EcoAgriculture Partners is happy to be a co-organizer of the seventh Wallace Inter-American Scientific Conference. The conference program is almost set and registration is now open, prompting the debut of the conference website this week. Click here to read more about this important opportunity to discuss the future of agricultural landscapes and biodiversity in the tropics.

In June, EcoAgriculture Partners completed a report with the support of USAID on “Institutional Models for Carbon Finance to Mobilize Sustainable Agricultural Development in Africa”. The project sought to develop an inventory of agricultural greenhouse gas mitigation projects in sub-Saharan Africa and characterize key elements of project design, with special attention to institutional arrangements. The study identified 81 projects in 24 countries, and documented implementation status, mitigation practices, developers/investors, field program managers, sellers, buyers, land tenure status and support services from other intermediaries.

The report also identified institutional gaps that are hampering the success of these projects and possible interventions to overcome them. These needs include low transaction costs, risk management for farmers, secure land tenure and carbon rights, sufficient incentives for farmers to participate, access to financing for farmers and project developers, project management and implementation capacity, and sufficient demand for agricultural credits. Based on the inventory and the institutional needs analysis, recommendations are offered regarding roles for various sectors and organizations to fill these gaps. Roles for national governments, community organizations, local and national NGOs, research institutions, international donors and the private sector are considered.

This report will be available shortly.

For more information, contact Seth Shames, sshames@ecoagriculture.org.

Download PDF, 724KB

In 2009 and early 2010, EcoAgriculture Partners collaborated with Forest Trends and Climate Focus to assess the feasibility of an African Agricultural Climate Finance Facility. The study examines the state and potential of African agricultural carbon projects and lays out pathways for developing new scalable climate finance transaction models to offer African smallholder farmers opportunities to mitigate climate change while transitioning to more sustainable farming systems with greater adaptive capacity.

This report was written by Charlotte Streck, Michael Coren, Sara J. Scherr, Seth Shames, Michael Jenkins, and Sissel Waage, with contributions from Timm Tennigkeit, and support from the Rockefeller Foundation. It is based on an extensive process that included interviews, roundtable discussions—with thought leaders in a range of fields from carbon finance through African agriculture— and a literature review. 

For more information, contact Seth Shames, sshames@ecoagriculture.org. 

 

The synergies from integrated management of diverse farming components provide new opportunities. Sita Rokka, a mother of two and a member of the Kalika home garden women’s group in Rupandehi district, is making great use of such synergies. Photo: Sajal Sthapit

A home garden, commonly known as ghar bagaincha in Nepali, refers to a traditional land-use system around a homestead that is maintained by household members for the primary function of family food consumption. Home gardens provide 60 percent of total fruit and vegetable consumption in a 5–6 member household in rural Nepal. They are also an important source of essential nutrients. In one study, 69 percent of the 1,100 surveyed households that had adopted home gardens added six different types of nutrients to their diet.

Home gardens feature several species of plants integrated with other farming components such as small livestock (including goats, pigs, and rabbits), poultry (including ducks and pigeons), fisheries, and beekeeping. The average home garden in Nepal contains 18 different species, and the average size is 600 square meters. However, even a relatively small home garden of about 312 square meters in Turang VDC of Gulmi district has been known to have 80 different species. Such diversity makes home gardens an important source of food, fodder, fuel, medicines, spices, herbs, flowers, construction materials, and income, providing a safety net for rural families.

Unique household needs and desires, as well as the available micro-environment, determine the combination and priority of farming components in the home garden. For example, karesa bari, or kitchen gardens, prioritize vegetable production, ful bari prioritize ornamental flowers, and bagaincha prioritize fruits.

Deliberate management of the intimate associations among annual and perennial agricultural crops, fisheries, and livestock within homesteads is the hallmark of home gardens. Such synergies provide new opportunities. For example, Sita Rokka, a mother of two and a member of the Kalika home garden women’s group in Rupandehi district, uses locally available medicinal and pungent ingredients such as neem leaves (Azadirachta indic), timur (Zanthoxylum armatum), garlic, and livestock urine to make zhol mol, an organic liquid pesticide that is applied to vegetables after mixing with five parts water. It also doubles as a good fertilizer.

Sita can make zhol mol instead of buying pesticides because of the synergy afforded by the diverse farming components in her home garden and in her community. She says her home garden, which boasts more than 50 varieties of vegetables, has given her confidence, dignity, and independence, in addition to nutrition for her family.

Such synergies make a home garden greater than the sum of its parts. The home garden is an overarching systems approach that incorporates several farming components and, crucially, their interactions. The full benefit of home gardens cannot be realized by promoting individual components in isolation.

