Lauren Phillips As the climate warms, extreme weather of droughts, floods and high temperatures are affecting agriculture, threatening food security in Africa. Smallholder farmers are barely able to put food on the table as they work on exhausted soils that only produce poor crop yields, if anything. Erratic and excessive rainfall patterns have also contributed to reduced …
By Busani Bafana for GCRF-AFRICAP The SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre (SPGRC) in Lusaka, Zambia is a regional gene bank, keeping in trust, more than 18 000 seeds of various food crops found and eaten in Southern Africa. A gene bank is a secure dedicated depository for seed collections stored for posterity and research. The Food, …
By Mantoe Phakathi for GCRF-AFRICAP Crop breeders should make use of climate information to develop seed varieties that will adapt to future environmental conditions in Southern Africa, researchers urge. Research projections show that, three decades from now, the Southern Africa region will be warmer than before and farmers will not be able to get any …
The international development and research communities are keenly focused on achieving and upscaling climate-smart agriculture (CSA), with a significant emphasis on delivering benefits to Africa’s smallholder farmers. Whilst there is a high level of knowledge around what CSA technologies and practices work on the ground, there is still poor understanding of how smallholder farmers can …
Sustainable and environmentally-friendly pest control could save billions of tonnes of crops every year. University of Leeds researchers Dr Steve Sait and Dr Stephen Whitfield explore GCRF-AFRICAP research and ask: how can we help farmers get fair access?