ICTs: transforming agricultural extension?
Heres’s an interesting reading for TechTuesday from the DevelopmentGateway about how ICT are becoming essential tools in providing agricultural extensions services. This paper reports on the 6th Consultative Expert Meeting of the ACP-EU Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation Observatory (CTA) on ICTs. The summary report provides an outline of the main issues, developments and […]
Rice farming tips: "Controlling’ water during the rainy season"
FarmFriday showcases this rice farming tips from Philrice on “Controlling water during the rainy season” Don’t let your ricefields overflow with water. “Too much water, like the lack of it, could cause stress on the rice plant, affecting its growth and yield,” explained Jovino de Dios of the PhilRice’s Agronomy, Soils, and Plant Physiology Division. […]
Stop the Seed Gestapo!
Stumbled upon this worrisome article in reddit.. http://onthecommons.org | 17 Nov 2006 / Jonathan Rowe In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word, binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are set aside and used as seeds in the next planting season. […]
Sleepwalking into a crisis
For HungerWednesday, we have this insightful interview over at grains.org, of Timothy Lang, a Professor of Food Policy at City University in London and a leading authority on food. “The steep rise in the price of basic food commodities on the world market this year came as no surprise to him, for he has been […]
Doha Round collapses
This is big! and its all over the net. From IHT GENEVA: A high-level summit meeting to salvage a global trade pact collapsed Tuesday after the United States, China and India failed to compromise on farm import rules, according to trade officials. Trade diplomats, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the meeting […]
UNESCO's Virtual Laboratory Toolkit Released
For TechTuesday we found this interesting tidbit. haven’t gotten around to testing them out yet though. The first edition of the UNESCO “Virtual Laboratory Toolkit” has just been released on the World Wide Web and within UNESCO’s Public@ series of representative “open access” CD-ROMs that are giving access to information in the public domain or […]
The threat of soil pollution to food safety and sustainable agriculture
FarmFriday again and we share this article from FFTC about the looming soil pollution problems in the Asian REgion associated with “contamination of heavy metals in soils due to rapid industrialization, urbanization and intensive agriculture.” TSUKUBA, JAPAN – The Asian economy has been growing fast in recent decades, and environmental stresses are building up rapidly […]
G8 and the food crisis: the real solutions
HungerWednesday features this writeup by Greenpeace we found on Eldis outlining the underlying causes of the food crisis and recommendations for the G8 countries. Millions of people around the world are suffering food shortages, unaffordable food prices and hunger, primarily due to industrial farming, bad harvests related to climate change, unjust terms of trade and […]
Taking to task the Cereal offenders
From Eldis, we get this policy brief that ActionAid circulated calling for the “G8 leaders to take bold steps in Hokkaido to prevent world hunger spiralling further out of control.” Three years after the G8 pledged to ‘make poverty history’, the current global food crisis has left close to a quarter of the world’s population […]
Community supported agriculture
FarmFriday brings you this interesting concept of “community-supported agriculture” fromt he LEISA Magazine. In a situation of growing globalisation of food systems, questions are increasingly being raised about the integrity of our food supply, the impact of its production on the environment and animal welfare, and the fairness of trade between consumers and workers along […]
