Empowering women scientists in MENA

Posted on 29 Sep 2016 by Pakinam Amer

Funded by the Islamic Development Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, an international center for agriculture is promising to lay the ground work for a women empowerment initiative aimed at scientists, reportedly the first of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

The International Center for Biosaline Agriculture (ICBA) launched the design phase of the Young Arab Women Scientists Leadership Programme, dubbed Tamkeen (literally meaning empowerment in Arabic) this month.

Nature Middle East speaks to Setta Tutundjian, director of partnerships and knowledge management at ICBA, about the potential of this gender-specific science programme.

NME: How will your programme empower women involved in scientific research across the Middle East?

Setta Tutundjian: The objective of the Tamkeen program is to encourage young Arab women scientists to pursue a life-long career within the field of scientific research and development. The programme also aims to help women scientists interested in pursuing leadership positions to acquire the skills necessary to assume such leadership position within research institutes across the region.

The programme will develop leadership and soft skills among participants in key areas such as negotiation, human resource management, science writing, proposal writing, planning, presentation, mentoring, deeper understanding of self-esteem and so on.

We expect this to be achieved through a careful mix of classroom training, online training, coaching and mentoring.

NME: You’re still designing the programme, correct?

ST: Yes. And a critical part of this phase includes conducting focus group discussions and interviews with young women scientists to fully understand the challenges and opportunities they currently face within their careers, as well as to hear from them on the elements of an ideal leadership program that can help them address some of the challenges they face. We want to build a program primarily based around their needs and aspirations.

NME: By identifying the barriers and challenges, do you mean that you plan to launch country-specific investigations into how women are faring in the research and development field?

ST: Besides focus group discussions and interviews with the women, the design phase will also include an assessment of current academic programmes on offer in the region and whether these programmes cater to leadership development among graduates. There will also be an assessment of regional and international capacity building programmes to leverage learning and best practices.

During the coming months, a gender expert, a leadership expert and an expert in training activities will gather to prepare modules and produce a detailed framework of the leadership programme incorporating the results of the various assessments.

NME: I can imagine that women in a country like Egypt would be facing starkly different challenges than, say, the women of the United Arab Emirates …

ST: We do have a unique understanding of the region and the differences that exist between the different countries, specifically when it comes to research and development. Our focus group sessions will be divided among three sub-regions (the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa) in order to cater to the differences among the regions and target countries.

NME: How do you plan to measure progress?

ST: Measuring short-term results will include references to quantity and quality of workshops, participant feedback, network reach and similar metrics. Measuring long-terms results and impact will consider the number of women leaders over time in research institutions in the region, and the increase in number of scientific publications of women scientists.

Farm to Genomes: African Rice

Posted on 08 Aug 2016 by Catherine Potenski

Meyer at al., Nature Genetics, 2016

Rice is one of the most important crops on the planet, responsible for feeding billions of people. Given this global significance, studying rice in different geographies can be useful and aid in harnessing genetic diversity underlying particular traits and adaptations favorable to different environments. African rice (Oryza glaberrima Steud.) is mainly grown in sub-Saharan Africa and known for its stress tolerance. In a new article this week in Nature Genetics, Michael Purugganan and colleagues report the whole genome re-sequencing of 93 African rice landraces from various regions of Western coastal and sub-Saharan Africa. They create a genome-wide SNP map and through comparative genomic analysis study the domestication and population history of African rice. They use their map to perform GWAS for salt tolerance and find 11 significantly associated regions, highlighting the value of this unique genetic resource.

Meyer et al., Nature Genetics, 2016

By studying various regions with distinct environments, the authors were able to get clues about adaptation and geographic spread of the populations. They focused on coastal Senegal and inland Togo, which have higher and lower levels of soil salinity, respectively, and interviewed farmers in the region to understand the agricultural practices they employ in each region. The knowledge of the farmers helped to inform the genetic analysis and contributed to the model of African rice domestication and dispersal.

You can watch some of the interviews with the farmers here:

African rice farmers- interviews

Additionally, we spoke with authors Michael Purugganan and Rachel Meyer to get some background on this research.

