Forests and insects for food security

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has recently brought attention to two neglected areas of food security: forests and insects.

On the 13th to 15th May 2013 the FAO hosted an International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition which aimed to increase understanding of the role that forests, trees and agroforestry systems can play in improving the food security and nutrition of rural people. 1985 was designated the year of forests and food security but since then it has disappeared off the international agenda.

Forests, trees and agroforestry are often forgotten in national food security strategies and yet 1.6 billion people rely on forests and other natural systems for food and their livelihoods. Forests and trees are important in a number of ways:

• They provide affordable sources of food, nutrients, fibre and fuelwood as well as sources of income
• They help deliver clean water to agricultural lands by protecting catchments
• Herders in arid and semi-arid lands depend on trees as a source of fodder for their livestock
• Agroforestry can improve productivity, resilience and is a climate-smart agricultural practice.

In order to fully realise the potential of forests in tackling food insecurity, issues of land tenure, access and sustainable extraction need further investigation and policy agencies of agriculture, environment, health, development, nutrition, conservation, land-use planning and forestry require greater integration. Background papers to the conference discuss the role of trees in the livelihoods of the poor and the enabling political environments needed to increase the contribution of forests to food security.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Talk point: is water a commodity or a human right?, The Guardian

Demystifying modern biotechnology, Modern Ghana

FAO leader calls for shift towards more sustainable food production and diet, Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR) 95th Anniversary Symposium

Yes, I get furious when foreign aid is wasted. But Britons are saving lives… and are leading the world, says Bill Gates, Daily Mail

George Osborne declares ‘historic moment’ on UK aid target, The Guardian

Stop GM crops in Europe – new campaign launched, GM Watch

Food, fuel and plant nutrient use in the future, Council for Agricultural Science and Technology

GMO poll finds huge majority say foods should be labeled, Huffington Post

New metric to be launched on hunger and food insecurity, FAO

New EU policy to improve nutrition across the world and save millions of lives, EU

Connecting the dots between vaccines and hunger, The Guardian

Africa is on the rise – come see for yourselves, Financial Times

Aid for Trade: Reviewing EC and DFID Monitoring and Evaluation Practices, Traidcraft and CAFOD

Food Security when in Rome

This blog was first posted on Huffington Post

Food is often in short supply. The availability of and access to food is also, and has always been, highly political. Poor wheat harvests imported into Rome between 56 to 58BC led to grain shortages and fluctuating prices. As a result the Roman mob became volatile and “on one occasion crowds besieged the senate and threatened to burn the senators alive, apparently encouraged by the tribune Clodius who had passed a law increasing the number of people entitled to subsidised grain” (excerpt from Gordon Conway’s book ‘One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world?’).

Today food security is equally political and the 2007/08 food price spike led to political and economic instability and social unrest in both poor and developed nations. In Bangladesh, 10,000 workers rioted close to Dhaka, smashing cars and buses and vandalising factories in anger at high food prices and low wages. In Burkina Faso rioting broke out in the country’s second and third largest cities over food price increases of over 65%. In Cameroon large scale rioting in protest against inflating food and fuel prices saw at least seven people killed in the worst unrest seen in the country in over fifteen years. And the list goes on with unrest seen in Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Haiti, Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique, Senegal, Somalia and Yemen. Russia and Mexico froze food prices to avoid public backlash, the Pakistan government deployed military to protect food reserves from being seized and Brazil announced a temporary ban on the export of rice.

As ‘One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world’ explains, these acute crises are part of a chronic crisis; the paradox of food insecurity that we face today is that there is enough food to feed the global population yet around one billion people are chronically hungry and another billion are obese. In his book Gordon Conway lays out the routes for achieving a fairer, more productive, stable and resilient global food system. On the 27^th-28^th February 2013, he took this vision to the three Rome-based UN agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

The View from Rome

On the 27th and 28th February 2013, Gordon Conway travelled to Rome to discuss the messages of his book, One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world? with the three Rome-based UN agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

On the 27th February, in a joint FAO-WFP-IFAD seminar, Gordon presented his vision for tackling global food insecurity. Director General of FAO, José Graziano Da Silva, President of IFAD, Kanayo Nwanze and Executive Director of WFP, Ertharin Cousins, discussed their opinions of the book and the issues they see as crucial for eradicating hunger. A press release for the event can be found here.

