October 26, 2009
The Deccan Herald (India) recently featured our work with teenage girls in Allahabad, India.
“Some distance away from Allahabad, a minor revolution is on. Young girls, all in their teens, are teaching their parents and relatives about HIV/Aids prevention and learning about sexual abuse themselves.”
Take a look at this video to learn more:
October 26, 2009
“My group and I know the importance of honey in our daily lives. Honey can be sold to generate an income. It also acts as a source of food, has medicinal values, and we can use the wax to make candles.” Said Gondwe, Rumphi District.
“The Vanishing of the Bees.”
As the ‘buzz’ (bad pun – sorry!) in the news has highlighted recently, bees are vital to our food security. The documentary “The Vanishing of the Bees” stated that 80% of all fruit, veg, nuts, seeds, herbs and flowers rely on the bee – meaning that they play a role in one in every three mouthfuls of food we eat. The decline of the bee has therefore triggered alarm that our food supply could be in jeopardy.
And, ironically, fingers have pointed at intensive farming as the main culprit for the decline in the bee populations. The modernising of farming included extensive monoculture. The pesticides needed to keep monoculture going are thought to be having unexpected negative effects on honey bees. In addition to this the land clearance associated with intensive farming has destroyed much of the natural habitat of wild pollinators.
Bees in rural India and Malawi
“We know very well that bees not only act as a source of income but also sustain the forest. You find that where bee hives are hung and bees have colonized people do not cut down the trees.” Said Gondwe.
Our partners in India and Malawi are providing people in rural areas with training and equipment so that they can start beekeeping. As Said highlights, this often runs in parallel to important conservation and reforestation efforts – restoring the natural habitat of wild pollinators and helping to reverse some of the negative effects of intensive farming.
It costs £13 to provide training and equipment so that a farmer in Malawi can start beekeeping, providing them with an additional source of income and improving their food crop yields. Support our important work. Donate now.
October 23, 2009
Put People First G20 Counter Conference
November 7, 10:00 – 17:30
Central Hall Westminster, SW1H 9NH
In March, we marched in our tens of thousands to demand the G20 Put People First. Far from putting people first we’ve seen nothing but a tinkering around the margins followed by the return to business as usual.
On Nov 7, as the G20 returns to the UK, the agenda on the table nurses an already failed economic model back to life, whilst looking to stitch up an unjust international climate deal outside the UN process.
They bailed out the banks to the tune of billions, and now the only choice offered is between what cuts are made to pay for it.
Government intervention to create a Green New Deal is slipping off the agenda, and yet strong alliances are forming – for example environmentalists and trade unionists have been standing side by side at Vestas to save the UK’s largest wind turbine factory.
- In the run up to Copenhagen, how do we get a global agreement on climate that truly puts climate justice at its heart?
- How do we respond to the jobs crisis and growing poverty around the world
- How do we ensure the global green new deal the world needs?
- How we do we show that cuts are not the only option, and demonstrate what Putting People First really look like?
This counter-conference will bring together academics, activists, campaigners, unions, policy makers and YOU to share ideas on what the alternatives are to cuts, cuts and more cuts, and how we must organise across our issues, of jobs, justice and climate, to make the alternative the reality.
Register now
October 15, 2009
“The special perspective of women is often overlooked in global discussions on climate change.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
Today (October 15th) is Blog Action Day. This year bloggers have decided to create discussion around climate change, in the lead up to Copenhagen this December.
Today is also Rural Women’s Day. This international day was established with the aim of recognizing “the critical role and contribution of rural women, including indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty.”
Women’s ‘critical role’ in producing and providing food for their families means that they are most adversely affected by climate change and that they are already developing innovative ways to adapt.
Why don’t you take a look at this video I made after my trip to India earlier this year. In the video women in rural India share their stories about the way climate change is affecting them. The video also shows the innovative ways these women are finding to adapt to climate change.
Help us to continue supporting women in rural areas to adapt to some of the worst effects of climate change. Donate now.
September 16, 2009
Fascinating debate at Times Online about the merits and drawbacks of the Green Revolution.
“For someone of my generation, growing up under postwar food rationing, the idea that food would always be plentiful and cheap seemed about as likely as a portable phone that you could carry around with you.
For many of us the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus were all too credible. Malthus had advanced the dismal theory that human populations would always grow faster than their food supply. It meant you could forget all your grand ideas about progress. Every social advance was destined to be brought to nothing by famine.
