from conventional intensive farming methods to what is known as conservation agriculture, Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division, said in a keynote speech at the Fourth World Congress on Conservation Agriculture in New Delhi, India.

Introduced some 25 years ago, conservation agriculture is a farming system that does not use regular ploughing and tillage but promotes permanent soil cover and diversified crop rotation to ensure optimal soil health and productivity.

“The world has no alternative to pursuing sustainable crop production intensification to meet the growing food and feed demand, to alleviate poverty and to protect its natural resources,” Mr. Pandey told the 1,000 participants at the Congress. “Conservation agriculture is an essential element of that intensification.”

Conventional intensive farming methods have often resulted in environmental damage, leading to lower agricultural productivity rates, said Mr. Pandey.

According to current trends, agricultural productivity rates are expected to fall to 1.5 per cent between now and 2030 and further to 0.9 per cent between 2030 and 2050, compared with 2.3 per cent per year since 1961.

However, the world needs to double its food production to feed nine billion people by 2050.

“In the name of intensification in many places around the world, farmers over-ploughed, over-fertilized, over-irrigated, over-applied pesticides,” he said. “But in so doing we also affected all aspects of the soil, water, land, biodiversity and the services provided by an intact ecosystem. That began to bring yield growth rates down.”

He stressed that conservation agriculture could not only help increase yields but also help the environment, including by restoring soil health, saving water and energy use and reducing the footprint of a sector which currently accounts for some 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The four-day Congress, hosted by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS), is the largest gathering of the conservation agriculture community, bringing together farmers, experts, and policymakers from all over the world. FAO, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and other organizations are among the sponsors and co-organizers of the event. UN News Centre

2009-02-08T11:46:00.000-08:00

Company opens door for veggie farmers
Story by the Ministry of Agriculture

Saturday, February 07, 2009

From: Fiji Times

While hundreds of farmers around the country are still coming to terms over the loss of their income caused by the recent floods, the story is different for Navua farmers.

They are full of joy following an announcement that a local company was willing to buy their vegetables for export.

The Navua-based Company Kaiming Agro Processing Limited (KAPL), has successfully established overseas markets for local chillies and is calling on farmers to produce more to fulfil the export demand.

KAPL managing director Kaiming Qiu said there was a huge demand for local crops in the overseas market and farmers should take advantage of the opportunity by increasing their local production.

Mr Qiu said farmers should grow more cassava, dalo, ginger and also chillies for export.

The company needs about one tonne of chillies a month for export, around 800 tonnes of cassava, 300 tonnes of dalo and 50,000 dozen bundles of rourou in a year.

The company is offering $0.45-$0.50 for a kilogram of cassava, $4 a kg for red fire and bongo chillies, $0.90-$1 a kg for dalo and $5 for a dozen bundle of rourou.

"I prefer farmers to supply me with pink and yellow skin cassava since they are of good quality and optimum for export," Qiu said.

Currently KAPL buys most of its cassava from Rakiraki and Tailevu but he insisted the farmers of Navua to take advantage since a market was at the doorstep.

"In an acre a farmer can produce 18 tonnes of cassava and for every tonne he or she can earn up to $450 per year or $8100 per acre in one year.

He said chillies should be picked at matured stage since it would be exported frozen.

"It is very easy to cultivate these crops whereby it has very low production cost and it is advisable for farmers to use poultry manure during land preparation," said Mr Qiu.

Kaiming said it is essential for farmers to maintain and manage the farm in order to obtain a good harvest.

KAPL exports frozen root crops and brined ginger to New Zealand.

2009-02-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

Plant your own

Saturday, February 07, 2009

From : Fiji Times
TO avoid buying high-priced vegetables, the Agriculture Ministry has advised people to start their own backyard gardens.

The rising cost of living has forced many homeowners to plant small pieces of land around their houses with vegetables and root crops.

Dhurup Ram Sharma, who is also a pundit by profession has utilised only a small piece of land around his house to grow fruits, vegetables and root crops.

