Deliberating costs lives

There have been a couple of disheartening developments this week.
The World Food Summit in Rome represents an opportunity for world leaders to address the growing food security crisis. However it looks likely that leaders will be signing a vague declaration which lacks targets or deadlines for actions to reduce global hunger.

This strikes a familiar tune. Time has apparently run out for securing a legally binding climate deal at Copenhagen. On Sunday Barak Obama backed plans to delay a formal pact on climate change until next year. This will have a serious effect on food security. As UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon said in his opening speech at the World Food Summit “there can be no food security without climate security.”

1 in 6 people on the planet are already facing life-threatening hunger. Lack of targets and delayed deadlines could spell disaster for many more people living in developing countries. These aren’t just statistics – these are people’s lives.

Help challenge this situation! Here are a few things you can do. They may not seem significant but they are all a part of a vital wave for change.
• Make sure that the voices of some of the world’s poorest people are heard: Embed/ post/ e-mail a link our video ‘Climate change: Listening to the voices of rural women’
• Participate in The Wave on December 5th.
• Find out where The Age of Stupid is showing near you and go along with all your friends.

 

Voices of Rural Women on Climate Change

“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.

 

Reflection on Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution

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”…..

Read more

 

Trees “vital for food security” in Africa

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.

aw/js/am/mw

 

‘Feeding Africa’ – Find Your Feet in The Guardian

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.

 

Blind Alley? DFID’s policy on agriculture

Is DFID’s policy on agriculture is in danger of failing to deliver food and environmental security?

“The UK Government still sees a combination of intensive farming and GM crops as the solution to hunger and malnutrition in the Global South….[their] current funding policies for agricultural research, development and extension fail to match up to the International
Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development’s (IAASTD) key findings.

The agroecological approach to food production and land management needs considerable research investment to develop techniques and ensure that farmer-led extension services are appropriate and lead to the adoption of the best systems for each agro-ecosystem. DFID is
potentially in a very strong position to ensure that this happens.”

Download the GM Freeze report to read more.

 

Back to Business? – the G8 Food Security Initiative

It is expected that the G8 states will be signing up to a new food security initiative this Friday (10th July 2009), with the aim of replacing food aid with more sustainable aid to farmers in the developing world. The US and Japan will lead the way on this initiative, providing $6-8 billion of the proposed $12 billion fund.

At Find Your Feet we are really pleased to see this emphasis on providing more long-term funding for agriculture. However there doesn’t seem to have been any shift from a ‘business as usual’ approach to agriculture that relies on industrial farming methods and free-market agricultural policies. To quote Japan’s prime minister Taro Aso “recipient countries [must be supported] to develop growth strategies with renovated agro-industries.”

According to Olivier De Schutter, the OHCHR Special Rapporteur on the Right to food, the issue isn’t one of merely increasing budget allocations to agriculture, but rather “that of choosing from different models of agricultural development which may have different impacts and benefit various groups differently.”

This echoes our belief that, in the light of a changing climate and increasing pressure on the world’s resources, decision makers at the G8 must, as the IAASTD report puts it “dramatically increase their investments in smallholder ecological farming systems.” This could have a serious impact on food security in Africa because, as an important UNCTAD and UNEP study Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa showed, organic or near-organic agriculture practices in Africa outperformed conventional production systems based on chemical-intensive farming. (visit our website to read more)

The same goes for free-market agricultural policies. A recent report by Action Aid ‘Let Them Eat Promises: How the G8 are failing the billion hungry’ says that “developing countries must shift their focus away from export crops, back to sustainable local production for local markets.”

“If the G8 is indeed serious about its commitment to confront hunger,” writes Anuradha Mittal in Foreign Policy in Focus, “the member countries must stop the steady drumbeat of proselytizing for free markets and technological solutions to hunger.”

