Agronomist Davison Masendeke shows a farmer in Bulawayo a variety of white sorghum, which is an ideal crop for arid areas. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Apr 25 2014 (IPS)

There is urgent need to increase the proportion of climate finance for adaptation in Africa by increasing public sector budgets for agriculture and exploring partnerships with the private sector.

This is according to Sonja Vermeulen, head of research for Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), a research programme of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

CGIAR is set to spend close to one billion dollars in agriculture research in 2014. But Vermeulen says African agriculture needs more financing to help smallholder farmers, who produce most of the continent’s food, adapt to climate change.The focus should be on increasing public sector budgets for agriculture and exploring partnerships with the private sector, beyond development finance, for countries that are now at the investment stage.

Financing for climate action and adaptation by developing countries has dogged the agenda of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conferences and remains a hurdle to a binding climate change treaty.

According to CCAFS’s “Big Facts” website, total costs for adaptation in agriculture have been estimated at seven billion dollars per year up to 2050. However, of the total flows of climate finance across all sectors, estimated at 364 billion dollars in 2011, only five percent went to adaptation activities.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: Climate change has huge implications for agriculture in Africa. What is the best way forward as Africa seems to have failed to secure concrete actions from the UNFCCC process?

A: In spite of the stalled UNFCCC talks, several African governments are collaborating with research institutions and development partners to explore options for tackling the climate change challenge.

These early actions revolve around pilots and testing of climate-smart agriculture or climate-resilient agriculture such as trailing market-based mechanisms for reducing emissions … and improving climate forecasting that helps farmers deal with climate extremes. The larger the scale of piloting, the more convincing it will be.

Q: Climate finance seems a bankrupt concept from the start. Now with the collapse of the European carbon markets, can agriculture in Africa succeed without funding? 

A: Financing is critical for the success of agriculture in Africa. However, carbon markets are not yet a significant source of funding for African agriculture. Instead, public sector funding and development support are significant financing options for agriculture in Africa.

For instance, since 2003 the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme has been supporting countries with the implementation of their respective agricultural investment plans, and the importance of strengthening agricultural finance services to support the transformation of African agriculture has been noted.

In order to strengthen the performance and competitiveness of the continent’s agriculture sector, the focus should be on increasing public sector budgets for agriculture and exploring partnerships with the private sector, beyond development finance, for countries that are now at the investment stage.

Q: What concrete programmes has CGIAR implemented in Africa to help farmers become resilient in the face of climate change?

A: Recognising that drought is one of the major challenges facing Africa, CGIAR focuses on developing crop technologies that are suitable for drought conditions and tolerant to insect damage.

There are several initiatives, for example, the Insect Resistant Maize for Africa (IRMA) project launched in 1999 by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre and Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. The other is the Water Efficient Maize for Africa being undertaken by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, whose main objective is to make drought-tolerant maize available royalty free to small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.

Q: How successful have these initiatives been? 

A: The IRMA project has resulted in the release of more than 50 new cultivars, which are now grown on at least one million hectares in southern Africa.

By working in partnership with local communities and by replicating the poor conditions found in farmers’ fields, the approach was tailored to meet the needs of poor farmers who had not previously benefited from conventional breeding programmes.

At the same time, insect-resistant maize greatly increases farming efficiency since insect control is available for the cost of only the seed. In addition, research on developing resistant varieties provides 100- to 300-fold greater returns on investment than research to develop insecticides.

Another successful project is the Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement for Sorghum and Millets project … [which] seeks to improve the livelihoods of at least 60,000 smallholder farm households in West and Central Africa and 50,000 in East and southern Africa, who depend on sorghum and millet for food and income.

Q: What of the challenges?

A: These projects have faced several challenges. The private sector has little incentive to provide seeds to smallholder farmers due to high transaction costs, and systems for the certification and distribution of seeds are poorly developed.

There is lack of access to the improved technologies and insufficient knowledge regarding the technologies, high costs associated with the improved seeds, and poor linkage to markets.