Why do you think that rice is understudied in Africa compared to other places?

MP: I think it’s because it is not widely grown, unlike its Asian counterpart which has pretty much taken over the world. But there definitely is more interest in African rice as breeders are trying to figure out how to increase food production in Africa, as well as to try to see what genes in African rice can be used to improve Asian rice.

RM: There is a lot of great research on improving Asian rice for African farmers that is being done by brilliant AfricaRice scientists, and they are working hard on the social science side too. But there are so many challenges that Africa disproportionately faces – particularly climate variation – that demands ramping up rice research. There is insufficient support for programs that integrate crop experiments and trials into the different farmlands. A better connection between scientists and small-scale farmers would really help farmers adopt new varieties too- because there is sometimes resistance to trying new ones.

How did you choose which samples to include in your analysis?

RM: Recognizing that a lot of NGO work encouraging farmers to grow Asian rice ramped up in the 80’s and 90’s, we took advantage of the germplasm largely donated in the 70’s to the West Africa Rice Development Association, which were duplicated and available through IRRI (International Rice Research Institute). We chose accessions with the most metadata available, preferring ones with georeferenced location and a cultivar name. It wasn’t until later that we realized water tables far inland were high in salinity, so we just tried to make sure we had a fair number of samples within 250km of the coast, or along rivers connecting to the ocean.

Were you surprised by any of your findings?

MP: There definitely were a few surprises in the data, but the big revelation for me was the long time for the population bottleneck that led to domestication. We found from the genomic data that it may have taken more than 10,000 years of steady population decline before full-blown domesticated African rice shows up in the archaeological record. This suggests the possibility that humans were already cultivating or managing its ancestor for thousands of years, and I think if this pattern holds for other domesticated crop species it will change our thinking on how domestication has taken place.

RM: I was surprised we got nice GWAS results with so few samples, and even more surprised that we saw several of those exhibiting signatures of geographic selection. We were lucky to find a broad distribution of traits in the landraces we chose to sequence, for we had made the DNA libraries ahead of the phenotyping experiments.

What was it like to meet and talk with the farmers?

RM: It was one of the highlights of my life to meet the farmers! I’m grateful to have gotten a glimpse of their heritage, their pride, and their struggles. We were all so impressed with the generosity of women, in particular, to help each other. We were also shocked by how many farms are run by the elderly; their children don’t see farming as profitable and many have left. For the three of us in the field, it made us think hard about how we can give back to the communities that gave us their time. I hope that crop science, publicity (like this blog) and policy changes can raise the profile of the small-scale farmer.

In each interview, the farmers also had a chance to interview us, and that part was especially interesting. Several asked really good questions about African and Asian rice domestication. You could see the cultural value of the basic science.

You chose to focus on salinity tolerance as a trait particularly relevant to farming in Africa. In what ways do you see your results being used for crop improvement?

RM: One of the authors, from AfricaRice, Dr. Kofi Bimpong, had actually been working on salt tolerance separately as well, and has two graduate student collecting African rice landraces in Casamance. If from this paper we can consider that domestication possibly occurred in the Inner Niger Delta region and also in the West, then these collecting efforts are all the more important because they are from a center of origin, promising more genetic variation than people would have ever estimated. If you look through the available germplasm there is so little that has been collected or studied from Casamance. It’s tricky collecting there, for there is social unrest, and landmines. Hats off to the young graduate students, Mamadou Sock and Bathe Diop, doing that fieldwork; I’m sure there is a lot of discovery to be made with those collections, and more promising salt tolerant landraces to integrate into breeding programs.

In addition, our results suggesting many of the salt tolerance genes are shared in both rice species make them more valuable to explore in other crops. Shared adaptive mechanisms are especially fascinating to evolutionary biologists and are powerful assets of the breeder’s toolbox.

April issue cover: What’s going on here?

