SUJAN PIYA'S BLOG

Study on supply chain of construction materials- study carried out in the post earthquake reconstruction in Nepal http://infohub.practicalaction.org/oknowledge/handle/11283/620299  

Fertile ground: harnessing the market to reverse soil degradation in South Asia Seth Cook , Chris Henderson , Menila Kharel , Afsari Begum , Abdur Rob , Sujan Piya Briefing Soils are the foundation of all terrestrial life on the planet and are essential for agricultural production. Yet intensive agriculture involving heavy inputs of chemical fertilisers is degrading soils across South Asia and many other parts of the world, threatening food security. Soil fertility and structure can be vastly improved through greater applications of compost, manure and other organic fertilisers. However, the shift away from diverse farming systems means that organic matter is now in short supply on many farms. There is a need to develop value chains to enable organic fertilisers and composts to supply much needed organic matter to depleted soils. Lessons from multi-stakeholder initiatives in Bangladesh and Nepal illustrate the potential for scaling up such value chains to foster more incl...

Establishment of agro-vet opens new doors Sujan Piya April 1st, 2015 Bhakta Bahadhur Saud, a resident of Kuldevmandu VDC of Bajura District, earned his living by selling agricultural inputs to local farmers which he bought from the agro-vets of other districts. He was carrying out this work in a very basic way but changed his working modality after participating in a training workshop. He was one of the participants of the market mapping workshop organised by Rural Access Programme (RAP) – 3 in the Bajura District. During the workshop, he was identified as a potential market player who could do input business formally and provide services to many farmers in the community. Rural Access Programme (RAP) – 3 is a four years project being implemented by Practical Action through IMC Worldwide with the financial support from DFID in 22 Village Development Committees (VDCs) Doti, Achham, Bajura and Humla Districts. In all these districts, market system...

Practical Action Consulting (PAC) is organizing international training on participatory market system development (PMSD) from 16-19 March 2015. To download registration and for further information https://practicalaction.org/consulting-pmsd-training PMSD is based on three basic principles: participation, systemic thinking/planning and facilitation and has been developed and improved over the last decade by Practical Action's markets practitioners in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. The technical training assisted microenterprise development practitioners, from agencies as varied as CARE, World Vision International and fhi360, to gain a greater understanding of Practical Action’s approach to inclusive market development.  The training focused on how to design and facilitate preliminary and participatory market mapping workshops, how to engage key public and private market actors and how to help them move from plans to actions that can make their market system work bett...

"Tie Agriculture With Women" SUJAN PIYA Ph. D, head of program, Agriculture, Food Security and Markets of Practical Action, is now leading a project, Promotion of Sustainable Agriculture for Nutrition and Food Security, in far west. As the project is at the implementation stage, Piya spoke to New Spotlight on various issues. Excerpts: Issue Name : Vol: 08 No. -11 November. 21- 2014 (Mansir 5, 2071) 2 SUJAN PIYA What is the state of Promotion of Sustainable Agriculture for Nutrition and Food Security Project (POSANFS)? With the financial support of the European Union, Practical Action has initiated POSANFS (Promotion of Sustainable Agriculture for Nutrition and Food Security) project directly targeting 7,000 households, including 20 percent dalits and 50 percent women from Achham, Bajhang, Bajura and Doti districts. This project is related to food and nutrition. However, this project aims at comm...

Open publication - Free publishing - More agriculture

Open publication - Free publishing - More carbon capture

Abstract: This study focuses on comparing the technical efficiency of rice farms in two locations with different level of urbanization. A production function using maximum likelihood method is estimated and efficiency score of individual household is calculated using stochastic frontier analysis. The efficiency scores are regressed on variables including farm-household characteristics and degree of output market commercialization. The empirical evidence suggests that the elasticity of production to land size and biological inputs like chemical fertilizer, pesticide, fungicide and seed is positive and statistically significant. The average efficiency scores in two sample districts indicate that the production can be increased by 26-33% through improving efficiency in a given technological condition. The result suggests that the degree of commercialization has positive effect on technical efficiency . Furthermore, household characteristics like education, age, share o...

