JUBA – After the sound of gunfire fell silent in Southern Sudan, marking the end of one of Africa’s longest running civil wars, Pio Kowr Ding decided he would return home to the autonomous region to take up an agricultural research job with the government.
With a masters degree in soil and land evaluation, and experience working for the Agricultural Research Corporation’s Land and Water Research Center (LWRC) in Khartoum, Ding was keen to help the region rebuild its agricultural research. But when he arrived in 2008 he realised that the task was actually to start from scratch and the living conditions were tough.
“It is very discouraging — completely the opposite of life outside here — and it is difficult to cope,” he says.
Although peace returned to Southern Sudan in 2005, several economically vital sectors in the region lag behind, even as the clock ticks towards the expiry of the five-year lifespan of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the north and the south.
As well as claiming 2.5 million lives, the war also drove 4 million people out of the region.
Attracting scientists back is proving tricky. A drive to lure scientists back to rebuild Southern Sudan’s agriculture has attracted just seven researchers so far.
“Those of us who found courage and returned cannot even find research equipment or facilities like the ones we had in the diaspora,” says Ding. “That is why a lot of my friends and colleagues are still there.
Worried by the dismal performance of the sector, Southern Sudan’s government has now looked abroad and brought in the renowned agricultural research scientist and plant pathologist, Joseph Mukiibi, the founder of Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), to run a new research institute.
The region ‘could feed East Africa’
Mukiibi, who once led NARO’s research on food crops, forestry and livestock, is now spearheading the re-establishment of a strategic agricultural research plan in Southern Sudan.
“We are to re-establish what existed before, we have to see what is on the ground, what network, which model do we want that will suit Southern Sudan best,” he says.
The government needs to start training its own people, or tap cheaper labour from neighbouring areas, he says.
“This region has a population of ten million people in an area three times the size of Uganda, which has 32 million people. A lot of Southern Sudan is empty land: if the government is serious, it can start agricultural projects here that can feed the rest of East Africa.“
The real key, however, is to attract scientists back because, he believes, modern agriculture cannot succeed without research. Mukiibi believes the region has an untapped seam of highly qualified nationals who continue to live abroad.
“Very few people in the diaspora would be willing to leave their plum jobs and comfortable lifestyles to come back home. You can imagine that after 20 years of war, education is limited, people and resources are just not here, and those who are coming back need some time to settle back in.”
Making a start
And the working environment is indeed far from inviting. He recounts the grim state of a former research station in the town of Yei.
“I can tell you it’s empty, in a sorrowful state. There is a lab but it is in darkness. There is nobody and no research equipment, just some dilapidated staff houses, which are empty,” Mukiibi says.
“Can you imagine someone in the diaspora who has a fully functioning lab with running tap water and electricity? And you’re telling him to come to the bush where there is no power, and where he can run out of water and not even have a pit latrine?”
Many Sudanese scientists are proud of their nation but that is not enough. “They cannot eat nationalism,” Mukiibi says.
“Human resources are limited but we will start with what we have. We will start small, with one centre, make it functional and, with the experience we get there, we will move to the next centre, learning from mistakes and strengths. We will ultimately build the system.”
Foreign input, indigenous priority
Mukiibi compares the Southern Sudanese experience to that of Rwanda after its civil war and genocide in the early 1990s. The Rwandans “opened up and got people from Uganda and Kenya even as they returned to be trained to take over the operations of their research institutes”, he says.
His team is now developing the strategic research plan, which must be completed by March 2011. It will be based on that of Kenya’s Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and Uganda’s NARO, and it will be put out for discussion with stakeholders at every step — “that way, you have many chances of having it implemented”.
Other than Mukiibi and Ding, the team comprises a plant breeder, an entomologist, a horticulturalist and an agronomist, all of them Southern Sudanese who have returned since the war ended.
Loro George Leju Lugor, director general of research, training and extension services at Southern Sudan’s agriculture and forestry ministry, makes these points about the plan:
“First, we do not want to rely on imported seeds year in, year out. Second, we want to upgrade our national germplasm of indigenous crops. And third, we want to improve crop production technology for our own consumption and export.”
He says the emphasis should be on indigenous crops in the region’s six agro-ecological zones: green belt, iron-stone plateau, flat plains, Nile-Sobat River, hills and mountains, and semi-arid areas.
Moving into production
At the newly established research unit, Lugor says that seed production and the creation of a database of all locally grown crops will be a priority.
“We are distributing seeds proven to do very well in the agro-ecological zones after importing them from Uganda and Kenya,” Lugor says.
“The production of our own, locally bred seeds, and their distribution to farmers is not something we can do within a year: it will take two to three years to be fully established due to the many challenges involved in conducting research work in the situation we have in Southern Sudan,” he concedes.
Like Mukiibi, Lugor says challenges range from financial constraints, the diversity of the country, and lack of infrastructure and manpower.
