Precise prescriptions for growing crops can be obtained quickly, and less expensively, by measuring electromagnetic radiation reflected from farmland. The data are collected by orbiting satellites.

For the farmers that utilise the satellite technology, the amount of data available to them about their crops is great:

The spectrum of this radiation—which can be in the form of either natural sunlight or artificial radar—can reveal, with surprising precision, the properties of the soil, the quantity of crop being grown, and the levels in those crops of chlorophyll, various minerals, moisture and other indicators of their quality. If recent and forecast weather data are added to the mix, detailed maps can be produced indicating exactly how, where and when crops should be grown.

It is very new technology. However one country seemingly leading the way in utilising this technology is France, according to The Economist.

More farmland is analysed by satellite there than in any other country, according to Infoterra (a subsidiary of EADS Astrium, a European space giant), the firm that is France’s largest provider of such information.

Computer mapping of farmland, also known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), can also help farmers to establish land ownership and in turn encourages long-term investments such as irrigation infrastructure to boost yields.

Ryk Taljaard of Geo-Logic Mapping noted that this technology is extending into Africa and is helping farmers make more accurate and cost-effective orders for inputs such as seed, fertiliser and sprays.

The Economist article also reports that the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi has begun cataloguing more than 100,000 samples of African soils with the aim of incorporating this information into existing satellite technology.

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In a Reuters article, Leslie Lipper, FAO economist and co-author of the report said that financing remains a major hurdle to greater implementation:

“A key part of the problem is a lack of financing.  If adopted by farmers, many of these practices make them better off, but in the short run they may face reduced income,” Lipper said, using the example of removing cattle to allow grasslands to recover.

In terms of contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, the report estimated that farms accounts for 10-12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions directly.  It also estiamted that $210bn would be needed between now and 2050 to help farms upgrade sufficiently to meet future yield needs.

Developing countries could raise about $30bn annually toward this investment through carbon market financing.  Measuring such improvements to the carbon efficiency of farm production is currently being researched.

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Coinciding with the summit, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has launched 1BillionHungry.org, a petition to promote an end to hunger. The web site is premised on the fact that one billion people currently live in chronic hunger.

Jacques Diouf, the FAO Secretary-General, is recorded counting out the amount of time another child soemwhere in the world dies from hunger: 6 seconds.

To support the initiative, all you need to do is enter an e-mail address and your currently country location.

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In the post, David King, secretary general of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP), a Farming First supporter organisation, is quoted:

If we don’t give farmers practical help to make their full contribution to fighting climate change, we will fail in Copenhagen. This is why Farming First wants world leaders to create a dedicated adaptation fund for agriculture to help farmers get the financial support they need to deal with the threats of climate change which they, more than any other group of people, are already struggling with.

The article goes on to discuss how agriculture has been largely ignored by the international community.

For more than two decades agriculture has been largely ignored by the international community, with health and education taking centre stage in discussions on development. But, as the affects of climate change become all too obvious, with erratic weather patterns destroying crops and livelihoods … farming is slowly being drawn back into the spotlight.

The post also points to Farming First’s six principles. Nora Ourabah Haddad, senior policy officer at the IFAP, is quoted as well:

Haddad believes farmers can adapt and mitigate climate change through sustainable practices and decrease greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, such as through better water management and the production of renewable energies, such as biogas.

A Farming First video of Nora Ourabah Haddad also featured:

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The project aims to improve the livelihoods of 22,000 families with incomes below the poverty line. A needs analysis demonstrated that one of the problems in the area was poor handling and application of crop protection products, leading to health and environmental risks.

As a result, IFAD formed a partnership with CropLife Latin America to provide training for the project beneficiaries.

A multiple approach was used: teaching Integrated Pest Management (IPM) concepts and proper, safe use of crop protection products to farmers and their families, school teachers and health workers; a one-year course for schoolchildren on environmental protection; training teachers on the benefits and risks of crop protection products; communicating to housewives the importance of washing farmers’ clothes separately so as to avoid contamination of other clothes and water supplies; providing information to health workers at medical and paramedical levels on treatments in the event of accidents; and the training of trainers to amplify the reach of the programme goals.

A similar programme has started in the Dominican Republic and plans are being implemented to expand it throughout Central America.

This initiative in Guatemala echoes two of Farming First’s principles: Sharing knowledge and Building local access and capacity.

There are currently four IFAD-supported projects ongoing in Guatemala. Among them is a rural development project in the Western Region.

