HarvestChoice

02/07/2017

"The fall armyworm, so called because it eats its way through most of the vegetation in its way as it marches through crops, is native to North and South America but was identified for the first time in Africa last year."

Scientists say a pest that destroys maize is spreading rapidly across Africa and could reach Asia and the Mediterranean in the next few years.

02/02/2017

Live right now: The Food Tank 2017 Summit Live from George Washington University with 35 amazing speakers! The entire event is being broadcast FREE on Facebook Live. Moderators will be taking your live questions — leave them in the comments. Please share this live feed across your networks and help us spread the word!

01/25/2017

"Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency…"

The Long Read: The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril

01/19/2017

Third year in a row...

2016 was officially the Earth's warmest since record-keeping began in the 1880s, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

01/17/2017

Food Tank's one day event in Washington D.C. will include 35+ incredible speakers, including Shenggen Fan, Director General of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Buy your tickets today!

Food Tank, in partnership with The George Washington University and the World Resources Institute, is excited to announce the 3rd Annual Washington, D.C. Food Tank Summit. This one-day event will feature more than three dozen different speakers from the food and agriculture field. Researchers, farme...

11/18/2016

New book chapter looks at the merits of resilience in the drylands of Africa. Contributions from HarvestChoice, check it out!

Explores the scope for using interventions to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience in the African drylands, estimating the potential for enhancing resilience, evaluating resilience intervention costs, and questioning the cost-effectiveness of the best-bet interventions compared to alternativ...

10/24/2016

"The WMO says that the rise through the 400ppm barrier has persisted and it's likely that 2016 will be the first full year when the measurements show CO2 above that benchmark, and "hence for many generations".

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37729033

2016 is likely to be the first year in recorded history in which levels of CO2 in the atmosphere remain above the symbolically important threshold of 400 parts per million.

10/18/2016

HarvestChoice CELL5M database for agricultural indicators in sub-Saharan Africa featured in recognition of World Food Day "illustrates the power of integrating and visualizing open datasets in the global struggle to improve the 750 million or so lives that make up the world’s poor."

In recognition of World Food Day this post highlights two articles recently published in the OKAD channel that illustrate the power of using data-rich visualization approaches to meet the Sustainab…

10/11/2016

*New* Open Knowledge in Agricultural Development article, from yours truly at HarvestChoice, "provides overview, structure and coverage of our CELL5M database—an open-access database of geospatial indicators at 5 arc-minute grid resolution—and introduces a range of analytical applications and case-uses. CELL5M covers a wide set of agriculture-relevant domains for all countries in Africa South of the Sahara and supports our understanding of multi-dimensional spatial variability inherent in farming landscapes throughout the region."

Read the latest article version by Jawoo Koo, Cindy M. Cox, Melanie Bacou, Carlo Azzarri, Zhe Guo, Ulrike Wood-Sichra, Queenie Gong, Liangzhi You, at F1000Research.

10/05/2016

Exciting new project taking off in the Horn of Africa via the Global Resilience Partnership and HarvestChoice team members. SATISFy "proposes a market-based innovative risk management solution in the form of Risk-Contingent Credit (RCC), a social safety net that could mitigate drought risks for the rural poor and improve farm productivity and livelihood." Follow the link to learn more!

http://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/teams/1ifpri-harnessing-power-tech/

Convened by the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and Sida the Global Resilience Partnership is building systemic approaches to addressing climate and population change.

10/03/2016

..."Kernza, a new breed of wheat. Unlike the usual varieties, it is perennial, which means it grows year-round rather than being sown each spring. That matters because over time, the plant develops a deep, dense root system that helps to build healthy soil and to keep carbon in the soil, a counter to climate change."

Called Kernza, it’s better for the soil and the planet, and advocates say taste can lead it to the mainstream.

09/28/2016

New research paper by Apurba Shee from HarvestChoice and Africa RISING, "Empirical results based on plant-level panel data on the Colombian food manufacturing industry for the period 1982–1998 suggest that productivity growth not only stems from technical progress, technical efficiency change, and scale, but also from significant learning effect."

Check it out!

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11123-016-0481-3

This paper models the bounded learning concept with the learning progress function characterized by the degree of efficiency and the specification of the learning progress as a logistic function captu