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An independent review of the Livestock Crop Research Programme with a focus on quality of science and output-outcome parameters for the period 2017-20. Contains analysis of product progress, bibliometrics analysis and extensive results of interviews. Includes recommendations for future interventions. The results were independently pier reviewed.

• While market access quotas have generated high levels of rents for traders and exporters in Namibia, Botswana, Norway, and offshore entities in the UK, their developmental benefits are diffuse, unclear, and difficult to unpack; • The consolidation of trade between small supply (Namibia, Botswana) and demand markets (Norway) provides some unique advantages for trading parties, given the former’s efficiency and scale disadvantages in international trade, and the latter’s desire to actively manage its food imports; • However, such a strategy is not necessarily replicable or scalable, as it entails both high entry costs for access and high risks from the over-reliance on a limited number of markets and the specter of animal disease incursions.

Conducted between September 2017 and April 2018, this analysis of the Zimbabwe beef value chain addressed the questions: What is the contribution of the value chain to economic growth? Is the economic growth generated by the value chain inclusive? Is the value chain socially sustainable? and, Is the value chain environmentally sustainable? The historical background for the Zimbabwe beef value chain is important as it provides context for the current situation. During the colonial and post-colonial period the key objective for the beef sector was intensive commercial farming and exploitation of market access opportunities under the Lome Convention. Following this Zimbabwe underwent a period of intensive land reform with large-scale transfer of farm land from Commercial (white) farmers to small-scale (black) farmers. Somewhere between 161,500 and 300,000 households have resettled on about 4.9 million hectares (Scoones et al, 2010). Commercial farms (white) have declined from 4,000 to about 725. However, various categories of 'new' (black) commercial farms have been developed pre-and post-land reform (11,000+ households). During this period the national disease control system failed and exports ended. Causes of this collapse include: co-habitation of buffalo and cattle; and, un-restrained movement of cattle from high-risk areas. Illegal exports and imports are also reported. Currently, Zimbabwe aims to reinstate centralised veterinary control to manage transboundary diseases. This has, so far, been unsuccessful with regular outbreaks of food-and-mouth disease occurring, including during the period of this research. A high proportion of the Zimbabwe population is poor (72.3%) and extremely poor (16.2%). Malnutrition affects 33.8% of children between 6-59 months of age. Rural Zimbabwe is poorer than urban areas by some margin (30.4% of households are extremely poor in rural areas vs 5.6% in urban areas). This drives migration and emigration. Livestock are essential for resilience and coping; cattle holding and maize yields closely correlated. Farms without livestock are the most vulnerable. Beef consumption is declining: from 13kg to 4 or 6kg per capita reflecting income changes and the availability of cheap chicken meat. Zimbabwe is a semi-arid country with 85% of the area receiving less than 800mm of rain a year. Resource endowment is high, but distribution skewed and sustainability is questioned by many. Key environmental issues include: land degradation, largely through poor land management; deforestation, through land clearance and fuel use; water scarcity, due to over extraction and urbanisation; pollution of water and air, through mining, urbanisation and intensive agriculture; biodiversity loss, through agricultural expansion and habitat loss; and, climate change and variability, resulting in higher temperatures and lower/variable rainfall.

This article provides a look at the planning process in Ontario from the point of view of a citizen. Ben Bennett is representing Residents for Sustainable Development in Guelph, which opposes two big-box proposals before the Ontario Municipal Board. As co-author of a new book on what has become a seven-year-long saga, Bennett shares his insights into the planning profession and the system from the perspective of a non-lawyer and nonplanner. The proposals, one anchored by Wal-Mart, the other by Zellers, were rejected by city council in the late spring of 1997. The date for the hearing was originally set for July 1998, but was repeatedly delayed. After five years of legal wrangling, court challenges and political intrigue, the hearing finally got under way in April of this year. It is scheduled to run for twenty weeks., Le présent article trace le portrait de l'aménagement urbain en Ontario tel que perçu par un citoyen. Ben Bennett, porteparole du groupement Citoyens pour un développement durable, de Guelph, auprès de la Commission des affaires municipales de l'Ontario, s'oppose à deux projets de grande surface. Co-auteur d'un livre traitant de la situation qui dure maintenant depuis sept ans, Ben Bennett nous fait part de ses réflexions sur la profession du point de vue d'un intervenant qui n'est ni urbaniste ni avocat. Les projets, l'un présenté pour Wal-Mart, l'autre pour Zellers, furent rejetés par le conseil municipal à la fin du printemps 1997. Une audience, prévue pour juillet 1998 et reportée plusieurs fois, après cinq ans de contestations, de guérilla juridique et d'intrigues, sera tenue en avril 2002 pour une durée de quelque 20 semaines., in English and French; text in English., https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/5482/Article003.pdf?sequence=3

The extent of physical and economic postharvest losses at different stages of cassava value chains has been estimated in four countries that differ considerably in the way cassava is cultivated, processed and consumed and in the relationships and linkages among the value chain actors. Ghana incurs by far the highest losses because a high proportion of roots reach the consumers in the fresh form. Most losses occur at the last stage of the value chain. In Nigeria and Vietnam processors incur most of the losses while in Thailand most losses occur during harvesting. Poorer countries incur higher losses despite their capacity to absorb sub-standard products (therefore transforming part of the physical losses into economic losses) and less strict buyer standards. In monetary terms the impact of losses is particularly severe in Ghana and estimated at about half a billion US dollar per annum while in the other countries it is at the most about USD 50 million. This comparison shows that there are no “one-size-fits-all" solutions for addressing postharvest losses but rather these must be tailor-made to the specific characteristics of the different value chains

The Generation Challenge Review aims to determine to what extent the GCP has provided support to genomics research and molecular plant breeding for developing country partners. In addition, as the GCP represented a new business model for international agricultural research in the CGIAR, the review should determine whether the model has been useful and to what extent particular aspects of it might be replicated in the current CRPs.\ud \ud This external review of GCP, commissioned by the Independent Evaluation Arrangement (IEA) of the CGIAR at the request of GCP’s Management and Executive Board, with the consent of the GCP Consortium Committee, was undertaken about a year before Programme closure in December 2014. Although not an EC review, the EC entrusted the IEA to design and manage this independent review to obviate the need for an additional review. The review looks back on the evolution of the Programme and its component activities to determine whether or not it has met its objectives, and seeks to learn from one of the first multi-centre, multi-partner CGIAR programmes that were the predecessors of the current CRPs.

The big idea for sustainability for indigenous natural product (INP) harvesting is that communities have a reason to protect and manage their resources when those resources pay them a suitable regular income. Forming a long-term healthy commercial relationship between harvesting groups (Producing and Processing Organisations - PPO’s) and up-stream companies that develop and promote products from INPs is one of the essential steps along the pathway to proving this big idea works. Namibia has, arguably, one of the richest recent histories of developing such PPO/commercial INP enterprise models and there is much to learn from considering the range of approaches that have been adopted.\ud \ud In this Chapter the aim is to share the range of models and enterprise/PPO interactions tested during the MCA-Namibia INP Programme period, many of which build upon a much longer history of similar efforts going back to the Colonial times. We shall draw some conclusions about what models might be suitable to meet the current and future problems facing the INP sector in Namibia and what important lessons we have learned.\ud \ud Six main types of INP – SME relationships (sometimes called “models”) are identified. These are: the ‘Trader model’, the ‘NGO model’, the ‘Government model’, the local ‘SME led model’, the ‘PPO model’, and a ‘future model’. Considering the INP sector today, it could be said that all of these models are now present and working in parallel.