The Man Who Stopped the Desert By: Janeen Madan

When Mark Dodd, an award-winning filmmaker visited Burkina Faso’s Yatenga province, he met Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer, whose life story Dodd felt compelled to share through film. Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer in Burkina Faso, has developed an innovative planting technique that is restoring degraded land across Africa’s Sahel region. (Photo credit: Center for International … Continue reading →

Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism? By: Andrew Rice

Dr. Robert Zeigler, an eminent American botanist, flew to Saudi Arabia in March for a series of high-level discussions about the future of the kingdom’s food supply. Saudi leaders were frightened: heavily dependent on imports, they had seen the price of rice and wheat, their dietary staples, fluctuate violently on the world market over the … Continue reading →

Slash-and-burn ‘improves tropical forest biodiversity’

Slash-and-burn ‘improves tropical forest biodiversity’ – SciDev.Net. Slash-and-burn agricultural practices, banned by governments because of the risk of uncontrolled fires, provide better growing conditions for valuable new trees than more modern methods of forestclearance, a study suggests. Starting in 1996, researchers cleared 24 half-hectare areas of tropical forest in Quintana Roo state, in southern Mexico, … Continue reading →

WFP’s MERET Programme

By: WFP, “MERET: Land Generation in Ethiopia” A joint venture between the Ethiopian government and WFP, the MERET programme gets chronically food-insecure communities involved in environmental rehabilitation and sustainable income- generating activities that improve livelihoods. Mohamed Hussein stands on a ridge, looking down on the terraced hillside that he says changed his life “completely”. The … Continue reading →

Lacandon Maya’s Sustainable Agricultural Practices in a Sub-Tropical Forest Setting

Ancient Maya civilization is important to study as we learn more about their sustainable practices in the sub-tropical forests of Central America. As you may know, ancient Maya existed in parts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Scholars now know ancient Maya were able to sustain a long-term food production system that is … Continue reading →

Fuel Efficient Stove Designed by a Darfur Mother

Halima, a mother from Darfur, recently won a World Food Programme $300 cash prize for designing a fuel-efficient stove. The stove made from mud, consumes two-thirds less fuel than traditional way of cooking by effectively using the law of thermodynamics. Anything can be burn in these stoves–wood, household waste, animal dung, brickets (made out of recycled local materials by … Continue reading →

Ambani’s Mango Orchard Success in an Arid Part of India

We’ll continue to look into the reasons for success of mango orchards in an arid landscape with a BSh climatic Koppen classification. For those unfamiliar, BSh climates are characterized by very low, unreliable precipitation (<300 mm total annual precipitation), practically taking place in two to three months. Other areas around the world that have Bsh classification include western Venezuela, the northernmost peninsulas in South America, parts of Lesser … Continue reading →

Lessons of Deforestation & Microclimate Change: Past and Present

Climate and vegetation change in the ancient Maya landscapes is a known phenomena to scholars and scientists that have studied this civilization. Besides the non-anthropogenic regional climatic aridification that the ancient Maya went through during Late Preclassic (125-210 A.D.) and Late to Terminal Classic (800-1000 A.D.) periods, a significant change in climate and landscape change took place as a result of human-induced environmental impact in the … Continue reading →

EWG’s 2012 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

Executive Summary: Eat your fruits and vegetables! | EWG’s 2012 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce™. Producing and consuming organic food is becoming more and more significant as we learn about the negative health consequences of pesticides and other chemicals used in industrial farming (e.g. carcinogenic, toxic to the nervous system, etc). We are not even mentioning the tremendous … Continue reading →

Ancient Maya solutions to water and food insecurity: Low technology lessons for contemporary development

Ancient Maya solutions to water and food insecurity: Low technology lessons for contemporary development. This was an article I wrote with Dr. Vernon Scarborough of University of Cincinnati. The article was recently published at UNESCO and ANU’s Global Water Forum website. The article discusses the value of rainwater collection in natural or human-made depressions in … Continue reading →