 

“The time has come to regenerate ecosystems”

Mount Kenya Declaration on the Global Crisis and Africa’s Responsibility – Statement from the African Biodiversity Network

“The time has come for national governments to prioritise the regeneration of ecosystems, self-reliant communities and diversified local economies over export oriented policies, free trade agreements and the current wave of expansion of the food system.”

From 23 – 31 May 2009, the African Biodiversity Network (ABN) have gathered together near Mount Kenya, 25 organisations from 10 countries that work with farmers and local communities on the issues of biodiversity, food sovereignty, livelihoods, climate change, traditional knowledge, culture and community rights in Africa.

We are deeply aware that the planet is facing multiple interconnected crises which will have an even bigger impact on Africa, even though Africa is not responsible for these crises. On the one hand, there is the stark and devastating impact of the food and financial crises, which will be compounded by the impact of climate change.

We are very concerned about the devastating impact that the food and financial crises and climate change is having on the people of Africa and their environment. People are losing their livelihoods, houses, jobs at an alarming rate and at the same time, farmers, pastoralists and local communities have to cope with unpredictable changes in their environment. We concur with the Indigenous Peoples , that the Earth is no longer in a period of climate change but in a climate crisis.

We are outraged at the financial crisis which was caused by global financial institutions accumulating unimaginable wealth while speculating with ordinary people’s hard-earned savings. This economic meltdown is now pushing many countries over the brink and is adding another estimated 104 million people to the 1 billion permanently hungry people in the world.

We are also aware that the food crisis and recurring famines in Africa are not something new but is caused by basic structural injustices entrenched over decades, now reaching new levels of deprivation because of the speculative trading of food on international markets.

We find the current scale of ”crisis capitalism” intolerable and strongly reject the cynical attempts of corporates that target Africa for further exploitation of the food and climate crises by turning it into economic opportunities rather than trying to solve it.

We see the underlying cause of the crises as the globalisation of the industrial system which inevitably results in the concentration of capital and power in the hands of a few, generating ever growing poverty and ecological destruction resulting in global climate change. Now the same thinking that created these numerous toxic debts is promoting many “False Solutions” that are exacerbating the crises. There is an intensified scramble for Africa’s land and ecological wealth facilitated by governments who continue to be dominated by corporate interests.

We reject these False Solutions which include:

 Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), which, we are told will solve hunger and climate change, but have instead caused widespread contamination of farmers’ crops and our food while increasing the use of pesticides which destroy biodiversity and health. The ultimate aim of GMO companies is control over our seed and thus food system through the patenting of all forms of life. These crops require highly industrialised farming conditions, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, thus a major contributing factor to climate change. In spite of this, GMO proponents are now claiming that they can find GMO fixes for both the climate change and the food crisis.

 AGRA – A New Green Revolution is imposed on Africa by a collaborative effort between amongst others, the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Bank, and agro-industries to replace Africa’s seeds, crops and knowledge with hybrids, GMOs, fertilisers and pesticides. Because this industrial system needs large tracts of land, AGRA is also funding the push to change land tenure systems, privatise land and so facilitating the rapid change of land from community custodianship to just another commodity in the pockets of investors. The sheer amount of money and political influence the Green Revolution push has behind it, is now dominating the debate on agriculture, pushing for stricter intellectual property rights on seeds, weak biosafety legislation, in the process narrowing Africa’s options for food sovereignty both on country and local level.

 Agrofuels (or biofuels) are promoted in Northern countries as the solution to climate change, as providing an alternative to fossil fuels. But they are driving an unprecedented land grab across Africa, and leading to forced evictions, deforestation, and rising food prices. We challenge the myth spread by corporations and corrupt governments that there is plenty of free land, going spare in Africa. We in Africa know of the challenges and conflicts we already face from the competition for land and water. A number of other solutions to climate change are also turning out to be little more than business opportunities, including biochar, carbon trading, geo-engineering.