Mr Sharma hails from Tavua and has spent his whole life as a vegetable and sugarcane farmer.

With good planning, pure determination and hard work Mr Sharma has proven farming can also be done in urban areas which secures families with good supply of fresh vegetables and root crops.

In his backyard are a few rows of amaranthus, a few rows of beans, some eggplants, cucumber, chillies which are enough to feed his family.

Mr Sharma said their food garden was a constant source of fresh and nutritious food for his family.

"People should grow food crops of their choice since food garden is accessible and available to the family at all times whether one has or does not have money," said Mr Sharma.

He added home gardens also helped save money that would otherwise be spent on buying food from other sources like the super markets, local markets and shops.

"We ensure that the food crops are free from chemicals used for pest and disease control whilst our spare time is spent in a productive way," Mr Sharma added.

He said sometimes they also sold their excess vegetables along the roadside.

Mr Sharma said maintaining and managing the crops was the most essential step in home gardening.

2009-02-05T19:31:00.000-08:00

Marshall Islands copra soars with high prices, good shipping
PACNEWS 1: Fri 06 Feb 2009

06 FEBRUARY 2009 MAJURO (Pacnews) ---- Marshall Islands copra makers nearly set a record with production in 2008, making it the second best year in this western Pacific nation’s history since records began being kept in 1951, reports Marianas Variety.

According to statistics provided Wednesday by Tobolar Copra Processing Authority, 7,641.25 tons of copra was produced from January to December 2008. This was topped only in 1995, when 7,728 tons was processed by Tobolar.

Copra is dried coconut meat that is used to produce coconut oil World market prices soared in 2008, with the price paid to producers in the Marshall Islands nearly doubling to 22 cents per pound on the remote outer islands and 23.5 cents in the capital, Majuro, where the processing plant is located. Coupled with the dramatically increased price has been the privatization of government shipping since 2007, which regularized and stabilized ship schedules to the outer islands after years of haphazard service.

Showing that the continuing high price paid for copra in Majuro is having an impact, Majuro copra makers from October to December produced 67.9 tons of copra — nearly half of the total they produced in the previous 12 months.

But it wasn’t only Majuro hustling up copra. Likiep Atoll, which from October 2007 to September 2008 produced only 103 tons, produced 96.7 tons from October to December 2008. Another usually modest copra producer — Utrik — also outdid itself. For the previous 12 months, Utrik had only accounted for about 82 tons. But from October to December it produced 63 tons, or nearly 80 percent of the annual total in just three months. ……PNS (ENDS)

2009-02-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

Billions Face Food Shortages, Study Warns

Climate change may ruin farming in tropics by 2100 • Record temperatures to become normal in Europe

by Ian Sample

Half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers' crops, scientists have warned.
Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics. Warmer temperatures in the region are also expected to increase the risk of drought, cutting crop losses further, according to a new study.
The worst of the food shortages are expected to hit the poor, densely inhabited regions of the equatorial belt, where demand for food is already soaring because of a rapid growth in population.
A study in the US journal Science found there was a 90% chance that by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.
More temperate regions such as Europe could expect to see previous record temperatures become the norm by 2100.
"The stress on global food production from temperatures alone is going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, at the University of Washington, who led the study.
Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, at Stanford University in California, combined climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and historical examples of the impact of heatwaves on agriculture, and found severe food shortages were likely to become more common.
Among the periods they examined was the record heatwave across western Europe in 2003, which killed an estimated 52,000 people and also cut yields of wheat and fodder by a third. In 1972, a prolonged hot summer in south-east Ukraine and south-west Russia saw temperatures rise by between 2C and 4C above the norm, driving down wheat and coarse grain yields for the whole of the USSR by 13%. The disruption affected the global cereal market for two years.
Naylor, who is director of food security and the environment at Stanford, said the study emphasised the need for countries to invest in adapting to a changing climate. To develop new crops to withstand higher temperatures could take decades, she added.
"When we looked at our historical examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year," Naylor said. "People could always turn somewhere else to find food. But in the future there's not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies."
The tropics and subtropics, which stretch from the southern US to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia, and cover all of Africa, are currently home to 3 billion people. Future temperature rises are expected to have a greater impact in the tropics because the crops grown there are less resilient to changes in climate.
According to the study, many local populations now live on less than £1.30 a day and depend on agriculture. The need for food is due to become more urgent as populations are expected to nearly double by the end of the century.
"When all the signs point in the same direction, and in this case it's a bad direction, you pretty much know what's going to happen," Battisti said. "You're talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won't be able to find it where they find it now.
"You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it. You could also mitigate [climate change] and not let it happen in the first place, but we're not doing a very good job of that."
Naylor added: "We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties [of crops], but also recognising that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now."
In many countries, a combination of poor farming practices and deforestation, exacerbated by climate change, may steadily degrade soil fertility, leaving vast areas unsuitable for crops or grazing. In 2007, scientists warned that poor soil fertility meant a global food crisis was likely in the next half-century.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