The nongovernmental organization LI-BIRD (Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development), with financial support from Swiss Development Cooperation Nepal, has been mainstreaming the home garden approach into Nepal’s national system of development for resource-poor and disadvantaged farming groups for the last seven years. Development workers already recognize the value of kitchen gardens as a source of vegetables. This existing system can be improved by integrating the synergies inherent in the home garden approach.

The project has focused on scaling up the home garden approach through coordination and linkage with different strategic partners. For example, the Nepalese Department of Agriculture has recognized home gardens as a viable approach for the sustainable livelihood enhancement of resource-poor and disadvantaged communities. As a consequence, the Ministry of Agriculture and Co-operative has taken a step forward and approved norms for home garden establishment and management and issued a circular to District Agriculture Development Offices (DADOs). Such government initiatives could be capitalized on further and used as an opportunity for developing a synergistic action plan.

Government programs linked to the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and international poverty reduction strategies for the poor should be re-analyzed to maximize the potential of home gardens in the context of global food crisis and climate change issues. Nepal’s National Biodiversity Strategy, National Agro-biodiversity Policy, and National Agriculture Policy favor the promotion of local crop diversity with nutritional, economical, social, cultural, and ecological values. Home gardens could be a strategic intervention for sustainable management of neglected and underutilized species that contributes to national agrobiodiversity conservation efforts as well.

As published in the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet blog. For more information about home gardens in Nepal, contact Roshan Pudasaini at LI-BIRD (rpudasaini@libird.org).

  

Sajal Sthapit, from EcoAgriculture Partners and Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD), gave the context setting presentation and participated at the Climate Integration Workshop in Begnas, Kaski district, Nepal. 

Mr. Kul Chandra Adhikari, a local farmer, shares his group's work at the Climate Integration Workshop. Photo: Mahesh Shrestha, LI-BIRD

The workshop participants, representing diverse actors in development from government ministries to local and international organizations and farming communities, collaborated in understanding and sharing perspectives on climate change vulnerability and adaptation and its linkages to poverty reduction in the Nepali context.

LI-BIRD, with funding from  The Development Fund of Norway, organized the workshop on 24-28 June 2010 at the Begnas Resort in Pokhara to help integrate climate change into development projects.

The first objective of the workshop was to create a common understanding among the various actors on the vulnerability of local communities in Nepal to climate change. The second objective was to understand ways of addressing climate change adaptation in development projects in order to avoid maladaptation and increase people’s resilience to climate change in the long term.

Climate change is increasingly accepted as a major issue facing Nepali communities. The Initial National Communication to UNFCCC and a range of other studies have shown that Nepal is highly vulnerable to negative impacts of climate change. The scenarios of climate change in Nepal predict significant warming particularly at higher elevations. Climate change will lead to reduction in snow and ice cover, increase the frequency of climate induced disasters including floods and droughts, and cause uneven precipitation over the regional scale.

Climate induced risks and hazards can have wide ranging, often unanticipated, effects on the environment and on socio-economic and development related sectors, including agriculture and food security, water resources, energy, human health and urban settlement. Poor and vulnerable communities of Nepal, therefore, face possible dramatic impacts on their livelihood and well-being. Impacts have been increasingly evident and damaging in Nepal in the past decade. Loss of arable lands to floods and erratic changes in monsoon, water shortages and droughts are constraining food production. Communities in high elevations face growing threats from Glacial Lake Outburst Floods (GLOFs). Invasion of exotic species, outbreak of diseases, sharp and sustained decline in food security and threats to biodiversity are all palpable risks for the people of Nepal.

For most marginalized people, climate change is one more stress factor, coming on top of any number of other challenges they are facing, poverty being a major one. Development practitioners now recognize that promotion of development paths that make households and communities more resilient to climatic stresses can also help to reduce poverty in more robust and sustainable ways. There is, at the same time, a growing realization that a failure to take climate change into account can undermine poverty reduction efforts and their intended social, economic and environmental benefits.

There is a need for greater understanding on how to design poverty reduction projects and programs in ways that increase the capacity of individuals, households and communities to respond to climate variability and change.

   

A project hoping to reverse desertification through 'holistic management' of livestock has been awarded US$100,000 prize in a global competition on sustainable practices.

By carefully planning the grazing of the cattle on fields, Operation Hope has reclaimed some 6,500 acres of grasslands at the Africa Center for Holistic Management, Zimbabwe — where the project is based — while increasing the livestock population by 400 per cent.

The project's efforts won first place in this year's Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an international design competition for projects that provide practical solutions to the world's most pressing problems such as water and food scarcity, and climate change.

