Building Resilience to Drought in the Sahel by Early Risk Identification and Advices

Agriculture in the Sahel region is characterized by traditional techniques and is strongly dependent on climatic conditions and rainfall. As a consequence of recurrent droughts in East and West Africa, integrated famine Early Warning Systems (EWS) have been established in order to produce and disseminate coherent and integrated information for prevention and management of food crises. Since the early 1990s, analysis tools and simulation models based on satellite meteorological data have been developed to support Multidisciplinary Working Groups (MWG) in cropping season monitoring. However, many of these tools are now obsolete from the IT perspective or ineffective due to unavailability of regularly updated meteorological data. To ensure a long-term sustainability of operational systems for drought risk zones identification CNR-IBIMET has developed 4Crop, a coherent Open Source web-based Spatial Data Infrastructure to treat all input and output data in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The 4Crop system has been conceived as a multipurpose tool in order to provide different categories of stakeholder, from farmers to policy makers, with effective and useful information for climate risk reduction and drought resilience improvement. Advice to farmers is a fundamental component of prevention that can allow a better adaptation of traditional cropping systems to climatic variability. Past experiences show that agro-meteorological information and weather forecasts can play a key role for food security, reducing the vulnerability of farmers, strengthening rural production systems and increasing crop yields. A participatory and cross-disciplinary approach is essential to build farmers' trust and to develop effective integration between scientific and local knowledge to increase the rate of dissemination and utilization of advice

Assessing the Sustainability of Horticultural Farms in Central Senegal: An Adaptation of the IDEA Method

This paper evaluates the sustainability of the different forms of horticulture farms (individual and collective) in the Groundnut Basin of Senegal using an adapted version of the IDEA method to the Senegal context. Results show that collective farms have higher sustainability scores than individual farms. Also, collective farms are more sustainable in the agroecological scale while individual farms are more sustainable in the economic scale. Results also suggest that although IDEA can be adapted to both individual and collective horticulture farms of Senegal, there is a need to include a fourth scale that will integrate the institutional and organizational features of collective farms as well as the socio-political and research context that can enable or hinder the adoption of sustainable farm practices

Sahelian food crisis forecast systems

AP3A, SV

THE ESTIMATION OF THE HERBACEOUS BIOMASS IN THE SAHELIANS PASTORAL ZONES USING A GIS

peer reviewedIn the Sahel region the pastorals resources are strongly linked to the fluctuation of the biomass production and as well as the breeding systems, which are based on the transhumance and the nomadism as well. In the present study, an integrated approach of multi-source, multi-type and multi-scales data analysis in the pastoral zone in Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger and Chad has been developed using PC-Arc/Info and Arc/View potentialities for the purpose of Sahelian rangeland production estimation.AP3

Mapping of the Crop Production System Zones of the IGAD Region

Food security monitoring requires effective crop status assessment and yield forecasting methodologies and tools. Such tools need to build on a thorough knowledge of the crop production systems of the region under monitoring. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) published in 1995 a database of the Crop production system zones (CPSZ) of the seven member states of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). This paper presents the main characteristics of a new version under development: database improvements and the methodology to define the new crop production system zones.JRC.DG.G.3-Monitoring agricultural resource

Les aptitudes agricoles et pastorales des sols dans les pays du CILSS

projet Alerte Précoce et Prévision des Productions Agricoles (AP3A

Vulnerability Assessment for Food Crisis Management in the Sahel Region

In the Sahel region the unfavourable climatic conditions and the natural resources degradation are recognised to be the main constraints affecting the agricultural productivity; nevertheless more complex and less evident causes of food insecurity of population groups need to be investigated