Team from Brazil’s Embrapa on data collection mission in Mozambique

A team from Brazil’s “Embrapa Monitoramento por Satélite” (Campinas/SP) – “Embrapa Satellite Monitoring” – is in Mozambique on a mission to collect data about land use, natural resources, and agri-livestock production systems in the Maputo Corridor, the institution said.

The team, which is part of the Brazil-Mozambique Platform, is expected to have travelled around 3,000 kilometres in the Mozambican provinces of Maputo, Gaza, and Inhambane when it ends its five-day mission Saturday.

Previous surveys in another region of Mozambique in 2010 were the basis for writing a book entitled, “Paralelos – Corredor de Nacala” (Parallels – Nacala Corridor) organised by “Embrapa Monitoramento por Satélite,” which discussed potential similarities between Brazil and Mozambique and highlighting the savannah region between the 13thS and 17thS parallels, which has the same geographical position as the Brazilian “cerrado” region.

In 2011 WebGIS Moçambique, an interactive and dynamic system to subsidise production of maps of the potential for agri-livestock production, was also published on the Internet.

The system, which has incorporated new data since it was launched, includes information about soil and agricultural aptitude for crops such as soy, maize, cassava, rice, peanuts, and cotton, information about land use, hydrographical basins, and information on transport infrastructure, amongst other data.

Last Monday the team visited the Cartography and Geographical Information Systems Laboratory of the Mozambican Agrarian Research Institute (IIAM), expansion of which is being coordinated by “Embrapa Monitoramento por Satélite”.

(source: macauhub)

Labex Korea Colletion

By Gilberto Silber Schmidt
Labex Korea – The new format of Labex Korea Collection provide our readers more facilities to identify and read the titles of interest without having to go through the entire page. The PDF document includes the TOP10′s for each month. This version includes the articles published in January, February and March. Enjoy

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Agroenergy in Spotlight

By Gilberto Silber Schmidt

Labex Korea – Labex Korea prepared a summary of publications on the subject Agroenergy recently published in this Blog, in order to make easier for readers to access informations without having to navigate through the Blog …. Click here  to get up the list  ……enjoy

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Brazil and China will have Research Center for innovation on nanotechnology

In Portaria published on Tuesday (14) the “Official Gazette”, the Minister of Science and Technology, Marco Antonio Raupp, establishing the CBC – Nano (Brazil-China Center for Research and Innovation in Nanotechnology). Is not clear yet the research agenda of the center, but according to the chemist Fernando Galembeck, China expressed an interest in developing, with Brazil, sensors and devices for use in clinical diagnostic to attend dispersed communities.
“The idea is having a portable reliable equipment, of cheap production, to facilitate taking care to people,” explains Galembeck, who is director of LNNano (National Nanotechnology Laboratory) in Campinas (SP), and will be the Brazilian coordinator of BCC Nano. According to him, another area of interest is the development of new products from the biomass. “We can use nanotechnology to transform agricultural waste,” he said, noting that Brazil, being a leading global producer of food and agricultural commodities, generates large volumes of biomass not yet grasped.
The Sino-Brazilian Center will be virtual and working as a network of research and development cooperative linked to the LNN-Nano. According to the concierge “participation in the CBC-Nano will be considered relevant public service, not entailing any specific remuneration. China is considered a major power in nanotechnology research, with a while Brazil occupies the 25th position. According to data released by ABDI (Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development), the international nanotechnology market will reach $ 693 billion by the end of this year to $ 2.95 trillion in 2015.
Nanotechnology concerns the ability to manipulate materials of atomic size, of 1 to 100 nanometers, that each has a millionth of a millimeter, ie, a unit 10 000 times smaller than the diameter of hair.

Source: Agência Brasil, February 13th, 2012
Click here to read the complete article (Portuguese) at Folha de São Paulo
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Brazil and Scotland team up to tackle food security challenge

By Arabella Mileham

GlobalMeat News: Agriculture scientists in Scotland an Brazil have signed a formal agreement for research teams from the two countries to work together on join projects.

Source and Images from: GlobalMeat News, January 20th, 2012

Click here to read the complete version of this article

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New Frontiers in food Security

Global Food Security, Tuesday, 3 rd january, 2012

It is now more than one month since I arrived in Brazil to spend a period working in Embrapa (the Brazilian Government agricultural research organization) as part of the Labex (Laboratorio no Exterior) programme.

For more than 10 years Embrapa have been sending scientists abroad to work in labs and organizations that they regard as of scientific and strategic importance, and a UK Labex base was established at Rothamsted Research in 2010.

Click here to read the complete version of this article published at  Global Food Security.

