On 14^th and 15^th June, the UN General Assembly will gather in New York with representatives of international NGOs, civil society organisations and the private sector to provide input for the MDG Summit in New York on 20-22 September 2010.

Ajay Shriram has been selected to speak in the third thematic session ‘Sustaining development and withstanding crises’, taking place at 10am (EST) on June 15, which will look at how food security and other emerging challenges, such as water scarcity and biodiversity loss, can be addressed in the light of ongoing economic, financial, food and climate crises.

In his speech, Ajay Shriram will be concentrating on how agriculture in India, once highly productive during the green revolution but neglected over the past decade, can be transformed by keeping farmers’ requirements in focus.  He shall promote the solution of  ‘last mile delivery’, meaning delivering the latest and improved location-specific farm technology to farmers for improving crop productivity.  His speech shall also address the recommendations he made recently in an article published last month in The Economic Times.

1. Putting the crop / farmer in focus.
2. Training and certifying professional crop advisors
3. Increasing extension reach by roping in agri input dealers
4. Creation of a common knowledge pool
5. Leveraging ICT infrastructure by efficient knowledge dissemination
6. Organising farmers into groups
7. Establishing farmer-corporate partnerships
8. Adopting a concentrated , focused local approach.

Ajay Shriram’s article concludes;

The need to focus on agriculture and rapidly increase productivity stems from the requirement of ensuring food security and an all-inclusive growth for the country. Putting all the above on the ground, though feasible, is still a challenging task for the country. To achieve the coveted objectives, any delivery system has to ensure that the knowledge is latest, need based, location specific and made available timely in a manner which is simple & easily understandable by even the poorly educated farmer. No single agency would be able to do full justice. Collaboration between multiple stakeholders is probably the only way in which last mile delivery systems can be spruced up leading to a transformation in agriculture.

The hearings will be available to watch live on the UN’s webcast.

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Women play a vital, but often ignored, role in addressing hunger. Whilst a large proportion of farmers in the developing world are female, many lack voice and organisation.  To boost women smallholders’ productivity and reduce their vulnerability to various challenges, women need to be able to access and apply appropriate training for rural livelihoods.

A recent project – Training for Rural Development – highlights the many challenges that women marginal farmers face on a daily basis in their efforts to produce food for their families and communities and focuses on how training can contribute to improved livelihoods for women in the developing world. The research project was conducted by City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, a not-for-profit research and development organisation that spent January to August 2009 researching and reviewing past and present international projects helping women farmers.

Having evaluated the success of various training schemes in different contexts and different countries, the project’s report offers six key findings:

1. Enterprise training is valuable in helping women branch out into small business.
2. To improve women smallholders’ access to training, their particular situations – including their level of literacy and domestic chores – need to be taken into account.
3. A systematic approach to training for women should be taken, whereby the whole community is involved, to improve women’s positions.
4. Groups are particularly important in enabling access to training for women, and helping to disseminate information from that training.
5. Increasing technology use helps to improve agricultural yields whilst reducing the amount of work needed to go into production.
6. Training programmes needs to be coordinated with improving women farmers’ access to resources to purchase inputs and technologies, and building strong rural infrastructure links to enable women to access training.

After the review phase, the project held four field trials over two countries; Ghana and India. Using lessons from these case studies, the project draws out four recommendations in reaching and supporting women farmers:

1. Projects must engage with the women and their current challenges through providing a long-term commitment to the community.
2. Projects must use existing community structures, for example engaging with community leaders, to make training more effective.
3. Changes need to be introduced in stages that women can manage themselves. Including managerial skills in training programmes can help to support them in this.
4. Projects can secure longer-term change by engaging effectively with local government structures.

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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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According to a recent article on scidev.net by its director David Dickson, global trends indicate that emerging economies such as China, India, and Brazil are accelerating their domestic research capacities.  China alone has increased the number of its researchers by more than three-fourths and has more than doubled its R&D spending.