2009-02-03T17:29:00.000-08:00

New regional programme supports adaptation to climate change

From : SPC

Wednesday, 4 February 2009, Secretariat of the Pacific Community – A new regional project will help three Pacific island countries, Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu, cope with the effects of climate change.
The Euro 4.2 million project is being funded by GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) and will be based at SPC’s (Secretariat of the Pacific Community) Land Resources Division in Suva. For some time now, SPC has been systematically integrating climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies into its policy, technical and advisory services.
In the Pacific, climate change is likely to cause saline intrusion in atolls, coral bleaching, increased coastal erosion, changes in rainfall patterns, and shifts in tuna stocks.
In addition, more extreme weather events may severely damage food crops and infrastructure, impacting on food security, water resources and even tourism. Climate sensitive diseases may be worsened by climate change.
Pacific island countries therefore need to strengthen their capacity to adapt to climate change and to protect their natural resources against its effects, for example, through such strategies as avoiding deforestation.
Department heads and senior officials from the environment, agriculture and forestry sectors in Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu will meet in Suva this week to set directions and plan national activities for the four-year regional project. The meeting, which will start on Thursday, 5 February, at the Tradewinds Convention Centre, Lami, will be opened by Fiji’s Director of Environment, Mr Epeli Nasoma.
At the regional level, the project is aligned with the Pacific Island Framework for Action on Climate Change 2006–2015. It will support Vanuatu’s implementation of its National Adaptation Programme for Action and will also assist Fiji and Tonga in preparing their national communications (or reports) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The workshop will introduce the impact monitoring planning process that is followed by GTZ and other major development agencies. Results-based monitoring, a standard procedure for GTZ, will be applied to steering the project and reporting on activities.
A feature of this type of monitoring is that observation does not focus solely on completed activities, but on the changes resulting from activities.
For more information, please contact lrdhelpdesk@spc.int

Background:

SPC’s 26 member countries and territories include American Samoa, Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji Islands, France, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, United States of America, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna.

2009-02-02T14:47:00.000-08:00

Recent CTAHR Publications

From : Jim Hollyer [hollyer@hawaii.edu]

*** Free Publications ***

The publications listed below by their subject category are now available for downloading from the CTAHR free publications webpage, http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/freepubs

Unless a publication is indicated to be Web only, printed copies, when available, are circulated to departments and Hawaii libraries, and copies for starter inventories are sent to CES offices.
Place orders for additional quantities of printed copies of free publications by e-mail to ocs@ctahr.hawaii.edu.