The target group comprises smallholder farmers, landless farmers, and microentrepreneurs and artisans. The programme will reach minority groups, particularly indigenous populations with lower educational levels and very limited access to productive resources.

For farmers in Guatemala, such assistance is needed as the country is facing the worst drought in 30 years.

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The program is the first of its kind. Here are more details:

Under the novel system, farmers register their purchases by sending an SMS to a phone number provided by UAP. The weather stations then monitor the weather and inform the insurance company of impending crop failure and subsequent compensation. Each farmer is then informed via SMS about the payouts. Costs are kept down through the use of automated weather stations which avoid the need for expensive field visits to farms to ascertain risk and loss.   This makes the insurance feasible for both the farmer and the insurance company.

The first pay-out to farmers affected by drought happened in Nanyuki last week. UAP Head of Marketing and Distribution Joseph Kamiri said that the company had developed the product in response to a great need identified while developing agriculture insurance products for the Kenyan market in conjunction with the Syngenta Foundation.

The early success of the programme has given it the go-ahead to be released across the country in 2010, said Rose Goslinga, insurance coordinator of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture in Kenya:

Traditionally, smallholder farmers have been totally dependent on the vagaries of weather. In times of drought they lost their crops and their investment in seed and fertilizer.  To make matters worse, farmers then had to pay for a second lot of seed to enable them to replant. But because they had not obtained a crop, they had little money, if any, to repurchase the seed.

In recent months, Kenya has been hit by severe drought, so this new programme will likely go a long ways toward helping impacted farmers get back on their feet.

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Two implicit dimensions are rreflected in this report’s title.  Firstly, the world already has many good solutions for reducing world hunger, but they simply need to be scaled up and funded in order to work at a broader level.  Secondly, while many markets are still fragmented and inefficient,these markets are increasingly part of a common globalised economy, in which we all participate.

Two interesting African initiatives highlighted in the report and being funded by DfID are the North-South Transport Corridor and the ‘best bets’ approach to agriculture.

The North-South Transport Corridor is a $1.2 billion project which will upgrade 4,000 kilometres of road and 600 kilometres of rail track.  The goal of the project is to free up bottlenecks in shipping and other transport, especially in parts of eastern and southern Africa.

DfID’s ‘best bets’ for agriculture will see funding going to “the innovations with the greatest potential to lift poor people out of poverty, and to getting these into widespread use.”  AS DfID sees it, these include:

• tackling new pests which attack staple crops, such as virulent wheat rust and cassava viruses.  This will cost £20 million but could help protect almost three billion people who depend on these crops for their food
• breeding drought-resistant maize for Africa.  This will cost up to £60 million but will help 320 millino farmers in Africa who are affected by drought and will indirectly benefit many more likely to be affected by climate change.
• improving the vitamin content of staple crops. To develop these crops and get them into widespread use will cost around £80 million but it has the potential to help improve the nutrition of up to 670 million of the poorest people, many of them children.

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Dr. Sibanda discussed the key principle of the Farming First plan as well as highlighting recent work of her own organisation FANRPAN on identifying the most vulnerable households in villages for targeted support.  She discusses how African countries are spending $19 billion each year on the import of key staple foods despite the fact that 70% of the population is smallholder farmers with the potential to grow their own food.

Dr. Sibanda argues for the need to improve productivity in a sustainable way.  Knowledge transfer and investment in infrastructure and resource management skills are key in achieving this.  For instance, many farmers use recycled seeds which yield only 10% of the harvest that new seeds would bring.

Under these principles, agricultural policy should aim to help farmers eventually ’self-help’ and become self-sufficient.

Listen to the full broadcast of Dr Sibanda here:

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Traditionally, the public sector was called upon for infrastructure development. The private sector can also have an important role to play, as shown by the example of the agricultural growth corridor concept promoted by Yara International SAS, a Norwegian fertilizer company with important operations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Building on past initiatives promoting a more competitive agricultural sector through more efficient supply chains, the agricultural growth corridor aims at investing in communications routes with existing infrastructure to achieve economies of scale, developing clusters and strengthening input-output markets.

To date infrastructure development in Africa has not been particularly focused on the needs of promoting agricultural value chains. Most African countries have limited port capacity with small shipments that significantly raises the unit import costs of key inputs. There is a lack of larger warehouses at ports or in strategic inland locations to act as key distribution or collection hubs or to facilitate potential adoption of warehouse receipting measures. The limited number of trained rural retailers and limited access to appropriate rural credit compounds impedes farmers to get easy access to their inputs. In addition, the political did not exist to promote intra-regional agricultural trade and market development which combined with weak purchasing & selling power amongst the poor, as compared to commercial farmers, has contributed to a lack of competitiveness of local and regional agricultural markets and has continued the trend of internal consumptive markets, particularly in relation to core staples.

