Afghanistan Initiative

Note: The Afghanistan Initiative is no longer considered an "emerging program." It has been transferred to the "collaborative programs" section."

Following a request by Senator Clinton's office to join the New York Campaign for a Green Afghanistan, faculty at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences met to determine how Cornell might become involved. Initially, the thrust of this initiative involved rebuilding the orchards, working with a small NGO Global Partnership for Afghanistan. Faculty members with expertise in the areas of fruit breeding, production and disease and insect management initially met to consider how they could contribute to the revitalization of Afghan fruit farms. [more...]
Contact: Alice Pell, CIIFAD Director

Southern Africa Initiative

CIIFAD is collaborating with the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the WCS project, Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO), on a project called "Developing a Participatory Socio-economic Model for Food Security, Improved Rural Livelihods, Watershed Management and Biodiversity Conservation in Southern Africa." This effort is supported by the SANREM-CRSP (through Virginia Tech) and USAID.

Unsustainable agricultural and natural resource management practices and unsound economic strategies contribute significantly to food insecurity, limitations in livelihood opportunities, and diminished biodiversity throughout southern Africa. In Zambia, a market-driven approach called “Community Markets for Conservation” (COMACO) is being developed to improve biodiversity conservation via explicit linkages to improving food security and livelihoods. This community-owned enterprise implements sustainable agricultural practices at the level of individual farms using extension support, marketing, and pricing strategies organized around COMACO's regional trading centers to increase small stakeholder profits. Preliminary data show that these market incentives are sufficient both to foster sustainable agricultural practices and to increase wildlife populations, making future game-based economic opportunities possible. Due to its preliminary successes, COMACO has been invited to expand into Malawi and possibly Mozambique. Through broad stakeholder consultations, a multi-disciplinary team has identified key research issues regarding soil, crop, food, veterinary, and social sciences that are needed to optimize this model. Targeted research and the training of host country nationals will inject the new technologies and generate the critical knowledge needed to scale-up the COMACO approach within Zambia and across southern Africa to improve food security, rural livelihoods, and biodiversity conservation.

Contacts:
Alex Travis, Asst. Professor. of Reproductive Biology, CU College of Veterinary Medicine
Alice Pell, CIIFAD Director and Professor of Animal Sciences