Project Activities include:

1) Analyze sociology-economic and biophysical data with households implementing climate smart practices based on the menu of practices.

2) Continue to build capacity of farmers and farmer groups and development and extension practitioners for increased crop-livestock-tree productivity using climate smart practices through farming and demonstration sites.

3) Measure progress in ecosystem characteristics monitoring changes using the Land Health Surveillance Framework and employing Greenhouse Gas Flux measurements

Expected outputs

1) Increased capacity development and implementation of climate smart agricultural practice for increased sustainable crop productivity;

2) Increased productivity and land health (including biological diversity and risks to water quality and quantity)

3) Measurement and monitoring to access carbon stocks and net emissions within farming systems and landscapes

The smallholder sector produces most of Botswana’s meat and over 70% of the country’s agricultural gross domestic product. Although past policy and research have focused on the beef export sector, rather little information has been generated on the circumstances and potential of the 80,000 smallholders who own most of the country’s cattle, and the 100,000 households that earn livelihoods from sheep and goats.  This leaves strategies and investments for rural development and livelihood generation without a basis in data and analysis.

For both cattle and small ruminants, more competitive smallholder systems can improve livelihoods.  Several factors constrain the production and marketing of surpluses by smallholders: poor animal is one example, that is often made worse by the complexities of communal grazing, and by limited access to services.

This 3-year research project asks the following questions, and engages partners in research industry and government to help answer them:

• What are the characteristics of smallholder livestock producers in Botswana and what factors constrain their livelihoods?
• How can livestock-related marketing systems in Botswana be improved for the benefit of smallholders and the rural population?

The project has three objectives:

• To better define smallholder livestock production systems and to identify the factors affecting the productivity of smallholder livestock producers and assess their competitiveness
• To understand and improve conditions for market participation and value addition in markets for livestock, livestock products and inputs
• To strengthen the capacity of agricultural education and extension

Project activities centre on:

• Data collection and analysis
• New thinking arising from new knowledge
• Regular communication of results
• Packaging of results into training and extension materials

Some of the project’s first steps are to:

• Define and measure competitiveness
• Select project sites for a baseline survey
• Identify animal diseases and measure their prevalence

The outcomes from this project will be improved and more sustainable livelihoods amongst smallholder livestock keepers, and increased uptake and use of scientific and economic knowledge by those providing services to smallholders.

Partners

• Botswana Institute for Development Policy Analysis
• Botswana Ministry of Agriculture

Funder

Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

The first goal of the project is to identify the top 20 or so disease/vector systems of economic importance in each of four livestock categories in Africa: cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, and poultry.

We will collate information from all of the expert lists that we can access, and use a citation search to determine which pest/disease systems have received the most research attention since 2000.

From these ranked lists, we will produce distribution maps to indicate presence or implied absence in each country of the pest/disease systems that rank highest in each of the four livestock categories.

This information will then be juxtaposed against spatially explicit measures of livestock and human geographies and disease impacts to help identify the prima facie importance of each disease within each country. This analysis will be published, and the atlas of maps will be made available online.

The 20 or so livestock pest/vector systems deemed likely to cause the largest economic losses in this first phase will be given more intensive study in a second phase of the project, where we will more formally address the bio-economic issues of relevance.

In early 2013 we plan to bring together relevant experts on livestock pests and diseases for a workshop to identify additional sources of data and technical information of prospective use for our analysis, and to critically review future research priorities and strategies.

The ultimate goal is to develop a robust, spatially explicit modeling approach rooted in technical and economic realities and combined with improved data (and data estimation methods), to enable more evidenced-based decision-making about strategic research and other intervention options designed to economically reduce the losses from livestock pests and diseases throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Scientists

• Darren Kriticos
• Delia Grace
• Jason Beddow
• Jusper Kiplimo
• Pamela Ochungo
• Philip Pardey
• Tania Yonow

Partners

• HarvestChoice – University of Minnesota
• Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

Objective

The overall objective of this project is to understand the mechanisms leading to the introduction of pathogens into urban populations, and their subsequent spread.

The focus is on livestock as sources of these pathogens: emerging diseases are likely to be zoonotic in origin, and livestock pathogens, through the close interactions between livestock, their products and people, are at high of risk crossing the species barrier.

The focus in this project is on Escherichia coli, as an exemplar of many potential emerging pathogens, which exists in a diversity of hosts, in the environment, on food, in waste etc.

The geographical focus is the city of Nairobi, Kenya, and its hinterlands. In the microbiology components, the project takes a landscape genetics approach to understanding E. coli distribution and spread, with a view to understanding how this is affected by environmental and socio-economic factors.

Research questions

• Does urban livestock keeping pre-dispose people to acquiring new or more diverse microbial flora?
• Is the risk compounded by poverty status or other social factors?
• How is the microbial flora influenced by the keeping of livestock in these areas?
• Do supply chains for livestock and livestock products bring people into contact with microbial diversity over and above what they would otherwise experience?
• Why do people source food from particular places? What social and economic factors define food sourcing in a complex city?
• What influences the microbial flora to which people are exposed through food?
• How does the design of complex urban environments influence exposure to microbial flora?
• How has the city of Nairobi grown, how does it continue to grow, and how does urbanization in the region affect exposure to microbial diversity in the human and animal population?
• What is the role of per-domestic wildlife in transmission of zoonotic pathogens and the transport of microbial flora?
• Why do supply chains exist in the way that they do, and how might they change as demand for products changes with urban growth, or as a consequence of legislation?

The findings will inform development of policy on urban livestock keeping by improving knowledge of the public health risks and by putting those risks in a wider socio-economic context, including the risks associated with alternative sources of livestock products.

Partners

• African Population and Health Research Center
• Development Planning Unit, University College London
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
• International Institute for Environment and Development
• Kenya Medical Research Institute
• Roslin Institute
• Royal Veterinary College, London
• University of Liverpool
• University of Nairobi
• University of Edinburgh
• Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre

Previously, it has been difficult to quantitatively access the socio-economic performance of the different dairy breed-types within in-situ (peri-urban or village) settings, as the breed-mix of individual animals cannot be determined from phenotypic observation and pedigree records are lacking. New genomic approaches, however, provide a solution to this problem as they enable the breed composition of individual animals to be determined from DNA information. By combining genomic-based breed information with economic and performance information from on-farm monitoring of the same animals (obtained from both baseline and longitudional surveys), the most appropriate breed / cross-breed type for a particular production environment can be identified. Utilisation of the most appropriate breed -type is critical to sustainably increasing the productivity of the dairy sector.

The objectives of this project are to:

• Determine the most appropriate dairy breed/ cross-breed types for peri-urban dairy production systems in Mali, and disseminate this information;
• Characterise the dairy germplasm production chain, and related policies, and use this information to develop a strategy for strengthened dairy germplasm production and delivery systems;
• Enhance local human, institutional and organizational capacity on accessing and promoting different breeds/cross-breeds of livestock.

The project is embedded in the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish

The project is funded by the the Finnish Government’s Food Africa Programme

The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Improved Nutrition and Health is developing an impact pathway by which agriculture can enhance nutrition and mitigate health risks through value chain research. This requires new tools and approaches to prioritize which can be applied to informal markets in which quality and safety are diverse and where there can be trade-offs between income, employment, nutritional benefits and disease risks.

For these informal and emerging value chains, market access and income are as much an objective as the quality and safety of foods produced and consumed. Key questions to be answered include:

• Among the wide range of potential hazards associated with animal source foods products in informal systems, which are likely to have the greatest risks to human health?
• Which have the most impact in terms of limiting the availability of food critical to the nutritional security of the poor and constraining development of the value chain, particularly livelihood opportunities of the poor who produce or handle those products?
• What are the key constraints to supply and demand of safe and nutritious foods?
• What are the potential health and nutrition benefits of research that seeks to overcome these risks and constraints?

Research objectives

1. Development of tools and approaches for assessing value chains in relation to nutrition and health
2. Assessment of food quality and safety research priorities in value chains with high potential for pro-poor transformation and of interest to the CGIAR and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR).

The value chains have been chosen for their ability to generate information to inform research and development. They are pig meat in Vietnam, dairy in Tanzania and fish in Egypt, together comprising one third of the value chains targeted by the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish.

Research partners

• Central Laboratory for Aquaculture Research, Egypt
• Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
• Vietnam School of Public Health

Funding

Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

India is presently the largest milk producer in the world: 75% of rural households have bovines, 60% of dairy animals are owned by small farmers, and two thirds of marketed milk goes through the informal sector.

However, despite the importance of the informal milk sector, policy towards it is generally hostile. Informality leaves actors vulnerable to extortion, decreases investment in technology, chills the flow of innovation, and, paradoxically, makes foods less safe.

The huge burden of food-borne disease and the high level of pathogens in informal sector milk are well documented, as are the substantial, yet avoidable, milk losses from spoilage and spillage.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners have developed an action research approach to help poor people get more from the traditional dairy sector. This involves engaging with policymakers, assessing health risks and improving standards of informal sector producers and value chain agents through training and certification. The approach has been very successful in East Africa and more recently has been extended to India.

General objective
To evaluate the impact of a self-sustaining model for improving the performance traditional dairy through certification and training in order to generate evidence for scaling-up and scaling-out as well as provide recommendations that will help continue to improve performance of the traditional dairy in Assam.

