Improving nutritional status, including micronutrient status, can lead to increased productivity, increased child survival and growth and reduced maternal morbidity and mortality. Home gardening activities are centered on women and it can also increase the income of women, which may result in the better use of household resources and improved caring practices and empowerment. Thus, the simultaneous impact of home gardening programmes in terms of giving women a voice and promoting their full

Women in rainfed areas in Dharmapuri are switching over to kitchen gardens, which provide nutrition to the family as well as money. By recycling the limited water available, these women have shown that it is possible to grow vegetables all round the year.

Original Source

Small farmers in Odisha’s disaster struck areas are finding new ways to ensure food and nutrition security for their families, and to cope with climate change impacts.
Vegetable gardens and rice-fish farming initiatives are helping farmers meet the required food, nutrition and income needs of the farm families.

Despite the increasing acceptance of traditional medicines in peri-urban areas in South Africa, this rich indigenous knowledge is not adequately documented. Therefore, an ethnobotanical study was undertaken to document medicinal plants grown and maintained in per-urban domestic gardens in the Capricorn District, Limpopo Province. Semi-structured interviews, observation and guided walks with 62 participants were employed to obtain ethnobotanical data on medicinal plants grown and maintained in peri-urban domestic gardens.

Farmers of fragile agro-ecosystems have developed some unique integrated farming systems, to make their farms more resilient to factors like changing climatic conditions, declining soil fertility levels and decreasing farm income. While many NGOs have promoted such improved systems, it is time to reckon these systems as units of planning for large scale adoption.

Original Source

Butana is a dry plateau in northern Sudan, east of the river Nile. Covering 65,000 square kilometres, less than 10% can be described as ‘woodland’ in the vaguest sense of the word, and even these trees are disappearing rapidly. The Butana Integrated Rural Development Project began in 2008 with the aim of supporting the livelihoods of poor family farmers by strengthening their resilience in the face of recurrent droughts. And improving tree cover was a key means of achieving this.

With the global population expected to reach over 9 billion by 2050, there is a continuous need to increase food production and buffer stocks. In this scenario, countries around the world, especially developing countries where the pervasiveness of hunger and food scarcity is more acute, are resorting to various counter strategies to meet the growing demand and to avert food insecurity and famine. Over the recent years there has been growing interest to strengthen and intensify local food production in order to mitigate the adverse effect of global food shocks and food price volatilities.

In a study of influences of biotic factors on the productivity of homegardens biotic factors were classified into three classes viz., complementary, supplementary and intervening factors. It is found that structure, composition, management and productivity of home gardens depend upon several interlinking socio-economic-cultural, ecological and policy and institutional factors. Intervening factors are the foremost deciding factor in the homegarden management system and its survival.