Aquaculture Efficiency in Egypt

Photo credit: Google

Tilapia fish farm Costa Rica

 

Switzerland Launches Project to Boost Aquaculture Efficiency in Egypt

The Embassy of Switzerland’s Office for International Cooperation, in collaboration with WorldFish and CARE International, has launched the Sustainable Transformation of Egypt’s Aquaculture Market System (STREAMS) project aimed at boosting production of inexpensive, nutritious and safe fish from sustainable aquaculture systems in Egypt.

STREAMS will increase the participation of Egypt’s underprivileged socioeconomic segments in the country’s fast-growing aquaculture sector while also making fish more affordable and accessible. Increased availability and consumption of fish can reduce Egypt’s high rates of childhood stunting, undernutrition and obesity.

The three-year STREAMS project will assist fish farmers, fish traders and retailers across seven Egyptian governorates: Kafr El Sheikh, Beheira, Sharkia, Fayoum, Port Said, Minya and Beni Suef. The funding allocated for this project is 2 million Swiss Francs.

STREAMS will focus on three goals. The first is to train fish farmers on improved management practices in existing fish farming zones and increase access to the Abbassa improved strain of Nile tilapia, a faster growing variety of the main fish species stocked in Egyptian fish farms. The second is to promote aquaculture practices in geographical areas that are not yet engaged in this sector with a focus on small-scale and integrated systems. The third is to enhance marketing systems for aquaculture products through support for retailers, the provision of market information and the establishment of a certification scheme for farmed Egyptian tilapia.

Read the full article: World Fish Center

Food security and nutrition, urban planning and development

Photo credit: FAO

Crops growing on the outskirts of Fayoume in Egypt.

 

Feeding the world’s cities: a critical challenge for sustainable development

Providing healthy diets for the world’s growing urban population requires forging stronger links between rural producers and urban markets and building food systems that are more socially inclusive, environmentally sound and less wasteful, FAO Deputy Director-General for Natural Resources, Maria Helena Semedo, said today.

She spoke at the opening of an FAO-organized meeting at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) taking place during this year’s International Green Week in Berlin, from 15-24 January 2016.

Semedo warned of the difficulties that many cities face in ensuring regular and stable access to adequate food for all. “This will worsen as an increasing proportion of the hungry will be living in urban areas,” she said.

More than 50 percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas and this is expected to rise to 70 percent by 2050, particularly in developing countries.

Increasing effects of climate change, including storms, floods and other extreme weather events, pose an added threat to how people in cities, especially the poor, access food.

Re-shaping food systems and making them more sustainable

Read the full article: FAO

Enabling women to combine farming with bringing up children and running household

Photo credit: ICARDA

Cactus thrives on very little water and does not require frequent labor inputs. 

Female farmers show the way

In parts of Egypt’s arid New Lands, female farmers are choosing to grow prickly pear, a type of cactus, rather than more conventional crops such as wheat. Prickly pear is better suited to desert conditions than most of the crops promoted by the Egyptian government. It also generates an income which helps women to pay for their children’s education. Against a backdrop of climate change and associated water shortages, ICARDA researchers have identified ways that the government can support female farmers in the New Lands and promote the cultivation of prickly pear and other drought-tolerant crops throughout desert settlements.

OPUNTIA BIOGAS ELQUIGLOBALENERGY P9270040_2 copy.JPG

Due to climate change and population growth in the Nile Basin, Egypt is set to face severe shortages of irrigation and drinking water in coming years – it is predicted that by 2050, Egypt will need to use around 50 per cent of the Nile’s water for drinking alone. At the same time, up to 15 per cent of agricultural land in the fertile Nile delta could be inundated as sea levels rise.

Since the 1980s, the Egyptian government has been resettling farmers in desert regions, the so-called ‘New Lands’, in response to land and water shortages and as a strategy for boosting food production. Each settler is provided with a plot of land, a shared irrigation pump, and a house. ICARDA researchers have been investigating how female settlers have adapted to farming in these arid conditions.

PRICKLY PEAR: AN ADAPTATION TO A THORNY PROBLEM

Female farmers in some New Lands settlements grow spineless prickly pear, Opuntia ficus-indica f. inermis, to supply the tourist sector in Cairo and Alexandria. This is partly a response to their marginalization from support programs, such as agricultural extension activities, which promote more conventional cash crops such as wheat.

