Africa Competitiveness Report 2. Reports. Jennifer Mbabazi Moyo El hadj M. Bah Audrey Verdier Chouchane. African Development Bank. This section introduces a range of climatesmart agriculture CSA practices and technologies within seven entry points for CSA soil management, crop. LONDON The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat. But an extensive. Daily paper. Local, state, and wire news and commentary. Photo galleries, business and obituaries. The authors gratefully acknowledge the very useful comments provided by Steve Kayizzi Mugerwa, Acting Vice President and Chief Economist, Af. DB Issa Faye, Manager, Af. Just Cause Save Game Pc here. DB Research Division Zuzana Brixiova, Af. DB Economics Complex and Xavier Boulenger, Joseph Coompson, Ken Johm, Benedict Kanu, and Damian Onyema, Af. DB Agriculture and Agro industry Department. Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' title='Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' />It was not until after 9,500 BC that the eight socalled founder crops of agriculture appear first emmer and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter. Genetically modified crops GMCs, GM crops, or biotech crops are plants used in agriculture, the DNA of which has been modified using genetic engineering methods. Compiled by W. R. Brown Published in The Arabian Stud Book vol. For the information of the public and the guidance of breeders, the following standard of. Source Marcus Tullius Cicero. De Officiis. Translated by Walter Miller. Loeb Edition. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1913. Before using any portion of this. Microsoft Visual Source Safe 2005 here. BibMe Free Bibliography Citation Maker MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard. A New Biology for a New Century. Carl Woese is the worlds greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy, the classification and understanding of microbes. Bacteria and fungi can help crops and soil MICROBES, though they have a bad press as agents of disease, also play a beneficial role in agriculture. StuffLandscapeSixteenByNine.620x349.140x17.png/1426299149308.jpg' alt='Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' title='Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' />In particular, they would also like to thank Charlotte Karagueuzian and Anna von Wachenfelt Af. DB Consultants for their excellent research assistance. Agriculture persists as an important sector of the African economy. Although its significance in the economy varies widely across African countries, agriculture remains a vital sector for most countries. It contributes from 2. GDP in Equatorial Guinea to 7. GDP in Liberia,1 providing an average of around 1. GDP for the continent. The declining GDP contribution of agriculture to the economy is a sign of low productivity and limited value addition to agricultural commodities, as the sector provides employment for 5. Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' title='Breeding Field Crops Fifth Edition' />Chapter 1. Figure 4 4. It is the main source of income for Africas rural populationestimated to represent 6. Africas agriculture is dominated by a variety of staple food crops maize, rice, sorghum, millet, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes, etc. The sector is also characterized by a high percentage of smallholder farmers 8. These farms depend on rainwater, thus subjecting production to the vagaries of the weather. Despite its importance, agricultural productivity remains dismal, undermining Africas overall productivity and food security. The sectors productivity in Africa considerably lags other developing regions see Figure 1 for cereal yields see also Chapter 1. Figure 5a and, unlike other regions, Africa has not benefited from the green revolution. In spite of its vast natural resources, including a huge expanse of arable land, Africa has the highest incidence of undernourishment estimated at almost one in four persons worldwide. Africa imports food staples valued at about US2. The level of value addition and crop processing of agricultural commodities is low and post harvest losses in sub Saharan Africa average 3. US4 billion each year. Moreover, the poor performance in agriculture undermines poverty reduction and inclusive growth. Despite its fast economic growth in the last two decades, poverty reduction in Africa has remained limited. The Millennium Development Goals Report finds that the share of people in sub Saharan Africa living on less than US1. The limited decrease in poverty is partly the result of the fact that growth has been driven mostly by low labor intensive sectors such as mining, while agriculture played a minor role. A substantial body of the literature finds that agriculture led growth has greater impact on poverty reduction than non agriculture led growth. The agriculture sector is a key to achieving inclusive growth because, in Africa, it consists mostly of smallholder farmers, the majority of whom are women. With higher agricultural productivity gender equal access to land, seed, and fertilizer and overall better performance in rural economies, growth will reach the most disadvantagednamely women and youth. However, considerable effort is needed to ensure that institutions and mechanisms for inclusion are put in place, while at the same time pushing toward the development of large commercial farming. The slow productivity growth in agriculture is also constraining Africas structural transformation process and economic diversification. As reported in several studies on structural transformation, reliance on subsistence production and weak productivity growth in the agriculture sector prevents the workforce from moving out of this sector into manufacturing and services. Globally, countries that have developed successfully are those that have shifted their resources from agriculture to manufacturing. However, as indicated in Chapter 1. Figure 4, this is not the case for Africa, where labor tends to move more into services, in particular trade, rather than into the manufacturing sector. Given the low productivity in services and the prominence of the informal service sector, this current pattern of structural transformation will not yield sustainable income growth for the majority of people nor will it lead to economic development. Inclusive growth and higher income for the majority requires higher productivity in labor intensive sectors, including agriculture. As outlined in its 1. African Development Bank Af. DBthe first and overarching objective of which is to promote inclusive growthwill pay particular attention to agriculture and food security, to fragile states, and to gender. This chapter presents the ingredients needed to transform Africas agriculture in order to make it more competitive. The next section explains the missed green revolution in Africa and draws lessons for the continent from Asias experience. The following section analyzes the mechanisms for productivity improvements, with a particular focus on the role of information communication technologies ICTs in agriculture and the importance of land reforms. It also considers the opportunities and challenges of biotechnology for facilitating a quantum leap in productivity. The next section considers the role of value chains