What we’ve been reading this week

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

Urbanisation, value chains, food systems

Growing Food for Growing Cities: Transforming Food Systems in an Urbanizing World, Chicago Council

Are cities doing enough on climate change? Residents say no, Green Biz

Shifting our Approach: Four Priorities for a More Sustainable Food System, The Chicago Council

Done sensibly, agricultural development can reduce poverty in Africa, The Conversation

Small-scale producers in the development of tea value-chain partnerships, ifad

Shifting our Approach: Four Priorities for a More Sustainable Food System, Chicago Council

Climate change

Promising climate for investment, Thomson Reuters Foundation

How should we compensate poor countries for ‘loss and damage’ from climate change? The Conversation

Why the Paris climate change goals may already be slipping beyond reach, The Guardian

Supplying the demand: growing food for growing cities.

By Alice Marks, @alicemarks0

Credit, FAO

On April 26^th 2016 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released their new report, Growing Food for Growing Cities: Transforming food systems in an urbanizing world, as part of their Global Food Security Symposium in Washington, DC. According to UN figures, two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, and this report looks at how such rapid urbanisation is changing the structure and functionality of the entire global food system, from the source of inputs to the farm and on to the consumer.

With urbanisation and the accompanying expansion of urban middle classes comes a shift in dietary expectations and demands. Traditional staple diets such as cereals, roots and pulses are increasingly supplemented with a wide variety of higher-value foods such as fresh fruit and vegetables, or meat and dairy products. For example, in some African countries including Uganda and Tanzania up to 66% of urban household food expenditure is on foods other than staple grains.

Value chains have potential

Chicago Council, 2016

According to the report, if agricultural and supply chains are to accommodate the growing demands of the cities, they will need to “lengthen geographically, increasing the potential to reach farmers in more and more distant areas.” No longer is ‘farm to fork’ a simple process that serves local populations; increasingly it is a complex and far-reaching chain, involving many actors that might cross borders and even continents.

What urbanisation means for rural areas in Africa

By Katrin Glatzel

Credit: Alvise Forcellini, 2006

“How to feed our cities? Agriculture and rural areas in an era of urbanisation” – that was the theme of the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture, or for short, the GFFA, hosted in Berlin in mid-January. With Habitat III taking place in October in Quito, Ecuador, urbanisation features on top of the agenda of many meetings and conferences in 2016 including the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ annual flagship report and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). These forums are important as they draw attention to what urbanisation will mean for rural areas, the agriculture sector and those millions of smallholder farmers, upon which urban areas rely for their food supply. This is particularly important in a developing country context.

Urban and rural transformation

According to UN figures, in 1950 only about a third of the world’s population lived in cities, but rapid population growth has led to increased urbanisation, which has seen this figure rise to 54% in 2014. As this trend is set to continue, by 2050 over two-thirds of the global population will live in urban and peri-urban areas. Take for example Nigeria. Under current trends, by 2050, at 397 million, Nigeria’s population would be larger than Central Africa’s population in its entirety. Lagos’ population of 17.9 million is set to double by mid-century. This has a significant impact for the development of rural areas and our food systems. In order to support growing urban areas, to improve rural livelihoods, reduce poverty and to lower Africa’s food import bills, local agricultural sectors in the rural and peri-urban areas will need to adapt to an increased demand for food and changing diets. Pressure on natural resources, such as water, and climate change make the sustainable production of nutritious and affordable food ever more challenging.

The indoor farming revolution

Indoor, vertical, hydroponic, urban. Whatever you want to call them, these high-tech farms are popping up all over the world from office buildings in Japan to research laboratories in the Netherlands to O’Hare International airport in Chicago, and even your own home. Here we talk about what they are, how they can revolutionise the food industry and what the major drawbacks are.

Introducing indoor farming

Access to arable land and fresh water is declining, traditional commercial farming methods are environmentally unsustainable and climate change is becoming less of a threat and more of a reality. In the face of these challenges we must produce enough food to feed a growing population, many of whom are chronically hungry. Some believe the answer lies in a radical transformation of our food production systems, namely indoor farming, a method that can reduce the inefficiency and waste (e.g. of water or of crops) associated with modern farming practices.

Indoor farming is happening across the globe, although predominantly in developed countries. The world’s largest indoor farm at 25,000 square feet is located in the old SONY factory located in eastern Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. Some 380 enclosed farms growing fruit and vegetables are operating in Japan, including some run by electronics companies Fujitsu, Toshiba and Panasonic. But what is indoor farming?

When will we run out of land?

Between 1980 and 2000 over half of new agricultural land in the tropics was created through cutting down intact forest. Land clearing for crop production is a major issue for the maintenance of biodiversity and environmental stability but growing human demand for food is only one of several pressures on land, a resource that is rapidly shrinking.

Recently we at Agriculture for Impact came across a paper investigating global land scarcity, a topic much discussed in One Billion Hungry and on this blog. Published in 2011, the paper by Dr Lambin of Stanford University and Dr Meyfroidt of the University of Louvain, entitled Global land use change, economic globalization and the looming land scarcity, documents the processes that are driving global land use change and estimates when we might run out of land.

Of the total ice free land on the planet (13,300 million hectares), around 4,000Mha is suitable for rain-fed agriculture. The amount of land that is currently uncultivated, that isn’t forested, protected or populated by more than 25 people per km² is estimated at 445Mha and occurs mainly in the cerrados and grasslands of Latin America and the savannahs of Africa, which are important in themselves for biodiversity conservation and livestock grazing. The paper’s authors calculate low and high estimates of the amount of land needed to supply demand for different competing land uses:

Cropland for human food – an additional 2.7-4.9Mha each year depending on food waste, diets and efficiency.

Biofuels – 1.5-3.9Mha per year based on current biofuel mandates

Pasture – 0-5Mha per year based on the projected intensification of livestock systems

Urbanisation – 1.6-3.3Mha per year

Industrial forestry – 1.9-3.6Mha per year

Protected areas – 0.9-2.7Mha per year

Land degradation – 1-2.9Mha of land will be lost each year

Added together and balanced against current available land, and assuming that some deforestation will occur, means that current land reserves will run out by the late 2020s at the earliest and 2050 at the latest, and this is excluding the impacts of climate change.