These countries’ growth has helped pull the developing world as a whole to growth levels which are three times those of the developed world.  But areas like Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced more moderate growth, with the number of researchers increasing only 18% vis-a-vis total population growth, and Arab states’ R&D contributions are actually falling. The least developed countries, which host 12% of the population, have less than one percent of the world’s researchers.

If these research trends continue, countries such as India and China will become global leaders by the year 2025, at which point they are expected to account for more than one-fifth of total R&D expenditures.

And the technology gaps are still quite profound.  The developed world has only one-fifth of the population, yet accounts for three-quarters of total spending.  While part of this discrepancy might be the result of incomplete or non-existent data reporting on the part of certain developing countries, it also indicates the need for continued efforts to bridge the technology gaps which still exist globally.

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Potato blight has devastated potato crops for hundreds of years.  In 2007, 70% of India’s potato crop and 50% of Bangladesh’s crop were destroyed.  This blight was also responsible for the Irish potato famine, which killed millions of farmers in the mid 19^th century.

To combat this disease, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison worked to isolate a blight-resistant gene in a wild relative of the potato.  They then partnered with an Indian organization to insert this gene into potato cultivars grown across South Asia.  Other collaborators on the project included the US Agency for International Development, Cornell University, India’s Central Potato Research Institute and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.

As highlighted in the 2009 Better World Report, a recent round of field trials has proven successful, and the new potatoes will be licensed to both private and public enterprises soon.  This means that poorer farmers can also access the seeds through local distribution channels.

A team of economists estimates that farmers will be able to double their incomes as a result of this new development.  They will require less chemicals to protect their crops, and they are more likely to have excess yield which they can sell as a cash crop.  The labour required to farm potatoes is also expected to decrease by 11%.

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The programme host visits farmers in India, Cuba, the UK to look at how key issues such as water availability, climate change, and price volatility impacts their livelihoods and their ability to grow their crops.

The programme raises many of the questions and concerns which the Farming First plan aims to address.  It also suggests that the issue of food security is one that is increasingly capturing the attention of more mainstream audiences in the west.

For those interested, the second part of the series airs on BBC Two on Monday, 24 August at 9pm.

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Agriculture-related activity is responsible for around 70% of freshwater use.  Here are some other interesting facts from the report:

• Less than 3% of the world’s water is freshwater.  Of this freshwater supply, about five-sixths is frozen and thus inaccessible.

• Almost 97% of the available freshwater is stored in underground aquifers, with the remainder coming from rainfall, natural lakes, rivers, and other man-made facilities.

• Fewer than 10 countries possess 60% of the world’s available freshwater supply: Brazil, Russia, China, Canada, Indonesia, U.S., India, Columbia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

• Globally, roughly 15-35% of irrigation withdrawals for agriculture are estimated to be unsustainable.  Susceptible regins include the western U.S., northern India and Pakistan, northern China, eastern South Africa, southeastern Australia, and parts of the Mediterranean.

• India, China, and Egypt all use more than 80% of their freshwater for irrigation, compared to about 1% in the UK.

• 1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases (including cholera)– the equivalent of 15 killer tsunamis each year or 12 Boeing 747 crashes every day.

• U.S. average annual domestic consumption of water (per capita) is 215 cubic metres per year, 6.7 times the average in China and more than double the average in France.

• Important trends impacting water use in the future include population growth, increasing global affluence, and climate change.

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HKB is an innovative effort aimed at empowering farmers and meeting the needs of rural households by providing access to agricultural products, services and retail. Established in the countryside, the stores offer:
•    quality inputs (fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, tools, veterinary products, animal feed, irrigation items, diesel, petrol)
•    agronomic services with teams of extension workers and agronomists providing advice to customers
•    financial products (crop insurance, credit, banking, investments, money transfers)
•    consumer goods (groceries, home appliances, garments)
•    access to output markets by helping farms produce buyback opportunities, commodity trading
•    information (weather forecasts, market prices, farmers’ databases)

Each HKB centre caters to communities within a 25-30 km perimeter and impacts the life of about 20,000 households. HKB’s business model is to provide targeted services to farmers in remote regions. As such, it is a pioneering project because it contributes to rural and agricultural development while being a profitable business venture. It also reinforces the need for farming communities to have access to information and technology.

