KI work and African agriculture

I spend a very rewarding hour or so in the evenings sourcing material for the FANRPAN website's newsflash section. My preference is for material published in the southern Africa media which illustrates the complexities of increasing agricultural production in the SADC region. Debates on land tenure and ownership, the impact of climate change, the impact of fertiliser subsidies and the such like are posted. It is lonely work. But the thought that the RSS facility allows my editorial judgements to reach a wider audience, hopefully connected in some way to policy debates, more than compensates. I think of it also as getting these subscribers "to read off the same page". The recent conference in Addis Ababa on maximising the impact of agricultural research seemed to have little to say on this personal interest. It was more concerned with conventional research outputs. But still worth a read! Take a look at the FANRPAN contribution by Francis Hale.