The SPeRA web Portal for Cooperation Associations and Projects in Africa

Africa is the largest continent in the Southern Hemisphere. It has enormous ecological diversity, embracing two temperate zones, two subtropical zones and a tropical region. This geographical situation allows people in Africa to grow diversified crops. The 655 million Africans are largely agriculturally based. The main foods consist of the coarse grains (sorghum, millet, maize), wheat, rice, root and tuber crops (yam, cassava, sweet potato, potato, and taro); Asian rice is the preferred cereal and now replaces the indigenous African rice species. In order to solve the food problem of the increasing population, efforts have been made to increase rice production in most African countries. Republic of China on Taiwan has been one of the countries which extended technical assistance to Africa to help increase rice production. During the past 39 years, through the Committee of International Technical Cooperation and International Cooperation and Development Fund, Republic of China on Taiwan devoted a large number of Chinese specialists and technicians in oversea service across six geographical regions. Taiwan's agricultural cooperation projects in Africa began in 196L with agricultural technical mission sent to Liberia. In the following years, 23 missions were stationed in Africa, though some were withdrawn later. As of May 1., 2001, eight missions are still operating in African countries. During the past 39 years, the agricultural technical missions in Africa reclaimed a total of 28,631. hectares of rice fields in 24 African countries. They also built a total of 2,784 Km of irrigation canals and a total of 1,524 km of drainage canals, which enabled to irrigate a total of 18,244 hectares of rice fields in 24 countries. This infrastructure building in the past years played an important role to promote the ability ofrice production in the African countries. In this paper, a special focus is placed on the Taiwan assisted rice production in 13 African countries, including Burkina Faso, Chad, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Benin, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia, Malawi, Mauritius, Niger and Senegal. Taiwan model of rice production in Africa, with regards to the past achievements and difficulties encountered in technology transfer, and the perspectives of future cooperation in rice production between Republic of China on Taiwan and African countries are discussed.

Abstract. The Austrian wine industry made the fundamental decision to intensify the marketing of Austrian wine via its origin. Therefore, the creation of protected wines of origin has once again become the focus of interest. Since the marketing of Austrian wine through vineyard designations is increasing every year, it is necessary to present Austria's vineyards in an informative way in order to bring the special features of the protected geographical origin of Austrian quality wines closer to the consumer. The comprehensive, precise and professional acquisition as well as appealing geographic map design of vineyards for different demands, tasks and presentations is widely seen as a conceptual framework for the dissemination of wine relevant issues.Under this assumption, a collaboration project between representatives of the wine industry and academia came into being. Developing Wine Maps for Austria is an embedded research and development project with the aim of conceiving a functional as well as user-centered geographic communication portal of all Austrian vineyards to record, represent and communicate relevant factors dealing with wine and their spatial-temporal characteristics. The Austrian Wine Marketing Company (ÖWM Österreich Wein Marketing GmbH) commissioned the project in cooperation with the University of Vienna, Department of Geography and Regional Research and the Technical Office for Landscape Planning plan+land, Artner & Tomasits OG in order to promote the creation of protected wines of origin as well as to explore new horizons of geo-communication.The project aims to establish a web portal that visualizes and disseminates information on Austrian vineyards in an effective and appealing way. Thus also communicating additional information to accentuate on wine specific features within a defined geographic entity. The goal is to play a pioneering role in the presentation of vineyards and associated products emphasizing in the objective of achieving (cartographic) image of excellence.The presentation will discuss the general conceptual framework clarifying the communication structures and workflow within the system. Thereby explaining the methods and structures based on the defined system architecture. In this context the development and implementation of interfaces for the digital storage and manipulation of all decreed vineyards in Austria will be introduced. These are embedded in a geographical and political hierarchy. This paper will also focus on the prerequisites of wine maps as well as their digital representation with special emphasis on quality assessment and map design. It will compare and discuss currently accessible geo-data sources as well as online applications and finally present an approach to accommodate the described difficulties to facilitate sustainable data caption, creation and design for wine maps that must fulfill the conceptual framework.

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