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FANRPAN CEO and Farming First spokesperson Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda took part in one of the panel sessions, which included with Calestous Juma, of Harvard University, David Beckman from Bread for the World, World Bank Vice-President Inger Andersen.

Focusing on the solutions to the problem of rising and volatile food prices, the panel discussed the possible paths to relieving poverty and food insecurity.

Dr Sibanda spoke of the role of the private sector in helping to develop local agribusiness. She cited a case where treadle pumps were distributed to farmers, but that there were no local artisans to repair the equipment and make them affordable. The private sector, she said, have the opportunity to get involved to help communities be able to produce tools locally, and offer the services to repair and renew the tools.

On empowering farmers, Calestous Juma said that farmers need two things. Firstly, they need to be encouraged to organise themselves into enterprises, and be supported in this endeavour, and secondly, an expansion in technical training is needed to ensure farmers are up to speed with modern farming techniques.

David Beckmann emphasised that while these types of panel sessions can talk about the technological solutions, we need to make a commitment to get this done. In the US, he said, there are proposals for cuts that would harm the poor all around the world. This is not just technical problem, he said, it is a matter of mobilising commitment.

Much of the online debate accompanying the panel discussion revealed that people’s greatest concerns were with support for smallholder farmers. Dr Sibanda addressed the issues of access and affordability of inputs for smallholders. Malawi, she said, is one example where we saw uptake of hybrid seeds when subsidies were introduced. The subsidies were for 2kg of seed per farmer. Farmers who were producing yields of 500kg per hectare were later seeing yields of 3 tonnes per hectare. Through the introduction of the new seeds, an improved network of suppliers was built up, and on top of their subsidy, farmers then sought to buy additional supplies of seed of their own.

Dr Sibanda’s final plea was to put farmers first in efforts to deal with food crisis. She said that today in Africa, farmers do not have the food to feed themselves let alone their communities. The first port of call is to enable farmers to come out of poverty. Assisting farmers to feed themselves is the first step to the farmers being able to feed others.

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The new project will help farmers overcome threats to food production such as crop diseases, pests, poor soils and unreliable weather, to increase crop yields and consequently farm incomes. Also taking part in the project is the UK Department for International Development (DfID) that will contribute $32 million over the next five years to the partnership.

The new partnership is a reaction to the escalating food prices around the world. World Bank data released this month showed higher food prices — mainly for wheat, corn, sugars and edible oils — have pushed 44 million more people in developing countries into extreme poverty since June 2011.

In this new project, technologies such as wheat disease research will be prioritized. Cornell University will be receiving $40 million to continue its work to develop wheat varieties that are resistant to emerging strains of stem rust disease, such as Ug99, which is destroying crops in East Africa.

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He says, “We really will fail if we do not incorporate agriculture into the way we think about climate change.” Focusing on the concept of a “triple win” for agriculture, he highlights the need to secure farmers’ livelihoods, to help them become more resilient to climate change and to help in the joint effort to reduce its future impacts globally.

Steer also illustrates the potential for agriculture-focused carbon markets in Africa and the work that the World Bank is doing in a pilot project in Kenya to this effect.

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Over the past two weeks, global leaders and policy makers have been debating a global climate change deal but no concrete agreement has been made. The Roadmap for Action: Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change, a new reiteration of the workplan launched at the Hague conference last month, proposes key actions to be taken to link agriculture-related investments and policies with the transition to climate-smart growth.

It advocates getting the right policies and programs in place that will increase farm productivity and incomes, make agriculture more resilient to variations in climate and make the sector part of the solution to climate change by sequestering more carbon into the soil and biomass.

Supported by high-level experts including Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Robert B. Zoellick, President of the World Bank Group, it offers some progress towards a dedicated work programme for agriculture within a broader climate agreement.