Furthermore, [government and non-government] extension has failed due to inadequate human resources…, while government and NGO [extension officers] stress lack of resources to mobilise communities, and poor communication with researchers leads to information distortion.

Q: What about CGIAR’s financial commitment to innovations in agriculture? 

A: Investment in agricultural research must increase substantially if it is to have a sizeable impact on global poverty and hunger. The implicit budget request in the existing portfolio of 15 of the CGIARs’ research programmes was around 790 million dollars for the first year [2011], with an annual increase of around 100 million dollars for the first three years. Following this trend, close to one billion dollars will perhaps be committed in 2014.

The remains of shade houses that one farmer attempted to build to protect his crops from the effects of climate change. He subsequently abandoned the project after the Trinidad and Tobago government withheld the anticipated subsidy for completing them. Credit: Jewel Fraser/IPS

By Jewel Fraser
PORT OF SPAIN, Sep 23 2013 (IPS)

Dalchan Singh, a root crop farmer and board member of the Agricultural Society of Trinidad and Tobago, says the past year has seen drastic changes in the weather of this twin-island Caribbean nation.

Normally, the rainy season starts in June and continues during the months of July and August, he explained, then eases up until November when the rains start again.“As a region we do little to collect, preserve and improve our local germplasm." -- Dr. Humberto Gomez of IICA

“But this year was not so,” Singh told IPS. “For two months, we had a lot of sun and very little rain. It is only about August that we started to get rain.” He added, “This year when you get rain, it is very powerful, and when you get sun, it is very dry, hot sun. This year is very different.”

Crops grow more slowly when they do not get enough rain at the correct time, he said. Conversely, the heavy, powerful showers the country experienced this year killed some of the crops such as the pigeon peas and caused some of the root crop to rot.

Local farmers say the unpredictability of the weather is making it almost impossible to determine what crops can safely be planted when.

Climate change is also creating an additional challenge in terms of the pests farmers have to deal with. Khemraj Singh, president of the Felicity Farmers Association in Chaguanas, Trinidad, explains that when there are two or three weeks of steady rain, any attempt to eradicate pests using chemicals is useless since the rain washes away the pesticides.

At the same time, said farmer Hudson Mahabir, “there are some positives to climate change” in controlling pests, since “heavy rainfall reduces thrips”, a winged insect that feeds on crops.

However, when there is a mix of heavy rainfall and hot sunshine, “it creates the ideal situation for fungus and bacteria to multiply,” he added.

Farmers throughout the Caribbean are seeing changes in seasonal weather patterns, which began to become apparent about eight years ago, and now find themselves battling more intense flooding, on the one hand, and dry hot weather, on the other.

But strategies exist to minimise these negative effects of climate change.

When Ramgopaul Roop started to work his small farm in North Freeport, Trinidad, the soil was very acidic, sterile and compacted. During the rainy season, he had to contend with flooding and during the dry season with the challenge of drought.

Roop decided to lime his farm’s soil and increased the amount of organic material in it to improve its fertility. He also made a pond and adjusted the farm’s topography in such a way that during the rainy season the excess water flowed smoothly into the pond, thus preventing flooding; during the dry season, he began using that same water to irrigate.

The result is that Roop now makes a good living out of farming.

Though Roop’s work in sustainable agriculture began before the impacts of climate change became noticeable, Dr. Humberto Gomez, a technological innovation specialist of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), cites it as an example of what can be accomplished when farmers take a proactive approach to dealing with the problem.

“For example, with improved soil and water management practices, such as irrigation and drainage,” he told IPS. “Also, crop varieties can be bred to require less water, complete their cycle faster or slower, to have tolerance to pests and diseases.

“Plants could also be bred to use smaller spaces, to absorb and metabolise nutrients more efficiently, etc,” Gomez said.

The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) report, “Farming’s Climate-Smart Future: Placing Agriculture at the Heart of Climate-Change Policy”, also suggests growing crops under cover as a useful technology specifically for farmers in the Caribbean.