In fact, prickly pear suits desert conditions better than other produce grown in Egypt, such as fruit trees. The cactus thrives on very little water and does not require frequent labor inputs. Because of these characteristics, it has sometimes been dismissed as a ‘lazy farmers’ crop. These same features, however, enable women in the New Lands to combine farming with bringing up their children and running their households, which are often located some distance from their farms. The cash they earn from selling prickly pear fruits has helped them to fund their children’s schooling and provide for their daughters’ marriages.

BARRIERS TO EXPANDING THE PRODUCTION OF DROUGHT-TOLERANT CROPS

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For more information:

Najjar, D. (2015). Women’s contributions to climate change adaptation in Egypt’s Mubarak Resettlement Scheme through cactus cultivation and adjusted irrigation. In Buechler, S and Hanson A.S. (Eds). A Political Ecology of Women, Water and Global Environmental Change. Chapter 8.

Read the full article: ICARDA

From pyramid to biosphere

Photo credit: Industry Tap

To convert the Great Pyramid of Giza into a living machine by melding the Pyramid with a modern skyscraper and a biosphere.

A Group of Designers Want to Turn Egyptian Pyramid into a Desertification-Fighting Skyscraper

By: Nidhi Goyal

One of the major consequences of climate change is desertification. Deserts are growing day by day at an alarming rate. In order to solve this problem, a US-based design team has put forward an ambitious solution: the Bio-Pyramid.

Bio-pyramid: A team of seven designers set their project in Egypt, situated on the edge of the Sahara Desert, with the goal to transform an ancient Egyptian pyramid into a green skyscraper that works to reverse desertification. It is a non-conventional skyscraper that operates as a biosphere.

Read the full article: Industry Tap

The challenges desertification poses to Egypt

Photo credit: Lydia+environment

The effects of desertification on land in Egypt (found on http://www.commercialpressuresonland.org/)

Desertification in Egypt

by LYDIA GROSSMAN

EXCERPT

In class this week we looked at the causes, impacts, and possible solutions to desertification issues around the world. I decided to look more closely at desertification in Egypt, a country which I’ve focused on in a couple of my past blog posts. In Egypt you can find the perfect recipe for desertification–an arid environment with several additional stressing factors such as salinization, over-cultivation, deforestation, and water scarcity.

I found this article (http://www.irinnews.org/report/93193/egypt-desertification-threat-to-local-food-production) that goes into depth about some of the challenges desertification poses to Egypt’s rapidly growing population, especially when it comes feeding everyone.

Read the full article: Lydia+environment

VIDEO : https://youtu.be/Co2bKDrpBI8

According to the UN, 6 million hectares of arable land dissapear every year because of desertification, a loss equivalent to an estimated 42 billion dollars. In Egypt, a mere 3% of the country’s surface area is fit for agriculture. Drought, higher levels of salt in the aquifer and the soil, bad farmland drainage and construction on farmlands make up 30% of the total desertification.Duration: 01:43

 

Up and down a canal

Photo credit: IWMI

Farmers cultivating lettuce, while another farmer digs a small canal (marwa) with a donkey, Egypt.
Photo: Hamish John Appleby/IWMI

How Egyptian farmers are adapting to water scarcity up and down a canal

Heads or Tails : At first glance, it might seem like these farmers are foolishly growing the wrong crop in the wrong place.

Read the research report:

Ghazouani, Wafa; Molle, Francois; Swelam, A.; Rap, Edwin; Abdo, A. 2014. Understanding farmers’ adaptation to water scarcity: a case study from the western Nile Delta, Egypt. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute (IWMI) 31p. (IWMI Research Report 160) [DOI]

If you wander up and down one of the many irrigation canals in Egypt’s Nile Delta, you’ll see a wide range of crops being grown. Fields of swelling water melons sit alongside leafy greens. Twirling grape vines back on to rows of cucumbers. But why have the farmers chosen to grow one crop rather than another? Is it simply because they have differing access to water? A new study undertaken by IWMI and partners* sought to better understand the reasons for crop choice, and has come up with some surprising conclusions.