Without returning professionals, he says, the region lacks the “think tanks” needed to plan and execute agricultural research work.
“We are making proposals to international research organisations and bilateral partners but it’s not easy to get the money needed. For example, we budgeted for US$56 million but have received a small fraction of this, so we are prioritising the crops and seeds we need to produce and develop.”
A number of non-governmental organisations and bilateral partners including the Dutch government, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, and World Bank and the US Agency for International Development partners have offered to assist in the research, says Lugor.
Others that have expressed interest, he adds, include international research organisations such as KARI, the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa, in Uganda, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, in Kenya, and the Kenya Forestry Research Institute.
The seven researchers who have made it home no doubt await these developments with great interest.
By Paul Jimbo - SciDev.Net
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In Science today, there's yesterday, there was an article called "Quantitative analysis of culture using millions of digitized books" [subscription required] by at least twelve authors (eleven individuals, plus "the Google Books team"), which reports on some exercises in quantitative research performed on what is by far the largest corpus ever assembled for humanities and social science research. Culled from the Google Books collection, it contains more than 5 million books published between 1800 and 2000 — at a rough estimate, 4 percent of all the books ever published — of which two-thirds are in English and the others distributed among French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. (The English corpus alone contains some 360 billion words, dwarfing better structured data collections like the corpora of historical and contemporary American English at BYU, which top out at a paltry 400 million words each.)
I have an article on the project appearing in tomorrow's in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, which I'll link to here, and in later posts Ben or Mark will probably be addressing some of the particular studies, like the estimates of English vocabulary size, as well as the wider implications of the enterprise. For now, some highlights:
1. The team: The authors include some Google Books researchers (Jon Orwant, Peter Norvig, Matthew Gray and Dan Clancy), a group of people associated with Harvard bioscience programs (Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden, Aviva Aiden, Adrien Veres, and Martin Nowak), as well as Steve Pinker of Harvard and Joe Pickett of the American Heritage Dictionary, Dale Hoiberg of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and Yuan Kui Shen of the MIT AI lab. So it's dominated by scientists and engineers, and is framed in scientific (or -istic) terms: the enterprise is described, unwisely, I think, with the name "culturomics" (that's a long o, as in genome). That's apt to put some humanists off, but doesn't affect the implications of the paper one way or the other. I have more to say about this in the Chronicle article.
2. The research exercises take various forms. In one, the researchers computed the rates at which irregular English verbs became regular over the past two centuries. In another, very ingenious, they used quantitative methods to detect the suppression of the names of artists and intellectuals in books published in Nazi Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, and contemporary China. A third deals with investigate the evolution of fame, as measured by the relative frequency of mentions of people’s names. They began with the 740,000 people with entries in Wikipedia and sorted them by birth date, picking the 50 most frequently mentioned names from each birth year (so that the 1882 cohort contained Felix Frankfurter and Virginia Woolf, and so on). Next they plotted the median frequency of mention for each cohort over time and looked for historical tendencies. It turns out that people become famous more quickly and reach a greater maximum fame today than they did 100 years ago, but that their fame dies out more rapidly — though it's left unclear what to make of those generalizations or what limits there are to equating fame with frequency of mention.
The paper also presents a number of n-gram trajectories — that it, graphs that show the relative frequency of words or n-grams (up to five) over the period 1800-2000. ("Relative frequency" here means the ratio of tokens of the expression in a given year to the total number of tokens in that year.) By way of example, they plot the changing fame of Galileo, Dickens, Freud, and Einstein; the frequency of "steak," "hamburger," "pizza" and "pasta"; and the changing frequency of "influenza" (it peaks, in the least surprising result of the study, in years of epidemics).
The big news is that Google has set up a site called the Google Books Ngram Viewer where the public can enter words or n-grams (to 5) for any period and corpus and see the resulting graph. They've also announced that the entire dataset of n-grams will be made available for download. Some reports have interpreted this as meaning that Google is making the entire corpus available. It isn't, alas, nor even the pre-1923 portion of the corpus that's in public domain. One can hope…
At present, that's all you can with this. You can't do many of the things that you can do with other corpora: you can’t ask for a list of the words that follow traditional for each decade from 1900 to 2000 in order of descending frequency, or restrict a search for bronzino to paragraphs that contain fish and don’t contain painting, etc. And while Lieberman Aiden and Michel made an impressive effort to purge the subcorpus of the metadata errors that have plagued Google Books, you can't sort books by genre or topic. The researchers do plan to make available a more robust search interface for the corpus, though it's unlikely that users will be able to replicate a lot of the computationally heavy-duty exercises that the researchers report in the paper. But my sense is that even this limited functionality will be interesting and useful to a lot of humanists and historians, even if linguists won't be really happy until they have the whole data set to play with. Again, I'll have more on this in the Chronicle essay.
That's all for now… watch this space.
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