Friday, 28 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

IFPRI: Seminar on 'Strategies & Priorities for African Agriculture', 3 October

Posted: 28 Sep 2012 07:40 AM PDT

IFPRI is running a seminar on strategies and priorities for African agriculture on 3 October 2012, which will be streamed online. The live stream will be here. IFPRI is also inviting questions on Twitter using the hashtag #AskIFPRI.

More details below:
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Thursday, 27 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

Vive la révolution?

Posted: 27 Sep 2012 02:42 AM PDT

cattle market  Photo: Garissa cattle market from USAID's photostream on Flickr

Revolution is in the air. As the 3-day African Green Revolution Forum kicks off officially today in Arusha, the talk is of scaling up investment and innovation, focusing on small and medium-sized agribusinesses. Agriculture in Africa, neglected in recent years, is now seen as a sector with enormous potential to feed local populations and grow economies. The language of revolution is about historic change around big ideas. It suggests a radical, visible change for the better. Who benefits, and at what cost, will be crucial in determining its success.

But the African Green Revolution isn't the only one around. The so-called Livestock Revolution has also emerged, in the last 10 years, as a powerful idea to provoke change. Like all revolutions, it is full of opportunities and threats, winners and losers. The STEPS Centre's project on the poultry sector in Ghana will look at different parts of the sector, tracing how they interact and change over time.

We're interested not only in what happens as a result, but where the changes come from. In a blog on the Future Agricultures website, Jim Sumberg looks at the question of whether this Livestock Revolution is driven by 'supply' or 'demand', compared with the Green Revolution of the last century. Talking about revolution may be a great way to galvanise action and bring people together – but in reality, many different visions and needs are at stake. As time marches on, recognising this diversity will be crucial.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Supply or demand: what ‘drives’ modern agricultural revolutions?

Posted: 26 Sep 2012 08:27 AM PDT

Garissa-cattlemarket

In 1999 Delgado et al. published the report Livestock to 2020: The Next Food Revolution. They argued that there would be a quantum jump in demand for livestock products in parts of the developing world, and a shift in the location of livestock production, tied to human population growth, rising incomes, continuing urbanisation and changing food preferences. The notion of the Livestock Revolution – with its promise of diet diversity, better nutrition and health, and also opportunities for small-scale producers – is one of the most powerful ideas to emerge in the areas of food, nutrition and agricultural development over the last decade.

Delgado and his co-authors suggested that the Livestock Revolution is fundamentally different from the earlier Green Revolution because it is 'demand driven' while the Green Revolution was 'supply driven' (p.1, 59). The language of 'demand-driven production systems' looms large in the story of the Livestock Revolution, and is depicted as part-and-parcel of what Delgado et al. suggest is an important shift, with livestock production moving from a 'local multipurpose activity to a global food activity' (p.60).
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Friday, 21 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

FHS supports the Private Sector in Health Symposium

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 07:15 AM PDT

The Private Sector in Health Symposium is a one-day biennial meeting which traditionally occurs in advance of the International Health Economic Association (iHEA) World Congress. The Symposium brings together researchers, implementers and policy makers with an interest in the role of non-state actors in the provision of health services and goods. This year, two Future Health Systems associates, David Bishai of Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health and Gerry Bloom of the Institute of Development Studies, are organising the Symposium which is overseen by a Scientific Advisory Committee of researchers from around the world.

The goals of the Symposium are to map out and understand current research, to generate more knowledge and to strengthen stakeholders’ commitment to learning in this area. It is attended by approximately 100 participants and is a mixture of key note speeches and parallel panel sessions from notable individuals in the field which are organised around particular themes. This year the themes are:

  1. Paying for private care: the private sector and health financing.
  2. Good, bad, or indistinguishable: quality of care in the private sector.
  3. Building institutions for influencing private sector performance.
  4. Health markets and the poor: moving towards universal access?
  5. The evolution of the global health marketplace: implications for health systems.
  6. Using metrics to understand the role of the private sector as part of the health system.
  7. Juxtaposing private healthcare in rich and poor countries.

Join us at the Symposium

The 2013 Symposium will take place in Sydney, Australia on 6 July 2013. We have just announced a call for abstracts – which you can submit online through the iHEA website. Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words and the deadline for submission is the 22 January 2013. There are a limited number of scholarships available for those who would need financial support to attend.

Further information

Read more about the 2013 Symposium by downloading our brochure.

