Sylvain Charlebois, a Canadian academic at the University of Regina, recently published a commentary piece in the Globe and Mail newspaper discussing how the developing world, especially Africa, needs to put in place a new agricultural system in order to work toward greater food security.
Charlebois argues that the current system for agricultural production needs to
CNFA established credit insurance in 2001 in Malawi to guarantee repayment of half of the money borrowed by agricultural input retailers to stock their shops.
This greatly expanded the number of rural distributors and decreased the distances farmers travelled to obtain inputs, sometimes quite dramatically, resulting in savings in both time and travel costs.
By 2005, retailers
Professor John Beddington, the UK Government’s Chief Scientist, has warned that the world’s population is facing a series of threats to livelihoods due to insecure access to food, energy, and water.
The BBC News coverage notes that:
demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops
Newsweek recently ran an story about how Africans are increasingly weighing the benefits of plant biotechnology for coping with some of their most important development challenges, including climate change adaptation, reversing rising levels of hunger, and better accessing markets.
The crops which result from this R&D are being called the second generation of biotechnology advancements:
The result
At a recent Farming First conference in New York, Dr. Lindiwe Sibanda explained how supporting small-scale farmers with $100 worth of agricultural inputs and training can help them to improve their livelihoods more than $1000 worth of equivalent food aid.
Dr. Sibanda is CEO of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), a
Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist and winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, recently warned that the world should not allow the financial crisis to overshadow a lingering food crisis.
Krugman noted that a number of resource constraints – such as access to water, oil, and arable land – are converging with growing demand,