Specific objectives

• To rigorously evaluate a model for improving the traditional dairy sector (based on training and certification of informal value chain actors) by assessing the impacts on capacity of value chain actors and net benefits accruing to milk value chains and consumers.
• To understand and document the process of policy influence and change which supports local ownership and sustainability of this model for improving the traditional dairy sector.
• To assess the economic impact and cost-benefit of the model for improving the traditional dairy sector.
• To gather lessons from the Assam experience to inform dairy development in other parts of India and in Bangladesh.

Funder: OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID)

Activities

• Expert consultation on already published maps of poverty, livestock and zoonoses hotspots with the aim of achieving a preliminary qualitative evaluation of which countries/regions need updating.
• Collation of additional data from countries/regions undergoing rapid change in demographics, location of livestock units, biodiversity and those forecast to suffer most from climate change.
• Update/refresh of the ILRI 2002 publication, Mapping poverty and livestock in the developing world.
• Update/refresh of the map by Jones et al. (2008) in the journal Nature: Jones, Kate E et al. “Global trends in emerging infectious diseases.” Nature 451.7181 (2008): 990-993.
• Identification of priority zoonoses which pose risk to the poor.
• Development of maps showing hotspots for poverty, livestock and zoonoses.

Funding: UK Department for International Development (DFID)

A previous project in Vietnam (Improving the competitiveness of pig producers in an adjusting Vietnam market) comprehensively characterized the smallholder pig sector; the project found that pork comprises three-quarters of meat consumed and is supplied mainly by smallholders, mostly women; pork production delivers substantial benefits to poor households; and smallholders are efficient producers.

However, pork contains high levels of pathogens and there is growing concern about food safety and animal disease among consumers and national policymakers alike. These concerns have already led to policy that favours industrialization and threatens smallholder access to markets.

Yet research by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and partners has shown that smallholder value chains are not only efficient, but safe. Research has a key role in generating evidence on the real impacts of pig disease and better ways of managing disease risks that are based on incentives rather than regulations.

This project addresses the evidence gaps that lead to unsupportive policy and through partnerships, capacity building and communication provides a pathway by which evidence can influence policy and practice, enhancing and safeguarding the smallholder pig sector in Vietnam.

The project forms an important part of two CGIAR Research Programs: one on livestock and fish and the other on agriculture for improved nutrition and health.

Objectives

• To assess impacts of pork-borne diseases on human health and the livestock sector.
• To develop and test market-based innovations to improve management of human and animal health risks.
• To communicate the lessons learned to sustainably improve capacity to assess and manage risks in the pork value chain.

Research questions

• What are the health risks and economic costs of pork-borne diseases in Vietnam?
• What is the added utility of risk-based approaches to food safety and pig disease over current hazard-based management?
• What is the role of market-based innovations to improve management of human and animal health risks in the smallholder pig value chains?

Partners

• Hanoi School of Public Health
• Hanoi University of Agriculture
• Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Development
• National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Vietnam
• National Institute of Veterinary Research, Vietnam
• Oxfam
• Vietnam Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development
• Vietnam Ministry of Health

Funding: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

The workshop, organized by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in conjunction with the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), saw government ministry representatives, scientists and specialists in pig health, animal health, public health, economics and ecology, discuss their research on public health innovations and how they can be best implemented through the CGIAR Research Programs on livestock and fish and agriculture for improved nutrition and health.

These two programs have identified improvements in pork production, productivity and safety in the smallholder-dominated pig markets of Vietnam, Uganda and the northeast Indian state of Nagaland as initial areas of focus.

With pig markets in the three locations heavily weighted towards smallholder producers, the workshop paid particular attention to the challenges facing the informal pig sector.

The three-day gathering saw participants share short papers and presentations on the lessons learnt from the following key areas:

• Food safety in informal markets
• Integrated assessment and management of pig health risks in Laos
• Veterinary public health research in SE Asia
• Market-based approaches to food safety
• Sharing lessons from pig production between SE Asia and NE India
• Managing pig risks from a farming systems perspective
• Best practices for value chain upgrading for food safety: some examples for selected livestock commodities

View photos from the symposium and field trip

The goal of this project, the fifth of seven work packages of the FoodAfrica Programme, is to reduce the risk of mycotoxin contamination in staple crops in Kenya. To achieve this goal, cost-effective and incentive-based mycotoxin control strategies and solutions will be developed for the use of poor farmers and other actors within the feed-dairy chain.

The principal project activities are:

• Integrated risk and economic assessment of the Kenyan feed dairy chain
• Investigation of technologies and strategies to reduce mycotoxins risk in the feed-dairy chain
• Impact assessment of a package of post-harvest strategies for reducing aflatoxins in maize

Evidence dissemination and capacity building are included in each activity. The capacity of local researchers and postgraduate students is developed through participation in designing surveys, field work and data analysis.

In addition, participatory methods are applied to develop and test strategies to mitigate the risk of mycotoxins in the feed-food chain. Farmer participatory research engages farmers in action research on their fields so they can learn and adopt new technologies and disseminate the knowledge to other farmers.

Partner institutions

• MTT AgriFood Research Finland
• International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
• University of Nairobi

Funding: Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs

It focuses on four emerging or re-emerging zoonotic diseases in four diverse African ecosystems:

• Henipavirus infection in Ghana
• Rift Valley fever in Kenya
• Lassa fever in Sierra Leone
• Trypanosomiasis in Zambia and Zimbabwe

Its innovative, holistic approach brings together natural and social scientists to build an evidence base designed to inform global and national policy players seeking effective, integrated approaches to control and check disease outbreaks.

The Drivers of Disease Consortium comprises over 30 researchers working in 17 institutes across Africa, Europe and the US and includes researchers in the environmental, biological, social, political, and human and animal health sciences. They will generate new knowledge on:

• Ecosystem change
• How ecology and people’s interactions with ecosystems affect disease emergence
• Disease transmission and exposure

The partner institutes are:

• ESRC STEPS Centre, Brighton, UK
• University of Cambridge, UK
• Institute of Zoology, London
• University of Edinburgh
• University College, London
• Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission, University of Ghana
• International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), Kenya
• Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI)
• University of Nairobi
• Kenema Government Hospital, Sierra Leone
• Njala University, Sierra Leone
• Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development, Zambia
• University of Zambia
• Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development, Zimbabwe
• University of Zimbabwe
• Stockholm Resilience Centre
• Tulane University, USA

Funding: The programme is funded by a £3.2m grant from the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

• developing an inventory of marketing chains, institutions and agents from primary markets to export,
• defining grading standards for Somali livestock and livestock products to promote export, and
• assisting rural institutions to disseminate information related to livestock marketing at local and national levels.

Objectives The key result that ILRI is contributing to delivering is in understanding and pilot testing quality control systems for livestock and livestock products. This will be done through:

1. Identifying critical intervention points along livestock market chains for strengthening capacity of actors and quality assurance services.
2. Identifying options for building the capacity of rural institutions for planning livestock marketing services. These include:

• Strategies to monitor flow of export quality livestock through district and regional markets
• Approaches to developing a common understanding among stakeholders of different grades and quality standards of Somali breeds for export
• Options for viable livestock marketing information systems

Study sites: Four zones in Somalia (Somaliland, Puntland, central and southern Somalia)

Partner organization: Terra Nuova

Funding: European Commission and the Government of Denmark

Since 2005, IPMS has helped to create in its pilot areas an enabling environment in which the public sector, smallholder farmers and private-sector agents are empowered to increase the production and productivity of crops and livestock through participatory, market-oriented development. The successes resulted from applying innovation systems approaches to identify and exploit opportunities in commodity value chains.

LIVES will not only build on these lessons but also introduce new approaches and interventions, and will scale up and out, focusing on a more limited number of value chains, and emphasizing the development of sustained capacity that will continue to have impact beyond the life of the project.

Goal

To contribute to enhanced income and gender equitable wealth creation for smallholders and other value chain actors through increased and sustained market offtake of high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities.

Purpose

To improve competitiveness, sustainability and equity in value chains for selected high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities in target areas of four regions of Ethiopia.

Objectives

• To facilitate the identification, targeting and promotion of improved technologies and organizational and institutional innovations to develop the value chains of selected high-value livestock and irrigated crop commodities;
• To improve the capacity of the value chain actors and the support services at the different administrative levels (from kebele [neighbourhood] to national level) to develop the selected value chains and respond to emerging challenges and opportunities;
• To improve generation, access, flow and use of knowledge relevant to the value chains within and amongst the different administrative levels (from kebele to national level);
• To generate knowledge through action-oriented research on and synthesis of lessons learnt about value-chain development; and
• To facilitate the promotion and dissemination of principles and good practices for the development of value chains.

Funding: Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)

While the presence of food safety hazards (such as microbial pathogens and residues) in informally-marketed food is high, the risk to human health is mostly unknown and current food safety management is both ineffective and inequitable. Risk-based approaches for assessing and managing food safety offer a powerful new method for reducing the enormous health burden imposed by food-borne disease, while taking into account other societal goals such as pro-poor agri-food sector development and food and nutritional security.

The ultimate goal of this second phase of the Safe Food, Fair Food project (Safe Food, Fair Food 2) is the improvement of livelihoods of poor producers and consumers by reducing the health risks and increasing the livelihood benefits associated with meat, milk and fish value chains.

