A group of ‘barraginhas’, the micro-dams that retain water that runs off into the ground, benefiting vegetation and accumulating water in the soil to supply lagoons. Credit: Courtesy of Lucyan Vieira Listo

By Mario Osava
SETE LAGOAS, Brazil, Aug 18 2024 (IPS)

Water shortage is over, springs have emerged or become perennial, small ponds with fish have formed and pastures have become greener and more permanent, all thanks to the ‘barraginhas’, the Portuguese name given in Brazil to micro-dams that retain rainwater and infiltrate it into the soil.

This is a common claim among the many farmers who have adopted the technique developed and promoted by Luciano Cordoval, an agronomist and researcher at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a public entity comprising 43 research centres throughout the country.“The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves”: Luciano Cordoval.

Cordoval has worked since 1983 at the Embrapa Maize and Sorghum unit, based in Sete Lagoas (Seven Lagoons, in Portuguese), a municipality with a population of 227,397 in the southern state of Minas Gerais, where he further specialised in irrigation and soil conservation.

His Barraginhas Project was launched in 1997 with government investment. But the specialist has been promoting micro-dams long before as a way to “capture water from streams and promote its storage in the soil, avoiding erosion, sedimentation and environmental pollution, with increased volume in the springs”, according to his resumé.

Luciano Cordoval explains the functions of barraginhas in his office at the Maize and Sorghum unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation in Sete Lagoas, a municipality in central Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

One hundred micro-dams create a lagoon

Antonio Alvarenga, a pioneer of the initiative, built 28 micro-dams on his 400-hectare farm in Sete Lagoas in 1995, with the support of Cordoval’s project. “These were degraded and dry lands, affected by major erosion,” he recalled.

In a short time, the barraginhas filled and emptied several times and water began to flow in the lower part of the farm, which had previously been totally dry. The engineer by profession, who became a part-time cattle farmer, was then able to have his dream pond, which after extensions now covers 42,000 square metres of his land.

With the other micro-dams already built, he now has “more than 100” and has plans for another 40. The effect can be seen in the recovered springs and the abundance of water that allows him to irrigate the pastures in the dry season and double his livestock productivity.

“Before I used to raise only one cow on two hectares, today there are two animals on each hectare,” he told IPS in Sete Lagoas, highlighting the good results of the innovation.

“I became a producer of water, which fills my ‘artificial’ lagoon. Water is everything,” he praised. The benefits visible to the naked eye encouraged his neighbours to build their own micro-dams, with help from the mayor’s office. In addition, a television report helped spread the word about this ‘social technology’, as it is called.

Some of the micro-dams built in 1998, including on the farm of engineer Antonio Alvarenga. Credit: Luciano Cordoval

Also in the Amazon

In Floresta do Araguaia, 1,800 kilometres from Sete Lagoas, in the southeast of the northern Amazonian state of Pará, another cattle farmer, with some 6,000 hectares and 2,000 head of cattle, also points out impressive data.

“This part of Pará is not rich in water,” contrary to the general belief that it rains profusely in the whole Amazon region, says Pedro de Carvalho, a veterinarian from Minas Gerais, a state in southeastern Brazil, but who lives in the eastern Amazon since 1974.

“It rains a lot in the last two months of the year, but not the rest of the year,’ he told IPS in a telephone interview from his ranch. There is cerrado, a kind of Brazilian savannah, in the area, not Amazonian forest, he adds.

“I didn’t have enough water, I had to buy it from tanker trucks, and a lot of my cattle died of thirst,” he recalled.

But having been friends with Cordoval since they were young, he knew his ideas and began to build his barraginhas. He believes he now has 168 in all, although he is uncertain of the precise number. He bought an excavator to build and improve them, “because everything can be improved.”

João Roberto Moreira in the lagoon formed by water from springs revitalised by a chain of 11 barraginhas on the hill of preserved forests on his 200-hectare property in Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Some sceptics of such innovation in the region recommended artesian wells. “Pure ignorance. Where you draw water and don’t replenish it, it tends to run out. The barraginhas supply the water table,” he observed.