The Agricultural growth corridor initiative particularly focuses on the need to ensure that markets exist for increased output and that farmers have access through ICT to local, regional or or international market analysis.

Public – private partnerships and alliances are necessary to fast track development along a given corridor and at the same time helping to balance issues of scalability, knowledge transfer and market access particularly as they relate to small scale farmers and African entrepreneurs and investors. Government and business leaders will need to proactively work across borders to develop an on-going corridor management process. Public and private resources will need to be aligned to create a policy and investment climate that promotes the scope for such agriculture growth corridor initiatives.

The initial support for the concept of agricultural growth corridors has caused a core working group to be convened to discuss options for fast tracking.  Represented by a number of the organisations, it will draft an initial blueprint for action to be presented at the African World Economic Forum in June 2009.

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At a recent side event of the UN CSD-17, 71 delegates and members of major groups from more than 20 countries came together to define their specific issues and to hear their perspectives on effective capacity building actions. The event format included a brief presentation providing context, followed by round table discussions (90 minutes). The discussion focused on the cross cutting issues of Capacity Building and the three infrastructures (Social, Physical and Economic) as they relate to African (and other) rural sustainable development.

Capacity Building can be defined as:

“The building of human, institutional and infrastructure capacity to help societies develop secure, stable and sustainable economies, governments and other institutions through mentoring, training, education, physical projects, the infusion of financial and other resources, and most importantly, the motivation and inspiration of people to improve their lives.”

Results and Recommended Actions
A brief summary of participant contributions are noted below.

Common Rural Issues & Recommended Capacity Building Actions:

•    Rural migration to cities is eroding food development capacity for many countries, which results in the need to import food. Solutions are needed to establish jobs for farmers and their families to remain in rural communities.
•    Farmers are often the least educated;  90% are women; their farming techniques are extremely rudimentary and minimally effective. Education and systematic farming technologies are needed to boost food production and to keep youth on the farms.
•    Governments do not provide sufficient support to farmers, but focus their attention on the cities.  An organization of farmers & government relations is needed to boost food production and address farmer capacity shortfalls.
•    There is no “check list” to confirm the existence of new infrastructure or to measure & guide progress. Farmers should be given the means to define what they “need” in terms of capacity building.
•    Donor fund governance is extremely weak; corruption is a drawback. Effective governance and internal control practices are needed and must be transparent, accountable and participatory.
•    Uninformed government workers make poor choices for farmers. Government training is needed in all capacity building aspects (social, physical and economic infrastructures).
•    Diverse developed countries help, but there is no coordination to optimize the collective impact and outcome in the recipient country.
•    A huge capacity building void is created when women are not consulted on capacity development initiatives. Initiatives are often failures because women as the key element of familiar farming structures are not consulted. Effective facilitated engagement processes are required.

A sampling of specific recommendations for actions that were discussed is given below:

•    In a given location, 40,000 chickens are grown, but there are no storage & production facilities for chicken harvesting and marketing. Food is wasted & economic opportunities lost.   Action needed: Create infrastructure to manage loss reduction such as abattoir and meat storage facilities, and develop chicken markets.

•    Climate has changed and temperatures rising; existing seeds are no longer appropriate for climate conditions. Action needed: Provide seeds that grow effectively in changed climate.

•    Government/Farmer relationship management processes do not exist. Action needed:  Implement stakeholder management and strategy development processes.

•    Supply system technologies do exist but are not applied, i.e. In a given location, farmers know how to maximize the growing of oranges and mangos but lack the knowledge on how to produce and store juice. Action needed: Provide training for the application of these technologies.

•    Multiple government and stakeholder roles are unclear; they cannot work together effectively. Action needed:  Implement stakeholder management processes.

•    Lack of resources to access proprietary technologies limits the farmer’s ability to learn and develop capacity. Action needed: Provide access to open source technologies or fund proprietary technology transfer.

•    In a given place, electrical power infrastructure reliability is very poor; power outages that last for 3 to 4 days are common.  Action needed:  Upgrade infrastructure, provide reliable power supply, and implement training in system operation & maintenance. Include women in the training programs.

•    Ecosystems are degrading. Action needed: Implement ecosystem safeguard strategies.

•    Capacity building needs to involve service training. Action needed: Identify roles to involve local people in projects, assure gender balance and consider characteristics of local culture.

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