Do you know the Year 2013 is declared by the United Nations General Assembly as “International Year of Quinoa”? How will this help impact the women in the Andes region of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia who are the main growers of this grain crop? What will be the consequences on the food security and on the local culture and practice of the indigenous Quechua? Who will benefit and who will be excluded?

A team of researchers left to the depths of the Colombian Amazon, as part of the first phase of fieldwork for the project ‘Managing ecosystem services for food security and the nutritional health of the rural poor at the forest-agricultural interface”. The fieldwork consists of the use of various participatory methods with different indigenous communities that depend directly and indirectly on the forest to survive.

¿Cómo se sienten las comunidades menos favorecidas de las zonas rurales de Malawi y Colombia acerca de la seguridad alimentaria? Quizás ellas nos puedan enseñar una cosa o dos acerca de cómo sobrellevar los servicios ambientales (SA) amenazados y el cambio climático. O quizás seamos nosotros los que podamos enseñarles una cosa o dos. En realidad no interesa quién enseñe qué o a quién, en tanto todos aprendamos algo al final del día, no es así?

We just published a conference report on the Global Cassava Partnership meeting held in Uganda in June. The report can be found at the web site of the journal Food Security, online here (subscription required).

What happens to food security and ecosystems services on the forest-agricultural interface?  Over the next four years we’ll be looking at this as part of a grant from the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) program, funded by DFID, NERC and ESRC in the UK.  Our project, conveniently called ASSETS,  will undertake world class research on ecosystem services (ES) for
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Crop Wild Relatives (CWR), like many plant species worldwide, face increasing threats in many regions from habitat destruction, transitions in agricultural practices, and invasive species, among other factors.  Although the weedy nature of many CWR may make this group of plants more resilient to human impacts than more sensitive plant groups, a substantial proportion of
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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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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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Last week a new paper was on-line published in the journal Food Security based on a study lead by the Decision and Policy Analysis Program (DAPA)’s  researchers in collaboration with the Cassava Entomology area of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) . The study applies Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) to highlight potential geographical shifts
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In its January edition, the Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) documents the agroecology movement in Cuba. The article shows how peasant farmers have been able to boost food production via environmentally friendly methods. According to the authors, agroecology has played an important role in helping Cuba survive the economic crisis caused by the collapse of
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