An example is Unai, a city in Minais Gerais, which drilled many artesian wells and then had to deactivate 70% of them, “because they dried up,” he explained.

In his case, he no longer needs to buy water, having it stored in ponds where there are fish. Animals such as the capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris), a large rodent native to South America which lives around water, the collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu, an American wild pig), various birds and even bees, wasps and ants have proliferated on his farm.

Carvalho, a veterinarian specialising in reproduction, was one of the pioneers of Amazon colonisation in the 1970s. He first settled near Araguaína, a municipality of 171,000 inhabitants in the north of the state of Tocantins, where he has a farm of “between 3,000 and 4,000 hectares”.

Today, however, he is more dedicated to the farm in Floresta do Araguaia, a municipality with only 18,000 people, but where he foresees a promising future due to the expansion of soya bean.

A group of 23 engineers from 20 African countries visited different experiences of the Barraginhas Project, a social technology of easy application to capture, collect and disseminate water in rural areas. Credit: Barraginhas Project Archive

The multiplication of water

The barraginhas have spread throughout Brazil, from large to small farms. Cordoval and Embrapa were directly involved in the construction of some 300,000, but he estimates there may be two million of these micro-dams nationwide.

The first project, sponsored by the federal government’s Water Resources Board starting in 1997, sought to build 960 units near Sete Lagoas, Cordoval recalled in an interview with IPS at his Embrapa office in Sete Lagoas.

Between 2005 and 2008, some 3,600 were built in the northeastern state of Piauí, in a project promoted by then congressman Wellington Dias, later governor of the state and now minister of Social Development.

From the beginning, a priority was to train disseminators. “The results often turn the beneficiaries into my ‘clones’, who incorporate the DNA of the barraginhas and disseminate them out of passion, without thinking about the money,” Cordoval said.

“Barraginhas are like financial savings. You should stockpile water when there is abundance, for times of scarcity. The more the climate crisis worsens, the greater the need to capture rainwater and accumulate reserves. The growth of the country, cities and population demands more water for water sustainability,” he explained.

In 2011, a group of 23 engineers from different parts of Africa came to Sete Lagoas to learn about the local experience with micro-dams.

This social technology has received several national awards that promote other technologies also seeking to produce or protect water.

This is the case of septic tanks and biodigesters that prevent contamination of the water table. They are small multi-purpose ponds with an impermeable canvas floor to prevent water losses and an irrigation system for family farmers.

An alternative for plots of land with a slope above 10%, which is the recommended limit for establishing barraginhas, is a linear ditch that follows the contour line and withstands torrents on slopes of up to 25%.

Barraginhas and their annexes are a health factor, by improving the availability of good quality water, reducing medical expenses and increasing family income. In addition, they contain erosion, thus reducing sedimentation of watercourses, Cordoval pointed out.

A variant of this technology is built on roadsides, precisely to prevent deterioration due to erosion.

Barraginhas also prevent erosion on unpaved roads near their edges. Credit: Courtesy of Luciano Cordoval

Reclaimed springs and wells

For João Roberto Moreira, a.k.a. Betinho, a small cattle farmer with a herd of about 50 dairy cows, the major benefit of the 11 barraginhas built in 1998 on the hill of his farm was to intensify and perpetuate the springs that supply the three families that share the 200-hectare property.

“It was a blessing. The springs used to dry up, the water didn’t drain to the houses and attempts to pump it failed. Now there is water all year round. I’ve never seen so much water reaching us by gravity”, through four hoses from the top of the hill, he said.

There is also water left over for three lagoons, where they raise fish.

In Cáceres, a municipality of 90,000 inhabitants in central-western Brazil, Samuel Laudelino Silva, a chemist and retired professor at the State University of Mato Grosso (Unemat), has built 43 barraginhas of different sizes and a kilometre-long ditch on his increasingly water-scarce farm.