Zoellick said,“Agriculture, forestry, and land use change account for more than 30% of greenhouse gas emissions.  So we need to make the agriculture sector and soil carbon part of the solution to climate change. A number of countries are already making real progress, but the immediate challenge is making sure that financing flows in the right directions – so far only 2% of flows have gone to Africa.”

There is a growing recognition that agriculture in developing countries must become “climate smart” to cope with the combined challenges of feeding a warmer, more heavily populated world.

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This is a big increase from the $4.1 billion pledged annually before 2008 and shows a transition from prioritizing food aid as a means to dealing with food insecurity issues, to addressing the longer-term solution of refueling agricultural development programmes.

Jacques Diouf of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation provided a review of the global food challenge, saying,

The current dramatic hunger situation is the result of neglect of agriculture in development policies over the past three decades. It is time to tackle the root causes of food insecurity by adopting lasting political, economic, financial, and technical solutions. We know what should be done and how to do it. Success stories do exist in Africa, in Asia and in Latin America. These experiences need to be scaled up and replicated.

In its statement, “Keeping the Promise: United to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals”, the UN General Assembly agreed to a series of policies and actions that put much emphasis on boosting agricultural development in order to meet the 2015 target. The commitments include:

• Increasing the growth rate of agricultural productivity in developing countries through promoting the development and dissemination of appropriate, affordable and sustainable agricultural technology, as well as the transfer of such technologies on mutually agreed terms, and supporting agricultural research and innovation, extension services and agricultural education in developing countries.
• Increasing the sustainable production and augmenting the availability and quality of food including through long-term investment, access of smallholder farmers to markets, credit and inputs, improved land-use planning, crop diversification, commercialization and development of an adequate rural infrastructure and enhanced market access for developing countries.
• Addressing environmental challenges to sustainable agriculture development such as water quality and availability, deforestation and desertification, land and soil degradation, dust, floods, drought and unpredictable weather patterns and loss of biodiversity, and promoting the development and dissemination of appropriate, affordable and sustainable agricultural technologies and the transfer of such technologies on mutually agreed terms.

All this comes at time when support could not be more critical. Joanna Kerr, CEO of ActionAid, addressed the General Assembly, saying,

In 2009, rich countries pledged ‘decisive action to free humankind from hunger’, including ‘substantially increasing aid to agriculture and food security’ after years of decline. It is unacceptable that these grand promises have so far yielded only $ 6 million in new money – in a year in which more than $15 trillion was spent bailing out financial companies.

The Farming First coalition welcomes the inclusion of agriculture in the proposed outcomes of the General Assembly discussions on Millennium Development Goals. To translate good intentions into real impacts on the ground, governments will need to provide a clearer path to action, greater transparency in how to achieve it, and greater partnerships, including with the agriculture sector.

Download the Farming First press release on the MDG summit.

Visit our page dedicated to the Millennium Development Goals.

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An IFAP case study reports that several projects have been undertaken in Albania to stop further land degradation. Many Albanian female farmers have implemented good agricultural practices to maintain soil productivity, conserve water and lower production costs by practising crop rotation, intercropping, composting, selection of resistant varieties and using effective irrigation systems.

Farmers of 25 communes in remote areas have recently received payments from the World Bank Bio Carbon Fund as an incentive to manage and care for their forests, helping to preserve ecosystems.

Further projects include afforestation, improvement of irrigation systems and a democratic-approach to involve farmers, particularly women, in the decision-making processes of agro-environmental policy making.

For more information, visit http://www.ccalb.org/

This initiative was provided by the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP).

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Since 2003, ICRISAT have been working with the National Smallholder Farmers’ Association of Malawi (NASFAM) to establish a “hybrid” system for ensuring achievement of standard requirements for the export of groundnuts from smallholder farmers’ associations in Malawi.

The project’s focus on groundnuts is the result of severe decline in the crop’s production, due to changing market requirements overseas, unavailability of seed in sufficient quantities and at affordable prices, and poor post-harvest handling.