Posted on 26 Apr 2016 by Brooke LaFlamme

Tlalcacahuatl gold by Erin Dewalt

This month’s cover image is a visual tribute to the peanut and its importance to both the ancient civilizations of the Americas and modern agriculture. The genome sequences of the two progenitor species to the cultivated peanut were published in this month’s issue by David Bertioli and colleagues. The genome sequences are the first step to characterizing the genome of cultivated peanut, which was formed by the hybridization of these two species thousands of years ago. The genome sequences give us valuable clues about the evolution of these species. The authors also identified candidate genes for pest resistance, which could lead to advances in peanut cultivation in the future.

The image was inspired by a gold and silver necklace with beads in the shape of peanuts that was found in the tomb of the Great Lord of Sipan of the ancient Peruvian Moche culture. The necklace (c. 300) is now at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional Brüning in Peru. You can see an image of the necklace here and with more context here. The peanuts in the cover image have the same wavy shape as the beads in the necklace. The speckled texture and symmetric division of gold and silverish-blue in the cover image are also inspired by this ancient artifact.

Erin Dewalt, senior graphic designer for Nature Publishing Group, developed the image concept. She shows the peanuts underground, almost dangling from the plant above like beads. Peanut seeds develop underground after the flowers are fertilized. The ovary develops into a “peg” (gynophore) that drives back down into the soil, where it develops into the fruit that we cultivate as peanuts.

Peanut pegs growing into the soil. The tip of the peg, once buried, swells and develops into a peanut fruit. {credit}H. Zell via Wikimedia Commons{/credit}

The title of the image, Tlalcacahuatl gold, is a reference to the ancient Aztec name for peanut, tlalcacahuatl. But it is also a reference to the wealth represented by the peanut, both for ancient cultures and for modern agriculture. Because peanut plants fix nitrogen, thanks to the symbiotic bacteria in their root nodules, they return nutrients to the soil and improve cultivation of other crops (a fact famously advertised to farmers in the U.S. by George Washington Carver).

Tangential reading: The peanut necklace of the Great Lord of Sipan was almost lost to history forever. As this LA Times article from 1988 reported, grave robbers nearly made off with the treasures of the Lord of Sipan, including the necklace.

Safekeeping Syria’s plant genetic heritage

Posted on 07 Oct 2015 by Mohammed Yahia

The gene bank in Tel Hadya, Syria{credit}ICARDA{/credit}

The war in Syria has left nothing untouched, including researchers unaffiliated to any of the fighting parties. In September 2012, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) based in Aleppo, Syria, had to move all its international staff out of Syria as the fighting intensified. After looting and attacks on the premises, the research institute had to move a lot of sensitive equipment to hide them in rented houses, before they eventually had to evacuate and move all the operation to neighbouring Lebanon in the same year.

Before leaving the country, and to safe keep over 110,000 genetic samples for crops that were stored in ICARDA’s gene bank in Aleppo, the researchers started to send copies of all the gene accessions stored to the Svalbard gene bank in Norway, a secure ‘Doomsday’ gene bank near the North Pole designed to protect genetic material in case of a nuclear attack or devastating natural disaster. In March 2015, the organization received the Gregor Mendel Innovation Prize for managing this monumental task.

So far, genetic material has only ever gone into the vault. Last week marked the first time genetic material came out, when ICARDA requested copies of some of the samples they it had sent there for safekeeping, to fulfill requests from farmers and agricultural organizations that it works with.

“Until recently we were using and dispatching bulk seeds of these genetic materials to meet requests from Aleppo in spite of the tough security situation.” said Mahmoud Solh, ICARDA’s director general. “ICARDA requested some of its stored material in Svalbard in order to reconstitute the active collection in both Morocco and Lebanon in large bulks to meet requests for germplasm from the collections we have to meet the challenges facing dry areas globally.”

Since its formation, ICARDA has been working with developing countries, especially those in desert and arid areas, to help national programmes and individual farmers increase their yield by providing them with drought and pest resistant variants of staple crops like wheat, barley, lentil, chickpea, faba bean and peas.

Once we multiply these varieties, ICARDA will return part of it to Svalbard as another duplicated set,” adds Solh.

More bad news were reported for ICARDA yesterday, when news started to spread that Russian airstrikes near Aleppo may have destroyed the gene bank that the organization left behind in the war-torn country. However, the few ICARDA staff still in Syria confirmed that the bank was safe and unaffected.

