Fifty-five year old Rosalia Shemdoe feels empowered. She lives and works in Yamba village in the Lushoto district of northern Tanzania, but she just got back from what could be the longest journey she’s ever taken – one that ended in Mbinga, a district over 1,000 km away.

These are the known and predicted distributions of cassava brown streak disease (CBSD). The known distribution is from the scientific literature. Ecological niche models were developed to predict suitability for CBSD

When we think of climate change adaptation in agriculture the first thing that comes to mind is improved crop varieties. Water harvesting and irrigation schemes may also be high on our list. Perhaps too is crop diversification. But on a recent trip to western Kenya, one agricultural community reminded us that sometimes the interventions that
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Only dentists will be happy about this news. It looks as though climate change is going to take a bite out of chocolate production, according to a new study by scientists at CIAT.   REPOSTED FROM CIAT BLOG – 28 September 2011                          
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This week CIAT released its latest Policy Brief entitled Economics of Agricultural Adaptation to Climate Change: Tools for Informed Decision-Making. The Brief provides a full review of the decision-making tools currently available to prioritize and identify the costs and/or benefits of climate change adaptation. It then makes the case for a new, novel approach to
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We had a great recent post about small farmer participation in formal and informal markets by Rajiv earlier this month. In thinking about how a large portion of small farmers can be integrated in regional and international food systems, the sheer size and scope of global retailers offers significant new opportunities for inclusion. Connecting the
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Bellagio meetings always seem to deliver beyond the already high expectations, and this week’s meeting on a global strategy for cassava research is no exception.  Today we spent the day looking at the environmental challenges for cassava in the 21st century.  What does climate change mean for cassava?  What are the emerging pest and disease
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One of DAPA’s newest recruits is Bonny Ongom, who is based in CIAT-Africa’s Kawanda offices in Uganda. Bonny has just been hired as a research assistant for the CCAFS trial sites project (more on this soon), and to help with the update of the Atlas of common beans in Africa (see previous post). Bonny has
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African bean producers and consumers deal with climatic variability on a daily basis, but are likely to need adaptive technologies and greater adaptive capacities to be able to deal with the impacts of a changing climate over the next few years and decades.

Rather than satisfy ourselves with these abstract goals, however, researchers from the Pan African Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) have just spent three days looking in detail at what changes in temperature, rainfall and extreme events in Africa will actually mean for bean production, storage, marketing and utilisation.

12 years after the “Atlas of the Common Bean (phaseolus vulgaris) in Africa” was published it is high time for an update. The partners of the Pan-African Bean Research Alliance (PABRA) have decided to repeat the process and format of version 1 of the Atlas. The Atlas has served as a useful reference for many
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