The Trinidad and Tobago government offered to subsidise such technology, known as shade houses, promising to pay half of the cost of building them, according to Khemraj Singh.

However, Singh said, those promises were not fulfilled. He said that he began the project of building shade houses to protect his crops. However, such construction is expensive: two and a half acres required 10 shade houses covering roughly 10,000 square feet each, at a total cost of approximately 340,000 dollars.

Failure by government to subsidise the construction made the shade houses untenable. “A shade house is a long-term investment,” he said. “I cannot take TT two million dollars and say that the shade houses would make enough money to pay for themselves.” Singh has since abandoned his efforts to implement this technology.

He said that local farmers also see the value of drip irrigation and plastic mulching to help cope with local climatic conditions. Among the strategies farmers are using to cope with intense flooding, he said, was the building of many more water channels to ensure that their fields drained properly after heavy rainfalls.

Farmers are also building their plant beds smaller and higher to allow for faster runoff of water, he said.

IICA’s Dr. Gomez said governments can bring relief to farmers by“educating our industrialists, merchants and people at large to improve the management of residues, first by generating fewer residues, then by recycling a large proportion of these so that we can minimise the amount of waste that ends up going into the water courses.”

The IICA and other regional research organisations are helping by introducing improved germplasm that undergoes testing before it is released for commercial use. Germplasm comprises seeds and genetic material for more resilient crop varieties that can better cope with extreme weather conditions.

Unfortunately, Dr. Gomez said, only a fraction of the introduced germplasm makes it to the farms.

“As a region we do little to collect, preserve and improve our local germplasm,” he said. “A well thought-out plant breeding programme…will be a strategic and valuable asset, currently absent for all but a few crops. This is an area with plenty of room for improvement.”

Rice is a staple for much of humanity. Credit: Bigstock

By Claudia Ciobanu
ROME, Jun 15 2013 (IPS)

“If there was enough political will to defeat hunger, we would defeat it right now – immediately,” says Enrique Yeves, chief of corporate communications at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

“It is a scandal that in the 21^st century there are still people that suffer from hunger in a world in which we produce more food than we need,” adds Yeves, speaking on the sidelines of the Jun. 15-21 FAO biannual conference opening Saturday in Rome."The crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.” -- IPC's Antonio Onorati

Almost one billion people do not have enough to eat, yet we throw away one-third to one-half of the food we produce, according to U.N. estimates.

This is one of the paradoxes at the core of the global food system.

The world made progress over the last decade in combating hunger. But a widespread and lingering economic crisis has reversed this trend, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, according to FAO’s own assessments. High and volatile global food prices are putting additional strains on the world’s poor, as is the rapid depletion of natural resources caused by our unsustainable way of life.

This year, FAO’s membership will hit 195, once South Sudan, Brunei and Singapore join next week.

The sense of urgency in addressing hunger in the midst of the multiple global crises is reflected in the current attempt to reform FAO in order to make it more efficient and results-oriented.

“In the 2000s, there was even talk of shutting down FAO altogether, as the mantra of liberalisation of markets as a solution for food security became dominant and the World Trade Organisation became the locus for most food talks,” says Antonio Onorati from IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty, a platform bringing together around 300 million small food producers from all over the world in order to dialogue with FAO.

“But then we had the economic crisis and the food crises and the governments understood there was a need for a multilateral space for dealing with food issues,” he tells IPS. “They also understood that the crisis of the food system is not only an issue for poor countries in the Global South but for the global elites too.”

FAO’s Brazilian Director General José Graziano da Silva has come up with a set of proposals, including concentrating the organisation’s work around five strategic objectives: contributing to the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition; increasing and improving the provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner; reducing rural poverty; enabling more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems at local, national and international levels; increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises.

Another important change will be the mainstreaming of gender issues across FAO programmes, a move that is very much welcomed by civil society.