It is clear that these proposed solutions by corporate interests are based on acquiring large tracts of land and cheap labour for industrial scale production, serving to maintain the lifestyle of societies of over-consumption thereby exacerbating the crises both in the North and the South. All of these developments claim that they bring progress to Africa. But not only will they fail to address hunger and climate change, they will make them worse. These false solutions are cynical attempts by the corporations to reach new markets, and to make a business out of a crisis

ABN’s Position

ABN believes that the solutions to climate change and hunger are the same: healthy resilient communities depend on healthy resilient ecosystems and biodiversity.

We are certain that the role of healthy, biodiverse ecosystems in maintaining a stable climate is critical, and that it is completely underestimated in most predictions and discussions about climate change. When dealing with climate change, we must both reduce carbon emissions and enhance biodiversity as equally important. Healthy soils built up by ecological agriculture and livelihood systems sink carbon as well as having more capacity to hold water in times of drought or flood.

Food sovereignty at local and national level requires locally adapted crop and livestock diversity and land tenure systems that will enable communities to produce and market food in a way that really feeds people, promote equity and at the same time deal with climate instability.

We also believe that local and indigenous ecological knowledge and governance systems must be urgently revived and enhanced to maximise Africa’s capacity to read, anticipate and adapt to climate change.

The time has come for national governments to prioritise the regeneration of ecosystems, self-reliant communities and diversified local economies over export oriented policies, free trade agreements and the current wave of expansion of the food system.

Africa needs to have the courage to free itself from its colonial legacy and build on its rich heritage through reviving the wisdom of its people as a responsibility to past and future generations. Based on this wealth, it has the capacity to take a lead in finding true solutions by disengaging from the very thinking that has created the crises in the first place.

Here, as the birthplace of the human species, African communities have adapted and evolved over 1000’s of years, without destroying their life support system. Africa needs to reclaim its responsibility and legacy as a basis from which to build a viable future for all.

*************************************

 

Subsistence Culture

While the world plunges into crises, subsistence farming in Africa holds the key to sustainable agriculture production, not only for the region but also other parts of the world.

By Tewolde B. G. Egziabher, Director General of the Environmental Protection Authority of Ethiopia, and co-founder of the Institute for Sustainable Development.

I am from Africa, and you also came from Africa, albeit generations before me. I bring you all masses of love from your original mother, Africa.

It is usual for the young, especially in Europe, to look at the old, including their parents, as if they are past it; as if they are ready to be buried and forgotten. Therefore, it is not surprising to me that other continents think of Mother Africa as hopeless and view Africans as permanently hungry.

Yes, there are hungry people in Africa. But there are also hungry people in Europe, and in every other continent, for that matter. And, yes, the proportion of hungry people is probably the greatest in Africa, but I want to tell you why.

Africa is where all humans came from. Therefore, Africa is the continent that has fed humanity the longest. Our lore regarding food and feeding is massive in Africa. Nevertheless, thanks to the centuries of colonial and neocolonial plunder of resources and people, Africa is the least populated of continents. So Africa, of all continents, has the greatest potential to feed her resident people. Why, then, does the image of hunger in Africa persist?

To answer this question, I want to take you back to the 1850s when the industrialisation of agriculture started in the violently dominant countries of Europe and then America. The in-dustrialisation of agriculture requires, among other things, a high population density. This is because of its need for both a large market and a well developed transportation and marketing infrastructure.

The low population density of Africa meant that, because of its less well-developed transportation and marketing infrastructure, small quantities of subsidised food “dumped” on Africa by Europe and America easily disabled its internal small food markets. Africa’s non-mechanised agriculture thus remained at a subsistence level and never developed intensive agricultural production.

Now, the industrial agriculture of Europe and America, and recently that of Asia, is increasingly in crisis. It is polluting the land, the water and the air such that agricultural land is degrading fast, water is becoming unsafe for humans and for most of other forms of life, and polluted air is trapping the sun’s radiation to the extent that the whole biosphere is warming up. Global food production risks failing to adapt to the changing climate.

