Making the shift to sustainable agriculture: 10 principles

Image from GHI’s 2015 GAP Report: http://www.globalharvestinitiative.org

By Katy Wilson

According to the recently released 2015 Global Hunger Index from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), hunger levels remain “serious” or “alarming” in 52 of 117 countries, despite many countries having reduced their hunger scores by at least half since 2000, including Brazil, Azerbaijan and Mongolia. The highest levels of hunger were recorded in Central African Republic, Chad and Zambia. Several new studies and reports suggest that failure to meet countries’ food needs requires the transformation of our food systems and a shift to sustainable farming.

Global Harvest Initiative’s 6^th annual Global Agricultural Productivity Report (2015 GAP report), released last week states that for the second year in a row the rate of global agricultural productivity growth (1.72%) falls short of the level needed to feed an estimated 9.7 billion people by 2050 (1.75%). Regionally, the rate of agricultural productivity growth is particularly alarming in sub-Saharan Africa, where by 2030 only 14% of food needs will be met. Across all developing countries the average rate of growth is 1.5%. Stagnating agricultural productivity growth will cause food price increases, greater demand for humanitarian aid and for land to be converted to food production. The report urges productive and sustainable agricultural systems to become a priority.

10 priorities for making African smallholder farming work under climate change

By Katrin Glatzel

With just over two months left till a new international climate change agreement is being finalised in Paris, the Montpellier Panel is launching a new report today, “The Farms of Change: African Smallholders Responding to an Uncertain Climate Future”, which addresses some of the key challenges to climate-proof Africa’s smallholder farmers.

As we all know, two of the greatest challenges of the 21^st century are the increasing demands for food, water and energy from a growing population and – climate change. Agriculture and smallholders are central to both, perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. Africa is already battling against the impacts of climate change and smallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable with the least capacity to adapt. Rising temperatures signal more extreme weather events that will put lives and livelihoods at greater risk, increasing smallholders’ vulnerability to drought, famine and disease. And whilst progress has been made during the last two decades to reduce hunger and to improve farmers’ livelihoods, climate change jeopardises these gains.

High levels of poverty and underdevelopment combined with insufficient infrastructure exacerbate the already severe impacts of global warming on resources, development and human security. In order to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change, international organisations and governments must help smallholders to reduce and off-set greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

What we’ve been reading this week

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

Can greater transparency help people hold big corporations to account? Some new tools that may help, From Poverty to Power

S&T Committee Urges Change to EU Rules for GM Crops, ISAAA

New Project Announced – Global Food Security by the Numbers, Global Food for Thought

Public procurement in Africa benefitting family farmers and schools, FAO

Eight Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture, Union of Concerned Scientists

Biodiversity or GMOs: Will The Future of Nutrition Be in Women’s Hands or Under Corporate Control?, Institute of Science in Society

Will Food Sovereignty Starve the Poor and Punish the Planet?, Independent Science News

Limits Sought on GMO Corn as Pest Resistance Grows, The Wall Street Journal

Farmers Put Down the Plow for More Productive Soil, The New York Times

What we’ve been reading this week

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

Roadmap for Strengthening Forest and Farm Producer Organizations, FAO

Six innovations revolutionising farming, The Guardian

Could insects feed the hungry world of tomorrow?, BBC

Beating the heat, Nature Biotechnology

Crop yields and global food security, Australian Government (GRDC)

Acres of genetically modified corn nearly doubled in a decade, Harvest Public Media

What’s the best way to measure empowerment?, Duncan Green, Oxfam

Majority of African Farm Workers Struggle to Afford Food, Gallup

Wild about Agricultural Innovation in Botswana, Global Food for Thought

Pesticide blamed for bee deaths now linked to bird declines, Los Angeles Times

Food Security and WTO Domestic Support Disciplines post-Bali, ICTSD

Why does Europe hate genetically modified food?, Rappler

Can Africa create a new green generation of food producers?, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Higher Food Prices Can Help to End Hunger, Malnutrition and Food Waste, IPS

14 agricultural infographics – The rise and rise of the infographic part two

Last year we posted a blog article about the role of infographics in communicating policy and advocacy messages in a simple, accessible and powerful way. The trend for the infographic to present big data and hard hitting facts to the masses is still growing and here are some more infographics we think you should take a look at:

1. Oxfam Australia in their infographic, What’s wrong with our food system, look at why so many farmers are hungry.
2. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center documents Advances in global agriculture.
3. Public Health Degree investigate the Two sides of the global food crisis.

4. Online Schools compare Oil fields with corn fields in terms of their productivity and greenhouse gas emissions.
5. The United States Agency for International Development’s infographic, The global state of agriculture, looks ahead to how we must increase food for a growing population.
6. The International Food Policy Research Institute document how conservation agriculture works in Farming for the long haul.
7. Monsanto explores The role of data science in agriculture.
8. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, through their FAOSTAT database, explores Our food and agriculture in numbers. The FAO have also created Genetic resources and biodiversity for food and agriculture.
9. Raconteur presents the facts on Sustainable agriculture.
10. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have created several infographics entitled Simple innovations help African farmers thrive, Growing rice for a hungry world and Making progress on the MDGs.
11. Float Mobile Learning examines how Mobile technologies in North American agriculture have developed and progressed.
12. GSMA M-Agri have published an infographic on the Agricultural productivity gap and the opportunity for mobile.
13. ONE’s, A growing opportunity: Measuring investments in African agriculture, investigates whether promises by governments and donors have been kept.
14. The International Food Policy Research Institute look at Meat: the good, the bad and the complicated.