“Women are the majority of farmers yet they have always been discriminated in agricultural policies,” says Alberta Guerra from Action Aid International. “If women are given the resources they need, many will be taken out of poverty. We are happy to see the progress made by FAO on gender mainstreaming.”

Da Silva, who came to FAO after being responsible for implementing the Fome Zero programme in Brazil, said to have lifted 28 million people out of poverty, may indeed have the needed stamina and good reputation to carry the reform package through.

Yet there will likely be resistance from governments gathering in Rome. One contentious issue is a minor budget increase put up for discussion: FAO’s budget was 1.005 billion dollars in the 2012-13 period, and the organisation is now asking for an increase of one percent from its member states for 2014-15.

Some member states may resist this budget hike and these may be precisely the rich countries, as larger developing ones (most notably the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are already committed to increasing their financial contributions to FAO apart from the one percent: China by an additional 21.3 million dollars, Brazil by 15.3 million and Russia by 9.2 million dollars.

According to Onorati, the changes proposed by the FAO staff entail a “system view” of food issues – that is, looking at all factors together and interlinked – which is welcome. He also welcomes the organisation’s increased openness to civil society.

At the same time, Onorati warns that some of the national delegations coming to Rome may be less open than FAO itself to such changes.

Meeting on health and food security in the Caingangue Guarita Reserve in southern Brazil. Credit: Courtesy of Marcos Antonio Ribeiro

By Clarinha Glock
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil , Jun 1 2013 (IPS)

Healthcare for Brazil’s indigenous minority is in poor health, according to U.N. experts, missionaries, social workers and native people themselves.

Ida Pietricovsky, an adviser to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the northern city of Belem do Pará, stressed the lack of systematic information on the health of indigenous people.

Speaking to IPS, officials at the Health Ministry’s communication office blamed the shortcomings on the incomplete transition in healthcare for indigenous communities, which in 2010 began to be transferred from the National Health Foundation (FUNASA) to the Special Secretariat on Indigenous Health (SESAI).

Whatever the case, the situation is hindering the implementation of public policies catering to the specific needs of each indigenous group.

“It’s a very serious problem, and we are trying to discuss it with SESAI,” Pietricovsky told IPS. The way information is gathered differs from region to region, she said, which makes it difficult to compare data.

UNICEF and other U.N. agencies have set up offices with multidisciplinary teams to serve the Food Security and Nutrition Monitoring System and thus improve nutrition in every Special Indigenous Health District, in conjunction with SESAI.

The initiative first began to work with children from the Xavante indigenous community in the western state of Mato Grosso, a region with high levels of mortality related to malnutrition and diarrhea.

“The idea is to train the teams to prevent further deaths,” Pietricovsky said. “Child mortality in indigenous areas is double the national average, and improvements in the indicators have been very slow.”

The latest report on violence against indigenous people by the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council, based on 2011 figures, includes a chapter on healthcare neglect.

The report describes 53 cases of negligence in healthcare in 16 states, which affected a total of 53,000 people. The northern state of Amazonas accounts for the largest number of cases.

The study is based on newspaper and magazine articles from the different regions and missionary reports. It says the general complaint in indigenous communities is that there is a shortage of health professionals, medication, equipment, transportation and assistance – in short, that they have been abandoned by the health system.

From north to south, the needs are similar in this immense country of 198 million people. Of the total population, 900,000 people self-identified as indigenous in the 2010 census, belonging to 305 different ethnic communities who speak 274 languages.

In Dourados, a city in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the native reserve’s proximity to the city has driven up levels of alcoholism, diabetes and hypertension among the indigenous people.

The demarcation of the land of the Yanomami, who live in the north of the country, forced members of that group to abandon their nomadic lifestyle and has left them confined in areas that are near army garrisons.

As a result, they began to eat processed foods, because fish are scarce in the rivers and streams in their settlements. And when they seek medical assistance at the municipal health posts, they run up against discrimination and rejection.

“We are fighting for every community to regain its autonomy and a central role in feeding itself,” Sandro Luckmann, a member of the Council of Missions among Indigenous people (COMIN), run by evangelical churches, told IPS.

