Blog for People, Food and Nature

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” (William Shakespeare) During a tea break in the EcoAgriculture Partners office a couple of weeks ago, a familiar conversation broke out about the proliferation of words that describe various aspects of ecoagriculture. Usually this conversation ends with a coll…

Nearly half of the communities in the Pichincha Province of Ecuador are affected by chronic malnutrition. One example is the Olmedo community, in which 90% of the residents live below the poverty line, and 40% are malnourished. Many small-scale farmers cannot feed their families adequately, as they have little or no ac…

Info-brief 8: Using land for the benefit of all The DESIRE research project is a collaborative effort to develop integrated approaches to combating land degradation. Above is a booklet recently produced on "using land for the benefit of all." It is based on the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies…

Only around 30 plants account for more than 85% of global crop production. The majority of the planet’s food comes from a very small number of crops: out of approximately 380,000 plant species known to exist, fewer than 20% are eaten, and only about 150 are domesticated for farming. Despite providing a key input into…

A recent article in the open-source journal Solutions describes an integrated approach to the provision of public ecosystem services. Authors Joshua Farley, Abdon Schmitt F., Juan Alvez, and Norton Ribeiro de Freitas Jr. present an example of Management-Intensive Grazing (MIG) as a case study for how an incentivesch…

Local Governance and Empowerment for Improved Wetland Management By Winrock International Staff, Edited by Gelsey Bennett, Senior Program Associate Winrock International, Arlington, Virginia, USA The Management of Aquatic Ecosystems through Community Husbandry (MACH) project in Bangladesh (implemented 1998-2009) develo…