A 208-metre deep well, which did not produce water after a landslide reduced it to a depth of 135 metres, now provides 2,640 litres per day, enough for essential needs on the farm. It has water starting at a depth of 48 metres.

“Governments should promote the large-scale installation of this technology, including as a way to mitigate the droughts and fires that have been plaguing the Pantanal, a large wetland area on Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, in recent years,” Silva told IPS in an interview by email.

Cáceres is located in the upper Pantanal, in the state of Mato Grosso.

Vicente Castrellón proudly shows his biofortified rice crop. The 69-year-old farmer provides technical advice to other farmers participating in the Agro Nutre programme in the central Panamanian district of Olá. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
PANAMA CITY, Sep 16 2014 (IPS)

Panama is the first Latin American country to have adopted a national strategy to combat what is known as hidden hunger, with a plan aimed at eliminating micronutrient deficiencies among the most vulnerable segments of the population by means of biofortification of food crops.

The project began to get underway in 2006 and took full shape in August 2013, when the government launched the Agro Nutre Panamá programme, which coordinates the improvement of food quality among the poor, who are concentrated in rural and indigenous areas, by adding iron, vitamin A and zinc to seeds.

“We see biofortification as an inexpensive way to address the problem by means of staple foods that families consume on a daily basis,” Ismael Camargo, the coordinator of Agro Nutre, told IPS. Panama has pockets of poverty with high levels of micronutrient deficiencies, he explained.

In 2006 research began here into biofortification of maize; two years later beans were added to the programme; and in 2009 the research incorporated rice and sweet potatoes, as part of a plan that is backed by the National Secretariat of Science, Technology and Innovation.“We are producing three harvests a year, I provide technical support for other farmers. For now it’s for family consumption, but some grow more than they need and earn a little money selling the surplus." -- Vicente Castrellón

Panama’s Agricultural Research Institute and academic institutions are involved in Agro Nutre, which has the support of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), and Brazil’sn governmental agricultural research agency, Embrapa.

Some 4,000 of the country’s 48,000 subsistence level or family farmers are taking part in the current phase, planting biofortified seeds.

Adding micronutrients to staple foods in the Panamanian diet became a state policy in 2009. So far, five varieties of maize, four of rice and two of beans, all of them conventionally improved and with a high protein content, have been produced experimentally and approved for release.

“The project began in rural areas, because that is where the extreme poverty is, and where farmers produce for subsistence,” food engineer Omaris Vergara of the University of Panama told IPS.

She added that in this phase, “the commercialisation of these foods is not being considered – the aim is to improve the nutritional quality of the diets of family farmers.”

According to Vergara, the biggest hurdle for the expansion and growth of Agro Nutre is the lack of research infrastructure.

“The project is focused on vulnerable populations. Academic institutions will carry out impact studies, but they haven’t yet begun to do so because the studies are very costly,” said the engineer, who sees the lack of research facilities as the weak point of the project.

According to figures from Agro Nutre, of the 3.5 million people in this Central American country, one million live in rural areas. And of the rural population, half live in poverty and 22 percent in extreme poverty.

But the worst poverty in Panama is found among the 300,000 indigenous people who live in five counties, 90 percent of whom are poor.

Beans and rice in Olá

Isidra González, a 54-year-old small farmer, had never heard of improving the nutritional quality of food with micronutrients until she and her oldest son began five years ago to plant biofortified seeds on their small plot of land in the community of Hijos de Dios in the district of Olá, which is in the central province of Coclé.

Now the 70 families in that village next to the only road in the area produce biofortified crops: beans on small plots climbing tropical lush green hills and rice on nearby floodable land.

“I think these seeds are better and produce more. They grow with just half the amount of water,” González, who has been involved in the project since the experimental phase, told IPS. “People like these crops because they have more flavour and are really good – my kids eat our rice and beans with enthusiasm, you can tell,” she added, laughing.