Farmer preparing his land for cultivation. Egypt. Hamish John Appleby. IWMI – http://i2.wp.com/www.iwmi.cgiar.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Farmer-preparing-his-land-for-cultivation.jpg?resize=625%2C416

The study investigated how a group of Egyptian farmers were adapting to water scarcity along the al-Bayda secondary canal in the northwestern Nile Delta. While predictable differences in irrigation use were observed (e.g. night irrigation, reusing drainage water), the study reveals some unexpected crop choice; this challenges the assumption that farmers choose which crops to grow based only on water availability and profit maximization. These findings show the limitations of oversimplified recommendations and policies, which do not explore the numerous factors that influence farmer behavior.

Read the full article: IWMI

 

Farmers’ adaptation to water scarcity

Photo credit: Pixabay

Irrigation with sprayers

IWMI Research Report – 160: Understanding farmers’ adaptation to water scarcity: a case study from the western Nile Delta, Egypt

This study was undertaken to analyze farmers’ adaption to water scarcity in the command area of a secondary canal in the Nile Delta of Egypt. The results revealed that farmers’ responses were driven by a multiplicity of factors, beyond water scarcity or profit maximization. These additional factors include food security of the family, risk management, social capital and history of farmers, and most unexpectedly the collective dimension of crop choice. The findings of this study expose the limitations of projects, modeling exercises or policy recommendations that are too often based on the oversimplified view of profit maximization as the basis of farming system dynamics.

See: IWMI

Why are new olive orchards struggling to remain viable?

Photo credit: Foodtank

Farmers from the South East Mediterranean say olive orchards are struggling to remain viable because of a failure to value the indigenous knowledge and experience of local farmers.

Olives in the Desert: Egypt’s Farmers Call On Scientists to Value Local Know-How

EXCERPT

Olives in Egypt have been grown by successive generations of farmers for thousands of years in remote, isolated, harsh-environments. So why are new olive orchards are struggling to remain viable?

Farmers from the South East Mediterranean say it comes down to a failure to value the indigenous knowledge and experience of local farmers.

“Twenty-eight years’ experience in reclaiming desert and growing olives …has developed the saying: ‘Knowledge and knowhow encompass science; but science does not encompass knowledge and knowhow’,” say the farmers. The indigenous knowledge of farmers must be examined, analyzed, and recorded for the use of coming generations.

“Egyptian farmers have learned to respect the ecosystem in order to survive. They inter-planted olive trees with palms because they noticed that palms are the best desert climate modifiers. With their high, dense canopies, the palms shade the olive trees from the sun, yet allow the light needed for photosynthesis to penetrate. The long, fibrous palm trunks absorb air moisture during night and release it during the hot days, reducing the surrounding temperature by 5-7 degrees Celsius. The palms also protect the olive trees from the regular hot winds during March to May, when the trees are in full bloom.”

“Negligence of such indigenous knowledge has caused losses to investors who are growing olive orchards on thousands of hectares, simply because the indigenous knowledge has not been studied, evaluated, documented and disseminated.”

Read the full article: Foodtank

Desertification Sensitivity Index

Photo credit: Pixabay

Egyptian North Coast

RESULTS OF STUDYING THE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSITIVITY FOR DESERTIFICATION IN THE NORTH COAST OF EGYPT

Dr. RAFAT RAMADAN ALI

NARSS

Excerpt

2. ENVIRONMENTAL SENSITIVITY INDEX (ESI)

Definition

The ESI combines four Quality Indices described separately: Soil Quality, Climate Quality, Vegetation Quality and Management Quality

The Environmental Sensitivity Index of an area is the “result of interactions between elementary factors (information layers) each differently linked to direct and indirect degradation or desertification phenomena” (Basso et al., 1998). It is built on the ESA estimate, and it represents the combination of critical factors, expressed in terms of %.

 

3.3. Climatic Quality Index

 Climate quality index (CQI) is assessed depend upon the amount of rainfall, aridity and slope aspect parameters. The amount of rainfall and aridity are the same in the studied area, but the microclimate is differ from place to another depend on the surface slope and slope aspect. The digital elevation model (DEM) of the depression was established and used for extracting the slope aspect. The climatic quality index layer of the area refer that the northwestern coast of Egypt is characterized by a low (>1.80) climatic quality index.

3.4. Desertification sensitivity index