The singular achievement of the agronomist Norman Borlaug, who died at the weekend, was to take away this age-old fear, at least for those of us in the rich West”…..
September 11, 2009
FYF team member Catriona Fox is currently in India with Kevin E.G Perry, the amateur journalist finalist in the Guardian Journalism competition. We are supporting him to research an article about traditional silk handloom weavers in Varanasi. Visit his blog to read his thoughts on his trip so far:
http://www.on-the-silk-road.blogspot.com/
August 28, 2009
Integrating fleshy plants and trees into farming systems can help overcome food security challenges
NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (IRIN) – Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry – integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors.
“How do we, in a world of more than six billion people, rising to perhaps over nine billion, feed everyone while simultaneously securing the ecosystem services such as forests and wetlands that underpin agriculture, and indeed life itself in the first place?” Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), posited at the second World Congress on Agroforestry in Nairobi.
“We can empower people – not to wait for others to do something for them – but to take the initiative, one tree at a time,” Steiner said. “Trees are one of nature’s most ingenious answers to many of our problems.”
Agroforestry helps supply fodder, fruit and nuts as well as trees and shrubs that produce gums, resins and valuable medicines.
Steiner said agroforestry may have many roles to play in the new landscape of rewarding countries for their natural or nature-based services.
“Firstly it offers the potential for maximizing sustainable food production in the zones surrounding natural forests while also boosting biodiversity and other ‘natural infrastructure’.
“Secondly, it offers an opportunity for timber production and thus alternative livelihoods to meet perhaps a supply gap that may emerge under a fully-fledged REDD [Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation] regime.
“Thirdly these agroforestry areas can also potentially secure flows from carbon finance in their own right.”
Better REDD
REDD is a strategy to help local communities conserve forests, including funding these efforts through governments and market-based mechanisms, such as trading the carbon stored by forests as credits to greenhouse gas-emitting industries.
Trees such as the Faidherbia albida, a leguminous acacia-like tree, are especially useful.
“Faidherbia goes dormant at the beginning of the rains and deposits abundant quantities of organic fertilizer on to the food crops to provide nutrients and increase yields, totally free of charge,” said Dennis Garrity, World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Director-General. “They are fertilizer factories in the food crop fields.”
The leaves and pods of the Faidherbia, which are adapted to a wide array of climates and soils from deserts to humid tropics, provide fodder in the dry season too.
Garrity said: “The much higher food prices… have exacerbated the pain of hunger in hundreds of millions of households. The standard solutions just aren’t working. The question is, what are we as agroforestry scientists going to do about it? What are we going to contribute to sustainable solutions?”
With shrinking forests, he said, “the rising demand for tree products will have to be met from farm-grown sources. Clearly, agroforestry science has much to offer in overcoming the food security challenges in Africa, and elsewhere in the world.”
Tree cover
According to a 24 August report by ICRAF, “tree cover is a common feature on agricultural land”, and represents over one billion hectares of land.
“Agroforestry, if defined by tree cover of greater than 10 percent on agricultural land, is widespread, found on 46 percent of all agricultural land area globally, and affecting 30 percent of rural populations,” stated the report.
Namanga Ngongi, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said: “Seventy-five percent of Africa’s farm lands are degraded, and deforestation is taking place at four times the global average, destroying 1 percent of our forests every year.”
Agroforestry alone could remove 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 50 years, meeting about a third of the world’s total carbon reduction challenge, according to ICRAF studies.
Carbon payback
Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai suggested that subsistence farmers might be more willing to invest in farming trees if there were carbon credit revenue guarantees.
UNEP recently launched a Carbon Benefits Project in the catchments of Lake Victoria, Niger, Nigeria and China, which seeks to find a standardized way of assessing how much carbon is actually locked away in vegetation and in soils under different land-management regimes.
This has been a major challenge for African smallholders seeking to access the carbon market. Preliminary findings are expected within 18 months.
According to Steiner, economic incentives are required to reverse deforestation and forest degradation.
“…Simply locking away forests to secure their carbon as if they are the Queen’s jewels, or putting up the modern equivalent of a Berlin Wall between forests and people, is almost certainly folly and almost certainly a recipe for disaster,” he said.
