NERP

Clyde Graham from the Canadian Fertilizer Institute introduced the Nitrous Oxide Emission Reduction Protocol (NERP), which helps reduce on-farm emissions of nitrous oxide in a quantifiable and verifiable way that allows farmers to earn carbon credits. It has been approved in the Canadian provine of Alberta – the first jurisdiction of North America to actively regulate greenhouse gas emissions and establish a regulatory carbon trading market.

NERP is based on applying fertilizer using Best Management Practices on the 4R nutrient stewardship system: Right source, @Right rate, Right time, Right place.

The scheme has shown a 15-25% reduction in nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer application, and has also managed the risk of nitrate accumulation in soils. NERP meets the high production, intensified, resilient, sustainable and low-emission criteria of the FAO description of climate-smart agriculture. In the future, NERP could be adapted to be an eco-level and become an internationally recognised standard.

To read more, see the presentation.

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The award is offered every year by the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) to an individual for work that has led to significant progress in crop nutrition and that has been communicated successfully to farmers.

The IFA Award alternates on a 4-year cycle, celebrating both research and knowledge transfer successes in both developed and developing countries.

This year’s prize will be awarded for research in developed countries and in international agricultural research and development centres. Any individual involved in crop or soil science is eligible to apply. The recipient of the IFA Norman Borlaug Award will receive 10,000 euros and will be invited as a guest to the IFA Annual Conference to be held form 23 to 25 May 2011 in Montreal, Canada.

The award is named after Dr Norman Borlaug who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contribution to fighting hunger around the world.

Please visit the IFA’s webpage for further details about the nomination procedure.

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The Gates Foundation has provided this video to show how one of their grantees’ low-cost treadle pumps are helping Indian farmers access irrigated water for their crops.

These water pumps are supplied by International Development Enterprises (IDE).  They are designed to be cost-effective and low-maintenance, with only one part needed to be changed each year at a cost of 20 U.S. cents. Farmers simply dig a bore hole, insert a plastic tube into the hole and then connect the pump to this tube.  Farmers then operate the pump using their leg muscles, and they can even pump extra water into adjacent reservoirs for on-going regulated use.

Only one in three farmers currently has access to irrigation in India.  Accessing this technology helps smallholder farmers make more long-term investments, such as improved seeds and fertilizers, for their fields.  Farmers might even be able to begin growing more lucrative cash crops such as fruits or vegetables.

In an innovative promotional campaign, IDE shares this knowledge with farmers by bringing movie screens into rural communities in the back of a van.  Farmers are incentivised to watch a short presentation about the treadle water pumps by the promise of a free movie feature which is aired after the presentation finishes.

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Two veteran Wall Street Journal reporters, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, have teamed up to write a book addressing one of the most pressing questions of the 21st-century: global hunger.

The authors ask why hunger persists when the technology and tools already exist to feed the world:

Since the time of the Green Revolution, the world has known how to end famine and tame chronic hunger.  We have the information and tools.  But we haven’t done it.  We explored the heavens.  We wired the world for the Internet…. Yet somehow we haven’t eliminated the most primitive scourge of all.

In the opening chapters, Kilman and Thurow introduce the work of Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize-winning plant scientist who died on Saturday at the age of 95.  Back in the 1940s, Borlaug was assigned to a newly launched research centre in Mexico to train Mexican scientists how to boost farm productivity through plant breeding experiments.

Over the next two decades, Borlaug’s research helped boost wheat yields in the research areas almost seven-fold, from 11 bushels per acre in the early 1940s to as much as seventy-five bushels per acre in 1960.  Borlaug then travelled elsewhere in the Americas and across to Asia to demonstrate the potential yields which these new varieties could produce and to convince policymakers and farmers to adopt them to feed their growing populations.  (Apparently, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ripped up her flower garden to plant the new wheat varieties.)

And thus, the Green Revolution was born.  Demographic projections of mass famine and a population implosion were prevented, and the global supply of food exploded.

Yet around the same time, shifts in global agricultural policy began to shift.  Starting in the early 1980s, newly independent former colonies in Africa and Asia started to see a reversal in the foreign assistance being given to agricultural development (inputs, infrastructure, extension training, and research support).  In addition, the money being targeted at the alleviation of hunger came in the food of foreign-grown food aid shipped into areas of need.

A generation later, in the summer of 2008, the world went through a global food crisis where prices doubled and tripled for many staple foods and global reserve stocks of grain were reduced to dangerously low levels.  Kilman and Thurow argue that the time is right for a broad reinvestment into agriculture, similar to how the United States rallied to support the Marshall Plan for Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

The authors argue that public sentiment is in favour of increased support to feed the hungry, and social and political stability are increasingly under threat from those without sufficient resources to subsist.  They present a range of options, from investment in infrastruture and new seed technologies to policy reforms relating to how national budgets are allocated and how trade regulations are drawn up.

Africa is a particular target as it is seen as “the world’s final frontier of agriculture” where yields are still low and modern agricutural practices are often non-existent.  Coupled with a rapidly increasingly population, African farmers will be expected to double their production by 2030 in order to simply meet their own people’s food demands.  This will be no small feat, and it would require a coordinated, collaborative approach to see it through successfully.

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According to its website, IPNI is:

a not-for-profit, science-based organization with a focus on agronomic education and research support…. The mission of IPNI is to develop and promote scientific information about the responsible management of plant nutrition for the benefit of the human family.