How we built a better tomato

Posted on 13 Oct 2014 by Brooke LaFlamme

One species of wild tomato, Solanum lacerdae{credit}Sandy Knapp{/credit}

Most wild tomato species bear little resemblance to the large, red fruits you’re used to seeing in the supermarket. This is because humans have been molding the tomato to their own taste for thousands of years, by selecting for larger, tastier and (of course) redder fruits.

As a consequence of this selective breeding, we have significantly altered the tomato genome. A new paper published online this week in Nature Genetics analyzed the genomes of 360 tomato accessions, including multiple wild species and cultivated varieties, to understand exactly how and where humans have left their mark on the tomato genome.

This study, the product of a collaboration between many groups around the world, found that human selection on the tomato has led to vast improvement in certain traits at the cost of dramatically reducing genetic variation in large swaths of the genome. An unintended consequence of historical selective breeding in tomato is that there is now little room for improvement on many traits that we care about. By identifying these regions, the study will allow tomato breeders to make more strategic plans for future crop improvement.

We asked one of the study’s senior authors, Sanwen Huang, to tell us a little more about the work and why it is important:

This study was obviously a huge undertaking. How did collaborations come about, and what were the major difficulties in the project?

As an international consortium, we sequenced the tomato genome together (Nature 2012) and this project was regarded as another milestone of tomato research. The difficulty in the current project was deciding what to sequence. Fortunately, our team includes experts who understand tomato germplasm and they studied the natural variation of tomatoes for a long time. As a corollary, we combined tomato lines from many well studied core collections from several countries, such as the US (Roger Chetelat), Israel (Dani Zamir), France (Mathilde Causse), Italy (Andea Mazzucato), and China (Yongchen Du, Zhibiao Ye, and Jingfu Li).

What do you see as the most important aspect of your study’s results?

There are several important results that came out of this work. First, the evolution of tomato fruit size had two stages, from the wild progenitor of the modern cultivated tomato, Solanum pimpinellifolium, to cherry tomato (from ~1g to ~10g), and from cherry tomato to big-fruited tomato (from ~10g to ~100g). We found that there are two independent sets of QTLs or genes that have been selected during the two evolutionary stages. Second, there is a huge genomic signature of the divergence between fresh tomato and processing tomato [tomatoes used for commercial canning], on chromosome 5. This genomic region harbors several genes related to higher soluble solid content and fruit firmness that were selected during breeding for processing tomato. And more interestingly, we noticed that in recent fresh tomato F1 breeding, this region was also exploited for better taste and longer shelf-life. Third, we identified the causal variants for the pink tomato, which can be used for selective breeding. Pink tomato is a favorite in North China and I prefer it too, as it tastes better than the red ones. Finally, we found there have been costs to historical selection. For example, the near fixation of 25% of the tomato genome due genetic hitchhiking that occurred during domestication and improvement sweeps, as well as the linkage drags associated with wild introgression.

Cover of Nature, May 2012

Were you at all surprised to find such a large number of domestication and improvement sweeps? Did these results differ at all from other prominent vegetables, such as cucumber or potato?

The number and genomic proportion of domestication sweeps in tomato are similar to those in cucumber. However, the linkage disequilibrium blocks are bigger in tomato than in cucumber, possible due to the fact that tomato is a self-crossing species. Based on our data, we predict that the effective population size of tomato at domestication was about 300, similar to that of cucumber (~500), which is significantly smaller than that of maize (~150,000). This means these two vegetables have undergone much more severe bottlenecks during domestication as compared to maize.

How do you envision tomato breeders using the results of your study?

As a result of this work, tomato breeders will have a panoramic view of tomato variation and a better understanding of the raw materials used in their own breeding programs. From a practical standpoint, they will have access to a database of 11 million SNPs, from which they can pick the ones best suited to their molecular breeding programs. For example, they can combine the SNP dataset with their phenotypic data, to elucidate the genetic bases of important traits. Finally, and importantly I think, they will better understand the limitations of conventional breeding and the cost of historical selection, which will give them clues to improve their future programs.