Vicente Castrellón, a 69-year-old local farmer, plants improved seeds and became a community trainer to help farmers in the district.

“We are producing three harvests a year, I provide technical support for other farmers. For now it’s for family consumption, but some grow more than they need and earn a little money selling the surplus,” he told IPS.

“Life here is very expensive for farmers like us,” Castrellón said in Hijos de Díos, which is 250 km from Panama City, over three hours away by car.

He added that it was not easy for the families in Olá to switch over to biofortified seeds. “It took nearly a year to get them to join Agro Nutre,” he said. “But now people are excited because for every 10 pounds that are planted, they grow 100 to 200 pounds of grains,” he added, proudly pointing to the rice plants on his plot of land.

The inclusion of the fourth crop, sweet potatoes (Imopeas batata), was a strategic move, researcher Arnulfo Gutiérrez explained.

The sweet potato, which had nearly disappeared from the Panamanian diet, is the world’s fifth-largest crop in term of production and FAO is promoting its expansion worldwide. The incorporation of sweet potatoes in Panama has the aim of boosting consumption and in 2015 two or three improved varieties are to be released.

Luis Alberto Pinto, a FAO consultant, forms part of the Agro Nutre administrative committee and is the national technical coordinator in the first two indigenous counties where improved seeds are being used, Gnäbe Bugle and Guna Yala.

“We are working in four pilot communities,” he told IPS. “In Gnäbe Bugle we are working with 129 farmers in Cerro Mosquito and Chichica, and in Guna Yala we are working with 50 farmers on islands along the Caribbean coast.

“We work in accordance with their customs and cultures, incorporating these products in a manner that can be sustained in time,” Pinto said. “Our hope is to expand the project to all of the indigenous counties.”

Besides science and production, the project requires constant lobbying of legislators and government ministries, to keep alive the political commitment to biofortification as a state policy.

Eyra Mojica, WFP representative in Panama, told IPS it now seems normal to her to walk down the corridors of parliament and visit the offices of high-level ministry officials.

“We have worked in advocacy with legislators, directors, ministers and new authorities,” she said. “The issue of food security is so complex. The WFP has become the main support for supplying information on nutrition to the authorities. There is a great deal of ignorance.”

By 2015, the WFP hopes to introduce cassava and summer squash as new biofortified crops.

“We want to have a basket of seven biofortified foods,” Mojica said. “The idea is to move forward by incorporating small groups, of women farmers for example. We are also looking into working with the school lunch programme, starting next year.”

Biofortification of staple foods with micronutrients, to reduce hidden hunger, was developed by HarvestPlus, a programme coordinated by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Biofortified beans. Credit: Courtesy of BioFORT

By Fabíola Ortiz
KIGALI, Apr 17 2014 (IPS)

Latin America is one of the regions in the world suffering from “hidden hunger” – a chronic lack of the micronutrients needed to ward off problems like anaemia, blindness, impaired immune systems, and stunted growth.

Brazil is heading up a food biofortification effort in the region to turn this situation around.

Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras are targets of the biofortification programme, after six countries in Africa (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia) and three in Asia (Bangladesh, India and Pakistan).

Behind the initiative is HarvestPlus, which forms part of the CGIAR Consortium research programme on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health.

CGIAR is an independent consortium leading the global effort to modify food in developing regions by adding essential minerals and vitamins.

In Latin America, the project is led by the Brazilian Biofortification Network (BioFORT), which since 2003 has brought together 150 researchers from EMBRAPA, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency, and from universities and specialised centres.

EMBRAPA food engineer Marília Nutti, who heads the BioFORT network in Brazil and the rest of the region, told IPS that the three countries in Latin America with the highest rates of micronutrient deficiency are Haiti, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

HarvestPlus developed a Biofortification Priority Index (BPI) to identify countries in the developing South with the highest levels of micronutrient deficiency.

Agronomist Miguel Lacayo at the Central American University in Managua told IPS that Nicaragua is second only to Haiti in terms of problems in the production and availability of food for a nutritious diet in this region.