IFPRI has recently published Global Hunger Index The challenge of hunger: Taming price spikes and excessive food price volatility A very important book from IFPRI. It deals about why price hike in food, what are the effects and how to tackle it. Following is the pdf link http://www.ifpri.org/publication/2011-global-hunger-index

Sources of Agricultural Productivity in Low and Lower Middle Income Countries Sujan PIYA 1) and Akira KIMINAMI 2) 1) Corresponding Author, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo 2) Professor, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo (Received February 18, 2010) (Accepted December 5, 2010) Abstract Assessing and quantifying the sources of agricultural productivity across developing countries is the prime objective of this paper. Thirty-one low and lower middle income countries from the Asian and African continents were selected for the study. The results show that variations in land productivity are well explained by variations in labor and fertilizer resources. However, variations in tractor and livestock inputs have low impacts on the performance of land productivity. The average annual malmquist factor productivity index is positive. Factor productivit...

The world’s population will grow from almost 7 billion now to over 9 billion in 2050. A special report on feeding the world from Economist http://www.economist.com/node/18200618  

1. Evaluating the impact of geographic concentration on Nepalese agricultural export http://sae.sagepub.com/content/11/2/207.abstract Abstract: This study observed and analyzed the behaviour of Nepalese agricultural export using vector error correction model (VECM). The first part of the analysis focused on the dynamic relationship among agricultural export, geographic concentration and total agricultural production. Results of the study revealed that Nepalese agricultural export was very much dependent on the Indian markets and had positive relation with the geographic concentration index in the long run. The significant and higher error correction term indicated that the short-run fluctuations in geographic concentration and agricultural production were promptly adjusted to its long-run trend. The long-run effect of agricultural production increment on export was pos...

1. to calculate water productivity- http://save-the-rain.com/world-bank/ 2. land use calculator- http://www.lianpinkoh.com/luc/ 3. Immigrants moving money- http://www.torre.nl/migrantsmovingmoney/

Image via Wikipedia Treadle Pump - Micro irrigation technology - TP is basically an appropriate technology in rural areas where farm holdings are very small. Technology should be viable in terms of socio-ecoomic features of the farm household. Generally, the top down approach of government without concerning micro level intricacies hardly able to realize the targeted impact. Small farmers means- they have small investment capacity their risk bearing capacity is very weak they live in geographically difficult area less educated poor access to information   poor access to market Thus, agricultural development programs should consider the real situation of rural farm household under which they are operating the farm business. R ural development programs should be compatible in terms of farmers physical and human resource endowments. The most important part is their institutional capacity build-up. Only focusing on commodity does ...

Agricultural subsidies Ploughing on The rich world's farmers are still reaping handsome subsidies Source: www.economist.com FARMERS are getting by with fewer subsidies in many countries around the world compared with 20 years ago. Yet subsidies still accounted for more than three-quarters of farmers’ incomes in Norway, Switzerland and Iceland between 2007 and 2009. And farm subsidies in the EU made up a slightly greater proportion of farmers' incomes in 2007-09 than two decades beforehand. OECD countries spent $253 billion on farm subsidies in 2009—22% of gross farm receipts, the first increase since 2004. High agricultural commodity prices ensured payments slid, and reach a record low in 2008. Last year, this trend reversed as commodity prices fell.

http://www.r-project.org/  free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, different kinds of analyses can be done, can use as a calculator http://statgen.ncsu.edu/qtlcart/WQTLCart.htm  for mapping quantitative trait loci (QTL) in cross populations from inbred lines. http://folk. uio.no/ohammer/past/ : easy-to-use data analysis package with many features including diversity index, multivariate, parsimony etc. https://www. uni-hohenheim. de/plantbreeding /software/ : For genetics and plant breeding related experiment http://faculty. vassar.edu/ lowry/tabs http://faculty. vassar.edu/ lowry/tabs.html : Statistcial tables http://evolution. genetics. washington. edu/phylip/software.html : More than 100 software for phylogenetic study http://www.statsoft .com/textbook/stathome.html .html : Electronic statbook