Groundnuts are affected by aflatoxins, a naturally-occurring fungus which can infect crops during pod development or through poor post-harvest practices. Increasingly strict maximum allowable levels (MALs) of aflatoxin contamination in the European Union have prevented smallholder producers from accessing the European high-value markets.

According to the World Bank, the reduction of MALs to 4 parts per billion of aflatoxin has results in annual losses of over US$670 million for African countries.

The ICRISAT and NASFEM project objectives were:

1. To increase productivity of groundnuts by providing improved varieties and the accompanying crop management options.
2. To develop a system of grades and standards to enable smallholder farmers to participate in regional and international markets.
3. To assist in development of a Market Information System.

Alongside training farmers in improved agricultural practices to increase yields and improve crop quality, the “hybrid” system created ‘production standards’ that would ensure farmers follow best practice to reduce the chances of infection by the fungus. These targets complement the ‘performance standards’ that are used in European markets, which determine the levels of a contaminant in a product.

The team also established an aflatoxin analytical laboratory in Malawi to help identify the sources of contamination and provide the necessary solutions, to help increase farmers’ chances of meeting the MALs.

Other steps also included organising farming groups into clubs who sell their produce at designated areas to allow for easy traceability.

ICRISAT has written,

The ability to accurately detect and quantify aflatoxin contamination at an affordable cost, allowed farmers in Malawi to re-establish groundnut exports to the quality-conscious European market, and stimulated interest in the approach in Mozambique and Zambia. Many other African countries are benefiting from this technology and appropriate management practices that reduce the initial aflatoxin contamination are being employed.

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Projected as one of the countries to be most seriously affected by climate change, researchers have studied a range of climate risks to Bangladesh and identified adaptation measures in the agricultural sector using a comprehensive integrated framework.

The World Bank report, published by Earthscan, considers a range of climate factors, including warmer temperatures, higher carbon dioxide concentrations, changing characteristics of floods, drought and sea level rises, which are then examined according to the biophysical data specific to Bangladesh.

The research findings predict a much warmer and wetter future climate, in which sea level rises could significantly increase the area the is prone to flooding. Whilst the report examines how agriculture in Bangladesh is heavily dependent on the characteristics of the annual flood, it acknowledges that irregular floods of high magnitude can have disastrous effects.  Increased flows into the three major rivers in Bangladesh could stimulate a 10 percent increase in flooded areas by 2050.

Climate change is predicted to reduce rice production, Bangladesh’s main crop, and increase the country’s reliance on other crops and imported food grains. Crop production is potentially set to decline for at least one crop in each region. This simulated variability is projected to cost the agriculture sector US$26 billion in lost agricultural GDP during the 2005-50 period.

Overall, agricultural GDP in Bangladesh is projected to be 3.1 per cent lower each year as a result of climate change.

These risks will not only affect those in the agriculture sector, but all the way up the food chain to household consumption.

However, these production impacts ignore the economic responses that could be put into place to buffer against these physical losses.

The report concludes with adaptation options to climate change that incorporate methods to stimulate growth in the agricultural sector. As a comprehensive action plan, the recommendations cover improving crop productivity, supporting agricultural research and development, promoting education and skills development, increasing financial services, enhancing irrigation efficiency and water and land productivity, strengthening climate risk management and developing protective infrastructure.

On-farm opportunities, whereby farmers have improved access to modern rice varieties, irrigation facilities and fertilizers could help close the current gaps in actual and potential yields thereby offsetting climate change impacts.

Whilst the precise impact of climate change on developing countries remains to be seen, this report serves as a guide to other countries faced with similar challenges of securing food security.

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Farming First’s Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda spoke the growing importance which agriculture is seen to have in global policymaking recently:

The signs are encouraging but we need to make sure the money is invested in long term sustainable projects based on our framework principles.

The article discusses recent funding increases from the World Bank and the US administration under President Obama.  These measures are aimed to secure a food supply, build infrastructure, and avert the civil strife which emerged during the 20o7 food price increases.

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