 

What we’ve been reading this week

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

Food prices and poverty reduction in the long run, IFPRI

Is ‘Getting to Zero’ really feasible? The new Chronic Poverty Report, Duncan Green, Oxfam

Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education 2013/2014 Report from the Field, SARE

Research reveals true value of cover crops to farmers, environment, Penn State

From poverty to prosperity: A conversation with Bill Gates, AEI

Harnessing Innovation for African Agriculture and Food Systems, Meridian Institute

Pests worm their way into genetically modified maize, Nature

Scientists sound the alarm on climate, The New York Times

Scale up policies that work to eliminate hunger by 2025 – food expert, Thomson Reuters Foundation

GMOs Should Be Regulated On A National Level In Europe, British Scientists Argue, Huffington Post

Climate change will reduce crop yields sooner than we thought, University of Leeds

Examining the link between food prices and food insecurity: A multi-level analysis of maize price and birthweight in Kenya, Food Policy

GM maize heads for British fields, The Times

Number of Days Without Rain to Dramatically Increase in Some World Regions, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Accessing agricultural training

In the increasingly digital world in which we live, information can still be hard to come by for many. An international NGO, Access Agriculture, established by NGOs Agro-Insight and Countrywise Communications in 2012 is working to close global agricultural knowledge gaps.

Although only around 15.6% of the African population, according to 2012 figures, has access to the internet, the telecommunications market in Africa is one of the fastest growing in the world. Mobile phone subscribers have increased 18% each year for the past five years and, while coverage is only at around a third of the population, the rapid increase in mobile phone use is motivating telecommunications companies to develop Broadband Wireless Access technologies to connect more people to the internet.

And this could be beneficial to farmers, connecting them with various information sources from around the world. Access Agriculture is a platform for agricultural R&D staff, service providers, extension agents, communication professionals and representatives of farmer organisations, which provides agricultural training videos in local languages. Their aim being to make knowledge on sustainable agriculture accessible to people in developing countries.

Training videos are available across a wide range of topics from cereals to livestock to mechanisation to integrated pest management. From conservation agriculture and agroforestry to conflict resolution and input buying.

To check out some of the videos on offer click here.

Access Agriculture is also in the process of developing Agtube (think YouTube for agriculture) where people can upload their own videos to share with the agricultural community. Set to be launched soon, Agtube, through increasing two way dialogue between agricultural actors, may provide opportunities for innovation through collaboration. We also hope we will learn more about the challenges developing country farmers face and the solutions they have developed.

Online sustainable agricultural training is also provided by the Rainforest Alliance.

True cost accounting in food and farming: stories, smallholders and virtuous circles

On the 6^th December the Sustainable Food Trust held a conference entitled True Cost Accounting in Food and Farming at the Royal Geographical Society following a two day workshop on the same topic. Central to the conference was the understanding that if food systems are to become truly sustainable, the actual (environmental and social) cost of producing food must be reflected in retail prices. Food producers, suppliers and retailers need to be financially accountable for the impacts of production on environmental and public health.

The challenges we face

The event began with a story, starting 60 years ago when the need for cheap food drove agricultural development, disconnecting people from the origin of our food and creating an industry where small family farms could not compete. Despite the good intentions to end world hunger and make food accessible to all, the environmental and public health costs were considered too late (if at all). A small group of people (environmentalists and animal welfare lobbyists among them) advocated the need to consider the wider impacts of our food systems, a plea that is ongoing but largely ignored even today. As Patrick Holden, Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust and storyteller, explained, the conference, the largest international gathering on the subject of true cost accounting, aimed to be the beginning of a process of moving true cost accounting beyond rhetoric, objection and protest to one of real action.

Kicking off the event was a video message from HRH Prince Charles who began by stating that the biggest challenge the world faces today is producing enough food without doing irreparable damage to the environment and human health, a challenge made much harder by the likely impacts of climate change. He emphasised the need for the polluter to pay despite the financial odds being stacked against this objective. A burning question is whether the polluter pays principle will affect businesses and their ability to turn a profit or instead drive innovation, as in the case of the Land Fill Tax, which created new jobs and instigated greater recycling efforts. We need to understand better how food producers can make a profit whilst also moving to a more agroecological approach. He ended by expressing his hope that the outcome of the conference and workshops would be the commission of a study to find out if it is more profitable to farm by putting nature at the centre of food producing operations. The heart of the problem we face is the “economic invisibility of nature” and in realising that the ultimate source of economic capital is natural capital and not the other way around. We will only inflict conflict and misery if we continue farming based on increasingly weakened ecosystems.