“The diet in Nicaragua is principally made up of maize and beans, which are eaten two to three times a day,” the expert said. “People eat a lot of maize tortillas, accompanied by beans, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

Lacayo spoke with IPS during the Mar. 31-Apr. 2 Second Global Conference on Biofortification, organised by HarvestPlus in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

“The idea is to increase the concentration of iron and zinc in these two staple foods, to reduce nutrition problems. We want to help bring down anaemia levels,” he said.

Severe nutritional deficits are especially a problem among children in rural areas in Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in Latin America. “It’s a chronic problem among the rural poor, who make up 60 percent of the population,” Lacayo said.

Biofortification uses conventional plant-breeding methods to enhance the concentration of micronutrients in food crops through a combination of laboratory and agricultural techniques.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reports that two billion people in the world today suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies, and that every four seconds someone dies of hunger and related causes.

In December 2012, the World Bank released a toolkit providing nutrition emergency response guidance to policy-makers, seeking to ensure health, food and nutritional security for vulnerable mothers and their children in Latin America and the Caribbean.

According to the World Bank an estimated 7.2 million children under five are chronically malnourished in the region.

The Bank also warned about the economic costs of malnutrition, estimating individual productivity losses at more than 10 percent of lifetime earnings, and gross domestic product lost to malnutrition as high as two to three percent in many countries.

The World Food Programme (WFP) Hunger Map shows that the malnutrition rate in Nicaragua stands at between 10 and 19 percent, while in Haiti 35 percent of the population is malnourished.

Nicaragua began to biofortify foods in 2005 with support from Agrosalud, a consortium of institutions working in 14 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean that is mainly financed by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Agrosalud has also supported the inclusion of micronutrients in foods in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Peru.

Of these countries, Panama went on to launch a national biofortification programme, with no outside financing.

The first phase of Agrosalud ended in 2010, and Nicaragua was made a priority target in the second phase, with backing from BioFORT, initially focused on maize and beans.

“We want to support biofortified crops,” Lacayo commented. “We are going to create a network in Nicaragua with HarvestPlus, governments, non-governmental organisations, universities, and national and international bodies.”

The alliance will include 125 researchers from 25 university institutions, and the national plan is to get underway in June, with the aim of promoting food security and sovereignty in Nicaragua.

Lacayo stressed that one element of the plan will be support for small farmers in the production of seeds “for their own consumption, as well as a surplus to sell…We want to give this added value, and to strengthen small rural enterprises.”

The agronomist foresees a lasting alliance with Brazil through EMBRAPA, to help reduce hidden hunger in Nicaragua.

BioFORT’s Nutti said the network has an “innovative focus” of combining nutrition, agriculture and health.

“Biofortification is a new science. The big advantage of the project is that it has brought together agronomists, economists, nutritionists and experts in food sciences behind the common goal of having an impact on health,” she said.

Initially, HarvestPlus asked Brazil only to biofortify cassava. But BioFORT decided it was also necessary to incorporate other micronutrients in seven other foods that are essential to the Brazilian diet: cowpeas, beans, rice, sweet potatoes, maize, squash and wheat.

“This is a very big country. You have to show people that this biofortified diet is better,” Nutti said.

Brazil is one of the HarvestPlus country programmes, because it operates with its own technical resources and is seen as a model in the administration of the biofortification effort.

While in Africa, the main target of the initiative, 40 million dollars will be allocated to biofortification, the budget for Latin America over the next five years will range between 500,000 and one million dollars.

That is not much, considering the magnitude of the task, BioFORT technology researcher José Luis Viana de Carvalho told IPS.

In his view, Brazil has the experience needed to forge alliances that contribute to the development of biofortification in the region.

“Brazil is a granary due to the quantity of cereals it produces and its cutting-edge technology. We should think in terms of a 20-year timeframe for reducing the pockets of hidden hunger,” he added.

He said that in terms of public health, the cost of spending on biofortification is lower than the cost of not undertaking the effort.