in unlocking markets for smallholders, who make up the bulk of agriculture producers in Africa. Dbx Converter 3.2 Crack more. It begins with a discussion of Africas positioning and potential within global and regional value chains and then addresses the means for creating a conducive environment that fosters greater value chain integration. The chapter then outlines the Af. DBs recent and planned future support of the agriculture and agribusiness sectors to enhance both inclusiveness and competiveness. Conclusions and policy recommendations are then discussed. Impediments to Africas green revolution. The green revolution benefited most regions of the world, particularly East Asia, as it resulted in regional food surpluses within 2. Asia benefited the most, with significant increases in cereal yields Figure 1 in East Asia and the Pacific, for instance, cereal yields almost quadrupled between 1. Driven by the political will to make their countries food self sufficient, Asian countries doubled cereal production between 1. Drawing lessons from Indias experience, this success has been attributed to several factors. First, the adoption of high yielding seed varieties resulted in a substantial increase in food grain production, particularly wheat and rice. Second, the use of pesticides positively contributed to increased yields, albeit at the expense of the environment, discussed later in this chapter. Third, the availability and expansion of agricultural infrastructure facilities such as irrigation facilities, machinery, extension services, and broader infrastructure facilitiesincluding transport and communication as well as storage and warehousing facilitiesfurther supported the green revolution. Fourth, the expansion of better crop and soil management techniques, including multiple cropping practices, fostered the advance of the green revolution. Fifth, agricultural credit and land reform were crucial ingredients that enhanced agricultural productivity. Welcome to the Anthropocene The Economist. THE Earth is a big thing if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they would get almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could be lastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1 of 1 of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scalebut at a far faster than geological speed. A single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 3. That sediment flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking almost 5. That is one reason why the Earths deltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding away faster than they can be replenished. Geologists care about sediments, hammering away at them to uncover what they have to say about the pastespecially the huge spans of time as the Earth passes from one geological period to another. In the same spirit they look at the distribution of fossils, at the traces of glaciers and sea level rises, and at other tokens of the forces that have shaped the planet. Now a number of these scientists are arguing that future geologists observing this moment in the Earths progress will conclude that something very odd was going on. The carbon cycle and the global warming debate is part of this change. So too is the nitrogen cycle, which converts pure nitrogen from the air into useful chemicals, and which mankind has helped speed up by over 1. They and a host of other previously natural processes have been interrupted, refashioned and, most of all, accelerated see article. Scientists are increasingly using a new name for this new period. Rather than placing us still in the Holocene, a peculiarly stable era that began only around 1. Anthropocene the age of man. The new geology leaves all in doubt. What geologists choose to call a period of history normally matters little to the rest of mankind tussles at the International Commission on Stratigraphy over the boundaries of the Ordovician era do not normally capture headlines. The Anthropocene is different. It is one of those moments where a scientific realisation, like Copernicus grasping that the Earth goes round the sun, could fundamentally change peoples view of things far beyond science. It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly. Thinking afresh is the easier bit. Too many natural scientists embrace the comforting assumption that nature can be studied, indeed should be studied, in isolation from the human world, with people as mere observers. Many environmentalistsespecially those in the American tradition inspired by Henry David Thoreaubelieve that in wilderness is the preservation of the world. But the wilderness, for good or ill, is increasingly irrelevant. Almost 9. 0 of the worlds plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role. Although farms have changed the world for millennia, the Anthropocene advent of fossil fuels, scientific breeding and, most of all, artificial nitrogen fertiliser has vastly increased agricultures power. The relevance of wilderness to our world has shrunk in the face of this onslaught. The sheer amount of biomass now walking around the planet in the form of humans and livestock handily outweighs that of all other large animals. The worlds ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans. Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods. Recycling the planet. How frightened should people be about this It would be odd not to be worried. The planets history contains many less stable and clement eras than the Holocene. Who is to say that human action might not tip the planet into new instability Some will want simply to put the clock back. But returning to the way things were is neither realistic nor morally tenable. A planet that could soon be supporting as many as 1. The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 2. Increasing the planets resilience will probably involve a few dramatic changes and a lot of fiddling. An example of the former could be geoengineering. Today the copious carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere is left for nature to pick up, which it cannot do fast enough. Although the technologies are still nascent, the idea that humans might help remove carbon from the skies as well as put it there is a reasonable Anthropocene expectation it wouldnt stop climate change any time soon, but it might shorten its lease, and reduce the changes in ocean chemistry that excess carbon brings about. More often the answer will be fiddlingfinding ways to apply human muscle with the grain of nature, rather than against it, and help it in its inbuilt tendency to recycle things. Human interference in the nitrogen cycle has made far more nitrogen available to plants and animals it has done much less to help the planet deal with all that nitrogen when they have finished with it. Instead we suffer ever more coastal dead zones overrun by nitrogen fed algal blooms. Quite small things, such as smarter farming and better sewage treatment, could help a lot. For humans to be intimately involved in many interconnected processes at a planetary scale carries huge risks. But it is possible to add to the planets resilience, often through simple and piecemeal actions, if they are well thought through. And one of the messages of the Anthropocene is that piecemeal actions can quickly add up to planetary change.