NRCSHI07018_-_Hawaii_(716072)(NRCS_Photo_Gallery)

{credit}Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service{/credit}

Congratulations on your recent move to the Agricultural Genome Institute at Shenzhen where you are a co-founding director. Can you tell us a little about this new institute and what its goals are?

Thanks! The leadership of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences set up the institute (AGIS) to innovate agricultural research using genomics.

AGIS is located at the Dapeng District of Shenzhen, a beautiful bay area. The Shenzhen municipal government is developing the Dapeng Peninsula as the International Bio-valley and high-tech agriculture is one of the highlights. AGIS will recruit ~200 scientists who will decode, analyze, and utilize agricultural genomes. There will be three themes of research: the first theme is to develop basic algorithms and bioinformatic tools tailored for agricultural genomes, many of which are quite different from the human genome that has been the focus for most bioinformatians; the second theme is to empower agricultural breeding with genomics, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of breeding that is essential to global food security; and the third theme is to provide genomic surveillance of food safety and agricultural environment, which is a huge concern of society and a need for sustainable development.

A vegetable market in Shanghai, China{credit}nadja robot via Flickr.com{/credit}

Bonus question: What is your favorite vegetable?

China is a country of vegetables, as there are over 200 kinds of vegetables that are regularly consumed in the country. I enjoy the diversity. For fruit vegetables I like tomato, cucumber, and chili; for leaf vegetables, I like Chinese cabbage, lettuce, and coriander.

You can read more about this exciting study at The Scientist. Read the full paper here.

Radio and science

Posted on 29 Jul 2014 by Subhra Priyadarshini

At a ‘Career Day’ meet in Bangalore last week, I was asked by a young scientist from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) why there were not enough people communicating science in India’s national language Hindi. I had a ready answer for that (I get that question a lot of times from well meaning souls). And the answer is: it makes sense when you ask the same question in the context of Chinese or Japanese or for countries where science is done in regional languages. In India, the language of science happens to be English, for historic reasons. And even if you passed out of a Hindi medium school (or for that matter in any other regional language) and wanted to pursue science, nine out of ten chances you would have to switch to English.

So the question that follows is: who would be the takers, the audience of such communication then? Without a significant audience (and thus commerce) why would a publishing house think of a Hindi science communication venture that runs the risk of being in the red from the word go? [Having said that, here‘s a more optimistic piece that goes beyond the commerce of regional science communication and weighs its merit.]

Someone from the audience had the expected sequel question ready, “What about radio?” Yes, that’s a tried and tested medium — put to very good use by the All India Radio and BBC Hindi Radio to popularise science, primarily agricultural science in rural India. I have loved doing regional language radio trying to relate tough scientific terms to a Hindi audience [though I must admit I have fumbled to find the Hindi equivalent for terms like “cross-pollination” at times].

Prime Minister Narendra Modi says agriculture scientists must take to the radio to reach out to farmers.{credit}PIB{/credit}

Therefore, today when Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged hundreds of agricultural scientists at the 86th Foundation Day celebration of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) to make use of good, old radio to take science from ‘lab to land’, it rang a bell. Modi said agricultural colleges should start their own radio stations. Farmers listen to radio a lot and young agricultural scientists in these colleges kicking off new radio programmes would benefit the farmers immensely, the Prime Minister suggested.

Science-savvy Modi, who began his stint in the high chair a couple of months back flagging off a satellite launch vehicle and consulting scientists of all hues from day one, also called for creation of a digitized database of agricultural research in the country. He sought to link the young, educated and progressive farmers of India with agricultural research scholars saying they could form a powerful talent pool.

Farming in India is mostly inherited across generations and so it is difficult to change agricultural practices overnight. Modi said something science communicators often say — that it would be useful for scientists to explain the efficacy of a particular practice or initiative in language the farmer can understand. Agricultural scientists could play a big role in conveying the impact of changes in climate, water and soil to farmers.

While we are at it, I am taken back to a 1955 communication by British science writer Ritchie Calder, Member of the Council of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In the article written for UNESCO, Calder summarises the role of a scientist in popularising science through radio thus:

{credit}UNESCO{/credit}

We might well be heralding an era of a structured science communication and outreach programme in this country, with scientists and the radio at the heart of it all.