Food Safety and Technology

Good Food Safety Practices:
Managing risks to reduce or avoid legal liability

Elizabeth Haws Connally, FST-32, 6 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-32.pdf

Making chocolate from scratch

Skip Bittenbender, Erik Kling, FST-33, 5 p. Web only
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-33.pdf

Pest management systems to control rodents in and
around packing sheds

Jim Hollyer, Luisa Castro, Albert Louie, Lynn Nakamura-Tengan,
Vanessa Troegner, FST-34, 2 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/FST-34.pdf

Landscape

Barrier plants

Kent Kobayashi, Richard Criley, Andrew Kaufman, Stephanie
Tsugawa1, Alberto Ricordi, Patti Clifford, L-20, 12 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/L-20.pdf

Plant Disease

Plumeria rust

Scot Nelson, PD-61, 6 p., Web only
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PD-61.pdf

Hawaiian mistletoes (Korthalsella species)

Scot Nelson, J. B. Friday, PD-62, 9 p., Web only
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/PD-62.pdf

Resource Management

Achieving sustainable tourism in Hawaii using a sustainability
evaluation system

Linda Cox, Melanie Saucier, John Cusick, Harold Richins,
Bixler McClure, RM-17, 6 p.
http://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/RM-17.pdf

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2009-02-02T14:39:00.000-08:00

Food Summit – Concern Yes, Concrete Steps No

From : IPS

By Tito Drago

MADRID, Jan 27 (IPS) - A "High Level Meeting on Food Security for All" convened by the United Nations and the Spanish government ended Tuesday without approving concrete measures but with a commitment to redoubling efforts to bolster official development aid (ODA).

Representatives of national governments, civil society, trade unions, the private sector, academia, multilateral organisations and donor agencies from around 100 countries took part in the two-day meeting, in which the closing speeches were given by Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The problem of hunger suffered by one billion people around the world – nearly all of them in the developing South – was discussed in-depth throughout the meeting, and the progress achieved since the June 2008 high level conference in Rome was reviewed, in order to establish mechanisms for better coordination.

Although concrete resolutions were not adopted, the conference issued strong statements on the need to act with respect to questions like funding. The final declaration urges governments and international institutions to make good on their previous pledges of aid.

The participants also expressed "the urgent need to strive even harder to achieve international commitments of increasing substantially financial resources and ODA, particularly in relation to nutrition, food, agriculture and hunger-related programmes and policies."

One positive aspect, according to non-governmental organisations (NGOs), was the conference’s call to "eliminat(e) all forms of competition-distorting subsidies, in order to stimulate and conduct agricultural trade in a fair way."

Referring to the global food crisis, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) chief Jacques Diouf, who is vice-chairman of the Secretary-General's High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, said "This crisis is not only still with us, but could still worsen."

To confront the crisis, he said that in his congratulatory message to U.S. President Barack Obama, he "proposed the convening, at the level of Heads of State and Government, of a World Summit on Food Security in 2009 to forge a broad consensus on the final and rapid eradication of hunger in the world."

He also said that "Proposals have focused on establishing a High-Level Panel of Experts on food and agriculture, charged with conducting scientific analyses and a Global Partnership to enhance dialogue with all partners and thus facilitate coordination and implementation of the action plans."

"I am convinced, and this has often been said and repeated, that there is no need to create new bodies. The need is to improve, reinforce, coordinate, in other words to reform what exists so as to render our action more effective," he added.

With respect to compliance with earlier commitments, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos told IPS that Spain would like all governments in the industrialised North to live up to their pledge to earmark 0.7 percent of GDP to ODA, by 2012.

Spain has already committed itself to that goal, and Zapatero announced Tuesday that his administration would increase ODA by one billion euros.

Another 15 countries have joined Spain in that commitment, promising 5.5 billion euros over the next five years, as well as the 1.3 billion euros pledged by the European Union several weeks ago.

"The countries of the North have resources and means, we know what the solutions are, and we can and must apply them," said Moratinos, who has broad experience in development aid in Spain and the European Union.

At one of the panels in the Madrid meeting, the representative of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which groups 65 million workers globally, said one solution to increasing ODA is clear: by reducing the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) budget by a mere 10 percent, 100 billion dollars would be raised.

Speaking of funding, representatives of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières and Action against Hunger complained that transnational corporations seek to use the theme of the fight against hunger to their own benefit.

Lidia Senra with Vía Campesina Europa agreed, saying "there is a strong interest in using the money to help address the problem of hunger in such a way that companies can sell their own seeds and fertilisers."