Its purpose is furthering research into the practical application of risk analysis and economic and social methods by food safety stakeholders and value chain actors, improving food safety and market participation of the poor in informal markets for livestock products in sub-Saharan Africa.

The project contributes to this with outputs at two scales:

1. At the level of meat, milk and fish value chains, it will pioneer and test a practical, whole-value-chain application of risk-based approaches to food safety in selected countries which are the focus of the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish. It will develop, test and communicate the technologies and methods to improve food safety and enhance smallholder market access.
2. At regional scale, it will work through the food safety ‘champions’ supported in the completed phase to better incorporate risk analysis and economic valuation methods into food safety policy, commercial practice and veterinary education.

The project will work in four countries (Ethiopia, Mali, Tanzania and Uganda) and with university and research networks and economic communities in East, West and southern Africa. It will build directly on previous work supported by the BMZ-funded Safe Food, Fair Food project that increased capacity and generated evidence for improving food safety in eight African countries, training over 50 food safety stakeholders and supporting 20 post-graduate research projects.

Funding: Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development

Project coordinator: Kristina Roesel

2.Explore adaptive livestock management options to sequester and avoid emissions of carbon from rangelands through collaborative research with local livestock keeping communities in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso.

3. Assess the effects of changes in livestock and rangeland management on GHG emissions and land surface albedo.

4. Synthesize the research, combining the impact of livestock and rangeland management practices aimed at sequestration and avoidance of carbon emissions while taking taking into account the combined radiative forcing of GHG emissions and albedo, and assess the potential of PES scenarios to diversify pastoral livelihoods.

The aim of these Carbon studies is to collect information on soil and land surface characteristics for experimental sites and larger areas in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso. This work will be done so as to

i) Assess the impact of grazing and fire on soil Carbon stocks, and

ii) Sample soil Carbon and land surface characteristics to allow production of maps revealing spatial variation on soil Carbon across a larger area.

The aim of this project is to investigate the feasibility of using inactivated mycoplasma for the induction of protective responses against a challenge with CBPP. Therefore we will use a two-step approach. The project team will first establish a robust and reproducible challenge model. Afterwards they will immunize cattle with bacterins from a African Mmm outbreak strain followed by a challenge trial. The immunisations will be carried out using different adjuvants and routes of immunization to compare the rate of the protection achieved.
Project goal and purpose

A better vaccine to CBPP is the major stepping-stone for a successful eradication policy. Many attempts to improve the current live vaccine or to find protective antigens have failed. The main goal of this proposal is to deliver proof of concept for an inactivated vaccine.

If successful, future research will be geared towards improving a practical delivery package and towards acquiring solid scientific data on protective immune responses and to generate knowledge, which can be applied to other mycoplasma infections in the veterinary field.
Expected outputs

• Develop a uniform challenge model for CBPP
• Confirm induction of protection by inactivated mycoplasma

The project is a partnership with BecA and CSIRO

This project places feed in a broader context and acknowledges that enhancing feed supply has both technical and institutional dimensions. The project tackles feed scarcity from a value chain perspective and employs innovation system principles. The emphasis on value chain and innovation approaches will necessarily involve consideration of issues beyond feed including enhancing breed quality and health status of dairy cows.

The overall goal of the project is to contribute to improved dairy-derived livelihoods in India and Tanzania via intensification of smallholder production focusing on enhancement of feeds and feeding using innovation and value chain approaches.

The objectives of the project are three-fold:

1. Institutional strengthening: To strengthen use of value chain and innovation approaches among dairy stakeholders to improve feeding strategies for dairy cows.
2. Productivity enhancement: To develop options for improved feeding strategies leading to yield enhancement with potential income benefits.
3. Knowledge sharing: To strengthen knowledge sharing mechanisms on feed development strategies at local, regional and international levels

The project is embedded in the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock and Fish.

The specific objectives of this project are:

1.  To consolidate the science-led farmer-centric community watershed approach at nucleus benchmark watersheds for enhancing productivity and reducing land degradation in three districts, and to use these sites as sites of learning for scaling-out benefits in the three target districts;
2. To scale-out the benefits of productivity enhancement and community watershed management with technical backstopping in the target agro-ecoregion of M.P. (10+2 districts) and Rajasthan (9+1 districts); and
3. Capacity building of lead farmers, development workers, and consortium partners in the target region and provide technical support to development agencies in the area of Community Watersheds through establishment of a national support group for community watershed development (NSGCWD).

L3 will define the interplay between market access, crop and livestock technologies, and investment risks in water- and market-scarce environments that lead to technology adoption by farm families, enabling them to enhance food security and incomes through more efficient water use.

Innovation Platforms: The main entry point for the project will be the Innovation Platform (IP), which brings together value chain actors: input suppliers, farmers, traders, processors, etc in a shared forum to explore their challenges and opportunities. From this, the IP proposes site-specific solutions to align production and market requirements around food and cash crop production, dry season feed, animal health, and poor market performance.

Crop and Livestock Modelling: Participatory modelling will be an entry point to develop scenarios based on local knowledge, to be tested with farmers using on-farm participatory trials. Model testing and calibration will be done using on-farm trials then the model will be used to develop scenarios and extrapolate management effects to other soil types and rainfall regimes across time. Technology interventions linked to market development: This project targets private sector, NGO and CBO agents to bring about market-related changes for smallholder farmers. Such initiatives may include contract farming for groundnut production and a voucherbased input (seed and fertilizer) distribution scheme for smallholder farmers.

1.Water efficient farm enterprises and climate risk management

2.Investment choices matched to farmer capacities and climatic risk environment

3. Market-led technologies for smallholder farmers developed and tested

• Participatory assessment of Rift Valley fever (RVF) surveillance and rapid response activities
• Economic impact assessment and identification of cost-effective mitigation measures

The first component is aimed at assessing the 2007 outbreak of RVF in Kenya in order to identify key lessons on how to better predict, detect and respond to RVF. This will also provide information on how to better engage decision-makers to act promptly and appropriately in response to future outbreaks of the disease.

The second component of the project will leverage the information generated from the participatory assessment towards developing tools that improve risk management and decision making for future RVF outbreaks. This will facilitate planning of governmental and non-governmental preparedness, develop better contingency plans and better inform public policy in case of subsequent outbreaks in terms of the impact of uncontrolled disease and cost-effectiveness of measures.

Objectives

Component 1

1. To describe the symptoms of Rift Valley fever (RVF) in livestock and people, and assess the socio-cultural and economic determinants of knowledge and effectiveness of interventions as perceived by stakeholders in order to develop better surveillance and response systems.
2. To assess stakeholders’ perceptions on the impact of RVF at the household to the local market level.
3. To evaluate the local and national response capacity using key informant interviews and data collection in governmental and non-governmental organizations.
4. To foster communication between public health and livestock professionals and between professionals and the communities.

Component 2

1. To assess the economic impact of RVF at local and national levels.
2. To assess and prioritize the cost-effectiveness of disease control options from a multi-sectoral perspective.
3. To analyze intervention scenarios and provide recommendations that identify preferred strategies and steps needed to create institutional change to enhance the capacity to mitigate future outbreaks.

Funding: United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

The review considers eight themes:

• Transmission routes and wildlife
• Pathogen recombination
• Risk factors for transmission
• Drivers influencing interaction
• Historical changes and trends
• Livestock production systems
• Socio-economic, institutional and political factors
• Risk management and control

In this project, ICRAF will undertake the following activities:
1. Support the secretarial services of the Forum
2. Hire a consultant for the drafting of policy briefs and policy recommendations
3. Organization of seminars

Project outputs are as follows:
1. Policy recommendations and policy briefs
2. Seminar reports
3. Increased awareness on how to achieve competitiveness, profitability and sustainability of smallholder agriculture in East Africa

Project objectives are:
(a) Understand the interactions between crops and livestock in target farming communities and identify opportunities to overcome the constraints to farm productivity in maize-based mixed crop-livestock farming systems in eastern Africa;
(b) Develop and demonstrate efficient, lower risk and more productive farming systems based on the principles of conservation agriculture (CA) that combine increased grain production and the production of sufficient animal feed with improved quality;
(e) Explore, evaluate and demonstrate options for the incorporation of trees and shrubs into smallholder CA-based systems through participatory research in target communities;
(d) Evaluate the benefits of more intensive and diverse farming systems based on the principles of CA on farm family food security, income and livelihoods, and on labour requirements, disaggregated by gender and wealth groups;
(e) Disseminate and scale out Subproject II results to farmers, extension agents and researchers through targeted activities and publications; and
(f) Maintain Subproject 11 Subproject 11 titled “Enhancing total farm productivity in smallholder conservation agriculture based systems in eastern Africa” efficiency and dynamism through capacity building and constant monitoring, evaluation, and reorientation of Subproject 11 activities and outputs.

Project outputs are as follows:
1. Report on the baseline survey findings
2. Annual report on vine retention by farmers and quality of material
3. Evaluation report on the overall efficiency of the two value chains (factory vs. farmer organization based)
4. Evaluation report on the income and equity benefits to farmers from participating in both chains (compared to controlled group)

• The importance of livestock in the Lao economy and to the livelihoods of village households, with   specific poverty, gender, and ethnicity implications.
• The limitations of the current village-based systems in terms of feeding regimes and reproductive management for locally bred pigs.
• The potential for village pig production to become a better financial contributor to community well-being.
• Increasing pressure to confine pigs for hygiene, forage delivery, and other management reasons.
• The constant threat of disease incursions, especially classical swine fever (CSF).
• The risk of zoonotic diseases for animals and humans.

