Organic agriculture is defined as an environmentally and socially sensitive food supply system. This publication considers the contribution of organic agriculture to ecological health, international markets and local food security. It contains a number of case studies of the practical experiences of small farmers throughout the world (including India, Iran, Thailand, Uganda and Brazil) who have adopted fully integrated food systems, and analyses the prospects for a wider adoption of organic agriculture. The book also discusses the weakness of institutional support for nurturing existing knowledge and exchange in organic agriculture.
This book documents the history, successes, and failures of Save the Children's farmworker program in Zimbabwe, 1981-98. The report explores workers' past and present living and working conditions on commercial farms and describes how the program promoted a progression from workers with a migrant mentality to the building of functional communities, increasingly able to articulate and address their own problems. Information was gathered from key informants on commercial farms, government officials, development officers, and 426 farmworkers. Chapters cover: (1) an introduction to Save the Children Fund and the farmworker program; (2) the situation of rural people before 1980; (3) conditions for farmworker women and children as farmworkers missed out on national improvements in rural education and services; (4) the first pilot farmworker project, 1981-83; (5) expansion in the 1980s; (6) program impacts in the 1980s on the health of women and children, access to water and sanitation, provision of preschools on farms, housing, nutrition, adult literacy, socioeconomic status, and women's activities; (7) major concerns and lessons learned; (8) a period of uncertainty; (9) organizational issues and changes, program impacts, government partnerships, and community leadership training in the early 1990s; (10) program achievements; and (11) a portrait of the farm village. Appendices present data tables reflecting program progress and list participating farms and program staff. (Contains photographs, a list of acronyms, a glossary, and 80 references.) (SV)
This study represents a first systematic effort to document Zimbabwe "s new land uses during the years of economic crisis, the role of the state in promoting them, the differentiation associated with them, not only between black and white farmers, but also among them, and the implications of all these for the political economy of the Zimbabwean land question. The fact that some of the new land uses avoid redistribution of clearly under-utilised large scale commercial farms suggests that the Zimbabwean land question will remain a live political issue for a long time.
This report aims to 'crack the code' by deciphering the factors that hinder and facilitate girls' and women's participation, achievement and continuation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and, in particular, what the education sector can do to promote girls' and women's interest in and engagement with STEM education and ultimately STEM careers.
What did the future hold for Rhodesia's white population at the end of a bloody armed conflict fought against settler colonialism? Would there be a place for them in newly independent Zimbabwe? PIONEERS, SETTLERS, ALIENS, EXILES sets out the terms offered by Robert Mugabe in 1980 to whites who opted to stay in the country they thought of as their home. The book traces over the next two decades their changing relationshipwith the country when the post-colonial government revised its symbolic and geographical landscape and reworked codes of membership. Particular attention is paid to colonial memories and white interpellation in the official account of the nation's rebirth and indigene discourses, in view of which their attachment to the place shifted and weakened. As the book describes the whites' trajectory from privileged citizens to persons of disputed membership and contested belonging, it provides valuable background information with regard to the land and governance crises that engulfed Zimbabwe at the start of the twenty-first century.
Climate change presents a profound challenge to food security and sustainable development in Africa. Its negative impacts are likely to be greatest in the African region, which is already food insecure. In the face of global climate change and its emerging challenges and unknowns, it is essential that decision makers base policies on the best available knowledge. In recent years, the knowledge of local and indigenous people, often referred to as indigenous knowledge (IK) has been increasingly recognised as an important source of climate knowledge and adaptation strategies.
The book analyses how social processes impact on knowledge production and dissemination; investigates how differences between actors impact on knowledge dissemination and appropriation; explores how existing knowledge frameworks affect knowledge analysis and acceptance and how people bridge the gap between 'outside' and 'local' forms of knowledge.
This book explores why, a decade after Zimbabwean independence, government agricultural development policies still retains surprising similarities with those of the colonial period despite lengthy peasant opposition. Using documentary and fieldwork material from the Midlands province, the analysis covers the subjects of pastoral and land use management, household production and income-earning strategies, and farmer-extension relations.
This publication offers a framework for the empowerment of people living in poverty throughout the world that concentrates on increasing people's freedom of choice and action to shape their own lives. Based on analysis of practical experiences, the book identifies four key elements to support empowerment: information, inclusion and participation, improved accountability and local organisational capacity. This framework is then applied to five areas of action to improve development effectiveness: provision of basic services, improved local governance, improved national governance, pro-poor market development, and access to justice and legal aid. It also offers twenty 'tools and practices' which concentrate on a wide-range of topics to support the empowerment of the poor.
This book offers the first detailed scholarly examination of the nation-wide land occupations which spread across the Zimbabwean countryside from the year 2000, and led to the state’s fast track land reform programme. In an innovative way, it highlights the decentralized character of the occupations by recognizing significant spatial variation around a number of key themes, including historical memory, modes of mobilization and gender. A case study of the land occupations in Mashonaland Central Province, based on original research, adds empirical weight to the argument. In further identifying and understanding the specificities and complexities of the land occupations, the book also frames them by way of a nuanced comparative-historical analysis of the three zvimurenga. It thus examines the land occupations (referred to, likely controversially, as the ‘third chimurenga’) with reference to the original anti-colonial revolt from the 1890s (the first chimurenga) and the war of liberation in the 1970s (the second chimurenga). Further, the book engages critically with the ruling party’s chimurenga narrative and the hegemonic understanding of the land occupations within Zimbabwean studies. This book is a crucial read for all scholars and students of post-2000 land and politics in Zimbabwe, but also for those more broadly interested in historical-comparative analyses of land struggles in Zimbabwe and beyond.
