Did you leave Tropentag wondering if tropical agriculture is still your future career? Well, you were in the right place, because the student reporters caught up with one woman whose career path might just inspire you. Dr. Ajantha Perera, an Assistant Professor at Fiji National University, and the only one from Oceania participating at the Tropentag conference this year answered a few questions about  her career and her motivation to fly thousands of miles for Tropentag. Continue...

A poster about "Transaction Costs in Indigenous Vegetable Marketing: Evidence from Rural and Peri-Urban Areas in Kenya" was presented on the second day of the Tropentag 2015 in Berlin. The person behind this valuable topic is from Leibniz Universität Hannover. He is Christopher Kiprono (27) and he is competing for this year's Value Chain poster. Continue...

If there is one thing that all of the presenters at the Tropentag 2015 guided poster session V on "Value Chain Analysis and Marketing II" agree on, it is the truth that there is a lot of room for growth, development and advancement in various stages of the value chain and in marketing of agricultural products in the tropics. Continue...

by Pacifique Ingabire and Nizam Hussein

When people talk about value chains, we may understand how products move from one actor to another, and of course when you are a researcher or a student you hear it from lectures; but do we really conceptualize value chains in the same way? Given the variety contexts and questions in which it is used, do researchers have a common, concrete definition for this concept, or is it a vague term that is used differently depending on the objectives of the researcher? Christian Klein 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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