IPNI has a global presence with programmes in China, India, Southeast Asia, Northern Latin America, Brazil, Latin America-Southern Cone, the United States, and Canada, plus a new presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and soon to be in Australia.

Its initiatives address the world’s growing need for food, fuel, fiber, and feed as well as global issues such as climate change and the relationship of crop production to the environment and ecosystems.

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The programme has been funded by a $900,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and will be presented at the annual FANRPAN Regional Policy Dialogue and Annual General Meeting held in Maputo, Mozambique in September 2009.

The pilot projects will be based in Malawi and Mozambique and will help to amplify the voices of women farmers in policy decisions at the national and regional levels.  These projects will also then help women access the tools and technologies — such as better seeds, adequate fertilizer, extension services, and access to credit — that these realigned markets will provide.

FANRPAN’s involvement across 13 Southern African countries will help it to partner with other Gates Foundation grantees to create deeper linkages within the communities where their pilot projects will take place.  The lessons learned from these pilots will then be incorporated and extended into programmes for other Southern and East African countries.

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Borlaug, a Texas professor and winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, helped drive the first green revolution in countries such as Mexico and India by increasing the development and access to technologies which help boost farmers’ productivity.

In his article, Borlaug praises the recent decisions of world leaders to begin “focusing on growing food versus giving it away” as a “giant step forward”.  He argues that farmers, especially those in developing countries, need better and more inputs such as better seed and fertilizer:

Given the right tools, farmers have shown an uncanny ability to feed themselves and other, and to ignite the economic engine that will reverse the cycle of chronic poverty.  And the escape from poverty offers a chance for greater political stability in their countries as well.

Doubling food production over the next half century to meet global demand will be made even more difficult with a fixed or shrinking supply of land, he argues, as well as the present and future impacts of climate change.

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The findings discuss the fact that the impact which fertilizer subisidies have depends on existing farmer knowledge and the external conditions of the local area.  The best justifications for these subsidies are when farmers are unfamiliar with the benefits of fertilizer or are too poor to purchase it themselves, or when there is demonstrated profitability to be had and a sufficient distribution network for accessing those being targeted.

The authors review both sides of the debate and argue for “smart” subsidies, which do not undercut the development of efficient, broad markets and target the areas where the most benefit can be found.

Nonethless, African farmers still use on average only about one-seventh the amount of fetilizer that other developing countries use.  And, the recent successes of Malawi’s input subsidy programme (watch the Farming First interview with the coordinator of this programme here) have made the subject of fertlizer vouchers and greater agricultural support a new priority for many African governments.

Source:

Minot, N., and T. Benson. 2009. Fertilizer subsidies in Africa: Are vouchers the answer? Issue Brief 60. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

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Obama’s trips to Italy and Ghana both served to demonstrate his public support for an increased focus on the needs of farmers, particularly those without sufficient access to the tools they need to farm efficiently and feed themselves.

In Italy, Obama said:

There is no reason why Africa cannot be self-sufficient when it comes to food.  It has sufficient arable land.  What’s lacking is the right seeds, the right irrigation, but also the kinds of institutional mechanisms that ensure that a farmer is going to be able to grow crops, get them to market, get a fair price.

In a recent Bloomberg article, Farming First’s Ajay Vashee, President of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), discussed the need for African farmers to have better access to the seeds and fertilizers they needed to increase their yields and improve their livelihoods as farmers.

Vashee particularly noted the success of Malawi’s farm input subsidy programme, which has been running for the past five years and which has served as a model for neighboring countries.

The Bloomberg article noted that Tanzania began a fertilizer-subsidy programme last December, that Kenya has announced a similar subsidy plan to boost yields, and that the Ugandan government had increased spending on agriculture by 47 per cent in its latest budget.

In preparation for his trip to Ghana, Obama discussed the role that governments should play in driving progress in African development goals, quoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article:

Countries that are governed well, that are stable, where the leadership recognizes that they are accountable to the people and that institutions are stronger than any one person have a track record of producing results for the people.

In May, Farming First interviewed the coordinator of Malawi’s farm subsidy programme and Principal Economist in the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Idrissa Mwale.  Watch the video here:

Watch other videos from Farming First on Vimeo here.

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IFDC – an International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development – is a public international organization addressing critical issues such as international food security, the alleviation of global poverty, environmental protection and the promotion of economic development and self-sufficiency. IFDC is helping to enrich and sustain the lives and livelihoods of people around the world.

IFDC is the only non-profit, science-based organization meeting the integrated soil nutrient management needs associated with a sustainable global food supply. IFDC was established in 1974 in response to the twin crises of food insecurity and rising energy prices. These parallel crises now threaten the world again.

IFDC has helped increase sustainable agricultural productivity in more than 130 nations through the development and transfer of effective and environmentally sound plant nutrient technology and agricultural marketing expertise. IFDC has also contributed to the development of institutional capacity-building in 150 countries through nearly 1,000 training programs, primarily as part of IFDC’s long-term agricultural development projects. These collaborative partnerships combine cutting-edge research and development with on-site training and education. Currently IFDC staff members are serving in more than 20 nations throughout Africa, the Near East and the Far East.

In February, Dr. Marjatta Eilitta, Director for IFDC’s North and West Africa Division, spoke at a Farming First conference held during the UN Commission on Sustainable Development preliminary session in New York.  You can watch a video of her presentation here.

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