Role of ICRISAT in Nigeria seed industry development

The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is a nonprofit, non-political organization that conducts agricultural research for development in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with a wide array of partners throughout the world. Covering 6.5 million square km of land in 55 countries, the Semi-arid or Dryland Tropics has over 2 billion people, and 644 million of these are the poorest of the poor. ICRISAT and its partners help empower these poor people to overcome poverty, hunger and a degraded environment through better agriculture. ICRISAT is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) consortium. The CGIAR is an informal association of countries, international organisations, and private institutions. It is cosponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The CGIAR`s main objectives are to sustain food security in developing countries through support to the international agricultural research systems..

Paths to Fisheries Subsidies Reform: Creating Sustainable Fisheries Through Trade and Economics

The world depends on the oceans for food and livelihood. More than a billion people worldwide depend on fish as a source of protein, including some of the poorest populations on earth. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world must produce 70 percent more food to meet coming hunger needs.Fishing activities support coastal communities and hundreds of millions of people who depend on fishing for all or part of their income. Of the world's fishers, more than 95 percent engage in small-scale and artisanal activity and catch nearly the same amount of fish for human consumption as the highly capitalized industrial sector. Small-scale and artisanal fishing produces a greater return than industrial operations by unit of input, investment in catch, and number of people employed.Today, overfishing and other destructive fishing practices have severely decreased the world's fish populations. The FAO estimates that 90 percent of marine fisheries worldwide are now overexploited, fully exploited, significantly depleted, or recovering from overexploitation

'The claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the age of ambivalent internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.Accepted manuscrip

Ghana TRIPS Over the TRIPS Agreement on Plant Breeders' Rights

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Thaddeus Manu, 'Ghana Trips Over the TRIPS Agreement on Plant Breeders' Rights', African Journal of Legal Studies, Vol 9 (1): 20-45, July 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 31 July 2019. The final, published version is available online at doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/17087384-12342070. Published by BRILL.The premise under which the global IP system is validated has often focused on a traditional materialistic approach. While this seems to find legitimate support in economic reasoning, such a fundamental view also appears to contradict a related social norm claim which dictates that society ought to be shaped by appropriate values rather than economic rubrics. Although Ghana is not a signatory member of the UPOV Convention, there is explicit evidence that the PBRs Bill under consideration in Parliament contains provisions modelled on the UPOV Act 1991 rather than the potentially flexible and “effective sui generis system” in TRIPS. This paper aims to contribute to a recently active area of discussion on the topic by examining the consequences of stringent legislation on PBRs in the absence of adequate safeguard measures to protect public interests. Consequently, the hypothesis of this paper rests on the argument that every system needs checks and balances and the legislative system is no exception; therefore, social policy matters must be integrated into the so-called PBRs Bill in order not to undervalue public interests. To conclude, the author presents an argument based on a logical balance that ought to be found on the path to promulgating such legislation.Peer reviewe

Power in global agriculture: economics, politics, and natural resources

Recent events, such as the 2008 food price crisis, have focussed global attention on the agriculture and food sectors. In particular, many countries have become increasingly concerned with the issue of ensuring the security of their food supply and one key element of this is who has power within the food supply chain. Through examining three dimensions of power – Economic, Political, and Natural Resources – this paper explores where power currently lies in world agriculture and how this might change in the future. Whilst recognising that power is a somewhat abstract concept, through a process of deriving potential indicators, a picture of the distribution of power is drawn. These indicators were also used to develop a simple 'global power index'. The power index indicates that the US and the EU dominate world agriculture in terms of economics and politics, but are potentially vulnerable in terms of their possession of natural resources. On the other hand, the emerging economies have lower political and corporate power, but seem better placed in terms of natural resources. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the main food producing regions

Trends in first union formation in post-Soviet Central Asia

This study used recently available survey data to examine trends in the rate of first union formation in the post-Soviet Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. For the first time, it shows that the rate of first union formation in each republic is much lower than the Soviet-era level at the end of the 1980s. These results have three implications. First, they complement the literature on Central and Eastern Europe by illustrating the scale of post-socialist demographic change in very different cultural and demographic context. Second, post-Soviet Tajikistan and Uzbekistan here provide interesting examples of countries experiencing dramatic declines in first union formation in a conservative Moslem setting and at the same time as an increase in religiosity and a decrease in female higher education enrolment. Third, more generally, they serve to illustrate profound changes in demographic behaviour during dramatic social and economic change