Allan Savory, chairman of the Zimbabwe centre, said the project is currently being expanded to help other agro-pastoralists in Africa, with support from USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

The project hopes to eventually provide "permanent water and food security for Africa's impoverished millions".

'Holistic grazing planning' makes use of the movement and behaviour of the grazing animals to break up and fertilise dry soil, and also considers the needs of local people.

"To sustain healthy grasslands and savannas, and to reverse desertification, it is essential to maintain rapid biological decay of dying plant material, particularly the above-ground parts of the perennial grass that die every dry season," Savory told SciDev.Net.

Read more at SciDev.net

Read Ecoagriculture Snapshot on holistic grazing

 

Please join the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa for a panel featuring Frank Hawkins, Conservation International, and Sara J. Scherr, EcoAgriculture Partners, to discuss the links between development and the maintenance of ecosystem health. Dr. Hawkins will discuss efforts to measure the impact of agricultural efforts on ecosystem services and present CI's hypothesis that a sustained natural asset base is necessary to achieve development goals. Dr. Scherr will discuss global examples of agricultural landscape strategies and farm practices that benefit ecosystem services, and discuss the implications for food security related policies.

 

A Discussion with:
 
Frank Hawkins, Vice President of Conservation International's Africa and Madagascar Division

and

Sara J. Scherr, President and CEO of EcoAgriculture Partners

 

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
12:00 - 2:00 PM
Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa
499 S. Capitol Street SW, Suite 500B
Washington, DC 20003

 

Moderator: Julie Howard, Executive Director, Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa

 

Presentation: Frank Hawkins, Conservation International, Vice President of Africa and Madagascar Division,

Sara J. Scherr, Ecoagriculture Partners, President and CEO

 

Q & A

 

A light lunch will be served.

Please RSVP by 5:00 PM Monday, May 24 to events@partnership-africa.org

Dear Colleagues,

 

Please see this schedule (MS Excel) of Ecoagriculture Partners organized and ecoagriculture related events at COP 15 over the next two weeks.

 

At the Agriculture and Rural Development Day on December 12, Sara J. Scherr will be presenting at Roundtable 3 and Ecoagriculture Partners is organizing two Ideas Marketplace sessions.

 

Sara Scherr will be in Copenhagen December 10-13 and Seth Shames from December 9-14. Please contact Seth at sshames@ecoagriculture.org if you’d like to meet up.

Best,

Sara and Seth 

 

Ecoagriculture Partners Events at the Agriculture and Rural Development day at the COP 15 (12 December 2009)

Time	Program Title	Speaker and Contact information	Organization/Country	Program Summary
1115-1300	Strategies and responses for adaptation of farmers and food systems	Lead Speaker: Dr. Adel El-Beltagy; Panelists: Dr. Marco Ferroni, Dr. Sara Scherr, Ms. Sarala Gopalan, Mr. Peter Kendall; Moderator: Samantha Wade	International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP)	Even in the case of a stabilisation of GHG emissions, climate change will continue to challenge agriculture, increasing the vulnerability of ecosystems and rural populations. Farming and food systems will have to be better adapted to cope with the direct and indirect consequences of a changing climate. Farmers, both women and men, are well placed to implement sustainable agricultural practices that help adapt to climate change. This Roundtable will examine strategies and review existing responses to support farmers and food systems as they adapt to climate change.
1430-1500	Ideas Marketplace Session 1: The state of agricultural landscapes GHG measurement	Seth Shames, Antonio Bento, Sam Bell, and John Fay	Cornell University and Ecoagriculture Partners	In this session: Seth Shames of Ecoagriculture Partners will provide a synthesis of news from key players in the field as they move towards filling key research and methodology gaps. Antonio Bento, Sam Bell and John Fay from the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF) will discuss Community Markets for Conservation, a conservation agriculture initiative in Zambia, as an illustration of the technical challenges and emerging solutions for integrated MRV methodology. The discussion will explore unresolved technical and policy issues around agricultural landscape MRV, and ways to improve coordination to advance these methods.
1515-1545	Ideas Marketplace, Session 2	Erick Fernandes, Stephen Muwaya, Sara Scherr	Ecoagriculture Partners	In this session: Erick Fernandes of the World Bank will provide an overview of the benefits and challenges of the landscape approach to climate action.    Stephen Muwaya will present the TerrAfrica platform for Sustainable Land Management, as an example of a coordinated investment program that can confront the challenges of agricultural landscape carbon projects and bring them to scale. Sara Scherr of Ecoagriculture Partners will facilitate a 15-minute discussion among participants about the approach and next steps to develop landscape climate action.

Resources

• EP's Events and other related events of interest in Excel Spreadsheet
• Full list of Programmes Agriculture and Rural Development day