Water efficient farm enterprises and climate risk management

Innovation Platforms will be established at project sites to bring together all role players necessary to increase investments in farm management strategies to improve productivity of crop and livestock systems through improved fodder production. Outputs of the other two work areas will feed into the innovation platform process. The important outcome here is the development of an understanding that increased investments at farm level will have beneficial returns at the market place that compensate for climate-related production risks.

Investment choices matched to farmer capacities and climatic risk environment

Understanding how the capacity of farmers and their ability to make use of new opportunities is affected by their wealth status, investment priorities and variable climate will assist in the design of new and more target-specific crop-livestock management strategies. Through participatory modeling and scenario analysis we can learn together what the impacts of specific interventions are, which farmers can make use of them, and who may adopt them. On-farm testing will substantiate the efficacy of the technologies and the potential for out-scaling.

Market-led technologies for smallholder farmers developed and tested

The project will use market access as the driver of crop and livestock technology uptake. Market development initiatives such as contract farming, voucher-based input distribution schemes for seed and fertilizer and innovative fertilizer marketing strategies will be implemented by project partners, technically supported by research and extension and monitored for impacts across the value chain.

Nigeria was the first country in Africa to be affected by the H5N1 virus, with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks initially reported in the Kaduna State and confirmed by the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development on 8 February 2006. The disease spread rapidly to 97 Local Government Areas in 25 States and the Federal Capital Territory, and some 440,000 birds were culled in the first two months of the outbreak. The country subsequently suffered waves of HPAI outbreaks that peaked twice: in February 2006 and February 2007.

The outbreaks affected 3037 farms causing 1.3 million of the country’s estimated 160 million birds to be destroyed, at a cost of USD 5.4 million paid in compensation by the Government. The last outbreak of the first wave of disease was recorded in the Anambra State in October 2007. The disease was again reported on two farms in July 2008 in Kano and Katsina States, and was quickly brought under control.

The project development objectives were designed to support government efforts to minimize the threat posed by H5N1 to humans and the poultry industry, and prepare the necessary control measures to respond to a possible influenza pandemic.

To achieve these objectives, the project supported three sets of interventions: (1) response and containment, (2) control and prevention and (3) preparedness and planning. The project had four components: (1) animal health, (2) human health, (3) social mobilization and strategic communication, and (4) project management and coordination.

An implementation status and results report prepared in November 2010, and two implementation completion review reports, one by the project and the other by the World Bank, referred to the lack of an end-of-project impact assessment of the success or failure in meeting the intended project outcomes.

It was against this backdrop that an independent impact assessment study was carried out with the objective of understanding better:

1. how and, where possible, how much the project activities and outputs have contributed to the outcomes; and
2. how the outcomes have contributed to the primary impacts of interest, namely, reducing the risk of HPAI to poultry and humans and improving public health preparedness for a pandemic.

Objectives

• To review and synthesize literature on livestock and meat supply, consumption and trade in Ethiopia and identify information gaps for further research.
• To identify and map the export livestock supply shades and indicate volume of supply from major production areas.
• To assess current off-take rates for cattle and shoats in the highlands and pastoral lowlands and identify the characteristics of these animals.
• To assess the movement of animals and meat through domestic and export market chains, and how various market factors (price, market structure, marketing practices, transaction costs and market infrastructure) influence the movement of animals between market channels.
• To identify factors which affect the marketing behaviour of producers and other market participants.
• To develop alternative export scenarios for increased off-take through breeding, feeding management, disease control and producers’ marketing behaviour.
• To develop policy recommendations for investment in market development, development of quality and safety standards, extension, technology and dissemination of market information to achieve higher off-take rates and meat exports.

Funding: United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through Texas A&M University

The key areas and research questions that this project seeks to address are as follows:

• What are the important sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) requirements, specifications and demands of targeted export markets at different junctures in the meat export supply chain?
• How is current compliance with these SPS requirements or other international standards achieved and, if not, what gaps remain?
• What specific risks and critical control points identified in the supply chain in Ethiopia need to be identified and improved to enhance livestock and livestock product exports?
• What options are available at each stage of the supply chain to facilitate identification, screening, testing, quarantine, vaccination, inspection, monitoring and other priority requirements from specified export markets?
• What are the costs of establishing an SPS certification system for livestock and meat exports?
• Who picks up these costs and along what part of the supply chain?
• How do these costs and the feasibility of establishing an SPS certification system differ by region?
• Could such a program be further scaled up?
• What are the modalities and policy options for funding an SPS certification system?

Funding: United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through Texas A&M University

Partner: Texas Agricultural Experiment Station

Funding: The project is principally funded by the Wellcome Trust, with additional support from the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

The specific objectives are to do the following for each of the five priority diseases at national and agroecological levels:

• assess the direct and indirect financial burden of inaction including costs of death of animals; weight loss; lost milk, eggs and draught power; treatment during illness etc.;
• estimate the costs of targeted interventions including treatment, vaccination, surveillance, vector control and sanitary measures;
• determine the additional benefits, additional costs and net benefits associated with baseline interventions;
• evaluate of the BCRs of targeted interventions based on sensitivity analysis; and
• make recommendations on the feasibility of the targeted interventions given the underlying uncertainties permeating the various scenarios.

Funding: The World Bank

Partner: University of Nigeria, Nsukka

One Health places health issues in the broader developmental and ecological context, and can be defined as the collaborative efforts of multiple disciplines to attain optimal health for people, animals and environment.

The disciplines of public health and veterinary economics are yet to develop a satisfactory way of dealing with the economics of zoonoses to generate the much needed evidence to inform One Health decisions. Required evidence also includes distribution of control benefits and the institutional arrangements.

This study is generating the evidence needed to inform One Health decisions through an intersectoral assessment of the cost-effectiveness and economic benefits of Rift Valley fever control options, by considering both human and animal health economics from a societal perspective. The study is also evaluating feasible operational frameworks based on the One Health approach.

Specific objectives are to:

• identify and analyze stakeholders for prevention and control of zoonoses;
• identify and analyze suitable operational frameworks and coordination mechanisms for intersectoral planning within the One Health approach and their cost implications;
• identify alternate Rift Valley fever prevention and control strategies including One Health approaches;
• estimate the dual burden of Rift Valley fever epidemics in the human and animal health sectors; and
• assess the cost-effectiveness, cost and benefits of the alternate control options and prioritize them from a multisector perspective.

This work is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and is part of doctoral research by the principal investigator.

The specific project objectives are to:

• improve market participation of small-scale goat and cattle keepers in semi-arid regions of Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe;
• evaluate constraints to and opportunities for commercialization of smallholder production of goats and cattle;
• test and evaluate alternative livestock marketing and input delivery systems;
• assess the impact of market-led technology change on household incomes; and
• establish an effective communication strategy to facilitate networking and exchange of information among sector stakeholders.

This project is funded by the European Union (EU) through the ICART project (Implementation and Coordination of Agricultural Research and Training).

The project targets:

• a broader understanding of the importance of livestock to poverty reduction at the household level and identification of entry points for reducing poverty;
• the identification and analysis of market sheds, in particular ‘hot-spots’ of demand for livestock  products and the identification of opportunities for market participation for smallholders;
• analysis of constraints facing livestock-holding smallholders;
• stakeholder identification of critical data gaps, opportunities for addressing these gaps and the creation of an enabling environment through enhancing data collection and analytical abilities at a local level; and
• effective dissemination of project results with the objective of developing data platforms and national commitment to data collection/analysis.

Demand for pork is increasing rapidly in Vietnam due to growth in incomes and urban populations. Pork consumers are also demanding better product quality. A dual market structure is emerging, involving a few large-scale farms using higher yielding technology packages and a large number of smallholders using less sophisticated systems.

Given widespread rural poverty in Vietnam, successful commercial smallholder pig farming alongside the large-scale pig industry may serve as a vehicle for poverty alleviation if pragmatic options can be identified about the technology, institutional arrangements and policy support needed to improve the access of poorer producers to quality inputs and services.

Various formal and informal market arrangements involving input suppliers, marketing and processing firms and pig raisers are evolving. However, it is still unclear which institutional framework is best suited to increase smallholder access to high-value market chains.

Specific objectives

• Establish empirically the level of market demand for commercial and traditional quality attributes of pork in Vietnam, characterize these attributes and validate any associated significant price differentials and their determinants.
• Compare input and output marketing arrangements between smallholder pig-raisers selling into high- and low-priced markets.
• Characterize the structure and conduct of the input- and service-providing firms and pig markets.
• Compare the geographical distribution of and access to inputs and services by different types of pig producers.
• Identify smallholder constraints to entry into higher value market chains.
• Assess the potential impact of selected institutional, technology and policy options for increasing the access of smallholder pig producers to improved inputs and services, and high-value supply chains.
• Promote awareness and uptake of the pro-poor policy, institutional and investment options emerging from the project among stakeholders, decision makers, investors and market actors in the pig industry in Vietnam.

