Attempts to stimulate smallholder agriculture in metropolitan Cape Town
This case study provides a comparative analysis of two different initiatives designed to grow small
scale agricultural production in Cape Town.
This case study provides a comparative analysis of two different initiatives designed to grow small
scale agricultural production in Cape Town.
What is the future of food in South Africa? What might the food system look like in 2030, in terms of production, processing, distribution and consumption? Many people are asking similar questions and producing vision statements, policies and forecasts to enable anticipation and planning in a volatile system. They are all telling stories about the future – some optimistic, some dire. But these stories tend to be disconnected, narrated past each other to different audiences. The four scenarios contained in this document tell a more connected set of stories.
The Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) and the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape (PLAAS) are engaged in a project called Supporting Smallholders into Commercial Agriculture: A social dialogue and learning project. This project has been designed to ensure strong linkages between academic research and processes of social dialogue, policy debate, media dissemination and institutional learning among stakeholders involved in the development of smallholder agriculture. This report documents the proceedings of the first innovation lab.
ICARDA has long-standing outreach programs in North Africa, the Nile Valley, and the Red Sea region (Fig 2). In its current strategic plan, the Center will extend its work to the drylands of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Since ICARDA’s inception in 1977, the United States has been the single biggest donor to the center’s research and capacity development programs.
The benefits of this significant investment by US partners are dramatically increased crop yields and thus enhanced food security, improved livelihoods for large numbers of farmers, and the large-scale capacity building of farmers and national institutions.
Lebanon is ICARDA’s second host country and the country that witnessed the launch of the center in the mid-1970s through the ALAD program of the Ford Foundation. This process culminated in 1977 with a host country agreement signed with the Government of Lebanon in 1977, which established ICARDA here as an International Center.
This issue of Caravan showcases some of ICARDA’s efforts of coping with climate change in dry areas with improved water land management and resilient production systems. These include initiatives in conservation agriculture which provide sustained production levels while conserving the ecosystems on which our entire food system is dependent upon. ICARDA continues to make significant contributions in the promotion of sustainable water land management approaches and technologies devised by researchers and farmers.
Global concerns about fossil fuel prices and climate change have directed focus on prospects of biofuels. In Ghana, large-scale biofuel development has been entangled with several problems including disputes over land use and a combination of challenges such as low yield performance of Jatropha, food versus oilseed prices and financial viability issues. Furthermore, the exercised land acquisition processes lacked transparency and could not protect the rights of vulnerable local people. One particular challenge is the withdrawal of companies without returning the land to the land owners.
Utilization of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes poses a threat to food production and agriculture commercialization. Hence, this study examined Rural Land Utilization and Commercial Agriculture among Female arable Crop Farmers in South West Nigeria. A multistage sampling procedure was used to collect primary data through questionnaire administration. Findings shows that 71.62% of the women had land market index of 0, indicating that they obtained their land through non-transaction based method and 28.38% acquired their land through transaction based method.
This study examines the effect of land rights on agricultural outcomes in Rwanda. We characterize the effects of land rights from two perspectives. The first one is land rights indicated by the right to sell and guarantee land and the second one is land titling. The agricultural outcomes include agricultural productivity, food security and nutritional diversity. From the results, land rights are found to have a positive relationship with all the outcome variables. The effect of land rights on agricultural productivity is larger if the household head is male.
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