Professor Jules Pretty, University of Essex, explained how our understanding of the negative externalities that the modern agricultural and green revolutions have caused began with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, which documented bird losses occurring due to seed treatments. In 1992 Prof. Pretty and Gordon Conway wrote Unwelcome Harvest, which documented the wider impacts of food production but was still only part of the picture. In 1998, a team at the University of Essex published a paper that showed the total cost of agriculture in the UK to the environment to be £2.4 billion per year, in part from the contamination of water by pesticides, soil erosion, organic carbon losses and greenhouse gas emissions. This figure showed that the environmental costs alone of our agricultural systems were higher than net farm income. While similar studies were published in other countries, the outputs were criticised for ignoring the positive externalities of agriculture i.e. its contribution to the environment and human health. In 2005, Prof. Pretty and another of the day’s speakers, Prof. Tim Lang, City University London, recalculated the externalities of agriculture, expanding the boundaries from farm to fork, resulting in a lower figure. The most surprising result was that the environmental burden arising from food miles was greater than the environmental cost on farm, and most significant of all was the minimal impact of importing food and transporting it around the country compared to household shopping trips.

Prof. Pretty then went on to discuss our current farming systems, divided into three and represented by a glass of water. The first, almost filled to the brim with water, represented an industrial system, very productive but with lots of spillover effects. The second, half full, showed moderately productive systems trading some of the productivity of intensive systems for a lower impact on the environment. The third glass, with only a small amount of water, represented the 2.4 billion producers in the world who have yields of ½ to 1 tonne per hectare (compared to the UK average yields of 8t/ha). The latter could, theoretically, more than double yields with little environmental impact with the right agroecological techniques and farmer engagement. While some argue that feeding the world is more a matter of better distribution and reducing food waste, Prof. Pretty believes we need to focus on increasing the food production of these 2.4 billion farmers, many of whom are poor, on their own farms. But we need to increase production in the right way.

In 1997, Prof. Pretty coined the term sustainable intensification to highlight the fact that we need to do more and better on existing agricultural land. The term doesn’t imply that one system or technology is better than another, instead it is about getting the best outcomes for a range of objectives. There are a pantheon of options, for example, no till farming, push-pull pest control, precision farming to name a few and the right choice will depend on the agroecological circumstances. In 2009, Reaping the Benefits, a report by the Royal Society concluded that the need to increase food production by 70% to 2050 would have to come from existing land and that we need to do intensification better, accentuating the positive and diminishing the negative. In a sense we need to:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course the environmental impacts are only one of agriculture’s hidden costs, as Prof. Tim Lang explained. Of the 19 leading risk factors of disease, which account for 58.8 million deaths each year, food is a contributory factor in 10 of these, for example cardiovascular disease (CVD). In 2011 to 2030 CVD will cause economic losses of $15 trillion. From 2010 to 2030 non-communicable diseases such as diabetes are estimated to cost 48% of global GDP and yet the cost to prevent many of these diseases is very small in comparison. Prof. Lang expands that if food systems are to be designed with public health in mind they would look very different: more horticulture, less meat and dairy production for example. Dr. Pete Myers, Environmental Health Services, talked about the impacts of agrochemicals on human health, of which only the tiniest fraction of chemicals have been studied and linked to health and economic costs. Much of our knowledge on the impact of agrochemicals is based on outdated methodologies, ignoring the huge advances in epigenetics and endocrine disruptors of more recent years as well as cocktail and timing effects. For example, many chemicals whose properties we thought we knew may have a different impact when combined with other chemicals and exposure to even low doses of chemicals can have a profound effect, sometimes much later in life. Dr. Myers gave as an example the effect of 2.5 parts per billion (ppb) of atrazine (farmers usually apply at higher concentrations) to frogs from hatching to adult, the result was the conversion of a genetic male to a fully functioning female (i.e. able to reproduce). In another experiment, the same strain of mice, eating the same amount of calories and undertaking the same physical activities, would become obese when exposed to 1ppb of obesogens (commonly used as fungicides) from birth, stem cells that would have become bone cells becoming fat cells.

So our food production systems produce negative impacts on the environment and for human health but our understanding of these hidden costs is still relatively small and even smaller when it comes to how this information should be used. While some at the conference argued for the inclusion of these costs into retail prices of food, others acknowledged the impact this could have on the poor and hungry, and instead urged the use of such figures in guiding policy making, whose language is predominantly one of economics.

What we’ve been reading this week

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

One small change of words – a giant leap in effectiveness!, World Agroforestry Centre

Policy: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims, Nature

Enabling African Farmers to Feed the World, Farming First

Roundtable on Sustainable African Agriculture and CAADP 2014 review, PAEPARD

Agricultural Input Subsidies. The Recent Malawi Experience, Ephraim Chirwa and Andrew Dorward

African Farmers Reap Gains Of Biotech Cotton, CoastWeek

Humans are becoming more carnivorous, Nature

Seeds of hope emerge across the world’s drylands, World Agroforestry Centre

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee to examine Food Security, UK Parliament

For sustainable growth, count on agriculture, Thomson Reuters Foundation