The Rockefeller Foundation has given a $900,000, four-year grant to an interdisciplinary team of Cornell University agriculture professors to develop a pilot Ph.D. training project for improving food security and natural resource management in southern and eastern Africa. The African Food Security and Natural Resources Management program also will examine how to encourage African scientists trained abroad to return home to continue these interdisciplinary activities after their training is complete.

The project will focus on finding strategies for improving degraded soils, understanding the relationship between crops and livestock in Africa, and developing economically and environmentally sustainable approaches for small-scale farming.

"Understanding the dynamics of soil conservation in sub-Saharan Africa is central to understanding the dynamics of rural poverty," says Christopher B. Barrett, Cornell associate professor of applied economics and management.

The grant will allow Barrett; Erick C.M. Fernandes, Cornell assistant professor of crop and soil science; and Alice N. Pell, Cornell professor of animal science, to study ways to reverse soil degradation in the sub-Saharan region while providing interdisciplinary education in this area. More than 500 million people, or about 8 percent of the world's population, live in the nearly 50 countries that comprise sub-Saharan Africa, a region where agricultural productivity has lagged behind population growth. Pressures on land due to increased population result in shorter fallow or resting periods for soil and declining crop yields. Unchecked, this trend will contribute to food insecurity in many parts of the continent. Indeed, it is the only region in the world where the number of undernourished people is increasing.

The Cornell team and the Rockefeller Foundation field staff will begin working immediately with researchers from Kenya (Egerton University and the University of Nairobi), Malawi (Bunda College of Agriculture), Uganda (Makerere University) and Zimbabwe (Africa University and the University of Zimbabwe). The pilot project will determine whether interdisciplinary team building can improve research, education and outreach abilities with universities in eastern and southern Africa. In addition to working on soils, crops and livestock issues, the team also will examine an important social dilemma of the post-Green Revolution: Newly trained doctoral students in the agricultural sciences do not always return home, often finding work in the affluent West. Work conditions -- pay, time for research, equipment -- for African researchers in universities in sub-Saharan countries often "remain grim," according to the Cornell researchers. These conditions, they say, weigh heavily on an African student's decision to return.