Blog for People, Food and Nature

By Lloyd Timberlake Lloyd Timberlake is a freelance writer The “Green Revolution” never took off in Africa, for many, many reasons. One is that Africa contains so many different and varied agricultural ecosystems and in so many of these it is hard to grow the big international staples such as wheat, corn, rice, and potatoes. […] ...

The Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) has deemed this academic year the “Year of Agriculture,” in recognition of the major challenges facing a growing global population and an increasingly resource-constrained planet. SAISPHERE, the annual flagship publication released in January, honed in on the major issues rela ...

A Recipe for Conservation Agriculture   By Jimmiel Mandima, Program Director of Policy African Wildlife Foundation, Washington, DC, USA Situated in the Middle Zambezi Valley, Siavonga District in southern Zambia now houses a population of approximately 72,000 subsistence farmers and fishers, many having been displaced when the vast Lake Karibawas created half a century ago. [& ...

Modern food systems have been very successful at producing vast amounts of food to feed our growing world. However, this has come at a high cost. Many waterways have become depleted or greatly polluted. An expansive amount of natural habitat has been lost or fragmented due to conversion to agriculture. And this loss and degradation […] ...

The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative is not only striving to develop a knowledge base through the Global Review process outlined on Monday, but it also aims to turn that knowledge into action and scale-up activities and policies already in place. One strategy for accomplishing this objective is to target pertinent meetings and […] ...

By Ibrahim Thiaw, Director of the Division of Environmental Policy Implementation United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya It is very likely that by 2050 the planet’s population will have passed 9 billion people. The question we are all asking is how to feed them when it is already a challenge with our current population at […] ...

One goal of the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative is to amass the evidence base for integrated agricultural landscapes from diverse disciplinary and sectoral perspectives. This Global Review will be oriented around a set of eight Key Questions, the answers to which will be critical to management, policy, and investment for rural landscapes in […] ...

By Ann Tutwiler, Deputy Director General of Knowledge Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Rome, Italy  Integrated agricultural landscape approaches have shown considerable promise in simultaneously meeting goals for food production, ecosystem health, and human wellbeing. However, the evidence base related to such approaches remains fragmentary. The Landsc ...

By Dr. Emile Frison, Director General Bioversity International, Rome, Italy In recent years, evidence has been accumulating about the need for change in agriculture. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report, the 2010 report to the UN by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and FAO’s Save and […] ...

By Dr. Tony Simons, Director General World Agroforestry Centre, Nairobi, Kenya The answer to the question “what is a landscape?” differs tremendously depending on the respondent. To a landscape ecologist it is a cluster of interacting ecosystems; wildlife experts may consider it as a set of habitats; to a farmer it is about how adjacent […] ...