Email to find out more about the submission process or scholarships dbishai@jhsph.edu

Browse the website to find out more about the role of the private sector in health or about past Symposia www.pshealth.org

Abstracts can be submitted online through iHEA http://privatesector2013.abstractsubmit.org/
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Friday, 14 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

The great green land grab

Posted: 14 Sep 2012 08:04 AM PDT

noentry-rs

"Land grabbing" is rarely out of the headlines. But the practice of land being appropriated by the environmental agenda - so-called "green grabs" - is gaining more and more attention. A new article on the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) blog looks at this phenomenon, and refers to recent work involving STEPS Centre members, published in a recent special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Links

Image: No Entry_1952, from creative1the's photostream on Flickr (cc-by-nd)

The great green land grab

Posted: 14 Sep 2012 07:39 AM PDT

noentry-rs

"Land grabbing" is rarely out of the headlines. But the practice of land being appropriated by the environmental agenda - so-called "green grabs" - is gaining more and more attention. A new article on the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) blog looks at this phenomenon, and refers to recent work involving Future Agricultures members, published in a recent special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Links

Image: No Entry_1952, from creative1the's photostream on Flickr (cc-by-nd)
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Tuesday, 11 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

Day 1: Low Carbon Energy Development Network 2nd conference (#LCEDN2)

Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:06 AM PDT

Follow the conference on Storify

They are big, big questions: How can developing countries transition to low carbon energy systems? Do low carbon futures preclude economic development? Can low carbon energy access go hand-in-hand with poverty reduction? The first day of the Low Carbon Energy Development Network (LCEDN) second international conference grappled with all of these, and more (Photo: Kevin Urama by Lance Bellers).

It was a stimulating, provocative and productive day with presentations and discussions focussing on which pathways to energy access for all might prove the most beneficial in terms of addressing poverty reduction, human development and economic growth.

During this, the United Nations' Year of Sustainable Energy for All, exploring the mix of potential solutions to these global challenges is more pressing than ever.

As, Nafees Meah, head of science at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, pointed out during his conference address, there are  1.3bn poeple without access to modern energy, 2.7bn people without access to clean cooking and, by 2030, there will be 3bn middle class consumers.

We need to understand the impact of the energy access decisions these consumers make on the world's climate, Dr Meah said. "What works, and what doesn't work in driving clean energy? It is an area that is still unclear."

div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"> The UK government, he said, is commited to expanding access to clean energy in developing countries, in trying to identify UK expertise and how it can most add value to critical research questions by working in close collaboration with research partners in developing countries. And that is one of the reasons behind DECC's sponsorship of the LCEDN.

The Network brings together researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from the UK to expand research capacity around low carbon development in the Global South. One of the functions of this second conference is to forge even closer partnerships with colleagues around the world, including in developing countries.

The event's keynote speaker, Kevin Urama, executive director of the African Technology Policy Studies Network, stressed the need for partnerships between developed and developing country experts.

"Creating partnerships with developing countries is a major issue - not just creating solutions and transferring them, " said Dr Urama.

"Technology transfer has traditionally ignored difference between end users. We need to move towards not only transferring knowledge and skills but towards building the knowledge and skills of the people - this becomes a systemic process of co-production and sharing knowledge, experiences, skills and equipment," he said.

Dr Urama added: "The marginalised and the poor are not benefitting from the CDM becasue the current mechanisms are using the old method of technology transfer."

You can watch videos of the speakers at the conference, flick through the presentations that were given and see photographs. All the material will be gathered on the event's Storify, which tells the story of the conference. All the material is not yet availble, but it will appear asap. You can also follow discusisons via the event hashtag on Twitter: #LCEDN2.
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Wednesday, 5 September 2012

KNOTS blogger

KNOTS blogger

Video: Working together for low carbon development

Posted: 04 Sep 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Ed Brown, LCEDN Co-coordinator from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

In this video, Dr Ed Brown, Co-coordinator of the Low Carbon Energy for Development Network talks to RTCC about why the network formed, what they hope to achieve and why a much more multi-disciplinary approach is needed to low carbon development in the Global South.

The LCEDN network's 2nd international workshop is at Sussex next week: participants will look at the outcomes of Rio+20 and discuss how to meet the UN goal of "Sustainable energy for all".

Follow tweets from the workshop through the hashtag #LCEDN2.
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