Aquaculture collaboration between SLU and University of Dar Es Salaam

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This blog post was written by Anna Norman Haldén, research coordinator at the Department of Biomedical Science and Veterinary Public Health, SLU, and Dirk-Jan de Koning, professor at the Department of Animal Breeding and Genetics, SLU. Both have contributed as doctoral supervisors and as SLU coordinator and SLU principal investigator, respectively, within the UDSM-SLU aquaculture collaboration.

Research facility for tilapia fish farming in Tanzania. Photo: Francis Pius Mmanda

Year 2022 has been declared by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Year of Artisanal Fisheries and Aquaculture (IYAFA 2022). SLU aquaculture researchers collaborate with researchers in countries across the world, including in low- and middle-income countries. One of these countries is Tanzania. Since 2015, SLU and University of Dar Es Saalam (UDSM) have jointly focused on strengthening sustainable small-scale fish farming in Tanzania.

“Small in scale, big in value” is a motto used during IYAFA 2022 to highlight the importance of small-scale artisanal fisheries and aquaculture. Aquatic food (fish, molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants) plays a fundamental role for human well-being and livelihoods around the world. A large portion of this food is produced by small-scale artisanal fishers and small-scale fish farmers.

Fish farming in Tanzania has increased during the past decade but is still considered low in comparison with the country’s potential. The main fish species farmed in Tanzania is tilapia and dominated by small-scale production is in earthen ponds. Since 2015, SLU aquaculture researchers have been part of the Sida-funded Marine Science Program, within the research cooperation between Sweden/SIDA and Tanzania/UDSM, to strengthen capacity building within aquaculture in Tanzania. At the start of the UDSM-SLU collaboration, two focus areas were identified as being crucial for a sustainable development of tilapia production in Tanzania: feed and breeding.

A major challenge for fish farming in Tanzania, and all over the world, is to find a sustainable high-quality feed at a reasonable cost. Within the UDSM-SLU collaboration, the nutritional value of local ingredients available to small-scale farmers in Tanzania was evaluated as potential components of feed to Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus). The results showed that good-quality tilapia feed can be produced by replacing up to 50 % of the commonly used fishmeal with locally available feed ingredients. In addition to being a more sustainable feed choice, the use of these alternative ingredients can also reduce the cost of feed for the farmer by up to 30 % compared with a conventional fishmeal-based diet.

Tanzania has identified a great need for faster-growing and better performing strains of tilapia, which can be farmed successfully in great varieties of production environments, e.g. in both fresh and saline waters. The UDSM-SLU collaboration has strengthened the genetic competence among researchers in Tanzania and the results from the breeding research conducted can be used as a guideline for establishing a future tilapia breeding program in Tanzania.

The collaboration between SLU and UDSM has, until now, resulted in two SLU-registered sandwich PhD students that have graduated and one more that will defend her thesis during 2022. In addition, two local PhD students co-supervised by SLU researchers have graduated within the program, as well as one PhD student jointly supervised by Stockholm University and SLU. Linked to the UDSM-SLU collaboration, workshops arranged within the Sida-funded AgriFoSe2030 program have contributed to valuable knowledge-sharing and networking between researchers and farmers in Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Tanzania.

We have done all the ground work to start a systematic breeding program for tilapia that is well suited to the production circumstances in Tanzania. In order to actually establish such a breeding program we need to have long-term uninterrupted funding (decades not years). We also need additional investments in infrastructure to deal with the logistics and biosecurity that is required to deliver healthy and improved fingerlings to the small-scale farmers.

Next phase of the Sweden/SIDA and Tanzania/UDSM cooperation starts July 2022. This means a possible continuation of the UDSM-SIDA aquaculture collaboration, and thus a progression both within the area of developing sustainable fish feed and the establishment of a breeding program for tilapia in Tanzania.

Read two of the doctoral theses produced within the UDSM-SLU collaboration:

Read more about SLU Aquaculture global activities: https://www.slu.se/en/Collaborative-Centres-and-Projects/slu-aquaculture/global-aquaculture-activities-at-slu/

Read more about IYAFA 2022: https://www.fao.org/artisanal-fisheries-aquaculture-2022/home/en/

Countering the pitfalls of gender mainstreaming in development through gender transformative approaches

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This blog post is written by Karolin Andersson, PhD student in Rural Development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development, SLU.

Over time, gender inequality in global development has been addressed in different ways with varying outcomes and effects on people. Some approaches have been criticized by feminists and other activists for not taking the issue seriously, and for using the strategy of gender mainstreaming as a means to achieve economic growth rather than equality. In some areas of development, such as agriculture, gender transformative approaches to development research and practice have emerged in response to such critique.