Graziano began by saying that he thought the book was a good contribution to linking hunger eradication with sustainable production. He took from the book a series of five conditions we need to meet to tackle hunger, namely we can feed the world…

• If we save and grow
• If we put smallholder farmers at the centre of our effort
• If we have more effective food systems governance
• If we bring farmers together and build partnerships
• If we can link hunger, access and waste

He also agreed on the point that food security is political and that it is a political decision of society to not accept hunger. But he disagreed with regards to Gordon’s take on Food Sovereignty, stating that food has a cultural dimension and that a territorial approach to food security with local centres of production and consumption is critical. Gordon responded to this by saying he agreed but believed food trade and the development of farms as businesses was also crucial.

Nwanze stated that he “would like to doubly applaud this book” and that he valued it for its “holistic and nuanced approach”. He agreed that farmers in developing countries are skilled and innovative and need to be connected to business and he described the “terrible paradox of food security” we face: that there is no shortage of food and yet millions of people go hungry. Nwanze shares Gordon’s optimism that small farmers  can feed themselves and the world, and believes that this book comes at the right time. His full statement can be found here.

One Billion Hungry: Fighting hunger together

Gordon Conway will lead and participate in a series of high-profile discussions on the critical issues raised in his book, One Billion Hungry: Can we feed the world? at the three Rome-based UN agencies on the 27^th and 28^th February 2013.

The UN agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) – are critical to global thinking around agricultural development and as such their strategies have a far reaching impact on how we tackle global food security.

On 27^th February, the three agency principals, José Graziano da Silva (FAO), Ertharin Cousins (WFP) and Kanayo Nwanze (IFAD) will comment on Gordon’s vision of achieving food security, and will be inviting comments and questions from permanent representatives and staff at FAO. This high-level seminar will be webcast live here at 2:30pm GMT+1. Gordon will then lead a separate discussion around the themes of the book with the young professionals’ network, YouFID.

Gordon will also address IFAD on the topic of climate change and agriculture, and WFP on the issues of availability of and access to food, during this visit. The seminar at IFAD will be webcast live here at 10:00am GMT+1 on 28^th February 2013. You can also read IFAD Associate Vice-President Programmes, Kevin Cleaver’s review of One Billion Hungry here.

The UN agencies have complementary strategies and are increasingly working together to find solutions to both acute and chronic hunger.

Food security and agriculture information at our fingertips

This week we’ve been thinking about information. Specifically the type of information on agriculture and rural development that is available, how useful it is and to who. A lot of data and statistics went into the writing of One Billion Hungry and some was hard to find, out of date or non-existent. Indeed statistics, such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) estimate of the number of chronically hungry people in the world, are often challenged because there are so few rigorous and comparable data sets available on food security and agriculture.

Yet policymakers often base investments in international development around evidence and farmers too must have access to clear and credible information in order to be competitive in the market. Ensuring information is timely, relevant and reliable, therefore is an important challenge. A recent paper by researchers at Tulane University investigated the impact of Food and Nutrition Security Information (FNSI) and its shortcomings concluding that while more conventional forms of data must be expanded in coverage, greater types and sources of data that come with increased connectivity must also be utilised.

Greater access to information can also help solve global challenges. As discussed in Chapter 1, we face the threat of repeated food price spikes, of which we have seen three since 2007. In 2011, the G20, in response to increased food price volatility, established the Agricultural Market Information System, with the idea that if information on the production, trade, use and storage of four globally important crops, wheat, rice, maize and soybean, is more transparent then policy action in response to market uncertainty can be coordinated and potentially dangerous and inaccurate speculation can be avoided. The coordination of policies and development of common strategies is undertaken by the Rapid Response Forum, whose second meeting is to take place on 20^th February 2013.