Anticipated outcomes

• Evidence of the extent of demand for pork with better traditional quality attributes.
• Mapped locations of higher-and lower-priced pig value chains and market actors.
• Knowledge about the characteristics of pig producers selling in higher- and lower-priced markets.
• Knowledge about contractual arrangements and marketing systems for inputs and products, and the relative market power of input and service providers.
• Knowledge about the potential impact of policy interventions to improve smallholder market access.
• A strategy for pilot testing of a set of recommended options by development and/or private-sector partners in Vietnam.

Funder: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research

Partners

• Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Development (IPSARD)
• International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
• Oxfam
• The University of Queensland

Running until 2012, EcoZD supports all costs related to research studies undertaken in this project. During the project’s preparatory phase (mid-2009), national researchers are working with relevant decision-makers in disease control as well as with local communities.

ILRI and its technical partners support the research teams from the design phase of their studies to their final communications in such formats as policy briefs, conference presentations and peer-reviewed articles.To complement existing projects in the SE Asia region on emerging infectious diseases, EcoZEID may support research into endemic or neglected, as well as emerging, zoonoses if the former are deemed high-priority issues by national decision-makers and local communities.

Partners
EcoZEID links the national research teams in each of its six pilot countries through regular workshops and virtual work spaces and discussion forums. Regional networking is enhanced by close links to the Asian Partnership on Emerging Infectious Diseases Research (APEIR), the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance network (MBDS) and other relevant bodies and sectors (e.g. agriculture, land use, conservation).

In terms of technical inputs, ILRI is providing expertise in animal health, veterinary public health, risk assessment, geographic information systems, modelling and socioeconomics. MBDS and the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (formerly Swiss Tropical Institute) are providing the project with their public health expertise. APEIR researchers are in a position to provide valuable local knowledge in respect to animal health, public health, & socio-economics; Veterinarians Without Borders–Canada is providing expertise in ecohealth approaches.

Expected outputs
Tools, methods, approaches and lessons used or generated and found useful by EcoZD will be disseminated to South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to support development of similar projects in these regions.

Funding: International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Planned outputs of this project is (i) isolines with key stay-green QTLs having higher drought-adaptation and forage quality and better characterized molecular markers to facilitate MAS breeding; (ii) knowledge of traits related to a more efficient soil water use and their effects on yield, strategic knowledge on their relation to key stay-green QTLs, and assessment of their forecasted economic benefits.

This action-research project, which is led by the West and Central African Council for Agricultural Research and Development (CORAF/WECARD), tests and captures lessons for an approach to scale out a promising intensification strategy based on integrated smallholder dairy and vegetable production that will significantly increase smallholder income and improve household food security, and make households more resilient. The action research will focus both at farm level on adapting the production system to the local context, and at market and policy levels on ensuring farmers have access to the inputs and services required to support the mixed production system, as well as to market outlets for their products.

General and specific objectives
The project overall objective is to enhance the contribution of agricultural and natural resources systems to improved livelihoods and quality of the environment in semi-arid areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose is to build smallholder livelihoods resilience, and sustainability and profitability of smallholders by achieving the following specific objectives:

• Establish an integrated agricultural research for development (IAR4D) process for identifying, testing, adapting and scaling out of integrated smallholder dairy-horticulture systems that enhances livelihood resilience and sustainability in the semi-arid zones of West Africa
• Develop and promote social learning mechanisms for adapting integrated dairy-horticulture production technologies to local conditions appropriate for resource-poor households, gender-sensitive, and that conserve the natural resource base
• Develop and test innovative tools and options for upgrading local dairy and horticulture value chains that offer employment and generate added income for resource-poor market actors, especially women, while conserving the natural resource base
• Identify and formulate pro-poor policy options to support integrated, market-oriented and ecosystem-friendly dairy and vegetable smallholder enterprises
• Strengthen the capacity of researchers and research institutions in responding to the needs expressed by stakeholders along the dairy and vegetable value chains.

The scope of ILRI’s involvement in the project covers training activities on methodologies and approaches related to IAR4D, value chain analysis and business development services, as well as scientific backstopping in the selection of study sites and implementation of baseline surveys. The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

1. how to bring about sustainable improvements in livestock health service delivery in the project site and
2. how to translate improved livestock health into increased productivity and incomes.

A combination of growth and migration is resulting in massive increases in the population of urban and peri-urban zones in Africa. The United Nations has estimated that city populations in Africa will rise from 35% of the total population in 2007 to 51% by 2030. The impacts of this on human welfare, healthcare, sanitation, and other policy-oriented fields has received vast attention, but there has not been a substantive effort to integrate across disciplines, particularly with regard to the impacts of these diverse issues on disease transmission.

The focus is on diseases involving livestock reservoirs, using Nairobi, Kenya as a case study. Urban farming and livestock keeping are significant income generators; urbanization has been identified as one of the main drivers of the emergence of human diseases, though with little specific focus. It has been proposed that the processes leading to the emergence of new diseases are likely to be those that also matter for the re-emergence of endemic zoonotic and food-borne infections. Understanding these as models is a tractable problem; this study will therefore (1) improve our ability to predict the occurrence and burden of new diseases and (2) provide an opportunity to understand the biology and social ecology of existing but neglected diseases.

Funding: Medical Research Council (UK) through the UK Government’s Living With Environmental Change Initiative.

Funding: UNDP, GEF, and the African Development Bank

Partner: International Trypanotolerance Centre, the Gambia

This study was commissioned by the Government of Nigeria to summarize and generate evidence on the impact of food-borne disease associated with animal source foods. The overall objective of this study is to assess the costs associated with consumption of poor quality meat in Nigeria.

Sub-objectives include assessment of:

• major hazards associated with meat;
• prevalence of meat-borne hazards in livestock, meat and humans;
• knowledge, attitudes and practice of meat value chain actors;
• health burden of meat-borne disease and other burdens;
• appropriate level of protection; and
• recommendation of possible approaches to improving meat safety in Nigeria.

Weaknesses in veterinary surveillance systems in Africa have been highlighted during recent outbreaks of infectious diseases such as Rift Valley fever and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. Conventional passive surveillance has proven largely ineffective due to poor capacity and compliance, and many countries are not able to sustain active surveillance activities. As the result, public veterinary services and the commercial livestock sector are unable to detect and respond in a timely fashion to outbreaks of new disease threats, nor to manage successfully the control of transboundary diseases, many of which remain endemic in parts of the continent. This situation not only compromises the development of livestock trade, but also creates a continuing threat to human public health since the majority of emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, shared by animals and humans. Strategies are needed to ensure that surveillance systems can meet the challenges posed by emerging infectious diseases, while recognizing the context of resource limitations. Identifying appropriate tools and incentives that encourage the full participation of both public and private actors will be critical.

Approach

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Africa Bureau has identified three specific priority areas for strengthening the capacity of African animal health disease surveillance systems to enhance early detection and reporting of infectious animal disease:

• Providing veterinary professionals a toolkit of equipment, materials and information to aid them in detecting disease in the field and collecting samples, together with developing a business strategy for creating and sustaining internationally accredited laboratory capacity for timely processing of samples from the field;
• Engaging private-sector resources and capacity to enhance disease surveillance through public-private partnerships with commercial actors and with private veterinarians; and
• Developing the capacity of AU-IBAR’s (InterAfrican Bureau of Animal Resources of the African Union) animal disease information system to strengthen national disease surveillance capacities through communication strategies providing information and training.

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) addressed these priorities through a series of activities implemented in close collaboration with AU-IBAR and other African partners from May to September 2009. Several underlying principles inform the design of the activities as stated in the USAID Africa Bureau strategy. These include:

• Ensuring the interventions are demand-driven, responding to the needs of the targeted beneficiaries, by consulting with the intended users during design and implementation;
• Assessing the feasibility and sustainability of proposed interventions based on a combination of analyses using techniques drawn from business planning and institutional economics; the former highlights the need for financial sustainability through cost-recovery where appropriate, whereas the latter focuses on understanding the incentives that motivate the targeted public and private-sector actors to participate in and sustain the interventions;
• Sustaining the knowledge component of surveillance capacity requires establishing mechanisms that provide continuous access for practitioners in the field to the most up-to-date disease information;
• Public-sector capacity will remain inadequate to ensure surveillance so mechanisms must be established to involve complementary private-sector capacity; and
• African experts are capable of providing many short-term training and technical assistance services at substantial savings of project budget.

From October 2009 to September 2011, funds that had not been spent while implementing the first set of activities were allocated to support the development of AU-IBAR’s disease reporting and knowledge base system: ARIS II. It is also supporting a major workshop in March 2011 bringing together Chief Veterinary Officers and other stakeholders from the Horn of Africa and Gulf states to explore the use of a decision support tool for Rift Valley fever control to help stabilize livestock trade.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the goal of this project is to help one million people – 179,000 families living on small 1-5 acre farms – lift themselves out of poverty through more profitable production and marketing of milk.

