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This volume provides a unique collection of contributions addressing both the ‘too much’ and ‘too little’ sides of the nitrogen story. Building on analyses started at the 6th International Nitrogen Conference, Kampala, the book explores the idea of ‘just enough nitrogen’: sufficient for sustainable food production, but not so much as to lead to unsustainable pollution and climate problems. The range of nitrogen threats examined, solutions evaluated and science-policy analyses presented here has provided the foundation to agree the ‘Kampala Statement-for-Action on Nitrogen in Africa and Globally,’ as reported in this volume. Humanity today faces unprecedented challenges: How t...
This report summarizes lessons from cross-country analyses of the impact of the Africa RISING (AR) program. Implemented in six countries—Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, Mali, and Ghana—AR aimed to provide pathways out of hunger and poverty for smallholders by sustainably intensifying their farming systems in order to enhance income and food security, particularly for women and children, while conserving or enhancing the natural resource base. Phase I (2012–2016) focused on the validation of demand-driven sustainable intensification (SI) innovations, while Phase II (2016–2022) focused on the scaling of a subset of validated SI innovations in partnership with development partners. ...
This book deals with a rapidly growing field aiming at producing food and energy in a sustainable way for humans and their children. It is a discipline that addresses current issues: climate change, increasing food and fuel prices, poor-nation starvation, rich-nation obesity, water pollution, soil erosion, fertility loss, pest control and biodiversity depletion. This series gathers review articles that analyze current agricultural issues and knowledge, then proposes alternative solutions.
The theme of 2016 is ”Solidarity in a competing world - fair use of resources”. While on the one hand, one part of the world is profiting from natural resources, the other part of the world is suffering with hunger, malnutrition, human diseases, low income, violence and lately is also challenged through climate change. There is need to rethink and engage in a fair share of all resources between the continents and nations. This includes huge engagement into the management of natural resources to solve the long list of environmental threats expressed through ongoing erosion, loss of soil fertility and loss of biodiversity, and topped by climate change having strong impact on the productivity in agriculture, fishery and forestry, and the use and quality of water and of energy in the South.
Great attention has been paid to reduce the use of conventional chemical fertilizers harming living beings through food chain supplements from the soil environment. Therefore, it is necessary to develop alternative sustainable fertilizers to enhance soil sustainability and agriculture productivity. Biofertilizers are the substance that contains microorganisms (bacteria, algae, and fungi) living or latent cells that can enrich the soil quality with nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, organic matter, etc. They are a cost-effective, biodegradable, and renewable source of plant nutrients/supplements to improve the soil-health properties. Biofertilizers emerge as an attractive alternative to chemic...
Nitrogen constitutes 78% of the Earth’s atmosphere and inevitably occupies a predominant role in marine and terrestrial nutrient biogeochemistry and the global climate. Callous human activities, like the excessive industrial nitrogen fixation and the incessant burning of fossil fuels, have caused a massive acceleration of the nitrogen cycle, which has, in turn, led to an increasing trend in eutrophication, smog formation, acid rain, and emission of nitrous oxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas, 300 times more powerful in warming the Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide. This book comprehensively reviews the biotransformation of nitrogen, its ecological significance and the consequences of human interference. It will appeal to environmentalists, ecologists, marine biologists, and microbiologists worldwide, and will serve as a valuable guide to graduates, post-graduates, research scholars, scientists, and professors.
Although sustainable intensification (SI) practices such as intercropping of cereals with legumes are believed to offer productivity benefits to farmers, the adoption of cereal-legume intercropping remains low in Malawi. We use dynamic programing to assess the impact of four key constraints that smallholder farmers face. These constraints are i) land, ii) labor, ii) input market access and iv) output market access. We use the model to evaluate farmers’ optimal production plans across six scenarios in which these constraints are relaxed and compare their production plans across these scenarios. The farmer’s decision process given these alternative scenarios is modeled to assess the impact of these constraints on SI adoption decisions. Our model preliminary results suggest that both resource (land and labor) and institutional constraints (access to input and output market) play a key role in influencing smallholder farmers’ SI adoption decisions. The model results help to illustrate how labor constraints, land constraints and limited access to input and output market affect smallholders’ adoption of cereal-legume intercropping in Malawi.
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Soil degradation is a widespread problem in Africa resulting in decreased agricultural productivity while demand for food continues to increase. Degradation is caused by accelerated erosion, acidification, contamination, depletion of soil organic matter and plant nutrients, and salinization. The major cause of soil degradation in Africa is uncontrolled and excessive grazing in the savanna regions followed by deforestation and the use of inappropriate and extractive farming practices. Perpetual neglect of the health of soils in Africa can exacerbate the already serious problems of food and nutritional insecurity and environmental degradation. Food and nutritional security of the growing popul...