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Friday, January 15, 2016

Research community builds momentum for climate action after COP21

The historic Paris Agreement at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) last December has set the tone for the implementation of nationally determined contributions submitted to the UNFCCC.

From this year, countries would be expected to put their climate proposals into action – major areas include adaptation, mitigation and finance.

In sub-Saharan Africa, natural and human systems are under the threat of climate change.

There are challenges to the continent’s dominant rain-fed agriculture, sustainability of urban areas, overstretched health services, water resources management and energy resources.

Research findings indicate that the length of growing period of most crops in expected to drop below 90 days in the Sahel region, heightening the insecurity of agricultural productivity and livelihoods of smallholder farmers.

In Ghana for instance, food insecurity is predicted with a decline in yields of 5-25% between 2000 and 2050 and a projected revenue drop of 17-32%.
This a major issue requiring the attention of researchers, policy makers and politicians.

“Improving the understanding of the vulnerability of socially disadvantaged rural and urban dwellers, and critical social services will require sound climate change and adaptation policies,” says Prof. William Otoo Ellis, Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).

He observed climate change awareness is often missing in sectoral developmental policies and strategies as “some policies to the benefit of one sector have been to the detriment of the other”.

A research centre within the KNUST, West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), is hosting a consultative workshop on this important national and global issue of climate change.

It provides an opportunity to review existing knowledge gap in the subject, build research networking capacity and ultimately provide climate change research update for policy action.

Prof. Samuel Nii Odai, Director of KNUST WASCAL-CCLU, says the workshop is exploring Ghana’s priority issues in climate change, research agenda in the short to long term and public-private collaborations.

“We know government is doing its part but we believe that as a university we need to take that initiative… if these things are not properly covered in terms of generating new knowledge for where we live, that is in Ghana and to put these in our policy briefs, what it means is that government agencies will not even understand what is happening and how to respond,” he noted.

Prof. Odai says the workshop has the advantage of drawing inputs from the Paris Agreement for local implementation of action plans.

“We are at the downstream so we are benefitting from the knowledge generated in other countries. We are actually riding on knowledge that has been made available; we are going to work on concrete information which have been deliberated on and more synthesized,” he said.

He added that it has become critical for the country to be ready for the worse scenario of climate change in the near future.

Prof. Jerome Omotosho of the Department of Meteorology and Climate Change at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria, has charged governments in Africa to commit resource to research and development, if the continent is to win in tackling the phenomenon of climate change.

He says the threats posed by climate change to local economies require substantial increase in budgetary allocation to tackle environmental degradation.


“No research, no development,” he said.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Consolidating agricultural productivity through efficient innovation platforms

Ghana has developed over 30 agricultural technologies since the West African Agricultural Productivity Programme (WAAPP) was initiated in 2007.

WAAPP’s development objective is to generate and disseminate improved technologies in the country’s top priority commodities in root and tuber crops, specifically, cassava, yam, sweet potato and cocoyam.

WAAPP Ghana has the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) as its implementing agency.

Under the implementation of the first phase of the Programme, researchers at the CSIR-Crops Research Institute in Kumasi – the designated National Centre of Specialization – have developed diverse crop varieties and agricultural technologies.

However, the rate of transfer and adaptation of these technologies remains low along the agricultural value chain, observed Augustine Danquah of WAAPP’s Coordination Unit at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

This is because the project did not develop a comprehensive action plan to scale up technologies and best practices during the implementation of the first phase.
Director of CSIR-CRI, Dr. Stella Ennin, has acknowledged there have been gaps in previous participatory approaches to research.

She says the previous approach placed emphasis on farmers and extension whilst others in the value chain were placed in the background.

Adopting the innovation platform and Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IR4D) approaches, according to Dr. Ennin, is critical in engaging all key players long the agricultural value chain, including processes, traders and marketers.

“Usually we are able to move forward when there are projects in agriculture; what happens in the absence of projects?” she quizzed. “We should be able to incorporate this concept of innovation platforms and IR4D into our agricultural and extension system, so that whether there is a project or not, we’ll be able to move our agriculture forward”.

Innovative platforms give room for interest groups to discuss issues around a particular commodity or cropping system, especially with the view to adopting improved technologies.

Under the second phase of WAAPP, the platforms are being promoted to consolidate the gains by disseminating the develop technologies for widespread adoption.

WAAPP is collaborating with the International Centre for development oriented Research in Agriculture (ICRA) to build capacity of innovative platform facilitators in 15 districts in the country on soft skills to deepen the approach at the local level.

ICRA’s Benjamin Horlali Kofi Atidjah says technical skills must be complemented with soft skills to accelerate the adoption of agricultural technologies.
The second phase of WAAPP will be implemented from 2012-2017 with an amount of $60million to scale-up the generation, dissemination and adoption of improved technologies in the participating countries’ priority agricultural commodity areas.

“What we need to do right now is to move the innovation platforms beyond the community level; we should be able to establish innovation platform at the regional level and the national level for certain commodities… to improve on our food security and also on our exports,” said Dr. Stella Ennin.


The two-phase 10-year programme is funded by the World Bank and involves three countries – Ghana, Mali and Senegal.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Interview: Forest Plantation Development in Ghana

Ghana has over a million hectares of land for forest plantation development.

Under the country’s Forest Plantation Strategy, a total of 500,000 hectares of forest plantation would be established and managed over a 25 year period – 2015 to 2040.

