Use of Conservation Agriculture in Crop-Livestock Systems (CLCA) in the Drylands for Enhanced Water Use and Soil Fertility in NEN and LAC Countries

Dr. Aymen Frija is an agricultural economist with ICARDA’s Social, Economic and Policy Research Program. His current research interests focus on farm modeling, farm efficiency and productivity analysis, agricultural water management instruments, institutional performance analysis, and the economics of conservation agriculture.

Previously, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, specializing in agricultural water policy analysis in developing countries. He was also assistant professor and researcher at the College of Agriculture of Mograne, Carthage University in Tunisia.

Dr. Frija is the author of more than 50 publications. He is an active member of several scientific and professional associations, such as the African Association of Agricultural Economists and the Tunisian Association of Water and Environment. He holds a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Ghent University in Belgium.                                      

Information Products Coordinator

Sara Jani started her work with the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning platform (MEL) on 2016 as a documentation specialist and later as the FAIR Knowledge and Data Officer. Through her work with MEL, she provided support and training to ICARDA capacity along with the revision and management of ICARDA contents in MEL to ensure maximum compliance with FAIR principles of data and quality data objectives in terms of ORCID usage. In addition to her work on updating the online MEL user guide. 

Previously she worked as the program administrator for the CRP- Dryland Systems Program and served as a senior secretary for the Integrated Water and Land Management (IWLM) when she first joined ICARDA in 2005 assisting project leaders, international and local researchers in administrative and financial matters.

She holds M.Sc in Business Management from the SKEMA International Business School and B.Sc in Business Administration from Aleppo University in Syria.

Zied Idoudi is an Agricultural Economist Engineer with professional expertise in conservation agriculture; agroecology; rural livelihoods assessment; agricultural innovation systems, monitoring and evaluation; knowledge management and communication. For the past six years, he has been involved in different Agricultural Research for Development Projects dealing with Diversification and Sustainable Intensification of Production Systems. He is currently a Technology Scaling Specialist (TSS) at ICARDA-Tunisia.

Claudio Zucca is a soil conservation and land management specialist with ICARDA, based in Rabat, Morocco. His area of research is sustainable land management, soil and water conservation, and land degradation. His research approach is based on interdisciplinary and multi-scale methods that integrate fieldwork and geomatics. He is interested in soil-genetic processes and soil geography and has performed basic and applied research in pedology, contributing to several soil survey and mapping studies.

Currently, Dr. Zucca leads research on soil carbon sequestration and the effects of bioavailable silicon on water use by crops in collaboration with crop breeders and plant physiologists. He also leads ICARDA’s work on soil and water conservation in the savannah belt of Nigeria and integrated watershed management in Ethiopia and Tunisia, and co-leads the scaling of sustainable land management practices and land degradation neutrality.

He serves as focal point for the international consortium on global soil partnership and world overview of conservation approaches and technologies. He is on the UN international roster of experts for combating desertification and serves on the editorial board of World Desertification Atlas. He has authored more than 40 journal publications.

Before joining ICARDA in 2015, he was senior researcher and associate professor at the University of Sassari in Italy, where he spent 15 years conducting drylands research. Zucca received his Ph.D. in Pedology and a master’s degree in Environmental Sciences from the Universities of Palermo and Milano Bicocca.