Securing The Harvest

Improved food security, led by increased productivity among Africa's many small-scale farmers, has been the aim of significant national and international effort in recent decades. It has proved to be one of the most critical challenges facing humankind. This book grew out of a two-year exploration conducted by the food security theme of The Rockefeller Foundation focusing on the potential for crop genetic improvement to contribute to food security among rural populations in Africa. It provides a critical assessment of the ways in which recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, participatory plant breeding, and seed systems can be broadly employed in developing and delivering more productive crop varieties in Africa's diverse agricultural environments. It also presents an analysis of current plant breeding and biotechnology strategies for the key crops in Africa including: maize, sorghum, cowpea, rice, and cassava. The book will appeal to plant breeders, biotechnologists, and seed distributors as well as policy-makers in the area of agricultural development.

Harvest of Want demonstrates how hunger and malnutrition can exist simultaneously with growth in agricultural production. It points out a series of factors that have generated food insecurity throughout much of Central America and Mexico. .

Looks at partnerships between local small farms and nearby consumers, who become members or subscribers in support of the farm, offering advice on acquiring land, organizing, handling the harvest, and money and legal matters.

The availability, consumption and trade of bushmeat is highly variable across time and space. This paper examines how the bushmeat market in Napo, Ecuador has evolved alongside a variety of interconnected factors including local game scarcity, increased law enforcement, infrastructure development and increasing urbanization. Much of the human occupied landscape has already undergone extinction filters with only the most hunting resistant species still present. However, Napo maintains significant areas of largely intact forest which are not hunted due distance from roads and rough topography, which may serve as source habitat in the future. Two modes of hunting are identified both of which have very different implications for conservationists and for rural livelihoods. Supplemental or sustenance hunting generally focuses on more abundant species and thus occurs primarily within local agroforestry systems or nearby patches of forests. Commercial hunting meanwhile takes place within larger catchments and is focused on large-bodied species, which are especially susceptible to hunting pressure. Efforts by the Ecuadorian government to interdict bushmeat have largely driven the trade underground making it difficult to estimate current consumption rates. Demand generated by traditional Kichwa wedding parties remain a significant driver of commercial hunting. Policy recommendations include a greater focus on species-level game management, greater education about endangered species and more emphasis on using conservation programs to create corridors between protected areas. Due to the relatively small size of most communal forest areas, wildlife management is especially difficult for wide-ranging species and conservation efforts should focus on common pool resource management.

This second volume of a two-volume work reviews beneficial bioactive compounds from various microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, cyanobacteria in plant diseases management and the postharvest management of fruits using microbial antagonists. Furthermore, it reviews the impact of climate change on food security and addressed the legal aspects of microbial biocontrol applications. The two-volume work “Microbial Biocontrol” introduces to mechanisms of plant-microbe interactions and explores latest strategies of how microbes can be applied in biocontrol and management of plant pathogens, replacing chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The book covers different groups of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, but also the interplay of entire microbiomes, and reviews their specific benefits in crop growth promotion, in enhancing the plants’ tolerance against biotic and abiotic stress as well as in post-harvest management of various plant diseases. Novel tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 and microbe derived nanoparticles are also addressed besides the legal aspects of biocontrol applications. Today, rising global population and changing climatic conditions emerge as a major challenge for agronomist farmers and researchers in fulfilling the requirements of global food production. The conventional agricultural practices utilize undistributed use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to enhance growth and yield of agricultural products and fresh foods, but their extensive and continuous use have led to a range of negative consequences on the food quality and safety, to environment as well as to human and animal health. Microbial biocontrol applications are presented as a solution, paving the way to a sustainable agriculture in compliance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The book addresses researchers in academia and agriculture.

The problem; the systems approach;a working example of the systems approach;benefits of the systems approach;recommendations.

Although Wettach was not hired as an FSA photographer, his pictures provide a fascinating parallel to the more famous work of his FSA colleagues Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee. Yet unlike their photographs, his reveal an amazing intimacy and familiarity with his subjects, who were frequently his friends, neighbors, family members, and clients."--BOOK JACKET.

Debunking the notion that our current food crisis must be addressed through industrial agriculture and genetic modification, author and activist Vandana Shiva argues that those forces are in fact the ones responsible for the hunger problem in the first place. Who Really Feeds the World? is a powerful manifesto calling for agricultural justice and genuine sustainability, drawing upon Shiva’s thirty years of research and accomplishments in the field. Instead of relying on genetic modification and large-scale monocropping to solve the world’s food crisis, she proposes that we look to agroecology—the knowledge of the interconnectedness that creates food—as a truly life-giving alternative to the industrial paradigm. Shiva succinctly and eloquently lays out the networks of people and processes that feed the world, exploring issues of diversity, the needs of small famers, the importance of seed saving, the movement toward localization, and the role of women in producing the world's food.