agriculture

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May 10, 2012 | 11:49 AM | By

Don’t be too quick to dismiss organic farming for Africa

By Lisa Stiffler, special correspondent

CIAT International Center for Tropical Agriculture

A bean farmer tends her crop in DR Congo

One of the world’s leading advocates of the need for agricultural reform in Africa, speaking in Seattle earlier this week, said organic farming methods are already being used by poor farmers and they aren’t working. Organic farming cannot alone meet our planet’s food needs was the message.

Organic farming has lots of benefits: It doesn’t require expensive and possibly toxic pesticides; it emphasizes natural practices to build richer soils over a heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers; and it grows food that’s arguably healthier.

But when you consider that one in seven people worldwide will go to bed tonight hungry, it does seem fair to ask: Can organic deliver the goods for the developing world?

New research says yes – but not everywhere and not for everything.

WSU

“This is not an argument that organic can or cannot feed the world,” said John Reganold, regents professor of Soil Science and Agroecology at Washington State University in Pullman. “No one system can feed the world.”

A recent study in the journal Nature sought to answer the question of whether organic farming could match the output of conventional agriculture. The researchers, who did not include Reganold, compiled 316 comparisons of crops grown both ways and found that in developed nations, organic practices returned 20 percent less produce. The spread increases to 25 percent when data from developing nations are included.

But in a follow-up letter published in Nature this week, Reganold notes that the difference in yields between organic and conventional farming varies greatly between crops.  For some fruits there was only a 3 percent yield difference in the farming practices, but the spread was more than 33 percent for certain vegetables.

The answer, then, to the organic-versus-conventional debate is clear as mud.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Calestous Juma, farming, John Reganold, organic, Roy Steiner
May 9, 2012 | 11:33 AM | By

Calestous Juma says Africa CAN feed itself, and the world, by harnessing new science

Calestous Juma is a funny guy.

Tom Paulson

Calestous Juma, center, jokes with one of his leading critics, Phil Bereano, at left

The Harvard University professor of international development is author of The New Harvest, a book (free online) in which he makes his case for how agricultural reforms offer the most promise for positively transforming African economies.

Juma spoke Tuesday at the University of Washington’s Kane Hall at an event sponsored by the World Affairs Council. Outside the event, protesters from the local organization AGRA Watch handed out leaflets challenging his views — which also were challenged in a Q&A after his talk.

There’s a good reason this jovial and charming Kenyan provokes controversy.

Juma, though entertaining, doesn’t mince words — “Africa is already doing organic farming … and it isn’t working very well.” He describes himself as a bit of ‘techno-optimist,’ a believer like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the fundamental power of science and technology to transform agriculture in poor countries, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

“Agricultural reform is the key to economic development in Africa, and it is already happening,” Juma said. Many African nations lead the world in economic growth rates and new approaches to old problems are transforming the continent. “Technologies destroy ideologies.”

But it is Juma’s enthusiastic support for science and technology as the key to agri-reform — indeed, to development in general — that makes him a target for those who contend such a strategy ignores, or at least glosses over, a lot of the political, economic and social reasons why so many people remain in poverty.

One of Juma’s critics, retired UW professor of technology policy Phil Bereano, asked why Juma doesn’t describe in his book all of the political work he does behind the scene with African leaders to get them to make agricultural reform a priority.

Bereano: “The reality is that these technological choices are skewed by power …. Why do you leave this out of your presentations?”

Juma: “Yes, power matters … I wrote this book as a memo to African leaders …. If these guys are not engaged, nothing will happen.”

And if he focused his book trying to provide his own perspective on African politics rather than the promise of agricultural reform, Juma said, he would have been much less effective. In short, he explained, he had to leave the power politics out of the book in order to be heard within the corridors of power.

“Nothing is perfect,” Juma had said earlier. There’s plenty to debate and lots of conflicting ideologies, he said, but he is trying to stay focused on the practicalities of finding the best solutions to Africa feeding itself — and, if things go as well as he imagines, helping to feed to world.

For more of Juma’s thoughts, and responses to his critics, listen to the audio interview above.

 

FILED UNDER: Basics, AGRA Watch, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Calestous Juma, green revolution, Phil Bereano
February 23, 2012 | 11:02 AM | By

Bill Gates calls for new approach to agriculture in developing world

Tom Paulson

Bill Gates, speaking in Rome today at the International Fund for Agricultural Development meeting, says the current approach to improving agricultural productivity in the developing world is outdated and inefficient and announced $200 million in new grants supporting his preferred strategies.

As reported by AFP, Gates called on those gathered at the meeting to increase the use of information technologies to assist farmers — a ‘digital revolution’ for agriculture:

“We have to think hard about how to start taking advantage of the digital revolution that is driving innovation including in farming,” the U.S. billionaire philanthropist said in a speech at the UN rural poverty agency IFAD in Rome.

“If you care about the poorest, you care about agriculture. We believe that it’s possible for small farmers to double and in some cases even triple their yields in the next 20 years while preserving the land,” Gates said.

