Challenges for engineers

. One was to come up with ways to reduce carbon emissions because of the shear enormity of the disasters that climate change is already bringing in Africa, with their spillover effects on Europe, and the other is to come up with some simple, low cost, non electrically powered method of grating cassava flour, that requires less manual effort than the methods used presently. Dr Poulter said that, if other factors did not change, it should be possible to virtually eliminate starvation and extreme poverty by 2040. On the other hand, if climate change continued, the results could be failure of agriculture in Northern and Southern Africa, and hundreds of millions of Africans desperately migrating elsewhere. Professor Westby said that, “The major effect of climate change in the short term is climate variation – droughts are becoming more common and maize is so sensitive to drought”. One of his main research areas is further advancing the cultivation and processing of cassava, which is a root crop that is relatively insensitive to drought. Grating it in such a way as to produce a high quality cassava flour results in a product that can yield a smallholding family $604/year instead of $192, but it normally requires the use of an electrically powered machine. It is conventionally pounded by African women in a totally back braking process, so that it is hardly surprising that African villagers prefer to grow maize if they can. For more information: www.nri.org