Gender inequality has been considered a crucial issue in global development since the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 1995. Today, gender inequality is often addressed through the governance strategy of gender mainstreaming, which intends to challenge and change gender biases that lead to unequal development outcomes. In practice, however, gender mainstreaming efforts have mostly meant integrating and including more women into existing development projects and programs without challenging their underlying structures, gender norms, and unequal power relations that are the root causes to gender inequality. This has tended to turn gender mainstreaming into an instrument towards other goals such as economic growth, and it has contradictory cemented ideas of women as both especially vulnerable and as responsible for their own empowerment and for alleviating poverty and hunger. This approach has little prospects to achieve just, and thus sustainable, development outcomes.

Therefore, feminist researchers and practitioners persistently continue to reveal and challenge the biases and unequal effects of the dominant ways of addressing gender inequality in global development policy and practice, and of how gender mainstreaming is implemented. Many argue that if gender equality is to become an actual reality, development ideology, theory, and practice need to connect with and fully integrate feminist ideas and ideals of care, justice, and emancipation. Only then may it become possible to achieve sustainable and sustained social change.

Optimistically, some progress has been made over the past decade in this regard, for example within agricultural development. Researchers and practitioners in this field have increasingly challenged and questioned how gender has been addressed in agricultural discourse, including turning gender, and women in particular, into instruments of and as responsible for development objectives through modernized agriculture. In response, agricultural development actors have gained an increased awareness of the significance of power relations, gender norms, and unequal structures in agriculture. This has led to an emergence of what has been termed gender transformative approaches to agricultural development policy and programming. This broad range of approaches include a view that development interventions should engage with and prioritize the underlying constraining social structures and intersectional power dynamics that perpetuate gender inequalities at different scales. Gender transformative in this context refers to fostering the examination of gender dynamics and norms and intentionally strengthening, creating, or shifting structures, practices, relations, and dynamics toward equality. Application of such gender transformative approaches to development interventions could have positive effects on both the unequal gender relations and the sustainability of agricultural and development outcomes across scales. Indeed, linking development interventions with feminist objectives of challenging and changing unequal power relations and gender norms is the necessary pathway to realize a sustainable tomorrow.

In a recent article*, Karolin, together with Katarina Pettersson and Johanna Bergman Lodin, analyze how gender inequality is addressed in Rwanda’s current agricultural policy. The analysis shows that the policy’s gender mainstreaming efforts end up addressing the effects rather than the causes to gender inequality in agriculture, and that gender equality indeed becomes a means to achieve economic growth rather than social justice. The paper argues that the policy thereby risks reproducing and exacerbating existing inequalities, and suggests that it instead engages more with gender transformative approaches to challenge the underlying structures, gender norms, and unequal power relations that persist in Rwanda’s agriculture sector.

*Andersson, K., Pettersson, K., and Bergman Lodin, J. (2022). Window dressing inequalities and constructing women farmers as problematic – gender in Rwanda’s agriculture policy. Agriculture and Human Values, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10314-5.

Improved methodological development of participatory epidemiology

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This blog post was written by Erika Chenais, associate professor in infectious disease epidemiology at the National veterinary institute (SVA) and Klara Fischer, associate professor in rural development at the Department of Urban and Rural Development, SLU.

Drawing at a village

Participatory mapping with poverty ranking can be performed to assure that poorer people not are excluded from research in communities. Photo: Erika Chenais

Participatory epidemiology (PE) is a methodology initially developed in veterinary epidemiology research to collect epidemiological data in contexts where conventional quantitative data and statistics are unavailable. It has contributed to important new knowledge on animal disease in low-income countries, for example in the eradication of rinderpest* and the understanding of African swine fever transmission in the smallholder pig value chain.

PE has been praised for its ability to engage participants, visualise data and enable people with no or low levels of formal education to communicate their knowledge in ways that researchers can relate to and analyse. The veterinary application of PE stems from participatory methods and was first used in development cooperation to make projects better attuned to local needs and priorities and to investigate impacts of poverty. Historically PE has struggled with finding ways to simultaneously embrace the participation and knowledge of local livestock owners and applying methods and producing data that would be accepted and publishable in veterinary epidemiology journals. With increasing interdisciplinary engagement in recent years this has begun to change and there are now more and more studies that are guided by the participants own priorities and where suggested solutions are co-created according to these priorities and the local situation.

