By Ochieng OGODO, The Standard, Kenya

The food crisis that has hit the world hard in the last year, especially in Africa, brought to light the collective global ineptitude with which agriculture has been treated.

 

 

Steps to end poverty and hunger

The crisis squarely highlighted the need for essential steps that must be taken to improve world food security and end poverty and hunger; a paradigm shift that understands the nuances and takes pragmatic advances for much improved agricultural and food production.

 

Hans Herren, President of the Washington based Millennium Institute, said simple technologies and scientific researches focusing on improvement of soil fertility are some of the critical pathways to increased food production in Africa. “It is not expensive technologies like chemical fertilisers and transgenic seed varieties,” he said. African governments, he stated, should encourage technologies like crop rotation, planting of leguminous plants for nitrogen fixation, no till production, research and developments focused on improvement of soil health.

 

His position is that it is high time smallholder farmers were considered as managers of their ecosystems and even get compensated for renewed interest in agriculture. Equally important, in his view,  is that they should be brought on board at policy making tables and in the research processes instead of taking to them “complete packages they understand nothing about.” Herren argued that only organic or what he also termed ecological agriculture was the way out of the dwindling food stocks and rising food prices and poverty and not subsidised industrial agriculture. To achieve this, he observed, it was necessary to educate the consumers on the type of foods they need as people were not getting the truth since private interests of the large companies were defining food policies.

 

“Stop industrial agriculture that is mining soil and also energy intensive thus passing as one of the agents of global warming; agriculture of the multinationals manufacturing seeds and other farm technologies was drastically reducing soil health and people were not being told the truth,” argued Herren. It is a scenario in which common sense is put aside and money rules. Industrial agriculture is bankrupt and for any single calorie produced you put ten more in high energy usage. We can’t afford not to change the way we do agriculture and it is up to the consumer to make this happen,” stated Herren.

 

Put emphasis on soil science

Putting emphasis on soil science and not seed traits or fertilizers, he argued, will increase yield and address the food crisis. “Promoting biotechnology or molecular biology was not all. There is need to put emphasis on soil sciences as soils in Africa have been destroyed by bad agricultural practices like mono-cropping, introduction of ploughing, use of fertilizers while those in the north have been ruined by bad technologies and no longer had deposits of the nutrient  range plants need.” “We should diversify crops like was done many years back and not monocropping. Let us bring back the wild relatives and get back production. Transgenic varieties interfere with natural systems like natural pest control,” he observed.

 

Using transgenic varieties, Herren argued, was similar to dealing with symptoms and not the problems in agriculture.  “A good doctor prevents and not the one who waits to treat. What will a single seed variety achieve in a situation where agricultural production is faced with multifaceted problems like lack of soil nutrients, water stress,” he posed. The case of low production and resultant food crisis in some parts of the world especially the developing countries was as result of soil health and this can’t be addressed by transgenic agriculture.

 

In Africa, he said, food production could multiply in the next three years through organic agriculture and mixed farming as it will not only give people sufficient food but also put money into their pockets through sale of the surplus. He strongly pitched for intensive agricultural system that takes into consideration critical issues like land, water retention, policies and sustainable farming systems for significant increase in agricultural production. Organic farming, he said, will build resilience in agriculture by rebuilding the capital which in agriculture is soil. He suggested the creation of vocational schools for imparting practical knowledge to farmers on organic farming and not theoretical approaches in industrial agriculture.

 

Africa he said had been affected by climate change and experienced extremes like flooding or prolonged droughts, the many pathogens and farmers should grow varieties as one of the pathways of coping up with climate change.

 

“Growing varieties in Africa,” Herren pointed out, “was one of the best methods of dealing with weather variability. Transgenic seeds add no value to what is already there but go against diverse genes and crops varieties in the system.”

 

Pio Wennubst, permanent representative of Switzerland to Rome based United Nations specialised agencies of the Food and Agricultural Organisation [FAO], IFAD and World Food Programme [WFP] said organic farming was one of the sure corridors out of the current food crisis as it addresses costs and starts a full recovery of soil health. The supply of relief food like being done by WFP, he said, was not helping much since those areas remained hunger hotspots despite the assistance. Giving Ethiopia as an example Wennubst said 90 percent of aid to the country is used to buy food. Wennubst called for an all inclusive system of managing agriculture in which the entire people in the food chain, from production to marketing, worked together with policy making and research processes.

 

Incompetent political leadership

The severe food crisis being experienced in Africa with millions of people under the scourge of chronic hunger, starvation and malnutrition was mostly due to incompetent political leadership according to Kanoye Nwanze, the new International Fund for Agricultural Development [IFAD] president

 “There has to be the right policies and enough investments in place to move agriculture forward. It is not enough to talk of increased production without looking at linkages like developing local markets,” he said. The Nigeria born Nwanze elected to that prestigious post by IFAD Governing Council on February 19 said time had come to address the problem of hunger, starvation and malnutrition in Africa through new methods.

 

“Africa must realise that it cannot continue to apply the 19th And 20th centuries’ methods in agriculture in the 21st century. Things have to change and Africa political leadership must show the way,” he stated. “It is not necessary to tell farmers to increase production when there are no roads linking them to markets, no access to credit lines, to policy advice and knowledge and innovation,” he pointed out.

 

Nwanze who was elected by delegates from 165 Member States by acclamation, a head of five other candidates from Pakistan, Germany, Israel, Niger and India brings to the job thirty years of experience in agriculture, rural development and research. He said Africa’s political leadership has to be in the forefront if there has to be any agrarian revolution to lift the millions of people currently wallowing in poverty, hunger and starvation. He called for the building of strong agricultural institutions in the rural areas saying more than half of the population in Africa stay in those areas and depends on agriculture for food, earnings and employment. Nwanze said it was high time south-south collaboration in agricultural  development was fostered more adding that Africa could learn a lot from success stories in certain parts of Asia and South America.

 

IFAD, he said, will continue to address farming in rural areas through efforts like advisory work and provision of credit lines. “We shall continue to grow and become stronger with focus on poor people,” he said.

 

Smallholder farmers hold key

The outgoing IFAD President, Lennart Bage, said small holder farmers hold key to food security and the current food crisis was awake-up call to world leaders taken to improve world food security and end poverty and hunger. “We are living through the most significant global economic crisis of a generation, Bage noted. “Even before this crisis, almost one in six already lived in hunger and poverty. That number is now rising. Another 100 million people have been added over the last year. This reversed the previous downward trend.” He pointed out that while worldwide food demand is expected to jump 50 percent by 2030, agricultural productivity that grew up at 4 to 5 percent in then1970s and 1980s has fallen to 1 to 2 percent today. Smallholder farmers, he said, must be involved in global food supply responses.

 

 “In Africa and Asia,” he said, smallholders farm 80m percent of the total farmland. Globally, smallholder families constitute the vast majority if of the poor, living on less than US$ 1 or US$ 2 day at the same they are an important part of the global food production potential. He said high productivity per acreage of existing farmland is what was needed as there is limited scope to expand agricultural land. “This requires political attention and much greater investment in the whole agricultural value chain,” he said.

 

United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon, in a message to the council said more efforts are needed to help the most vulnerable people in developing nations.

 

“We must also contribute to long-term global food and nutrition security by building resilience to challenges and crises, including climate change, that endangered the hard-fought  development gains we have achieved,” Ki-Moon.

 

The Thirty-Second Session of IFAD’s Governing Council was dominated by calls for greater investment in agriculture as response to the steep economic downturn and as driver of economic growth in the word’s poorest nation. Development aid to agriculture fell from US$8 billion in 1984 to US$3 billion in 2006.