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August 27, 2009
In April this year our India office organised a centralised training for all our partner organisations in order to revisit the India advocacy strategy, formulated in 2006. On receiving the report we were sent on this training I decided to revisit the advocacy strategy myself.
“Any advocacy process must be initiated at the community level”
In a blog post I wrote earlier this year ( ‘pilot projects and participation’ ) I referred to a book I read called “The Aid Chain – Coercion and Commitment in Development NGOs”. In this book the researchers note that often, due to the prevalence of ‘log frame’ approaches in international development projects, important concepts such as “advocacy have been depoliticized and seen more as technical approaches to development…..often research and consultations with local people legitimize NGO advocacy work, which is set at the international level.”
I was therefore pleased to see that, in keeping with our vision and mission, the advocacy strategy was ‘initiated at the community level.’ The common issues to be addressed were identified following a process of consultation involving communities, project field staff and directors, with the support and assistance of activists and development professionals.
“Advocacy is a process of social transformation”
In “What is People Centred Advocacy?” John Samuel highlights the difference between advocacy viewed as a systemic process of policy change, and advocacy understood as a process of social transformation.
The cornerstone of FYF India’s advocacy strategy involves mobilising people around an issue. Our partners work at the local level to raise awareness of social, economic and political rights and to provide training in advocacy and lobbying skills. This approach goes beyond the idea of advocating on behalf of the marginalised, to the practice of enabling and empowering the marginalised to speak for themselves, as the story on our website about dalit women ‘speaking out to Sonia Gandhi’ shows.
Meanwhile our advocacy work on tribal and weaver rights shows the importance of networking in “bridging the gap between micro-level and macro level policy initiatives” and of media exposure in “bringing key issues affecting communities into the public arena and the political discourse.”
Looking forwards
Our partners took an active role in the training that took place in April. Through case studies, experience sharing and group presentations they undertook a deeper analysis of the issues facing the communities they work with and shared ideas as to how the advocacy strategy could be taken forward over the next couple of years. Following this process it was agreed that our advocacy strategy would work to:
• Build the capacity of the community to lobby on a particular issue by identifying committed local activists who could be involved in capacity building programmes for communities.
• Develop a data base of community organisations and NGOs working on similar issues so as to broaden our networking possibilities, thereby increasing the multiplier effect.
• Improve public awareness of key issues by identifying sensitive journalists, organising media workshops and conferences and facilitating field reporting of media persons. This work will be informed by fact finding missions and policy analysis of identified issues. This is important because, as John Samuel puts it “Knowledge-based activism is an important factor that influences the public.”
August 24, 2009
“Growing concerns relating to land degradation, threat to eco-systems from over and
inappropriate use of inorganic fertilizers, atmospheric pollution, soil health, soil biodiversity
and sanitation have rekindled the global interest in organic recycling practices like
composting.” Food and Agriculture Organisation.
At Find Your Feet one of the things we are really good at is composting! But I have to admit that it is our in-country office staff and their local partner organisations that are the experts. I write a lot about the positive effects of composting and saw lots of compost pits on my recent trip to India – but realised I didn’t actually know a lot about the techniques themselves!
So I decided to do a bit of research into the techniques we support farmers to use…and thought you would be interested to read a bit about what I learnt.
What is composting?
Composting is the biological decomposition of organic materials by microorganisms under controlled conditions to a relatively stable humus-like material. In the first stage bacteria, fungi, protozoa and other saprophytic organisms feed on the decaying organic materials, and in the later stages of decomposition invertebrates like earthworms further breakdown the composting materials.
The organic materials must include:
1. High carbon materials (brown and dry)
2. High nitrogen materials (green and wet)
Aerobic composting
Microscopic organisms, which use oxygen, feed upon the organic matter. They use the nitrogen, phosphorus, some of the carbon, and other required nutrients. Much of the carbon serves as a source of energy for the organisms and is burned up and respired as carbon dioxide (C02).
The compost volume gradually decreases and the phosphorous and most other nutrients become more concentrated. Some nitrogen will be lost during composting and some will convert from readily available forms (nitrate and ammonia) to more stable organic forms that are slowly released to crops.
‘Traditional Methods’ of composting are often based on passive aeration through measures like little and infrequent turnings or static aeration provisions like perforated poles/pipes. The process takes several months.
