Elisabetta Gotor

The impact of Bioversity International's African Leafy Vegetables programme in Kenya

An objective of Bioversity International is to promote income and food security by ensuring that agricultural biodiversity is conserved, characterised and used to improve productivity. The African Leafy Vegetables (ALVs) programme was initiated and implemented to meet this objective but no impact evaluation has been carried out since its conclusion. This study aims to evaluate the role played by Bioversity and its partners in the programme, and to assess the impact of the ALVs programme on the livelihoods of farmers in four regions of Kenya. The study used both primary and secondary data. Information from the survey was complemented by focus group discussions. To assess the role of Bioversity and its partners, all the partners were identified and interviewed. Bioversity was found to have ably acted as catalyst, facilitator and coordinator of the programme. Results also showed that production, consumption and marketing of ALVs had increased since 1997, women still dominated most of the ALVs activities, and those households that marketed ALVs were relatively better off than those that did not.

The scientific information activity of Bioversity International: the descriptor lists

This paper explores the history of descriptor lists (DLs)—scientific standards for documenting plant genetic resources—which have been published by Bioversity International since 1976 (formerly IBPGR 1974–1991; IPGRI 1991–2006). Each DL represents an important tool; together, they constitute the basis for a standardized characterization system that provides an internationally agreed format and universally understood ‘language’ for plant genetic resources data. The paper also presents an analysis of data collected through questionnaires and web statistics on the impact of DLs in order to understand their use by major stakeholders. The usefulness of Bioversity’s DLs was measured in terms of their value in facilitating the establishment of databases, and improving collaborations and information exchange among organizations. Most survey respondents reported that they not only used Bioversity’s DLs, but recognized them as the standards for plant genetic resources data collection and management. Bioversity’s DLs are widely respected because they are developed by large groups of crop specialists. Together, the DLs are helping Bioversity to meet the ambitious objective of establishing a Clearing-House Mechanism as set forth by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Article 18.3, which seeks to promote and facilitate information exchange among parties, Governments and stakeholders in order to assure a full implementation of the CBD. A number of areas for improvement were identified, although some of them are either outside Bioversity’s mandate or depend on human or financial capital for implementation.

Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on-farm conservation projects?

Smallholder farmers who grow diverse landraces in centres of crop diversity contribute to sustaining the capacity of agricultural and food systems to adapt to change by maintaining crop evolution in their fields today, thus enabling humanity to continue to have the broad genetic variation needed to adapt crops to changes tomorrow. Given this fact, the last 20 years have witnessed an ever-growing interest in on-farm conservation of crop infra-specific diversity. While numerous projects to support it have been, and continue to be, implemented worldwide, there has been very little systematic assessment of the extent to which these projects have been effective at contributing to the maintenance of crop diversity on-farm and the creation of associated benefits for the farmers involved. The factors and relationships implicated in attaining conservation and livelihood results are complex, so that a conceptual scheme that brings them together in a simplified but coherent fashion can be extremely useful for the scientists, donors, policy-makers and practitioners concerned. This paper presents a conceptual framework for analysing on-farm projects, the trade-offs involved and assesses their success in a more systematic way.

Livelihood implications of in situ-on farm conservation strategies of fruit species in Uzbekistan

The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of a set of interventions related to on-farm/in situ conservation and use of fruit species (cultivated and wild) on farmers’ livelihoods and species diversity in Central Asia. Specifically, a difference-in-differences propensity score matching is used to evaluate the outcome of a development research program in Uzbekistan between 2005 and 2010. Species crop diversity maintained by farmers before and after the project increased as a result of the interventions, showing the efficacy of the interventions promoted by the projects in terms of conservation. Furthermore, innovations provided by the program increased both household propensity of marketing and self-consumption of target fruit. However, the program’s interventions did not seem to impact significantly any of the indicators related to household livelihoods. The short time elapsed between the end of the project and the impact assessment may be too brief to capture any observable impact on livelihoods.