To stimulate this positive trend, and promote the furthering of PE as a participatory method we invited researchers from all disciplines interested in methodological development of PE to contribute to a special issue in Preventive Veterinary Medicine devoted entirely to this subject. The special issue is now published. The included articles stimulated methodological development and an academic debate about how power dynamics within communities and between participants and researchers as well as within the research community might impact information sharing and mutual understanding. Several of the published articles highlight the importance of that research embraces smallholders’ own priorities of animal health constraints, and call for an increased acknowledgement in the research community about that these priorities might not correspond with researchers’ priorities. Articles in the special issue show how embracing smallholders’ priorities can lead to more feasible and sustainable biosecurity measures, improved implementation of these, and in the end thus better disease control that can help smallholders improve animal health and escape poverty.

Individual interviews can be important for capturing perspectives of marginalised community members, such as herders. Photo: Erika Chenais

Moving forward, the articles indicate that the next step in the methodological development of PE, after successfully discussing participation, could be to call for greater interdisciplinarity. To be effective, interdisciplinarity needs to be present from project formulation and implementation to publication. Not only will this lead to methodological development, but more importantly to research outputs that are of greater local relevance and better scientific quality. The interest generated by these articles among social scientists and veterinarians interested in studying the societal aspects of animal diseases indicate that PE is developing in this direction.

You can read an introduction to the special issue here:

Power, participation and interdisciplinary tensions: Introducing a special issue on methodological developments in participatory epidemiology – ScienceDirect

And all articles are reachable here:

Preventive Veterinary Medicine | Participatory Epidemiology | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier

*Rinderpest, also known as cattle plague, is a contagious viral disease affecting cloven- hoofed animals (mainly cattle and buffalo).

 

 

 

 

Fostering food system transformations through innovation

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This blog post is written by Anudini Wijayarathna, Master’s student in Rural Development & Natural Resource Management at SLU. It was first published at SIANI, Swedish Internaional Agricultural Initiative.

Photo: Plant Protection Drone by viva14 / Pixabay.


SIANI, SLU and Sida (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) co-organised Food Systems for New Realities – Agri4D 2021 conference to explore the potential knowledge and constructive options that can be applied within the global food system to ensure food security. Having participated in the conference session ‘Innovation and Innovative Approaches’, I contemplated different approaches towards reshaping food systems based on innovation.

 

Shaping higher education for innovation

 

Innovation certainly incorporates a wide range of stakeholders from various sectors, such as the sciences, technology, policy, finance and different institutions. Yet, it is usually initiated through academia, which includes colleges, universities, research groups and many other actors. Thus, it is necessary to ensure that this transformation starts from the grassroot level of innovation. At the Conference, Laurens Klerkx, Professor, Wageningen University, highlighted the importance of boosting mission-driven innovation. Most importantly, identifying the directionalities of food systems clearly is essential to have ‘implicit and explicit food system transformation missions’ at the academic level.

 

Besides, more panelists attached to the higher education sector in different regions of the world depicted some more innovative approaches of capacity building, multi-sectoral collaborations, teaching methods, and facilitation in the universities to stimulate food system transformations. Especially, challenge-driven education around the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and student personal progress development methods, such as mentoring, is essential to encourage scholars towards research and innovation. In order to direct research-based innovation towards food system transformation, universities need to prioritise collaborating with other worldwide public and private stakeholders related to innovation and food systems. That will be crucial in creating opportunities for investments, future entrepreneurships, and global networks for innovation within academia to reshape food systems.

 

Two-sided financial aspects of innovation

 

On the other hand, Julia Compton, Head of Secretariat, Commission of Sustainable Agricultural Intensification, emphasised the dire need to expand investments in innovations related to agri-food systems in the Global South. Although 60 billion US dollars are spent on global innovations in agri-food systems yearly, it is just 4.5% of the total agricultural output. Particularly, most of the countries in the Global South have a critically low amount of investment in such innovations. Thus, it is urgent to acquire financial resources for that region through reconstructing policy structures, increasing incentives and identifying gaps between smallholder farmers and post-production processes through research while collaborating with all types of stakeholders affected by agri-food innovations.

 

Another significant aspect of innovation is its value-addition in the respective sectors, as innovation can play a major role in socio-economic development. The very same ideology was upheld by Tony K. Omwansa, CEO of Kenya National Innovation Agency, at the conference. To witness a profound change in food systems, it is required to transfer technological innovation and innovation ideas into market and entrepreneurship, through which a value-addition occurs. Furthermore, currently in a situation where food supply chain innovations are prioritised, it is also necessary to focus more on technological innovations around agri-food production.