“Prevention through quality food is important. Biofortification is not medicine, it is prevention. It is the daily diet,” de Carvalho said.

Isabel Michi carefully tends seedlings in the greenhouse on her small organic farm in the settlement of Mutirão Eldorado in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
SEROPÉDICA, Brazil , Mar 29 2014 (IPS)

Brazilian farmer Isabel Michi’s day starts before dawn, when she goes out to the organic garden on her small five-hectare farm that she runs with help from her husband and occasionally their children.

Starting at 5 AM, the 42-year-old farmer of Japanese descent plows the soil, plants seeds and seedlings, fertilises, harvests, and carefully tends the plants in her greenhouse.

She acquired the farm in 2002 thanks to a swap in a settlement that emerged 10 years earlier as part of the government’s agrarian reform programme.

The settlement, Mutirão Eldorado, is in the rural municipality of Seropédica, an area with 80,000 inhabitants located 70 km from Rio de Janeiro, a city that is home to agricultural research institutions and organisations that provide support to small farmers.

Six years ago, Michi took a radical step and decided to go 100 percent organic, abandoning all chemical products.

On average, chemical fertilisers and pesticides absorb 70 percent of the income of small farmers in Brazil, according to experts.

Michi is a cofounder of the group Serorgânico, made up of 15 small farmers, which has become a local leader in supplies of chemical-free seeds and seedlings.

The farmer, who is a Nisei – the term used for second-generation Japanese immigrants – said she was deeply affected by the death of one of her brothers at the age of 37. He died of lung cancer, even though he had never smoked. Michi blames his death on the intensive use of agrochemicals on the farm of their parents, who came to Brazil in the 1960s.

“In my family we worked the land with many pesticides. We were young and the damages they caused were not well-known then,” Michi told IPS during a visit to her farm.

She was one of the youngest of eight siblings, from a family who settled in another part of the state of Rio de Janeiro. “We were very poor; we managed to harvest a truckload of food, but we didn’t have money,” she said.

“It was a really hard life,” said Michi, who has worked in the countryside since the age of 13.

Michi stopped using agrochemicals on her crops when she married Augusto Batista Xavier, 51, who she met in 1992, the first time she visited an organic farm in a neighbouring state.

“When we moved to this land, I was already thinking about agroecology, because for me, it’s the future,” she said.

The land in Seropédica is good for growing mandioc, okra, maize, pumpkin, sweet potato and banana.

Besides these vegetables and fruits, Michi is also growing 25,600 organic seedlings in her new greenhouse, to supply Serorgânico.

Her husband’s job managing a cattle farm ensures them a steady income. But he helps her with the heaviest tasks in his free time. Their three children, between the ages of 14 and 16, also lend a hand when school is out.

On average, Serorgânico produces three tonnes of food a month, most of which is sold in the circuit of organic farmers markets in wealthy neighbourhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

For Michi, chemical-free farming is part of a holistic philosophy, which also takes into account the social and economic welfare of farmers and of consumers of fresh farm products.

But many organic farmers find it hard to survive in the face of competition from those who use more conventional farming methods at a much lower cost.

Although ecological products in Brazil cost between 30 and 50 percent more than food produced with agrochemicals, demand has grown approximately 30 percent in recent years.

José Antônio Azevedo Espíndola, a researcher with the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, pointed out to IPS that the number of organic farmers is still limited.

“There is potential for growth, but there is also a long road ahead,” he told IPS. “In the last few years, society’s concern about food quality has grown, from the point of view of the environment and of more sustainable, healthy production.”

Espíndola is a researcher in EMBRAPA’s agrobiological unit, which is dedicated to developing ecological farming techniques and methods.

Organic farmers represent a mere one percent of agricultural producers in Brazil. In 2006, when the last agricultural census was carried out, there were 5,000 certified ecological farmers, most of them small-scale family producers.

Espíndola estimates that there are now around 12,000 organic producers, who farm a combined total of 1.75 million hectares.