New agricultural trends to feed the world

Posted on 16 Apr 2014 by Mohammed Yahia

This is a guest blogpost by Youssef Mansour, a young researcher currently interning at Nature Middle East.

Scientists are struggling to come up with new technologies to feed ever increasing populations around the world.{credit}ICARDA{/credit}

The agriculture sector needs to double food production by 2050 to meet growing global populations – a tremendous feat considering the challenges posed by climate change, water shortage and how the increase in farming land is not catching up with demand. That’s why scientists are up to their ears looking for ways to sustainably increase production of crops capable of withstanding different environmental stresses.

At the BioVision Alexandria 2014 meeting last week, a group of leading agriculture scientists showcased new trends in agriculture that attempt to address the rising food needs of the next 100 years.

Classic approaches aimed at producing stress-resistant crops such as breeding programmes and genetic engineering “have not yielded the results that people had hoped over the years” says Rusty Rodriguez, CEO of Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies, a biotechnology company focused on agriculture research. These approaches are reductionist and focus on plants only, ignoring the fact that all plant and animal life partner with microorganisms for mutual benefit, he says.

Rodriguez introduced a new trend named symbiogenics, a technology that harnesses the impact that fungi that inhabit plants internally have on their ability to tolerate stresses.

In an experiment back in 2002, he found that symbiotic plants with a particular fungus close to a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park could tolerate temperatures up to 65°C. Neither the fungus nor the plant could withstand such high temperatures alone, but they developed a heat resistance when they partner up.

The Middle East is one of the most water insecure regions in the world, with water availability per person averaging 1,200m³ per person per year – less than a fifth of the global availability per person. Additionally, it is expected to heat up faster than most other regions, with an expected 6°C increase by the end of the century over the Levant region. The region faces numerous challenges for food security, such as the lack of investment in agricultural research and development, inadequate policies and the lack of social and economic stability in the region, points out Mahmoud Solh, director-general of ICARDA.

“We have seen people working on very important things but separate from one another. It seems to me that the problems are so severe [in the Middle East], that this is the perfect location to look at the convergence of these technologies,” says Rodriguez. “We [can] use engineering to get the plant to talk to us. Then we use microorganisms, maybe some genetic engineering, maybe some synthetic biology to modulate what’s going on inside the plant, so when it tells us something is wrong, we know how to fix it.”

Other approaches

A major goal of modern agriculture is to be able to bring across the symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria associated with legumes to cereals such as maize, wheat and rice.

This would optimize the use of nitrogen for increasing crop production while decreasing the exposure of the environment and humans to synthetic fertilizers.

Experiments conducted by Edward Cocking, director of the Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation at Nottingham University, have shown that introducing a low number of a non-nodulating nitrogen fixing bacteria called Gluconacetobacter diazotrophicus has been found to significantly inhabit the root meristem and exhibited “progressive systemic plant colonization”.

The bacteria, which localizes in vesicles in the cytoplasm of plant roots and shoots, were found to express nitrogenase genes that produce enzymes responsible for formation of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gas. Presently, work is geared towards determining how far these non-nodular bacteria can fix nitrogen in cereals. Field studies run under various environmental conditions would then show how much synthetic nitrogen fertilizers could be lifted.

Separately, a different approach that was pieced together in the 1980s in Madagascar by Henri de Laulanié increases rice productivity by modifying farming techniques to decrease agrochemical inputs and increase yield from the same genetic variants, explains Norman Uphoff, professor of Government and International Agriculture at Cornell University

The System of rice intensification (SRI) is emerging as a new paradigm for sustainable intensification of various crops, and many farmers in developing countries are already spearheading a movement to apply the same practices to other crops.

In the Middle East, “there is no silver bullet that will be able to solve the problems of dry areas,” Solh says. He believes an integration of strategies that optimizes the use of natural resources and utilizes genetically-modified crops, as well as the implementation of policies that promote sustainable agriculture, is the way forward.