COMIN has been working for 30 years with the Caingangue people in the Guarita Reserve in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, whose capital is Porto Alegre.

The Caingangue people are the third-largest native group in Brazil, and Guarita is their biggest settlement, according to the 2010 census.

Luckmann pointed out that ensuring healthcare and food security form part of a broad process, which includes finding new means of production.

“The demarcation of indigenous lands does not create the conditions to guarantee food security for the community,” he said. “There are programmes run by one government or another, but no stable public policy,” he complained.

In Guarita, Caingangue men and women must find work in meat-packing plants in nearby cities, or as temporary workers harvesting apples, onions or grapes on plantations where they sleep in precarious barracks.

“There are stories that in the meat-packing industry, the indigenous workers are given the worst jobs, the ones no one wants to do,” Luckmann said. “They commute up to four hours by bus, to work an eight-hour day, and then ride back again to be able to sleep in their homes.”

He pointed out that article 231 of the Brazilian constitution establishes that the demarcation of ancestral indigenous territories must guarantee the groups’ physical and cultural survival and the subsistence of their communities. But that does not happen, he said.

“When we talk about food security and sovereignty, we have to think about the territory that indigenous people occupy, and understand that the changes in their living conditions give rise to nutritional deficiencies and health problems,” he said.

Marcos Antonio Ribeiro of the Caingangue community, who coordinates SESAI in the Guarita Reserve, confirmed that the change from the traditional eating habits of his people to a less diversified diet based on processed foods had led to a rise in undernutrition, anemia and vitamin deficiencies.

In the past, the Caingangue people’s diet was based on the cultivation of corn, squash and beans, the harvesting of wild fruits and nuts, and fishing.

But the community’s diet changed because of the ease of acquiring commercially processed foods, the lack of land to farm, and the indiscriminate use of pesticides, which has killed off several native plant species.

Ribeiro explained to IPS that the dietary changes not only cause health problems, but are also harmful to the Caingangue culture, because there is a series of rituals associated with eating and food.

For example, “when a youngster is going to eat crumbs from a cornmeal cake, the oldest person in the house rubs his body all over and makes him previously drink an infusion, because the Caingangue believe that without this ritual, youngsters will be weakened and will suffer cramps as adults,” he said.

The Caingangue, who in the past depended on medicinal herbs, now want to see health professionals. And when they do, they are found to have high levels of diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol and triglycerides.

“And in recent years, there have been cases of cancer of all kinds in indigenous people of all ages, even children,” he said.

Ribeiro, who has an educational background in nutrition, is promoting a return to traditional knowledge in indigenous institutions and communities. His own mother died of complications from diabetes, becoming part of statistics that are still invisible to the health authorities.

Food’s carbon footprint is measured “from fertiliser to fork”: Thornton and Vermeulen. Credit: Courtesy CCAFS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 31 2012 (IPS)

Food production, including agriculture, represent 29 percent of the greenhouse gases that are causing global warming, say scientists with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Feeding the global population today involves the release of 10,000 to 16,000 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere annually, say two reports published Wednesday Oct. 31 in Copenhagen by CGIAR’s Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS).

Rising global temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns will affect production of staple foods like maize, rice and wheat. The reports estimate that by 2050, climate change could cause irrigated wheat yields to fall by 13 percent in developing countries, and irrigated rice yields by 15 percent.

The reports are “Recalibrating Food Production in the Developing World: Global Warming Will Change More Than Just the Climate” by CCAFS theme leader Philip Thornton, and “Climate Change and Food Systems” by CCAFS head of research Sonja Vermeulen. IPS spoke to the two researchers by telephone. Excerpts of the interviews follow:

Q: What is the global warning sounded by the reports launched by CCAFS?

PHILIP THORNTON: I would say that the overall message from the two studies is that climate change may have considerable impacts on agriculture in developing countries, but there are many things that can be done now to help reduce the burden on smallholders.

