An independent, peer reviewed journal for policy makers and practitioners in agriculture and related industries, assessing the interactions between population growth, resources, the environment and climate change.
Summary
Organic farming represents a promising, if still imperfect, approach to improving the sustainability, quality and health impacts of agriculture. Production standards have become highly codified and regulated to protect consumers and enable producers to benefit from specialist markets. Certified organic farming is now widely adopted in many countries. While the regulations make the concept appear unduly rigid to some, the underlying scientifically-based, agro-ecological understandin…
Summary
Fish is a key dietary ingredient in many coastal and landlocked African countries providing much-needed high-quality protein. The WorldFish Center cites a decline in the per capita supply of such protein in sub- Saharan Africa (SSA) which they attribute to a decline of fish from wild fisheries and rising population in the region. This paper contends that scarcity is primarily driven by sharply rising exports and the failure of aquaculture to meet predicted shortfalls despite …
Introduction
Collective action remains the only effective means deployed by smallholder farmers in Uganda to have access to markets and reduce transaction costs. These have varied from cooperative societies to various forms of farmer groups in an effort to have access to farm inputs, markets and processes.
However, weak institutions, political interference and internal inefficiencies weakened the cooperative movement and it was left highly stigmatised among the potential farmer co- …
Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the construction of irrigation and water conservation projects reached a peak in the 1960s and 1970s with farmland irrigation area of about 45 Mha (1) nationwide. This provides the base from which farmland can achieve its potential. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a result of limited and fragmented investment in the long term, this in turn gives rise to widespread agricultural infrastructure disrepair and functional degradation.
Given the …
