(For 2000/2001 regional programming go to Asia, Africa or Latin America
For 2003/2004 updates see the CIIFAD Annual Report's MOIST section)
At the global level, the MOIST Group has focused upon interregional exchange of information through
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A major undertaking of TropSCORE, with assistance from the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’s electronic technologies working group (AGET), the American Distance Education Consortium and CIIFAD’s distance learning program, is development of a TropSCORE "Worldwide Portal to Information on Soil Health". The website links practitioners, sources of information, and experts capable of analyzing and synthesizing emerging data and information. This international clearinghouse and search engine for Internet resources on soil cover, organic inputs, and tropical soil management is being developed by MOIST in cooperation with Cornell University’s Mann Agricultural Library. The Portal currently links into the Agricultural Network Information Center (AgNIC), a national alliance of U.S. land-grant university libraries. The Worldwide Portal to Information on Soil Health will begin operating a Spanish verison in March 2003.
This past year, MOIST undertook to cross both media and language barriers more systematically so that stakeholders who traditionally have had little opportunity to trade information and opinions can do so. TropSCORE recently agreed to crosslink the French (EVECS-L), English (MULCH-L) and Spanish (COBERAGRI-L) listserves operated by TropSCORE partners. EVECS-L and COBERAGRI-L continue to be co-managed by MOIST through interinstitutional agreements with CIEPCA and CIDICCO respectively. In addition to the TropSCORE Internet Soil Health Portal, MOIST continues to develop its homepage, the TropSCORE homepage, the African on-line GMCC extension center, The Taskforce for Soil Ferility in Arfrica website, the System of Rice Internsification website, CIEPCA's homepage, and the Fallows 2000 database.
The core activity of CTFMI is a graduate course at Cornell on tropical fallow management. Students in this course, now in its seventh semester, add to a relational database of tropical fallow management case studies based on their own field studies (the Fallow 2000 Database). They undertake comparative analyses and work on documentation methodologies that link research and development methods. During 1999-2000, collaborative student-based fallow characterizations were carried out in Guatemala, Madagascar, Mali and South Africa. Students also share their knowledge with the wider Cornell community through the MOIST/CAWG seminar series and prepared a series of posters for an international symposium on Tropical Fallow Management, noted below.
This work can involve action research as in the case of Maria Cristina Guerrero, who followed up her fallow field study by facilitating cross-visits between indigenous community representatives from the Philippines and Indonesia and by producing training booklets to assist farmers in adapting new rattan cultivation practices in Palawan, Philippines (in Talalog) and Kalimantan, Indonesia (in Bahasa Indonesia). These will be integrated into training programs in both countries. An English version of the booklets will allow information sharing on a global level .
Other participatory student fallow studies that have resulted in ongoing farmer experimentation on fallow species include work by Mark Johnson and Hannah Wittman in Guatemala, and a project by Carlos Piedrasanta on Chromolaena fallows in the Philippines. The latter effort continues to be overseen by partners at the Visayas State College of Agriculture, FARMI.
Proceedings of the CIIFAD-supported workshop on the Intensification of Shifting Cultivation in Southeast Asia, which involved students in the first fallow management course at Cornell, will be published during 2001: Voices from the Forest: Farmer Solutions Towards Improved Fallow Husbandry in Southeast Asia. The workshop, held in Indonesia in 1997, gave rise to national fallow-related networks in the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as a regional Indigenous Fallow Management (IFM) Network. CTFMI has managed an electronic discussion group for this network since its inception.
The formation and continuation of these networks has projected local and national efforts in fallow management within a regional context. Five years of work by CTFMI have been drawn together for presentation at a one-day international symposium entitled Fallow Management in the Tropics at the American Society of Agronomy meetings in November 2000, at which regional experience was compared and synthesized, research and development priorities were formulated, and a global vision for tropical fallow management was discussed. The proceedings are anticipated to be published as special issue of Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment in early 2003.