Action is required now at many levels, not only to adapt but also to mitigate – and there are wide overlaps of actions that can serve both adaptation and mitigation.

Q: Agriculture and the food production chain are among the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Does feeding the world produce a huge carbon footprint?

SONJA VERMEULEN: The emissions footprint of food production involves the combined emissions of all the stages of food production, from ‘fertiliser to fork’. It includes manufacture of inputs like fertilisers, then agriculture itself, but also food distribution and sales, use of food in the home, and how food waste is managed.

There are large country variations, but food production, including agriculture, contributes from 19 to 29 per cent of anthropogenic (man-made) emissions. The sector that contributes the most is the energy industry, however.

An important part of the impact of agriculture and food production on GHG emissions is of course the energy it uses: machinery on farms, refrigeration, transport over long distances. (Feeding the world represents) between 10,000 and 16,000 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Q: How could climate change impact people’s lives with regard to food security, especially commodities and natural resources?

SV: It highlights the imperative of providing help to those people who need it to adapt – most of whom are in developing countries and contribute very little to the global footprint of agriculture – while at the same time doing everything we can to reduce the footprint of agriculture in the developed countries.

Ensuring food security for nine billion people (the projected global population in 2050) has to be a priority, but we have to do this in a way that reduces emissions.

Q: The reports point to the urgent need to mitigate and adapt due to the reality of climate change. What actions should countries and food companies take?

SV: There are a wide variety of options that can both help smallholders adapt to climate change as well as reduce emissions – reducing waste, restoring degraded lands, feeding livestock better diets to reduce the amount of emissions per kg of meat and milk, for example.

Q: What are the consequences of the rise in temperatures and the reduction in rainfall periods?

PT: Rising temperatures and changing rainfall amounts and patterns will inevitably change the nature of growing seasons in some places and will also change the suitability of different places for different crops. In such cases, it may be that there are different varieties that can be used that are more heat-tolerant; perhaps the areas of production can be shifted to more suitable areas (e.g. shifting potato cultivation to higher elevations where it is cooler).

Regarding pests and diseases, it is certain that the prevalence and distribution of these will change, and in some cases will become increasingly important.

Q: What are the changes we may see in our diets?

PT: Climate change impacts on agricultural production may bring about substantial changes in the relative costs of different sources of calories and proteins. In developed countries, we may want to consider ways of reducing the over-consumption of certain types of food and reducing waste, because such things can help cut emissions.

In developing countries, research and development organisations may want to start thinking about ways to help smallholders grow and utilise new crops that they currently have no or only limited experience with. The issue here is to help provide smallholders with options to diversify their diets where this is appropriate.

Q: The reports say farmers around the world, especially smallholders in developing countries, should have access to the latest technology and science. Is climate-smart agriculture possible?

PT: Smallholders have enormous experience of farming, but the pace of change means that many of them are having to operate in very unfamiliar conditions. In such cases, proven technology and good science can surely help enhance food security and livelihoods – this may involve the use of new varieties that are drought-tolerant, or helping farmers to use seasonal weather forecasts to adapt their management practices to the current season. But yes, to help them towards an intelligent and resilient agriculture.

Q: How will these global changes affect different parts of the world?

PT: Several studies show that large areas of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia and South-East Asia may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Q: Is it true that growing crops is about to become even more unpredictable at a global level?

PT: The climate during the rest of this century is very likely to become more variable (more droughts, more floods, more extreme events), and as a result, agricultural production may well become more variable, particularly in developing countries in rain-fed situations. This is one reason why it is so important to enhance smallholders’ resilience and ability to adapt.

Q: The CCAFS reports predict a catastrophic scenario in the near future. How can we deal with this?

PT: My take would be: it doesn’t have to be like this – if we sit and do nothing, the future does indeed look bad, particularly for those who are in fact least to blame for the emissions trajectory we are currently on. But what I take from these two publications is that there are many practical things that we can do to reduce emissions and to help smallholders adapt. We need action at all levels – local, national, regional and global.

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