The project addresses the problem of cysticercosis (cysts by the tapeworm Taenia solium in pigs and humans ), involving a multidisciplinary coalition of researchers from veterinary, agricultural, human medical and social sciences in Tanzania, Mozambique and Denmark that will address four major obstacles for combating cysticercosis:

• Characterizing the disease and its risk factors and societal impact
• Increasing capacity for identifying and managing cysticercosis cases
• Identifying appropriate and sustainable “best bet” prevention and control strategies
• Promoting collaboration among the various relevant stakeholder groups

At its conclusion, the project will have raised awareness among policymakers and community leaders as well as within the affected populations and scientific, health professional and agricultural development communities in the selected countries and eastern and southern Africa region about the true extent of the problem and appropriate responses to it. These activities are intended to result in a sustainable coordinated control strategy in the form of full-fledged national and regional campaigns. This will lead to reduced incidence of cysticercosis and improved livelihoods of poor farming communities and consumers.

The project is coordinated from Denmark but all field work done by 1 post doc, 3 PhD and 6 MSc students in the partner countries Tanzania and Mozambique in close collaboration with Universities in Kenya and South Africa.

The project is funded by the Danish International Developing Agency (DANIDA) under the Danish Foreign Ministry.

The project objectives are to:

• evaluate the importance of animal source foods as sources of energy, high quality protein and bioavailable micronutrients in infants and young children consuming complementary foods in a sample of Ethiopian households; and
• characterize the animal source foods available in the same households, and the pathways by which livestock keeping influences their availability.

The field work was carried out by PhD students from Switzerland (ETH) and Ethiopia (Humboldt University, Germany).

Objectives

1. Improve national, sub-regional and regional capacity for evidence-based risk assessment approaches to enable rapid response for HPAI.
2. Improve national surveillance and reporting capacity.
3. Increase sub-regional cooperation and coordination, with regional support to undertake HPAI investigations, report disease and manage HPAI relevant information.

Summary of activities

The project objectives are addressed through a series of activities for each project location.  While the project activities have been tailored to each location, they contain a number of common elements as follows:

1. Rapidly assess existing HPAI surveillance systems
2. Develop, disseminate and train in the use of effective tools for targeting HPAI surveillance resources
3. Train in HPAI surveillance techniques, tools and approaches, including outbreak reporting and data analysis
4. Develop linkages with sub-regional and regional surveillance, disease investigation and learning networks

Expected outputs

1. HPAI surveillance systems assessed and training needs identified
2. Effective evidence-based tools for targeting HPAI surveillance resources based on risk developed
3. HPAI surveillance practitioners trained in surveillance techniques, tools and approaches
4. Knowledge base with regard to HPAI expanded through regional and sub-regional linkages

There is considerable uncertainty about timing, extent, and severity of a potential animal disease outbreak such as HPAI, yet developing countries must make critical decisions about ways to defend against a potential outbreak. Disease and control measures can have differential economic impacts on different income groups and sectors. Not all stakeholders may have the same incentive to implement/pay for control strategies for a variety of reasons. The question then is how do we choose optimal risk management efforts to reduce the risk?

The aim of this project is to increase knowledge of available methods and technologies to reduce the risk of HPAI, their effectiveness, costs, benefits, and to identify constraints to their adoption and appropriate incentives needed to ensure their use along the poultry value chains. The project has 5 workstreams: disease risk, livelihood impacts, institutional mechanism, evaluation of risk management options, and risk communication.

Mixed crop-livestock systems are very dynamic and are evolving rapidly in response to external drivers such as demographic pressure, development of urban markets and increased demand for crop and livestock products, climate variability and change. In addition, the recent interest for bio-fuel production exacerbates further the pressure on biomass in production systems.

This study aims at better understanding the tradeoffs in crop residue uses in cereal based systems in South Asia region on wheat/rice based system. The major tradeoff in most system is the short term benefits of using crop residues to feed livestock versus leaving the crop residues in the field to improve soil productivity (nutrient balance, erosion control, and soil health).

The study focuses on the decision making processes at the farm/household level and will capture the diversity/contrasts and recent changes in CR uses at various scales in order to better target technical, institutional and policy options to improve livelihood without compromising long term system sustainability.

Over the past year, ILRI in collaboration with various partners has pursued a comprehensive research agenda aimed at designing, developing and implementing market mediated index-based insurance products to protect livestock keepers from drought related asset losses they face, particularly those in the drought prone Arid and Semi Arid Lands(ASAL). For pastoralists whose livelihoods rely solely or partly on livestock, the resulting high livestock mortality rate has devastating effects on asset levels, rendering them amongst vulnerable populations in Kenya.

Index-based insurance products represent a promising and exciting innovation that could allow the benefits of insurance to protect the climate-related risks that vulnerable rural smallholder farmers and livestock keepers face. Because index insurance is based on the realization of an outcome that cannot be influenced by insurers or policy holders (such as the amount and distribution of rainfall over a season), it has relatively simple and transparent structure. This makes such products easier to administer and consequently to more cost-effective to develop, and trade. Indeed the success of several pilot programs conducted in India, and various countries in Africa and Latin America, have proven the feasibility and affordability of such products.

Much of the initial phase of the project, which included an extensive program of field work and stakeholder consultation, is now complete. The research has generated useful insights that have been used in the design of index-based livestock insurance(IBLI) products that is better targeted to the various needs of the expected clientele. Currently, an IBLI contract has been modelled, priced, tested among the target clientele and is now ready for implementation. ILRI in collaboration with partners from the public, private and non-profit sectors now plans to pilot IBLI contracts for the long rain/long dry season scanning March 2010 to September 2010 in Marsabit district.

Objectives:

• To effectively introduce index-based livestock insurance products to pastoral and agro-pastoral populations to help them manage drought-related livestock mortality.
• To learn and document the effectiveness of use of index-based livestock insurance as a tool for managing weather related perils and to incorporate lessons-learned in efforts to upscale the pilot for national rollout.

Duration: 5 Years

Location: Marsabit district, Kenya

Expected Outputs:

The expected outputs, aimed at catalyzing a commercially sustainable market for index-based livestock insurance, and understanding its possible role as a productive safety net within a larger social protection program are:

• Publications that offer insight into the conditions in which market-mediated IBLI products are possible
• IBLI products designed and related publications detailing design methods
• IBLI product piloted in Marsabit district
• The impact of IBLI adoption studied and detailed in publications.

Expected Outcome

The economic and social returns to an effective program that insures pastoral and agro-patoral population against drought-induced livestock losses can be substantial as it is expected to:

• Stabilize asset accumulation and enhance economic growth
• Crowd-in finance for ancillary investment and growth
• Stem the downward spiral of vulnerable household into poverty

Technical Partners:

• Cornell University
• Index Insurance Innovation Initiative (I4)
• Syracuse University (Maxwell School)
• University of Wisconsin (BASIS Research Program)

Implementing Partners:

• Equity Insurance Agency
• UAP Insurance Limited
• Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya
• Kenya Meteorological Department
• Ministry of Development of Northen Kenya and other Arid Lands
• Ministry of Livestock

Donors:

• Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Kenya / DFID
• USAID
• World Bank

The project is designed to bring insights and expertise from emerging fields of science, technology, and innovation to help improve efficiencies in agricultural value chains in Africa.

Meridian Institute, which leads the process, has brought together a select group of scientists and innovators from emerging fields of science and technology with African experts livestock value chains (alongside maize, cassava) to:

• identify the core bottlenecks along the target value chains,
• prioritize the importance of overcoming particular bottlenecks (based on impact on smallholder incomes, and technical, economic, and market feasibility), and
• generate and prioritize ideas for overcoming those specific constraints through innovative technology.

The project focuses primarily on technology and engineering components of the three target value chains, in particular post-harvest technologies. For livestock, the project focuses on technological enhancements and innovations that will help smallholder farmers overcome key constraints or inefficiencies in the dairy value chain, namely:

• Animal health and disease
• Milk production
• Milk quality
• Milk preservation, sanitation and transport

The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) is engaged in this process as a key partner with expertise and experience within respect to the dairy value chain. One of the project’s output goals is to develop business plans for highly promising technologies.

This new extended project goes beyond the initial one that mainly involved consumer demand analysis and takes a value chain approach starting from smallholder dairy and meat production and marketing, value addition and processing and demand in the three countries, and extends geographical coverage to Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. Within each country the project collaborates with various stakeholder organizations, both public and private, to meet the objectives of the project.

The four specific objectives of the project are to:

• Facilitate the generation and uptake of demand driven dairy and meat value chain technologies and innovations
• Promote enabling policies for enhancing value addition in the dairy and meat sub-sectors
• Facilitate policy options for enhancing the performance of the agricultural sector in the eastern and central Africa sub-region
• Strengthen capacity of smallholders and small and medium enterprises to exploit dairy and meat markets in the eastern and central Africa sub-region

Mixed crop-livestock systems are very dynamic and are evolving rapidly in response to external drivers such as demographic pressure, development of urban markets and increased demand for crop and livestock products, climate variability and change. In addition, the recent interest for bio-fuel production exacerbates further the pressure on biomass in production systems.

This study aims at better understanding the tradeoffs in crop residue uses in cereal based systems in Eastern Africa region on maize based systems.  The major tradeoff in most systems is the short term benefits of using crop residues to feed livestock versus leaving the crop residues in the field to improve soil productivity (nutrient balance, erosion control, and soil health).

The study focuses on the decision making processes at the farm/household level and will capture the diversity/contrasts and recent changes in CR uses at various scales in order to better target technical, institutional and policy options to improve livelihood without compromising long term system sustainability.