World Wildlife Fund’s Dr Brendan Fisher on improving fish diversity and conservation agriculture in Mozambique

Posted on 11 Apr 2014 by Alex Jackson

Dr. Brendan Fisher is a research scientist at the World Wildlife Fund. His research and fieldwork lie at the nexus of conservation, development, and natural resource economics. Brendan is the author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles on topics such as poverty, human welfare, ecosystem services and biological conservation, and the co-author of two books, Valuing Ecosystem Services (Earthscan, London, 2008) and A Field Guide to Economics for Conservationists (Forthcoming, Roberts and Company).

He is a Fellow of the Gund Institute at the University of Vermont and a Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE) at the University of East Anglia. He was recently a Rockefeller Bellagio Fellow working on relationships between the ecological conditions of coastal regions, gender inequality and childhood health. When he’s not working he spends most of his time hiking, skiing, and enjoying the Vermont outdoors with his wife and three children.

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Desert farming pilot yields positive results

Posted on 13 Nov 2013 by Mohammed Yahia

{credit}Sahara Forest Project{/credit}

After two and a half years of research and testing, the Sahara Forest Project pilot in Qatar has started to yield results, and initial findings are showing good results for arid land agriculture.

The pilot project, built on one hectare of land, produced 75 kg/m² in three crops annually, which is competitive with those obtained in commercial farms in Europe. The project, however, uses seawater instead of freshwater. The greenhouse, where the plants are grown, uses seawater and blowing winds to create a cooling effect which allows the plants to grow even under the scorching summer heats of Qatar, explains a news story in Science. Pipes with cold seawater passing in them causes some air moisture to condense, which is the source of freshwater plants use.

The cold moisture coming out of the greenhouse also allowed plants to grow outside the greenhouse, and the operators were able to use “evaporative hedges” which brought temperature down by a further 10°C, which allowed desert plants to grow quicker than normal and throughout the whole year. The final component of the pilot is a concentrated solar power plant which provides energy to run the project and any surplus is used in desalination of saltwater for extra freshwater. The salt end product was collected in large pools, and researchers are trying to grow salt-tolerant algae that can be used as animal fodder or grown for bioenergy production in the pools formed.

“The remarkable results demonstrated on the ground reveal the potential for enabling restorative growth and value creation in arid land,” Joakim Hauge, CEO of the Sahara Forest Project, told reporters. According to Hauge, scaling the project to 60 hectares can cover all of Qatar’s current imports of cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and egglants. The question is, however, is this commercially feasible? The reports don’t explain how much producing these food crops would cost.

The Sahara Forest Project will launch a new, 20 hectares pilot near Aqaba in Jordan to test the commercial feasibility of the project.

Farm technology

Posted on 29 Jun 2012 by Subhra Priyadarshini

Climate change has affected farmers in so many ways, it’s difficult to count on your finger tips. The popular view on climate change altering crop patterns, skewing yields and changing regional economies has triggered the interest of most livelihood researchers over the last decade.

Technology will play a key role in ensuring food security.{credit}Photodisc/ImageSource{/credit}

In India, a new grant was announced this week to improve livelihoods and food security of farmers in three states — Punjab, Gujarat and either Bihar or Jharkhand. These states have a significant stake in India’s overall food security. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) will award a $1.7 million grant to the Centers for International Projects Trust (CIPT).

The Trust will implement what is being called the ‘Water-Agriculture-Livelihood Security in India’ programme. The grant will be used towards public and private sector collaborations and will look at innovations that ensure better agricultural practices.

The programme will support local farmers set up innovative and integrated water and energy saving technologies and practices thereby trying to ensure better yields and incomes for farmers. It will look at introducing best practices in groundwater management, improving water and energy policies.

Partners in this programme include state governments, agricultural universities and research institutes, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research, Columbia University in the US, and agri-businesses.

The key to the success of such programmes will be empowering farmers with technology. As father of India’s Green Revolution M. S. Swaminathan argues in this article in Nature India: “This impending food crisis can be solved to some extent if we can turn the small and marginal farmers, now eligible for institutional credit, to science and technology based farming methods.”

Hope programmes such as these fall back on technology to create sustainable models that last a while and not end with a couple of yields.

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