What we’ve been reading this week

This week’s summary on the news stories and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

Feeding China’s pigs: Implications for the environment, China’s smallholder farmers and food security, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Global partnership launched to drive Africa’s agricultural research, SciDev.Net

New U.S. Biofuel Proposals Could Draw Heavily from Food Sources, Inter Press Service

Burkina Faso cotton output soars 57.5% due to GMOs –producers, Reuters

Community radio helps Cameroonians track climate change, AlertNet

Innovation is the future for Europe, Financial Times

FAO calls for governmental support for Agroforestry, Farming Online

Monsanto introduces another seed variety, The Daily Times

Ground water and climate change, Nature

Grabs for land include water

A paper on the impact of so called ‘land grabbing’ on freshwater resources has recently been published. Authored by researchers at the University of Virginia and the Polytechnic University of Milan, it is the first assessment of the amount of water appropriated within land investment deals.

Land is thought to be in short supply while at the same time demand for food, livestock and biofuels is growing, driven by population growth, changing diets and increasing food and oil prices. In an effort to ensure national food and energy security some countries over the past decade have been buying up land in other countries on which to grow crops and livestock. The World Bank has estimated that around 45 million hectares of land has been purchased since 2008 involving 62 countries doing the ‘grabbing’ in 41 countries across every continent except Antarctica.

Land grabs have hit the headlines and received strong criticism when large-scale land investments have proven to be inequitable and unsustainable. Problems include the reduction in natural resource access for local land users, displacement of local inhabitants without compensation and without the creation of job opportunities or consideration for the environment. Indeed in many places land that was a natural landscape or dominated by smallholder farming is transformed to large-scale commercial farming. In Ethiopia residents are thought to have been moved to new villages lacking adequate food and water resources to make way for the lease of land to foreign investors. Indeed where 100% rights over natural resources such as water are part of the deal both environmental sustainability and the livelihoods of local land users are negatively impacted. This has been seen in Sudan where land deals around the Blue Nile have affected local water users further downstream.

World Soil Day 2012

December 5^th was a day dedicated to an often overlooked resource that underpins food production on the planet, soil. In One Billion Hungry, chapter 13 lays out the threats to soil and ways in which soil degradation, depletion and fertility loss can be tackled.

World Soil Day was first proposed in 2002 by the International Union of Soil Sciences (IUSS) as a means of publicly recognising the importance of soil to human wellbeing; food, water and energy security; maintaining biodiversity; and tackling climate change. Soil is commonly undervalued in policy despite widespread degradation due to unsustainable use. In one study, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an estimated 1.9 billion hectares of soil was found to be degraded across the world.

The State of Food and Agriculture 2012: Investing in agriculture for a better future

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) this week released its annual report, the State of Food and Agriculture, for 2012. This year’s focus is on “the accumulation of capital by farmers in agriculture and the investments made by governments to facilitate this accumulation.” Farmers are part of the private sector and their investments in developing their businesses can have large impacts on the wider rural economy. This, as the report asserts, is why farmers are crucial stakeholders in national plans to improve agricultural investment.

And developing agriculture is important. Improvements in the sector can have wide reaching benefits for reducing hunger and poverty. Given that 80% of the world’s chronically hungry are farmers, greater investment in agriculture, which has been stalling or declining for several decades, can significantly contribute to meeting the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015. Indeed the report finds that over the last 20 years, countries with the highest rates of on-farm investment have made the most progress in halving hunger.

But farmers are only part of the story; governments have an important role to play. In low- and middle-income countries, farmers’ own investments to farming outstrip investments made by governments or the private sector. This report shows that farmer investments can have greater social and economic benefits when undertaken in an inductive investment climate, an area controlled by markets and government. As the report states, “Governments are responsible for creating the legal, policy and institutional environment that enables private investors to respond to market opportunities in socially responsible ways”. Developing this enabling environment is a crucial function of the public sector, particularly in terms of levelling the playing field between smallholders and larger investors. Improving incentives for farmers to invest and reducing the barriers will aid agricultural development significantly.