Overview of holistic application of biogas for small scale farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Report of a workshop on opportunities for fish marketing and handling initiatives that benefit traditional fishing communities in India. Chennai, India, 18-19 March, 1997

How can traditional fishing communities in India improve their fish marketing and processing practices to earn higher incomes? Can they adopt any new practices or initiatives, learning from past experiences and success stories in India or neighbouring Sri Lanka? What are the issues that need to be addressed? These questions were discussed at a workshop held in Chennai, India, on 18-19 March, 1997. As preparation for the workshop, a number of studies had been carried out by various organizations in India. These were funded by the Post-Harvest Fisheries Research Programme of the Renewable Natural Resources Research Strategy of the UK's Department for International Development (DFID). The project was managed by the UK's Natural Resources Institute (NRI). The workshop discussed preliminary conclusions from these studies, also the related experiences of some other organizations in India and Sri Lanka. It was attended by representatives of NGOs and fishing community organizations, government bodies, development agencies and research institutes as well as by private traders and market researchers. This document reports on the workshop's proceedings, the technical papers presented, and the discussions they led to. It also presents the findings of three Working Groups of workshop participants that discussed (a) fish marketing issues and their implications for fishing communities in South India; (b) dried fish processing and marketing on India's east coast; and (c) actions government organizations must take with respect to strategic policy and research issues on fish marketing. It is hoped that this workshop report will lead to wider awareness of the case studies and issues discussed at the workshop, and to informed debate and discussion on them. And more importantly, to new and successful initiatives, and more widespread use of currently successful initiatives, concerning marketing and handling activities by traditional fishing communities

Agro-environmental project duration and effectiveness in South-east Asia

Considerable emphasis has been placed on developing technologies for agricultural sustainability. Many bilateral projects are working to achieve this outcome. A desk review was conducted to study the importance of project duration for the effectiveness of sustainable agricultural projects. Longer-duration projects were successful in addressing more holistic issues than short projects. However, funding agencies tend to fund shorter-duration projects, so projects become progressively shorter. At the same time, the number of projects implemented each year is increasing. Despite the decrease in total development assistance, increases in project numbers, particularly since 1986, appear to be at the cost of project duration. Short project duration was one of the most cited reasons for not completing essential dissemination activities for wider adoption, whereas longer- duration projects were usually considered more successful in addressing more holistic issues. It is difficult to produce tangible outputs from agricultural and soil conservation projects within five years. Considering the slow changes in the system and in agricultural and environmental sustainability, the authors suggest that project developers should be advised to plan for a minimum of 5–10 years, depending on the nature of activities. It is time for funding agencies to reconsider their tendency to fund shorter-duration projects

Queuing-Inventory Models with MAP Demands and Random Replenishment Opportunities

Combining the study of queuing with inventory is very common and such systems are referred to as queuing-inventory systems in the literature. These systems occur naturally in practice and have been studied extensively in the literature. The inventory systems considered in the literature generally include (s, S)-type. However, in this paper we look at opportunistic-type inventory replenishment in which there is an independent point process that is used to model events that are called opportunistic for replenishing inventory. When an opportunity (to replenish) occurs, a probabilistic rule that depends on the inventory level is used to determine whether to avail it or not. Assuming that the customers arrive according to a Markovian arrival process, the demands for inventory occur in batches of varying size, the demands require random service times that are modeled using a continuous-time phase-type distribution, and the point process for the opportunistic replenishment is a Poisson process, we apply matrix-analytic methods to study two of such models. In one of the models, the customers are lost when at arrivals there is no inventory and in the other model, the customers can enter into the system even if the inventory is zero but the server has to be busy at that moment. However, the customers are lost at arrivals when the server is idle with zero inventory or at service completion epochs that leave the inventory to be zero. Illustrative numerical examples are presented, and some possible future work is highlighted

What is the potential for biogas digesters to improve soil carbon sequestration in Sub-Saharan Africa? Comparison with other uses of organic residues

Acknowledgments We are very grateful to the UK Department for International Development (DFID) New and Emerging Technologies Research Call for funding this work. PS is a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder.Peer reviewedPostprin