 

From innovation to adoption

 

Apart from that, the scholars’ various innovations and innovative ideas were mostly aimed at providing digital solutions to reshape agri-food systems, such as the digital mechanisation of tractor services, the real-time data generation on diet quantity and quality, the digital collaboration of farming cooperatives and markets etc. They addressed different global food system challenges such as malnutrition, shortage of agricultural mechanisation services, market irregularities, climate change, insufficient access to education to agri-business, etc. However, implementation of and familiarisation with these digital approaches in society is even more difficult. The most common challenges are lack of digital literacy, trust in digital devices as well as connectivity within rural agricultural communities.

 

Aside from these types of innovative approaches, individuals and organisations have to think about including psychological and social innovations, too. The ideal food system transformation emerges by transforming fundamentally unsustainable concepts, such as evaluating food system development solely on monetary profits and economic growth. It is also constructive to bring forward innovative ideologies and assessment tools like nutrition adequacy, happiness index, food affordability and availability, food waste and loss metrics, etc. to evaluate food system development.

 

Photo: geralt / Pixabay.

 

Innovation as a driving factor towards sustainable food systems

 

The most striking feature of this Agri4D conference session for me was its multidimensional view towards innovation-based food systems transitions. The discussions and presentations unfolded a variety of innovations, which entailed technological, social and organisational aspects. It also encompassed several stakeholders across the globe within academia, entrepreneurs, governments and societies.

 

However, all these requirements to foster innovation-based food system transitions highlight the utter complexity of the concept. Nevertheless, I would say innovation is imperative for transitioning towards sustainable food systems. As a result of prevailing humanitarian and environmental crises along with the world’s population growth, we desperately need more efficient and innovative changes to intensify global food production without wearing off ecological, social and financial resources. Thus, I believe no matter how complicated the process is, it is crucial to initiate and promote innovation to stabilise food systems and ensure food security.

 

Simultaneously, we need to understand that society needs time to familiarise itself with innovation and that outcomes do not lie in the immediate future. Hence, as much as we can be optimistic towards innovation, it is essential to have the patience to see a transformation in food systems. Moreover, it is also vital to make sure not to leave anyone in the global community behind within this transition process. Most importantly, this approach is not only about attaining sustainable food systems and food security, but also about reaching all SDGs. Therefore, I consider this discourse on food system transformations through innovation as a perfect platform for us to expand our vision beyond the conventional framework to create a better world now and for the future.

 

Read another blog post from Agri4D on circular food systems.

Challenges in terms of land use in a changing climate  

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This blog post was written by Ingrid Wesström, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Soil and Environment; Agricultural water management and Abraham Joel, Researcher at the Department of Soil and Environment; Agricultural water management, SLU.

Agricultural land in Rwanda
Agriculture systems need adaptation to stand change in climate (Rwanda). Photo: Abraham Joel

Knowledge transfer and building local capacity are key issues for resilient use of soil and water resources in agriculture production to cope with a changing climate. This to ensure food production and protect environment under threat.

The natural resource base continues to be very fragile and under threats from various pressures, such as unsustainable practices, increasing population and climate change. For that reason, old and new problems have to be addressed and solved simultaneously. Climate change involve temperature increment and changes in precipitation patterns. This creates a situation where drought, floods and erosion will become more frequent and with higher amplitude.

Soil degradation is still a major threat and land areas are taken out of production or have less productivity. Water erosion stands for almost 50% of the land degradation and more extreme weather situations in the future will make the situation worse. Therefore, better land use planning combined with local adapted soil and water conservation strategies has to be considered in the future use of soil resources.

Too little water or too much water has historically been a challenge for farmers. Irrigation and drainage have been the techniques for managing soil water content in field, but the implementation is still problematic in terms of efficiency in the use of the water resources and environmental impact. Significant improvements in the use of water are possible even with the use of traditional surface irrigation systems. However, each field is unique and farmers need knowledge on how to irrigate under specific field conditions.

Mitigation of the impact of climate change can be possible, but it will require significant investments in capacity for bringing knowledge into practices but also for generating new knowledge. Still, generation of knowledge is not sufficient. We need to disseminate the knowledge to several actors such as decision makers and land users.

SLU has longtime experiences of cooperative research project and beside the specific research thematic; building local capacity has being a central issue. Examples of past projects are: Evaluation of soil erosion rates under different land uses in Nicaragua and Developing of water saving strategies for irrigation in Mozambique. Examples of ongoing and new projects are: Management of salt affected soils and GHG emission for rice production in Rwanda; Precipitation patterns in changing climate and the need for adaptation in terms of water supply and land use planning.