Mixed crop-livestock systems are very dynamic and are evolving rapidly in response to external drivers such as demographic pressure, development of urban markets and increased demand for crop and livestock products, climate variability and change. In addition, the recent interest for bio-fuel production exacerbates further the pressure on biomass in production systems.

This study aims at better understanding the tradeoffs in crop residue uses in cereal based systems in West Africa region on millet, sorghum, and maize based systems. The major tradeoff in most systems is the short term benefits of using crop residues to feed livestock versus leaving the crop residues in the field to improve soil productivity (nutrient balance, erosion control, and soil health).

The study focuses on the decision making processes at the farm/household level and will capture the diversity/contrasts and recent changes in CR uses at various scales in order to better target technical, institutional and policy options to improve livelihood without compromising long term system sustainability.

Mixed crop-livestock systems are very dynamic and are evolving rapidly in response to external drivers such as demographic pressure, development of urban markets and increased demand for crop and livestock products, climate variability and change. In addition, the recent interest for bio-fuel production exacerbates further the pressure on biomass in production systems.

This study aims at better understanding the tradeoffs in crop residue uses in cereal based systems in four regions: millet, sorghum, maize based systems in West Africa; maize based systems in Eastern and Southern Africa; and wheat/rice based systems in South Asia. The major tradeoff in most systems is the short term benefits of using crop residues to feed livestock versus leaving the crop residues in the field to improve soil productivity (nutrient balance, erosion control, and soil health).

The study focuses on the decision making processes at the farm/household level and will capture the diversity/contrasts and recent changes in CR uses at various scales in order to better target technical, institutional and policy options to improve livelihood without compromising long term system sustainability.

• ‘Sustainable and Profitable Banana-based Systems for the African Great Lakes Region’, led by IITA.
• ‘Enhancing the resilience of agro-ecosystems in Central Africa: a strategy to revitalize agriculture through the integration of natural resource management coupled to resilient germplasm and marketing approaches’, led by TSBF-CIAT.
• ‘Building Impact Pathways for Improving Livelihoods in Musa-based Systems in Central Africa’, led by Bioversity International

As the above projects proposed to operate largely in the same parts of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with similar national partner institutes, and due to the complimentary nature of the activities proposed, above institutes agreed to operate as a consortium to ensure cooperation and complementarity and avoid technical and financial duplication at the national level. The Consortium for Improving Agriculture-based Livelihoods in Central Africa (CIALCA) brings together national, regional and international partners to focus their resources on improving the livelihoods of people recovering from decades of civil conflicts. CIALCA is implemented by the National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS) of Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in collaboration with the three CG centres listed above.

CIALCA-I and CIALCA-II

In its first phase, CIALCA has succeeded in characterizing the target areas, developing and evaluating technologies for improved productivity of banana- and legume-based systems, in promoting improved nutrition and farmer-market linkages, in building capacity, mainly of national system scientists and farmer groups, and in initiating partnerships to reach scale.

CIALCA 1 focused on:

• Adopting an Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) approach.
• Enhancing banana productivity using cultivars displaying tolerance/resistance to pests and diseases, drought and climate variability.
• Exploiting synergy between bananas and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF).
• Optimizing banana planting arrangement and management
• Exploiting the complementarity of intercropped banana and perennial coffee.
• Using zero-tillage and mulching to help overcome various agronomic constraints.
• Using soil and water conservation technologies.
• Mitigating the impact of BBTV and Xanthomonas wilt
• Banana and plantain germplasm characterisation in eastern DR Congo
• Training and extension work on banana technologies
• Exchange visits and field days to promote use of new varieties, fertilizer, crop management issues, and other aspects of CIALCA technologies.
• Surveys demonstrating links between health, nutrition, and agriculture and the development / distribution of human nutrition training manuals and brochures (English, French and Swahili )
• Establishing linkages with 20 externally funded ‘projects’.
• Planning further expansion of CIALCA communication efforts and tools through a Burundi-based Knowledge Resource Centre (support for this confirmed by GTZ CIM programme- to start September 2010).

Currently CIALCA has moved into its second phase (2009-2011). The goal of CIALCA-II is ‘to improve the livelihoods of agriculture-based communities in Central Africa by enhancing their capacity to access and efficiently use the resources needed to improve system productivity, resulting in a better income, nutrition, and environment’. The specific livelihood dimensions targeted by the project are enhanced crop productivity and, directly related with this, improved nutrition, higher income, superior knowledge, and a better production environment.  CIALCA-II aims at achieving impact at scale through activation of impact pathways with partners along the entire value chain.

The project has recently conducted its mid term review

However, the banana system adapted to a slowly-changing, village-based economy is under stress.  Throughout the basin, farm size has declined, the area under annual cropping has increased, natural grazing lands have been converted to agriculture and production has become increasingly market-oriented.  The result is a decline in soil fertility, particularly for poor-resource households, and nutrient mining.  Pest problems have also increased, especially at lower altitudes. This is a serious challenge for future generations of rural households who face, in addition, increasing costs of fossil fuel, increased temperatures and more irregular rainfall due to climate change, on-going impacts of HIV-AIDS and outmigration of youth in search of more interesting career challenges.

The purpose of this grant, funded by the Austrian Development Association (ADA), is to improve food security, income and natural resource quality of resource-poor young households through banana agroforests, associated animal production and carbon accumulation adapted to changing climates and social conditions.  Austrian and Ugandan scientists and students in collaboration with Bioversity International have begun an action research partnership with field organizations and rural communities in three pilot sites in Central Uganda with the following outputs:

• Methods piloted for strengthening young farmer groups organized for improved production and marketing of bananas, small ruminants and trees;
• Prototype for banana agroforests linked to small ruminant production developed and validated by young farmers in collaboration with field technicians and scientists;
• Biological interactions identified for designing and managing more efficient, resilient and resistant banana agroforests linked to small ruminant production
• Experiences of banana agroforest prototypes reviewed, adapted and extrapolated by farmers, field technicians, scientists and policy-makers

Project stakeholders have ratified issues of common interest, identified scientists and begun to develop partnership approaches for working effectively with local farmer experimentation groups.This was achieved through an initial diagnostic field visit and an inaugural workshop with the participation of over 25 scientists, field technicians and research and development directors. The work has facilitated detailed activity planning for 2010 in all four outputs, which will include: a baseline characterization of household livelihood strategies; a participatory market study; the establishment of farmer experimentation and learning groups with their respective ruminant and fodder modules and banana mother gardens; field studies of soil microbiology and resource partitioning among bananas and trees; a follow-up training and planning workshop, and the design of a grant website.

The overall project objectives are as follows: (i) Mycotoxin severity evaluated at key points in the selected maize and groundnuts value chains in East and West Africa. (ii) Identify and adapt low cost mycotoxin control methods that can be scaled and commercialized by traders for reducing mycotoxin contamination along the food and feed chain; (iii) Evaluate the cost-effectiveness of these mycotoxin control methods for reducing risk at critical control points for different actors along the crop food value chain using a risk analysis framework; (iv) Overcome market, institutional and policy failures which inhibit adoption of cost-effective mycotoxin control methods; (v) Chain actor and consumer awareness of mycotoxin risks raised in maize and ground nut market chains in East and West Africa (vi) Promote the adoption of effective mycotoxin testing and control strategies. These objectives provide the foundation for meeting our vision of success by combining targeted applied research with pilot testing and participatory approaches to ensure that we can identify the critical control points along the whole feed/food value chain and that we understand what is needed to provide incentives to the actors along the value chain, including poor smallholders, to adopt effective control measures for reducing mycotoxins in maize and groundnuts.  

1. Initial situation

Potato and sweet potato based agricultural systems in East Africa are predicted to experience considerable negative impacts of climate change. The IPCC Fourth Assessment emphasizes that adaptation strategies are essential. However, addressing adaptation in the context of small-scale, semi-subsistence agriculture raises special challenges. An important constraint is that data demands are high, because site-specific bio-physical and economic data are required. The development of relatively simple methods for ex ante evaluation of adaptation at the household and system levels is therefore needed.

2. Approach of the project

This project is using the Tradeoff Analysis methodology to evaluate the impacts of new potato and sweet potato technologies and enabling policies to help East African farmers to adapt to climate change. In a multi disciplinary collaboration between CIP scientists, stakeholders and collaborators in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Europe and the US, the project will develop climate change adaptation strategies using innovations in potato- and sweet potato technologies that have been shown to increase resilience of agricultural systems and reduce vulnerability of poor farm households to climate change.

3. Major results achieved

Stakeholder workshops in the three project countries revealed the most important vulnerability indicators of the agricultural systems at hand. Farmers, scientists and local policy makers furthermore identified already existing or possible future adaptation strategies in the context of climate change. The multi disciplinary research teams in the project have been trained in using the Tradeoff Analysis methodology and the first available datasets are currently being analyzed.

4. Expected impact

Specific outputs include:
1) Regionally-specific technology and policy strategies to reduce vulnerability of poor farm households to climate change;
2) Enhanced national and international capacity to utilize new research methods for analyzing impacts of technologies and policies affecting farmers’ adaptation to climate change;
3) Policy impact pathways identified and actual and expected policy changes assessed.

Websites:

www.cipotato.org/regions/CIP-SSA/Home.html

www.tradeoffs.oregonstate.edu

Focus:  The project will achieve its purpose through research activities that produce the following three research results:-

1.  Knowledge synthesized and disseminated to researchers and planners to guide managers in making optimal choices with respect to the direct and indirect impacts of climate variability and change for the agricultural sector in ECA.

