Caity's blog

By Caity Peterson

Catfish farmers in Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta are barely scraping by. They operate on the tightest of profit margins – 3% to 5% in a good year – and deal with a highly volatile, boom-and-bust export market.  For an industry that’s already on the brink, could the addition of negative climate change impacts push it over the edge?

Researchers at WorldFish, as part of the project “Investigating the vulnerability of and economics of adapting aquaculture in Vietnam to climate change”, partly funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), have attempted to calculate the costs of adaptation to these impacts, a first for fisheries and aquaculture at the national level.

Fish on the fryer

Aquaculture in the Mekong River Delta accounts for 80% of Vietnam’s total shrimp production and 76% of its cultured fish production (2008 statistics). In addition to our beleaguered catfish, the most important product here is brackish-water shrimp, cultivated both extensively and intensively over large areas of the delta. Being largely coastal endeavors, catfish and shrimp farming will undoubtedly be affected by the changing climate.

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By Caity Peterson

A detective solves a mystery by starting from the end result – the crime scene – and working backwards to determine the cause – the crime. The same logic, called backcasting, is also the key to climate change adaptation and development.

Joost Vervoort, scenarios officer for the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), and Katindi Sivi Njonjo Society for International Development in Kenya spoke to a group of CCAFS stakeholders as a prelude to the Second Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD2) in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

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By Alejandra Martins, BBC Mundo, 24 October 2012

When researchers from totally different continents met this year in Uruguay, they were looking to resolve one of the future’s great challenges: How to feed a growing world population that will reach 9 billion people in 2050.

The South American country has achieved rice yields comparable with what would be expected of the most fertile zones of the United States, thanks to a model that could contain vital lessons for other nations. The advance is one of those high-impact innovations that will be discussed at next week’s international summit, the Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD).

“We estimate that in 2035 it will be necessary to produce 116 million tons more of polished or dry rice every year to satisfy global demand,” said Achim Dobermann, the director of the International Rice Institute in the Philippines, to BBC Mundo. The current global production of dry rice (the kind that reaches the consumer) is close to 480 million tons. Dobermann is one of the experts who recently visited plantations of rice in Uruguay, together with representatives from Africa, Asia and other regions. “The advances in this country can offer lessons that could be adapted for other countries. We are looking at Uruguay in that context,” said Dobermann. How has Uruguay achieved its high yields? And to what extent can this strategy serve for other nations as well?

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