This book features a comprehensive foresight assessment, exploring the pressures — threats as well as opportunities — on the global agriculture & food systems between now and 2050. The overarching aim is to help readers understand the context, by analyzing global trends and anticipating change for better planning and constructing pathways from the present to the future by focusing on the right questions and problems. The book contextualizes the role of international agricultural research in addressing the complex challenges posed by UN 2030 Agenda and beyond, and identifies the decisions that scientific leaders, donors and policy makers need to take today, and in the years ahead, to ensure that a global population rising to nine billion or more combined with rising incomes and changing diets can be fed sustainably and equitably, in the face of the growing climate threats.

Forward. A call for integrated soil fertility management in Africa. Introduction. ISFM and the African farmer. Part I. The principles of ISFM: ISFM as a strategic goal, Fertilizer management within ISFM, Agro-minerals in ISFM, Organic resource management, ISFM, soil biota and soil health. Part II. ISFM practices: ISFM products and fields practices, ISFM practice in drylands, ISFM practice in savannas and woodlands, ISFM practice in the humid forest zone, Conservation Agriculture. Part III. The process of implementing ISFM: soil fertility diagnosis, soil fertility management advice, Dissemination of ISFM technologies, Designing an ISFM adoption project, ISFM at farm and landscape scales. Part IV. The social dimensions of ISFM: The role of ISFM in gender empowerment, ISFM and household nutrition, Capacity building in ISFM, ISFM in the policy arena, Marketing support for ISFM, Advancing ISFM in Africa. Appendices: Mineral nutrient contents of some common organic resources.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) was established in 1971 to support the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in funding four international agricultural research centres in Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria and the Philippines. As the first global programme to receive grants from the World Banks net income, the CGIAR now consists of 16 autonomous international centres, with a membership of 62 countries, including 24 developing and transition economies. This report evaluates the work of CGIAR and makes several recommendations to address the future challenges it faces in promoting agricultural research.

This book casts a light on the daily struggles and achievements of ‘gender experts’ working in environment and development organisations, where they are charged with advancing gender equality and social equity and aligning this with visions of sustainable development. Developed through a series of conversations convened by the book’s editors with leading practitioners from research, advocacy and donor organisations, this text explores the ways gender professionals – specialists and experts, researchers, organizational focal points – deal with personal, power-laden realities associated with navigating gender in everyday practice. In turn, wider questions of epistemology and hierarchies of situated knowledges are examined, where gender analysis is brought into fields defined as largely techno-scientific, positivist and managerialist. Drawing on insights from feminist political ecology and feminist science, technology and society studies, the authors and their collaborators reveal and reflect upon strategies that serve to mute epistemological boundaries and enable small changes to be carved out that on occasions open up promising and alternative pathways for an equitable future. This book will be of great relevance to scholars and practitioners with an interest in environment and development, science and technology, and gender and women’s studies more broadly. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351175180, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Charting the political, social, and environmental history of efforts to conserve crop diversity. Many people worry that we're losing genetic diversity in the foods we eat. Over the past century, crop varieties standardized for industrial agriculture have increasingly dominated farm fields. Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens. In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world's most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research works to promote food security, poverty eradication, and the sound management of natural resources throughout the developing world. It is the largest scientific network of its kind. CGIAR operates through 16 international research centres around the world and its members comprise 58 industrial and developing countries, private foundations, and regional and international organisations.