Yesterday we had a field visit out to Machakos District in Kenya, following the bean value chain.  We saw research which is developing the next generation of bean varieties, through to farmers eking a living out of their bean fields, finishing with the highly motivated entrepreneurs who are making the markets work for the farmers.  We
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In Central America more than one million smallholder families depend on the cultivation of maize and/or beans for their subsistence. To soothe the threats of future climatic changes to food security and national economies, effective and timely adaptation interventions must be developed, putting communities at the centre of such strategies…

If a crop were a film star, what would cassava be?  Well a month ago we established that cassava was a Rambo root – very difficult to kill.  It’s well known resistance to drought and heat was shown to stand up to climate change in our paper in Tropical Plant Biology.  Most interesting in that
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Blog post written by Ewen Leborgne (ILRI) They came and met; they discussed, argued, they laughed and they planned, they went around and went away. But they did it all together, and after three days of intensive work, African breeders and modelers came out one step closer to uniting around the challenge of climate-smart crops.
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During the last 2 weeks DAPA team went out to the field to visit farmer communities in Honduras and El Salvador. Part of the project “Tortillas on the Roaster”, the aim of the trip was to visit Hot-spots with predicted high yield-impact on maize-beans production systems due to predicted climate change scenarios and quantify their
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Within CCAFS Adaption to Progressive Climate Change theme, one of the objectives is to generate comprehensive strategies for crop improvement through a combination of modeling, expert consultation and stakeholder dialogue, and translating these insights into coordinated global, regional and national research and technology investment policies. As part of its 2011 activities and in collaboration with
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Prolific is the word I’d use to describe DAPA’s contribution to a new book entitled Crop Adaptation to Climate Change which is soon to be released by Wiley.  The table of contents are now online, and the book is in the final throes of being published.  DAPA’s contribution has been in no less than seven chapters.
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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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