Weeks 14 – 17: Monday 31 March – Sunday, 26 April 2020

Weeks 14 – 17: Monday 31 March – Sunday, 26 April 2020

Zimbabwe has announced a price freeze on goods and services and ordered businesses to instead revert to prices obtained on 25 March 2020, just before the country went into a nationwide lockdown. 

At a meeting attended by representatives of the manufacturing and retail sector, Vice President Kembo Mohadi, who is also chair of the Covid-19 taskforce, said the country has been experiencing escalating food prices that has made essentials unaffordable for many.

Skyrocketing prices

Egypt’s Minister of International Cooperation Dr. Rania Al Mashat joined a high level virtual panel on the significance of international developmental cooperation to face the implications of the coronavirus pandemic on the agricultural sector and food security.

Rome, 20 April 2020 - With the COVID-19 pandemic and economic slowdown threatening the lives and livelihoods of the world’s most vulnerable people, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) today committed US$40 million, and launched an urgent appeal for additional funds, to support farmers and rural communities to continue growing and selling food.

CENTRAL Governor Robert Agarobe is advising villagers to use the state of emergency period to farm their land.
Agarobe called on villagers to concentrate on farming instead of travelling to town to buy sugar and rice which was also putting themselves at risk of being infected by the coronavirus.
He said eating fresh food from the garden was better than buying junk food from the shops.
“It could be a good way too for young people to learn their traditional way of living by making gardens, growing crops and storing them for later use,” he said.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has said that tenure rights to land and other natural resources are fundamental to food and shelter, which are the key elements of social and cultural practices underpinning Tanzania’s economic growth.

Speaking in Dar es Salaam recently, FAO Tanzania’s National Land Officer, Beatha Fabian, pointed out that security of tenure on natural resources such as land, fisheries and forests was very key since food security of billions of people in the world depends on it.

For Mimi Pabai, 42, a mother of three, she can now see light at the end of the tunnel with the introduction of the EU-funded Boosting Agriculture and Food Security (BAFS) project in which selected farmers in Bo District are beneficiaries. In the Faala community of the Bo District, Southern Province of Sierra Leone, where she is head of the Gualatima Women’s Cooperative, there are visible signs of the gains brought to her farming activities. “Life was hard when I lost my husband during the January 6, 1999 rebel invasion of Freetown at the climax of the 11-year civil war of Sierra Leone.  I r

Our latest WOLTS publication is a fascinating photo essay from one of our pilot research communities, Mundarara, in Tanzania. The piece by Jim Grabham, titled “Are rubies undermining Maasai culture”, shares insights gleaned from in-depth interviews with two participants in a one-year training programme on gender, land and mining that has been developed and carried out by the HakiMadini and Mokoro WOLTS project team in Tanzania.

A regional workshop on “Strengthening the Accessibility and Visibility of Agricultural and Land Data through the Use of Semantics - AGRIS in Europe and Central Asia” was held by FAO in collaboration with the LandPortal Foundation (the Netherlands) in Moscow, 27-28 June 2019, hosted by the Central Scientific Agricultural Library (CSAL).

AGRIS, or International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, came into being in 1974 on the joint initiative of around 180 FAO member states.