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Hi Vijay Given your interest in food security and wider issues surrounding it you may like to see this video about Climate Food and Developing-Country Livestock Farmers ILRI film: In my mind it connects with John's vision for a model farm development at Attachab Eco-village and why it is important to develop models of good practice and effective ways to share them. Of course at Fantusam Foudation many initiatives are inter-related, so this is also relevant to the idea Cicely was promoting for helping farmers through the Internet services provided by Zittnet . (You may remember this idea and our...

Yesterday saw the last scheduled meeting of 2009 between the UK-Nigeria team. The main item on the agenda was to thank everyone for their continued commitment to these meetings and for all their hard work during the past year. We also wanted to reflect on the successes we had shared and explore together any aspects of our collaboration which might be improved upon in the coming year. We also hoped to clarify what should be our first objectives togeher for the New Year. In the event, the meeting departed from its usual Skype format involving all members together because of...

Hi Pam, I don't know if the Copenhagen Summit will end in some kind of a climate deal. But even if it does mark the first decisive step to do something about saving the planet, there are some who think it will amount to nothing, even if nations reach an agreement. The reason being that reducing carbon emissions by 80% from the 1990 levels - the target for 2050 for rich countries - depends on technological breakthroughs, not political pledges at Copenhagen. Without technological breakthroughs, reducing carbon emissions by 80% will erode living standards in the countries concerned, says leading...

Hi Pam, When I began discussing about a learning group on food security, I was only thinking of agriculture and farmers. But over this week, I began to realise that food security is a far bigger area than that: it also encompasses issues like availability and access, and most importantly, nutrition. Now, I don't how many people will agree with me that nutrition also forms a part of food security. But to me, the circle of food security is incomplete if a huge chunk of a country's population continues to wallow in hunger, despite high agricultural productivity and foodgrain output...

I’ve been struck by the high quality of collaboration demonstrated in the regular UK-Nigeria meetings, so thought I’d say a few words about this in this week’s blog. I’m talking not just about the obvious collaboration of these weekly online meetings between the UK and Nigerian teams - but also the more subtle and equally important collaboration between Pam and her network. Dadamac's relationship with Marcus Simmons of Ecoshelter illustrates this point perfectly. In brief, Pam introduced Marcus to John Dada , which in turn saw Marcus visit Fantsuam last year. Once there, among other achievements, he successfully built an...