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UNCTAD Report: Africa and the New Forms of Development Partnership

UNCTAD Release:  The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has released the Economic Development in Africa Report 2010, which is titled “South-South Cooperation: Africa and the New Forms of Development Partnership”.

According to the Report, increasingly important economic partners in the “South” can help African transformation, not only through growing trade and financial flows but by supporting regional infrastructure projects and transferring knowledge and technology.

The study shows a significant increase in the number and nature of Africa-South cooperation arrangements during the last decade.  With the continuing growth of large developing countries, such as China and Brazil, together with weaker growth prospects in advanced economies, the economic relationships linking Africa to other developing regions can be expected to grow in relative importance.

The overall aim, the study says, should be to build Africa´s “productive capacities” — that is, the abilities of the continent´s economies to produce a greater variety and more sophisticated goods.

Developing-country partners can support this process by broadening the scope of engagement beyond extractive sectors and by enhancing technology transfer and learning. Cooperation with the South should also ensure that gains are better distributed across countries.

The report recommends that African countries use targeted incentives to encourage foreign investors to source inputs locally. Also, the promotion of joint ventures between African and Southern firms could boost the diffusion of knowledge to local entrepreneurs and contribute to the structural transformation of African economies.

The report notes that despite advances in Africa-South cooperation, traditional donors are, and will remain the main providers of aid to the region and also its major trading partners. The report thus recommends that Africa-South cooperation should be seen as a complement to, and not a substitute for, relations with traditional partners in the North.

More of the Report´s highlights can be seen here.

The full report can be downloaded from here.

The Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace is Launched

The Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace is a multiparty international initiative involving the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Bank (WB) and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC). 

The initiative aims to promote South-South partnerships to enhance agricultural research and development in the African continent, focusing on small holders.  Agricultural innovation will be the major emphasis of this cooperation program and proposals will be accepted in the following thematic areas:

1. Productivity Enhancing Technologies
2. Natural Resource Management Improvement
3. Policy, Institutional and Market Strengthening and Knowledge Management
4. Smallholder and Poverty-Alleviation Targeted Technologies

Individuals representing collaboration between African-based public or private, governmental or non-governmental research and development organizations, and one or more Embrapa research centers can apply to a 2-step process. The call for pre-proposals is open until 15/07/2010 and proponents of selected pre-proposals will be invited to present full proposals to as second stage evaluation.

A steering committee will be in charge of the selection process. Funds for projects will be available up to US$ 80,000 for 2 years. See below the important deadlines:

July 15th, 2010: Call for pre-proposals closes;
July 29th, 2010: Announcement of selected pre-proposals and call for full proposals;
September 2nd , 2010: Deadline for receiving full proposals;
October 6th and 7th, 2010: Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace event, in Brasília, Brazil, and announcement of winners.

Click here for more information on the Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace.

Resource for Collaboration: Mendeley Research Networks

Mendeley is a free social Web application designed for managing and sharing research papers, discovering research data and collaborating online.  It has many associated functions to connect researchers with common interests, opening new avenues for interaction, knowledge sharing and discovery. Research articles can be fed to Mendeley, that has an intuitive, easy to use interface.  It automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, creating a searchable database that is easily accessed and shared.

The main possibilities offered by Mendeley are:

• creation of your personal bibliographic database using automatic extraction of document details and cited references from PDFs, as well as automatic retrieval of additional information from CrossRef, PubMed, ArXiv, etc;
• possibility to read, full-text search, annotate, and highlight your PDF research papers in Mendeley’s integrated PDF viewer;
• synchronize your bibliographic database across multiple machines, share it with colleagues, manage it online, or embed bibliographies on blogs and websites;
• quickly cite your papers in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer and create bibliographies with a single click;
• capture citations from websites using Mendeley’s cross-browser Web Importer;
• synchronize your digital library with your private Mendeley Web account and across multiple computers;
• manage your private article library online and full-text search across all your research papers;
• Web Importer that allows easy one-click capturing of citations from web pages like PubMed, ArXiv, Google Scholar, ISI Web of Knowledge, and SpringerLink, among others.

And there is a lot more!  Visit the Web site of Mendeley to learn about all features of this interesting resource for information management and collaboration.

Resource for Collaboration: Protocol Pedia

Protocol Pedia, or the encyclopedia of science protocols, has just been launched.   It is a free social Web application that provides a platform for organization of protocols and promotion of interaction and collaboration.

Researchers can create personal collections of protocols which will be available under their ‘Favorites’ for easy access.   Also, users can rate, comment and help improve protocols available in the database.

Protocol Pedia provides in addition a forum platform to connect scientists, promoting discussions directed to solve specific problems.  It also hosts a blog dedicated to discussion of the latest in the world of science.

Visit the Web site of Protocol Pedia to learn about all features of this interesting resource for information sharing and collaboration.