Cotton. How many of us come into daily contact (literally) with this wondrous natural fiber? Used in a huge array of materials, from the obvious clothing and cotton wool buds, to the less obvious products like cottonseed oils used to make soap, margarine, emulsifiers, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, rubber and plastics, the cotton plant is woven into the fabric of our lives.
Authored by: Abigael Mchana, Communication Officer, CABI Kenya
Developing fit-for-purpose, interactive and effective communication materials for farmers and their intermediaries is not an easy task. You cannot create a poster with generic text or images and then distribute it to your audience en-masse. It requires an in-depth analysis of your primary stakeholder, an understanding of your audience’s preferred communication channels and a realistic visualisation of how your intended audience will interact with the finished product.
In this guest blog special, Dan Leskien, Senior Liaison Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), considers how much work still needs to be done to implement Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) measures in respect of genetic resources…
I wish to commend CABI for its initiative to prepare and implement a policy on access and benefit-sharing (ABS) to work with their partners and various relevant communities to introduce best practice in compliance with relevant ABS measures of stakeholder countries.
Guest blog by Master Beekeeper ‘in the making’ Greg Long.
When people start to think about the ecosystem and nature as a whole, many don’t fully grasp the importance of relying on other species. Everything on earth is connected, whether we realize it or not. Human survival doesn’t rely on humans alone — the human species depends on tons of other life forms to stay in existence.
Ahead of One Health Day tomorrow (3rd November 2018), Robert Taylor, CABI’s Editorial Director, explores the relationships between human, animal, environmental and plant health…
The ‘One health’ initiative launched in 2007 was designed primarily to break down the barriers between human and veterinary medicine, particularly for dealing with zoonotic diseases. The link between BSE and nvCJD, as well as the threat of new diseases like SARS and threat of old diseases like avian influenza made for a strong case that the health of humans and animals are inter-linked. Since then, ‘One health’ has been expanded to include environmental health as there are many examples of how human activity can harm the health of the environment, and how in turn, a polluted environment adversely affects human health.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. It may seem like some of the species in this article are the making of horror films and scary stories but they’re all too real. Besides giving us the creeps, these spooky specimens offer up some surprising ‘tricks’ and ‘treats’ for humans and the environment.
CABI in Pakistan, under its ACIAR-funded ‘Strengthening Vegetable Value Chain in Pakistan’ (SVVCP) project, is committed to improving the value chain of vegetables for smallholder farmers so they can improve their livelihoods. Dr Babar E. Bajwa, Project Leader, reports on the progress being made so far…
Potato is a major crop in Pakistan with great potential to grow. It presents both the prospect of revenue increase for producers as well as opportunities as a source of foreign reserve by increasing exports. Importantly, Pakistan’s potato industry is self-sufficient to supply for the needs of domestic household consumption.