How aerobic composting is used by the farmers we support
NADEP compost is used lot in our India projects. It is carried out in specially constructed tanks with walls built like ‘honeycombs’ through which water is sprayed to prevent the compost becoming dry.
Indian farmers also use Vermi-compost. Earthworms not only speed up the composting process, they also contribute to the quality of the compost. ‘Casts’ produced by the earthworm are markedly higher in bacteria, organic material, available nitrogen, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and potassium than soil itself.
Meanwhile many of the farmers we support in Malawi make compost in pits and then use it to make liquid compost, which is easier to spread on the fields. They also make liquid manure by soaking it in water for a few weeks, which leaches much of the goodness of the manure into the water.
Anaerobic composting
Other organisms can operate without oxygen (ie in anaerobic conditions), and this process is sometimes called fermentation. These organisms use nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients to live and to develop cell protoplasm, but they reduce the organic nitrogen to organic acids and ammonia. The carbon from the organic compounds which is not utilized in the cell protein is liberated mainly in the reduced form of methane (CH4). A small portion of carbon may be respired as carbon dioxide (C02).
How anaerobic composting is used by the farmers we support
Bokash compost is used by many of the farmers we support in Malawi. Soaked maize bran is used along with rotten fruits or local beer wastes to ferment crop residues and the heap is covered with a plastic sheet to maintain the temperature.
Malawian farmers also practice a unique composting technique called chimoto. Weeds and other compost materials are heaped with soil into a dome like shape. A hole is bored at the top of the dome to observe the temperature and to add water as necessary to facilitate fermentation.
One of the main benefits of these anaerobic methods is that they far quicker than months of turning a compost pile. Our partners say that farmers are able to use their Bokash compost for basal dressing within three weeks.
August 14, 2009
FYF Director Dan Taylor was asked to write a comment on an article in The Guardian ‘Feeding Africa.‘ Visit the comment for a fascinating debate on the future of agriculture in Africa.
In the Guardian’s editorial (Feeding Africa, 29 July) the suggestion is made that, without improved seed varieties and fertiliser, African agriculture is a lost cause. This cannot go unchallenged. Farming in the UK elicits a peaceful picture of sheep grazing on green pastures, large fields of crops, and tractors. This image is far from the reality of the farms that produce the majority of Africa’s food. The average African farm is less than a hectare, the farmer is normally a woman and her main implement of cultivation is the hand hoe – this situates African agriculture in a very different context.
The editorial cites “subsidised seed and fertiliser” as the reason for Malawi’s farming transformation, “more than doubling productivity in a single year”. More than 25 years of working in rural Africa has taught me that this is an oversimplification of a very complex set of structural constraints and one that lulls us into a false sense of security. The suggestion is that if you get modern seeds and fertiliser to farmers then Africa’s food insecurity is solved. This modernist assumption that the industrial model of agriculture can solve Africa’s problems simply returns us to the failed policies of the 1960s and ignores the deleterious environmental impact of high input agriculture.
This puts Malawi’s “success” story in a different light. Malawi’s over-dependence on maize for national food security is short-sighted. Input subsidies do not target the poorest and the strategy depends on continued donor support, thereby raising questions of affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices. Since the scheme is subject to state patronage, it breeds farmers’ dependence on the state.
In attributing the success of the Malawian scheme to farming inputs alone, your leader pays insufficient attention to the optimal rainfall that Malawi experienced over the past agricultural seasons. Droughts and floods in Africa have put paid to best intentions; at some time in the future crops will fail again, at great cost to Malawi’s farmers.
The conclusion that “growing more food … is the part that matters most” is unhelpful since it overlooks the question of longer-term sustainability. Hunger is an abomination, but alleviation in the short term is merely food aid in a different form. A permanent solution is required. We need alternatives to monocultures and fossil fuels. My organisation, Find Your Feet, promotes agroecology – agricultural systems that more closely mimic the natural ecosystems that have served African farmers for millennia. These resource-conserving approaches reorient attention from single crops to diversified risk-reducing strategies that mitigate the effects of climatic unpredictability, and return control to Africa’s farmers.
Business as usual is not an option: new solutions to new problems are needed and science and technology must play a role. Agroecology challenges us to acknowledge the perspicacity of Africa’s farmers and resist the inclination to transfer to Africa more of the same old package – the technologies, market freedoms and mindsets – that created the food crisis in the first place.