But the menace of deforestation remains a major concern for Ghana.

Whilst the forest plantation strategy promotes efficient management of forest resources and nurturing of new trees, the implementation of the REDD Plus initiative also promotes tree planting with incentives to local communities.

Kofi Adu Domfeh spoke to Mr. Kwabena Nketia, Programmes Director at Tropenbos International Ghana (TBI), on wider stakeholders’ buy-in of the initiatives.

TBI is a not-for-profit organization at the forefront of forest protection and economic empowerment of forest dependent communities.

Mr. Nketia first explains whether Ghana is winning in the drive to protect and restore forests.

Listen to audio report…




Friday, January 8, 2016

Audio Report: Farmers embrace agronomic technologies for sustainable yam production

Yam is a major food crop with high export value for Ghana.

But like many other crops, its production is under the threat of climate change as farmers experience poor rains in recent times.

Ghanaian researchers are however promoting the use of mechanized ridging to reduce drudgery in yam production.

They explain the improved agronomic technology is climate resilient and gender-sensitive to sustain yam production in the face of climate change.

The farm is the classroom where the farmers and research scientists get themselves busy with the soil to learn how to better produce yam for higher income.

Kofi Adu Domfeh spoke to farmers and researchers at a farm in Nyomoase in the Atebubu-Amantin Municipality of the Brong Ahafo Region and filed this report…




Monday, January 4, 2016

Agronomic technologies for sustainable yam production in the face of climate change

Farmers at Nyomoase in the Atebubu-Amantin Municipality of the Brong Ahafo Region are happy to embrace an improved technology in yam production.

The farm is the classroom where the farmers and research scientists get themselves busy with the soil to learn how to better produce yam for higher income and reduction in drudgery.

At the end of eight months in field activities – planting and assessment of vegetative stage, an examination is undertaken by way of harvest and evaluation of the differences in crop yields between an introduced improved technology and the farmers’ practice.

Sumaila Rufai, a 32 year-old father of four, is enthused at the new knowledge of generating multiple planting materials of seed yam.

“We have been very wasteful with the use of seed yams,” he observed. “For instance, instead of planting a seed on one mound, now I know I can do that on 4-5 mounds”.

This and other best agronomic practices are off-shoots of the technology introduced to the farmers.

The participatory approach is the best to encourage farmers to adopt new agricultural technologies, according to research scientists from the Crops Research Institute (CRI) of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The introduction of the “Improved Agronomic Technologies for Sustainable Yam Production” involves the use of mechanized ridges and minimum staking per unit area, dubbed “trellis”, as well as fertilizer application on continuously cropped fields.

“…and you can see the yield as we weigh is about 35-50percent increase on the ridges as compared to the farmers’ practice and you can see the sprout rate was better on the ridges as compared to the mounds,” noted Eric Owusu Danquah, a Yam Agronomist leading the project.

The Project is under the West Africa Agriculture Productivity Programme (WAAPP), funded by the World Bank. Trials are taking place on selected farmers’ fields within Ejuraand Atebubu-Amantin yam producing agro-ecological zones of Ghana. .

The five-year project ends in 2017 and already the technology developers are satisfied with the rate of adoption.

Hannah Adade is a 65-year old mother of seven. She has been supporting her husband in yam production for over 40 years, long enough to appreciate the benefits of the improved production technology.

“We have more yield now growing yam on ridges than with mounds,” she said. “I encourage other farmers to come on board to also benefit”.

The use of the mechanized ridges reduces drudgery, which encourages women like Madam Hannah to venture into yam production for improved livelihoods.
Yam is a major food crop and Ghana is a lead exporter of the commodity.

Generally, yam produced with mounds give larger tubers but it is difficult to meet the export market requirements.  Ridges however give sizable weight for export and also help in preservation.

The researchers are collaborating with the Ministry of Food and Agriculture to fabricate and make available Mechanized Ridgers at vantage points to ease farmers’ access to go into production.

At Nyomoase, the farmers and researchers took the risk of planting the yam in drought, as the rains failed to pour in June and July, 2015.

“Even planting in drought you can see that the yields are still better,” said Mr. Owusu Danquah after harvesting the yam in December, touting the climate-reliance of the technology.

Farmers, traditionally, are inclined to clear new fields for yam production, in which process they contribute to deforestation and depletion of carbon sinks that eventually leads to climate change.

“We are encouraging farmers to plant on continuously cropped fields and that means they’ll not open up new areas, so at least we have our carbon sinks intact; and this is a technology which uses ropes and few stakes, so the farmers do not have to fell trees for staking. So this is climate resilient,” Mr. Owusu Danquah said.

Ghanaian farmers, like many others in Sub-sahara Africa, rely heavily on the rains to produce food.

The poor downpour in 2015 severely affected food production in Ghana, a situation that threatens food security in 2016.

Felix Frimpong, a research scientist focused on climate resilient crop production, says the adoption of climate smart agricultural practices is the way to go for Ghanaian farmers.


“We need to support the farmers with fertilizer subsidies, resilient crop varieties and farming technologies, increased diversification of agriculture systems, promotion of simple irrigation facilities, we need to also train them and advocate that the old ways of farming need to change to ensure increased productivity and climate resilient,” he stated.

Story by Kofi Adu Domfeh

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