International meetings on hunger are important, she added, but "food sovereignty must be respected, and each country must be allowed to decide on its own agricultural policies, protecting the production of each country and region and fighting speculation."

Lennart Båge, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), told IPS that one problem is that although prices have plunged, the food crisis continues.

But, he said, if small and medium farmers, who number around 450 million worldwide, are assisted, their production will be very important to enable them to pull out of poverty and contribute to feeding the rest of the world.

Four NGOs – Caritas, Engineers Without Borders, La Suma de Todos and Prosalud – launched the campaign "The Right to Food: Urgent".

In a public statement, they argued that the conditions are in place to overcome hunger, and that the fight must be based on respect for human rights, in a context in which states assume their obligations and develop political frameworks on agriculture aimed at guaranteeing the right to food.

The groups also added that agriculture based on the right to food must be at the centre of the public agenda, that civil society as a whole should participate, and that no single formula can be offered, because although the crisis has common underlying causes, it takes on different characteristics in each country.

Furthermore, they said, governments must make it clear that the private sector shares the responsibility to fight hunger by means of the creation of a code of conduct for companies that work with agricultural inputs, which is based on the principle of the right to food.

The campaign congratulated Zapatero for the economic agreements achieved, and expressed hope that his government will assume an effective global leadership role in the effort to come up with new ways of fighting hunger.

In the final declaration approved at the High Level Meeting, participants "reaffirmed the conclusions of the World Food Summit in 1996…to achieve food security for all through an ongoing effort to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing by half the number of undernourished people by no later than 2015, as well as their commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)."

The first of the MDGs, which were adopted by the international community in 2000, is to halve the number of hungry people in the world by 2015, from 1990 levels.

They also expressed deep concern over "the unacceptable global food security situation that affects over 960 million undernourished people" and "the negative impact on food access and availability fluctuations exacerbated by the current financial crisis on the livelihoods of the poorest, most vulnerable in the world." (END/2009)

2009-01-21T12:56:00.000-08:00

Coconut oil exports for 2009 to decline

From : Business Mirror

Written by Jennifer A. Ng / Reporter
Monday, 19 January 2009 21:07

THE country’s exports of coconut oil (CNO) may decline by 0.7 percent to 835,000 metric tons (MT) in 2009, from the estimated 840,547 MT last year due to an increase in demand for CNO in the domestic market, especially for biodiesel feedstock.

The United Coconut Associations of the Philippines Inc. (UCAP) also projected that exports of all coconut products will decline by 0.8 percent to 1.619 million metric tons (MMT) in copra terms, from the estimated 1.632 MMT shipped out last year due to a need to boost stocks, which had been sharply depleted.

In a statement posted on its web site, UCAP said shipments of oleochemicals will also decline by 9 percent to 80,000 MT this year, from the estimated 87,952 MT shipped out last year.

UCAP said shipments of all other coconut products will post increases this year. Exports of dessicated coconut will go up by 1.8 percent to 138,000 MT, from 135,609 MT, while copra meal will post an increase of 4.5 percent to 460,000, from 440,066 MT in 2008.

Coconut production for 2009, UCAP projected, will go up by 5.4 percent to 2.516 MMT, from the 2008 output estimated initially at 2.386 MMT.

UCAP said the projection was based on much improved weather conditions in 2008 with rainfall levels in coconut-growing regions at mostly above normal. The group noted that the continuous above-normal rains during the first semester of the year which usually record lower precipitation level, most of the time below normal in the first quarter.

The Philippines is eyeing to ship out at least 1 MMT of coconut oil CNO in 2009 as it expects the demand for the commodity will recover in 2009, an official of the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) said earlier.

PCA deputy administrator Arturo Liquete said shipments of the country’s top farm export could rebound this year, especially if the global economic situation improves.

Liquete and UCAP had earlier admitted that the country will have a hard time achieving its target of shipping out 1 MMT of coconut oil last year because of the global economic slump.

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