In June 2009, DSCL announced the plan to add 300 stores to the existing 300 by 2012. The group is currently present in eight states and is India’s largest rural retail chain.

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President of the foundation, former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Kenneth Quinn, spoke out at the State Department Event where the winner was announced along with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Quinn said;

He (Ejeta), developed and introduced the first sorghum hybrid in Africa in the early 1980s, which was drought tolerant and produced significantly higher yields”(…) “In the 1990s, he conquered the greatest biological constraint to cereal production in Africa-the deadly weed Stringa. Having discovered the bio-chemical basis of Striga’s parasitic relationship with sorghum, our laureate’s breeding programme at Purdue produced many sorghum varieties resistant to drought and to Striga with yields 10 times greater than local varieties.

Hillary Clinton noted that Ejeta’s drive has not only been to focus on science, but he has taken his work further to use it as a tool for development, working actively on getting his improved seeds into the hands and control of African and Indian farmers.

Ejeta worries that development in impoverished countries has stalled with a lack of funding. He also points out the problem of aid being too focused on short-term emergency food aid, as Farming First’s Dr. Lindiwe Sibanda discussed at a UNCSD conference in February 2009.  For example, the United States spends 20 times more on food aid to Africa than it does on programmes that could boost African food production.

Speaking at the State Department Event, Hillary Clinton noted:

The Obama administration is committed to providing leadership in developing a new global approach to hunger. For too long, our primary response has been to send emergency aid when the crisis is at its worst. This saves lives, but doesn’t address hunger’s root causes. It is at best a short-term fix. So we will support the creation of effective, sustainable farming systems in regions around the world where current methods are not working.

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In India, farmers in rural areas have little access to knowledge about farming practices, rural and agricultural services, crop and land management. IFFCO realized that it could build on its extended distribution network to provide access to expert information through mobile telephony services and thus promote access to ICT in rural India. IFFCO works with more than 40,000 cooperatives across the country, distributing fertilizers and other agro-inputs.

IFFCO Kisan Sanchar Ltd (IKSL) manages the distribution of mobile phones, SIM cards, and information services to small farmers. The main innovation is the use of a sim card, called the green card, with a voice message platform to record content and send information to farmers through voicemail. When signing up to the IKSL service, farmers get access to: five daily messages  in their local language with crop and area specific information, a help line and interactive information services, all free of cost. The messages cover information in relation to agricultural market prices and arrivals, availability of fertilizers, electricity timings, early warning systems on disasters, weather forecast, best farming practices, local crops, education and upcoming training opportunities, plant and veterinary disease prevention, financing and insurance services and government schemes. The information is provided by a large network of partners including: IFFCO’s extension workers and agronomists, state and national research institutes, universities, and extension services.

After only one year, the service is already available across India (except for Jammu & Kashmir and North East). It has now over one and half million green card subscribers (adding more than 200,000 subscribers per month) who listen to five million daily messages and ask about  5000 queries a month.

The company has created direct employment for 1200 people at the national level (retailers, marketers, extension workers). An independent report asserted that farmers have been avoiding losses by reacting quickly to weather and disease information, yields have been increased by the adoption of new seed varieties and cultivation practices. Access to knowledge has provided farmers with a sense of empowerment through the improvement of their practices. For example, in Maharashtra, farmers rely on the IFKSL weather information to adjust their irrigation levels. This new service has also proven to be a great business model as a new revenue channel for the cooperatives that retail the handsets cards and airtime. It has also contributed to bring the digital world within reach for farmers and rural people.

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