Bringing financial services to smallholder farmers.

Financial inclusion has made considerable progress in recent years. There are now a wide range of financial products which can help small farmers: debt financing, short term working capital to finance purchasing of inputs, long term working capital to finance machinery, equity and factoring. Whereas banks used not to want to go the ‘last mile’, ICT innovations have made it possible and profitable to do so. Vision Fund, for example, has over 1.2 million customers. There is nonetheless still a large financing gap for smallholders: $50billion is being offered, but over $200 billion is needed. This means that smallholders often have to resort to loan sharks. In India for example 37% of loans are still from the informal sector with interest rates of 20-40%. At the “Future of Small Farms” conference, organised by CABI and the Syngenta Foundation on 24-25 January in Basel, four bottlenecks were identified which constrain the growth of financial services to small farmers: 1)Little interest in agriculture shown by banks and formal lenders. This is due in part because they do not fully understand the sector, its needs and cycles. continue

Fake Doctor Nabbed For Carrying Out Illegal Abortion.

Fake Doctor Nabbed For Carrying Out Illegal Abortion.A fake doctor who allegedly performed an illegal abortion of a six month pregnancy in Akute, Ifo Local Government Area of Ogun State has been arrested. The crime was uncovered by a supervisory team of the State Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) while monitoring the level of compliance of the re-validation and registration exercise of health facilities in the State. Chairman of NANNM, Roseline Solarin who disclosed this during an interview added that the fake doctor was also discovered to have organised a graduation ceremony for a fake nurse.continue

Vegan ‘bleeding’ burger on Michelin-starred menu

Vegan ‘bleeding’ burger on Michelin-starred menu: Bill Gates-backed Silicon Valley start-up Impossible Foods will launch its ‘bleeding’ meat-free burger at two New York restaurants this week.

Hungary orders poultry indoors amid bird flu concern

Hungary orders poultry indoors amid bird flu concern: Hungary’s chief veterinarian Lajos Bognar has ordered the nation’s poultry industry to keep birds indoors as the country grapples with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HAPI).

EU hits out at South Africa's poultry dumping protest

EU hits out at South Africa's poultry dumping protest: The European Commission has expressed concern after hundreds of people protested in Pretoria, South Africa, against EU poultry dumping that has forced profit-hit chicken processors to cut jobs.

Insecticide resistance in mosquitoes.

A new study published in the PLOS Genetics shows that genetic analysis of mosquito populations in Africa shows that recent successes in controlling malaria through treated bednets has led to widespread insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. Insecticide-treated bed nets and indoor spraying have been incredibly successful at preventing the spread of malaria, but their widespread use has driven mosquitoes to evolve resistance to these insecticides. By identifying genetic patterns that predict when and where resistance will evolve, scientists hope to mitigate the effects of resistance. In the current study, researchers used a combination of sequencing techniques and genetic analyses to elucidate a continent-wide population structure of a major African malaria vector, the mosquito Anopheles funestus. They identified a gene region that has allowed mosquitoes to evolutionarily adapt to insecticides by enabling them to break down commonly used pyrethroid insecticides. The resistance form of this gene has now swept through mosquito populations in southern Africa to become almost universal. This gene region has been implicated previously in insecticide resistance, but the evolutionary pressures acting on it were not fully understood. This selective sweep occurred after 2002, likely in response to increased efforts at mosquito control. The study demonstrates the intense pressure that the use of pyrethroid insecticides places on mosquito populations. If this pressure and the associated increase in resistance continues, then humans will no longer be able to control malaria effectively through existing strategies.

Sitting Too Much Ages You by Eight Years.

Sit less, move more. It's a motto worth repeating, especially as research accumulates showing just how detrimental prolonged sitting is for your body. Diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and premature death are just some of the chronic conditions linked to sitting too much, and a new study hints at why: Being sedentary for long periods of time each day appears to accelerate aging at the cellular level. Among close to 1,500 older women included in the study, those who sat the longest were, on average, eight years older, biologically speaking, than women who moved around more often. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine gave activity trackers to a group of 64- to 95-year-old women and questioned them about their activity. Those who sat for more than 10 hours a day and got less than 40 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity had shorter telomeres. Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get shorter, which is why they're used as a measure of biological aging. Eventually, the telomeres become so short that the cell can no longer divide and dies. For this reason, telomeres are also sometimes compared to a lit bomb fuse In the women who sat for 10-plus hours a day, the telomere shortening was equivalent to about eight years of aging. In other words, too much sitting accelerated the aging process by about eight years. Short telomeres have also been linked with chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.more