This risk is growing in spite of the lure of “quick fixes” for all agricultural problems claimed by genetic engineers. Fossil fuels, on which the industrial culture, including industrial agriculture, depends, are running out. The rich banks of Europe and America are collapsing and governments have had to buy up some of their assets. The agreements of the World Trade Organization, which encouraged the dumping of subsidised foods in Africa’s urban centres, now, hold little authority. Indeed, negotiations on these agreements have been stuck since the Ministerial Conference in Seattle failed in 1999. I would not be surprised if the World Trade Organization were now to simply fade away.

But we must, all the time, have food to subsist on, and the subsistence farming of Africa is now the most intact of all agricultural systems precisely because industrial agriculture has bypassed it. So, the more-or-less intact African subsistence agriculture can become a reference point from which to base sustainable global food production, whilst ensuring it is compatible with the health of the entire biosphere.

For a start, subsidised food dumping in Africa must cease. The dependence it creates by destabilising Indigenous agriculture is the main reason why the proportion of hungry people in Africa is now so high. But it will take only a few growing seasons for the rurally intact subsistence food production systems in Africa to fill in the gap created by the cessation of food dumping.

A new form of sustainable agricultural intensification is already taking place in Africa. This started in four local communities in the badly degraded north-eastern highlands of Ethiopia. Members of each local community met and analysed their environmental and agricultural problems. They then developed their byelaws to determine what each community would do, and elected their own leadership to oversee the implementation. They built terraces and bunds to prevent soil erosion; they restricted their animals to specific areas and fed them crop residues so as to allow grass, shrubs and trees to maximise growth in the rainy season, and vegetation cover improved dramatically in just one rainy season. They could then harvest the grass and add hay to the crop residues to feed their animals sufficiently.

The increased availability of animal dung and biomass waste made it possible for them to make and apply compost on their respective fields. Soil fertility improved and so did crop harvests. Rainwater percolated through he improved soil structure and began recharging the water table more fully. Springs and streams began to flow again and strengthen, allowing irrigation in the dry season, which increased food production further. Trees that had disappeared owing to land degradation began returning in subsequent rainy seasons. Farmers enriched the resurgent tree cover with the species of their choice, usually fruit trees and leguminous trees for both fodder and soil enrichment.

Starting from just these four communities, the practice is now expanding throughout Ethiopia. In November 2008, the African Union organised a conference in Addis Ababa, preceded by field visits, to extend these innovative and sustainable practices to the rest of Eastern and Southern Africa.

Of course, I am not implying that the corporations that have plunged the world into unsustainability will simply give up. They will not, but Africa’s subsistence agriculture could be the basis for the much needed intensification of sustainable food production, not only in Africa, but throughout the world.

The time has come to learn from the wisdom and practical knowledge of the people whose continent gave birth to humanity. We will then be able to incorporate the globally resynthesised industrial culture of its most impetuous species, Homo sapiens, into a more healthy form of development that will sustain life robustly to the end of time.

-ends-

With thanks to Third World Network Features. The above article is reproduced from Resurgence, No. 254 May/June 2009. It is based on a speech given at the opening ceremony of Terra Madre, Turin, Italy, October 2008.

 

A G8 on agriculture without farmers = more hunger and poverty

(Treviso, 21 April 2009) The first G8 on Agriculture which ended yesterday in Cison di Valmarino produced a final declaration which not only admits its own failures in the past, but previews a future full of contradictions. The G8 will never be able to alleviate hunger in the world by making its decisions behind closed doors, in the absence of the main actors in the global debate on agriculture – the millions of peasants and family farmers, women and men, who feed the world.

The G8’s assertion that “farmers must be the main protagonists” rings particularly hollow when the meeting this weekend was explicitly designed to limit the access of farmers organisations and reduce their visibility. The G8 held their meeting in an isolated castle in the mountains, and the Italian Agricultural minister refused to meet representatives of Italian and International farmers organisations who wished to express their opinions.

Read more on the Via Campesina website