FILED UNDER: Basics, agriculture, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Food and Agricultural Program, United Nations
December 8, 2011 | 10:00 AM | By

Inter Press: The connection between the land grab in Africa and climate change

Interpress News Service has published this short two-part series exploring the connection between the current “land grab” in Africa and how this may contribute to worsening climate change.

As stated in Part 1 At the nexus of agrofuels, land grabs and hunger:

While the United Nations climate talks in Durban enter their ninth day of political feet-dragging, researchers and peasants around the world are busy connecting the dots between so- called “green climate solutions”, industrialised agriculture and chronic hunger.

Many African nations are already seeing what they believe is the adverse impact of climate change, Inter Press notes, with shifting weather patterns or droughts  that reduce agricultural productivity, which can lead to hunger of widespread famine.

As stated by one of those interviewed in Part 2 of the series, many Africans see taking action on climate change as a matter of life and death:

“People on the streets of South Africa are calling the U.N. talks ‘genocidal’,” Quincy Saul, author of “Reflections of Crisis: The Great Depression in the 21st Century”, told IPS.  Quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Saul added, “By delaying a binding agreement on global warming to 2020, the U.N. is effectively condemning 100 million Africans to death by the end of the century.”

FILED UNDER: Basics, agriculture, climate change, land grab
November 9, 2011 | 2:16 PM | By

Rwanda is empowering girls, with a little help from Seattle

RGI

The first class of the Rwanda Girls Initiative, launched by two Seattle women

It has become a mantra in aid and development circles today to say that empowering girls is the single most effective means of fighting poverty, inequity and any number of ills in poor countries.

This is one of the international community’s top priorities, for good reason.

But saying and doing are two different things. Talk is cheap, they say.

Paul Kagame’s government in Rwanda is clearly walking the talk on girls and women — and a number of Seattle organizations are assisting in the gender revolution happening here. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Basics, agriculture, education, Gashora, girls, Ralph Coolman, Rwanda, Rwanda Girls Initiative, Suzanne Sinegal McGill, women's rights
October 13, 2011 | 12:28 PM | By

Scientists propose a ‘Five-Step Plan’ to save the planet

Flickr, Southernpixel Alby

A 5-step plan to save the planet sounds ridiculous, I know. But, as they say, even the longest journey begins with the first step.

Rather than simply get overwhelmed at all of the world’s many problems, an environment and land-use professor at the University of Minnesota and his colleagues decided to come up with a workable game plan to simultaneously deal with three major, overlapping forces that dictate our future:

Population growth, agriculture and the environment. Says study leader Jonathan A. Foley in an online article in Scientific American, Can We Feed the World and Sustain the Planet?:

Right now about one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. the world’s farmers grow enough food to feed them, but it is not properly distributed and, even if it were, many cannot afford it, because prices are escalating.

But another challenge looms.

By 2050 the world’s population will increase by two billion or three billion, which will likely double the demand for food, according to several studies.

That doesn’t sound too promising, especially when Foley and his colleagues go on to note that our current approach to agriculture uses about 40 percent of Earth’s land already and our approach to farming contributes about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Most of our water use also goes to agriculture.

And if population growth continues at its current rate, we will need to double food production by 2050.

Yikes! Anyone planning a trip to Mars? Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Science, agriculture, climate change, food, population, Scientific American, water
October 12, 2011 | 11:39 AM | By

World’s food needs are central to health, poverty efforts

Flickr, elana's pantry

You can’t get very far trying to improve people’s health, reduce poverty or empower the poor without food.

This week in Des Moines, Iowa, about 1,000 people, including many former heads of state and top agricultural policy folk, are gathered together to talk about food — or more accurately, how to feed the planet’s growing population.

This is the week-long World Food Prize symposium and Borlaug Dialogue.

The latter part of the event title (no, it’s not a science fiction plot) is named after the late Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist who spearheaded the so-called Green Revolution which dramatically increased agricultural productivity in many parts of the world during the mid-to-late 20th Century.

There’s a push today for another such effort especially targeting Africa, which did not see much benefit from Borlaug’s revolution. It’s led by an organization called the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which was launched largely thanks to support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Many are critical of this new proposed Green Revolution for Africa, such as one Seattle-based organization known as AGRA Watch. There are too many issues to describe it adequately, but in a nutshell AGRA Watch sees the Gates-backed project as mostly favoring the interests of large international agricultural corporations like ADM, Cargill or Monsanto rather than the poor.

Many were, and are, critical of Borlaug’s original project as well. While the first Green Revolution did increase overall productivity, many contend it did so using industrialized farming techniques (mono-cultures, heavy fertilizer use) that may have improved yields but often did so at the expense of small, community-based farmers and the natural environment.

It’s way too big an issue to cover in this post. Here are few stories coming out of, or related to, the meeting this week:

Inter Press: Biofuels, market speculators driving up food prices

AP: Howard Buffett says no simple solution to global food crisis

Ames Tribune: Global food security key to national security, US Agri Chief says

Guardian: Agricultural policy hurting farmers in poor countries

Reuters: DR Congo is ranked worst on global hunger index

ONE Campaign: World Food Prize kick off

Below is a map featuring the findings of the 2010 Global Hunger Index

FILED UNDER: Basics, AGRA, AGRA Watch, agriculture, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, food, Norman Borlaug