Poster Session 1.3 Biodiversity and ecosystem services Kai Behn, University of Bonn, Germany, presented a really informative poster at this mornings poster session. His studies are about different plant species on fallow cropland in a valley in Namulonge, Uganda.

One of the highlights of this year's Tropentag is the introduction of the elevator pitch. This refers to a short summary that can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride. During the guided poster session "Climate change, Carbon Sequestration and Greenhouse Gases" presenters were allowed to speak for only two minutes. Continue after this pitch :)

Do we know enough to effectively conserve tropical forests? That was the topic of my pre-conference workshop, where we debated to find an answer to this question. Do we really need more and more research on conservation to make a change and answer society’s questions, or we just after satisfying our own curiosity? Continue...

Brave Ndisale, FAO

In our earlier post, we highlighted the subject of gender and land tenure as discussed by the Tropentag keynote speaker, Brave Ndisale. A gathering of researchers and development practitioners also presented research posters addressing issues of gender and land tenure, value chains, and collective action drawing from case studies in Nigeria, Sudan, Ecuador, Kenya, Uganda and Ghana. Continue...

A heightened debate marked the opening of the Tropentag conference with scholars, researchers, and development organizations confronting the complexity of addressing food insecurity, climate vulnerabilities, and gender disparities.

Thomas Pogge, a Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, contested the current methods used by organizations, such as the FAO, to measure food insecurity and hunger, thereby informing the international commitments to address world’s hunger and food insecurity.

Pogge argued that, because such organizations are government-funded, methods for measuring and setting targets, maybe politically influenced, and thus interfere with the reality of food security while moving the goal posts of commitments, such as the Millennium Declaration and the MDGs. Another controversy raised by Pogge was with FAO’s definition of food security, which considers energy availability but fails to address the deficiency of other nutrients.

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"You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.”  Brigham Young

 

Marufa Fatema (28), her husband Md. Alamgir Akter (36) and their daughter(3) from Bangladesh.

At the Tropentag conference I met a woman with no excuses to come to the conference, despite the fact that she was holding a 3 year-old toddler.

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"The world is facing a barrage of shocks". Director General and applied economist Shenggen Fan of International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was one of the keynote speakers of this year’s Tropentag 2015. "The world is facing a barrage of shocks". Continue...

Recap from today!