 2. An innovation system that will enable the Meteorological and Agricultural research and extension systems to jointly realize their potential through the formation of learning alliances and knowledge exchange systems for mainstreaming climate risk management research established and promoted.

3. Tested and proven strategies and tools that address priority ASARECA Programme concerns and provide an enhanced understanding of climate induced risks demonstrated and promoted through “Proof of Concept” projects in selected ASARECA countries.

This project has been developed by a consortium of research and implementation organizations spanning the health, veterinary, wildlife and vector communities in Kenya. Our organizations have experienced challenges in the prediction and prevention of emerging diseases and believe that our performance can be improved by better integration of surveillance, research and response. In developing such an integrated system, we plan to focus on the surveillance, research and response to Rift Valley fever (RVF) as an initial concrete example. RVF prediction and prevention has involved all key actors in this consortium and has the attention of the public and senior decision makers in East Africa. Our consortium plans to develop a network of surveillance, diagnostic, knowledge management and decision making platforms linked by key tasks. This network will be effective at improving the prediction and prevention of RVF and other arboviruses as well as serving as a model that can be applied and expanded to other emerging diseases in Kenya and more broadly in East Africa and elsewhere.

Research status
Genetic Diversity: NLRI has worked a project of genetic diversity of Korean native chicken using molecular markers since 2002. The comparison of genetic diversity among indigenous livestock was performed during last RDA and ILRI collaboration project.  The AVIADIV project in European Union performed studied 52 populations join Europe, Africa and China.  Nine MS- marker for population test and 147 MS-marker for comprehensive mapping were announced in US poultry genomic project.

Disease Resistance: Mx gene was identified to regulate post transcriptional viral protein synthesis in mice (Haller et al. 1987).  Various cellular regulatory enzymes were reported to affect viral replication (Mellen et al. 1994).  In chicken, 631^{s t} position base of Mx gene has been associated with increased to influenza infection (Ko et al. 2002).  To reduce the impact of AI epidemics in domestic chicken, ILRI made international research consortium to identify the chicken innate genetic factors that influence AI infection, pathogenesis and transmission.

Gaps in Korean research
Genetic Diversity: Classification of Korean native chicken is based on morphology while characterization base on genetic information is missing.

Disease Resistance: Migratory birds have supposedly plaid an important role in the expansion of current avian influenza virus such as H5N1 epidemics, but very limited research has been carried out to understand these diseases in Korea.  There is little research projects to discover the genetic factors to affecting virus resistance and susceptibility of host animal.

The specific objectives are:

1. To investigate the role of women in the production, processing and trade of livestock and animal-source foods (ASF) in informal markets using a case study in Nigeria.
2. To better understand collective action by women in informal markets for livestock and ASF: in particular the extent of women’s participation in collective action, associated benefits and costs, differential participation relative to men and barriers to participation for women.
3. To identify the main food quality and safety problems for important animal source foods informally marketed by women.
4. To develop and test a collective action strategy based on the positive deviance model for overcoming these problems

There are commercial feeds that farmers could use to feed their pigs but these are expensive and thus unaffordable by many farmers. Alternative feedstuffs are available locally that farmers could use as pig feeds. The challenge, therefore, is how to formulate cheaper alternative pig feeds that combine commercial and local ingredients to improve the overall performance of the animals.

Local pork butchers are the main market channels for pigs, but farmers are often exploited by these buyers. There is no system in place for farmers to accurately determine the weight of the pigs at sale and thus get better value for their pigs. The commonly used method of estimating the weight by “just looking” at the pig is highly unreliable and provides biased weight estimates.

The project is led by the University of Guelph, and work is being implemented as PhD research projects for Florence Mutua, a graduate fellow with the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) who is registered at the University of Nairobi, and a student at the University of Guelph.

Specific objectives

• Describe rural pig management practices in western Kenya and explore farmers’ beliefs, perceptions and attitudes towards rural pig keeping.
• Develop and validate weight estimation models for pigs using length and girth body measurements.
• Describe productivity indices for rural sows.
• Investigate the potential sources of pig feed, seasonal effects on feeding and feeding limitations.
• Compare the efficiency of the different pig feeding regimes (sources and frequencies) used by farmers.
• Develop a manual for training of farmers and local livestock and health officers.
• Assess farmer post-training uptake of knowledge on pig management, sow productivity and the pork tapeworm.

Anticipated outcomes

• Development of a weight estimation tool
• Capacity strengthening of local livestock extension staff
• Knowledge on feed sources and weight performance of rural pigs
• Baseline information on the reproductive performance of sows raised in western Kenya

This collaborative project represents the second phase of a regional research project titled “Improving the management of trypanocide resistance in the cotton zone of West Africa: A coordinated regional study”.   The first phase focused on adapting methods and evaluating the extent of resistance to trypanocides in northeast Guinea, southern Mali and southwest Burkina Faso, and testing integrated control strategies that would reduce the risk of emerging drug resistance.

The second phase of the project builds on these results to evaluate resistance and raise awareness and capacity to address the problem across much of the rest of the zone, and scale up the prevention strategies developed during the first phase.

The second phase also consolidates the results achieved to date, closing the circle from problem identification to development and dissemination of appropriate responses to resistance and establishing the capacity across the cotton zone to support and sustain those responses.

Appropriate strategies are being developed for containing — and, if possible, reversing — trypanocide drug resistance in the pockets characterized in Phase 1. A specific study is being undertaken to assess the impact of the efforts to date to understand and address the problem of drug resistance.

Expected outputs

• Evaluation of suspected “hot spots” and risk communication of trypanocide resistance in at least two other countries across the cotton zone.  This output will build the capacity of national agencies to use the diagnostic tools developed during Phase 1, while at the same time raising awareness of the problem and motivating dissemination of the best-bet prevention strategies. Additional surveillance techniques based on genetic markers will be validated.
• Best-bet strategies for preventing trypanocide resistance widely disseminated and supported.  The project will facilitate the uptake and dissemination of knowledge and media tools developed during Phase 1 by appropriate partners in the public, private, and civil sectors, including policy makers, to ensure livestock keepers have access to support for continued use of trypanocides while minimizing the risk of developing resistance.
• Best-bet integrated strategies for containment and reversal of resistance evaluated. Trials of resistance containment strategies will be conducted in hot spots identified in Phase 1. Mathematical models will be extended to better understand resistance genesis and decay, and make confident recommendations for resistance containment outside the study area.
• The impact of research and development investments in controlling trypanocide resistance assessed.  An impact assessment component is proposed to evaluate investments made to date to improve the management of resistance and their contribution to the ultimate goal, as stated above, considering both the sequence of research activities over the past ten years and the scaling up dissemination of knowledge products taking place in Output 2.
• National and regional capacity further enhanced to support the monitoring and control of trypanocide resistance.

The objectives of the project are:

1. To provide local and synchronized access to data and analysis tools independent of network resources

2. To establish a system for automatic update of genomics databases

3. To organize courses and training material to support ‘training of trainers’ activities at national and regional levels

The proposed project will be based on identified priority needs of African scientists. An important output of the project will be the development of linkages between African scientists with a global bioinformatics network.

It aims to develop climate change scenarios for the next 100 years on a regional/local scale for Sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, Ethiopia) and their impact on land use systems. The project aims at achieving ready-to-use scenarios and recommendations for agroforestry and silvopastoral ecosystems on a highly-resolved spatial scale. Ocean-atmosphere coupled global circulation models (GCM) will be used as the basis for downscaling onto a regional and local level. Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Transfer(SVAT)-models for a plot scale will be used to simulate competition of plants for space, PAR radiation, water and nutrients.

The capacity of the plant to cope with different environments will be estimated by measured and modeled leaf water potential.Present vegetation structure and function will be determined by means of remote- ensing and ground based measurements. Their future distribution will be derived from their habitat requirements and climate scenarios. Current forms of agriculture and livestock husbandry practices will be evaluated in the specific regions and confronted with future climate scenario conditions.

The project is structured into the following eight subprojects keeping modelling and measurement components as key categories.

Subproject I: Present and future climate at a local scale;

Subproject II: 3D SVAT-models for quantifying interaction of multiple plants;

Subproject III: Energy balance model for ruminants in their outdoor environment;Subproject IV: Large-scale distribution of vegetation structures;

Subproject V: Small-scale structures of vegetation;

Subproject VI: Physiological parameters of woody and crop plants;

Subproject VII: 3-D-radiation field in different land use systems; and

Subproject VIII: Animal husbandry, fodder plants and nutrient budgets.Outputs for this project correspond to the above sub-projects. They are as follows.

Output 1: Atmospheric models for short term forecasts and long term projections for regional and local scales;

Output 2: Adaptation of SVAT-models to local vegetation types

Output 3: Energy budget model for ruminant units in their different environments

Output 4: Digital maps of vegetation distribution and environmental factors on larger scales

Output 5: Digital maps of biophysical structures of individual plants on a small scale

Output 6: Data base of leaf water potentials, of sap flows and of photosynthetic respond curves for different plants

Output 7: Set of values for 3D-short and long wave radiation within vegetation types; and

Output 8: Data base of energy of fodder-plants and the contribution of excrements to soil fertilization