But threats loom on all sides.

Michi’s small farm is one illustration of the problems organic farmers face. It scrapes along, surrounded by quarries, cattle ranches, a sanitary landfill and a projected orbital motorway to be built just two km away.

In other words, the neighbourhood endangers her ecological production.

Trucks hauling rocks and gravel rumble up and down the dirt road in front of her farm, trailing clouds of dust, while the dump gives off a terrible stench and brings swarms of flies. Chemicals used at the dump are also in the air, causing skin ailments among her family.

Given these difficulties, Michi’s family constantly debates whether to move away.

“Besides the bad smell, there is the danger of water pollution,” Michi says. “There are days when I can’t stand working in the garden because of the odours and the flies. We’re an organic community directly affected by developments that arrived here after us.”

Family famers in Seropédica are worried about being hemmed in by industrial endeavours, while they put up with pressure from companies interested in setting up shop in the area.

“They made me an offer to buy my land, but I turned it down,” Michi said. “I’ll only leave here if I can buy the same thing elsewhere, where I can farm. I don’t know how to do anything else.”

Besides the challenges of using green-friendly farming methods, small-scale organic farmers have to overcome other obstacles, Michi said, like difficulties in access to credit and technical assistance from institutions dedicated to agricultural research and development.

The solution, according to Espíndola, is for the different parties involved to be brought together by a public policy specifically providing support for the organic farming sector.

“If that doesn’t happen, there will always be a bottleneck limiting production levels,” he said.

Another EMBRAPA technician, Nilton Cesar Silva dos Santos, told IPS that organic farming was undergoing a major restructuring.

“The conditions still don’t exist in Brazil for a 100 percent organic chain of food production,” said Santos, who is earning a graduate degree in sustainable development in rural settlements that emerge from the government’s land reform programme.

Not only the ecological farming sector but family agriculture as a whole is suffering from a scarcity of resources, said Santos, who is behind the first project to set up greenhouses on family farms in the state, with support from EMBRAPA.

Michi’s farm was one of the first four to have a greenhouse installed.

Santos said it is possible to improve working conditions for organic farmers while at the same time getting the city “to look to the countryside once again.”

Population density is high in rural Mozambique. Credit: Courtesy of União Nacional de Camponeses

By Amos Zacarias
NAMPULA, Mozambique , Dec 28 2013 (IPS)

Rodolfo Razão, an elderly small farmer in Mozambique, obtained an official land usage certificate for his 10 hectares in 2010, but he has only been able to use seven. The rest was occupied by a South African company that grows soy, maize and beans on some 10,000 hectares in the northeast of the country.

He got nowhere filing a complaint with the authorities in the district of Monapo, where he lives, in the province of Nampula. And at the age of 78, he can’t wait much longer.

Brígida Mohamad, a 50-year-old widow, is worried about one of her seven children, whose land was also invaded by a company.

“My son has nowhere to grow his crops; our ‘machambas’ [farms] aren’t for sale,” she complained when she met with IPS in Nacololo, the village in Monapo where she has lived her whole life.

These are two cases that help explain the fear among small farmers regarding the Programme of Triangular Cooperation for Agricultural Development of the Tropical Savannahs of Mozambique (ProSavana), which is backed by the cooperation agencies of Brazil (ABC) and Japan (JICA).

Inspired by the technology for tropical agriculture developed in Brazil, ProSavana is aimed at increasing production in the Nacala Corridor, a 14.5-million-hectare area in central and northern Mozambique that has agricultural potential similar to the Cerrado region – Brazil’s savannah.Of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the Corridor, 80 percent live in rural areas, representing much higher population density than in Brazil and other countries, where the countryside has lost much of its population as agriculture has modernised.

Of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the Corridor, 80 percent live in rural areas, representing much higher population density than in Brazil and other countries, where the countryside has lost much of its population as agriculture has modernised.

But in certain parts of the Corridor, it is possible to go two kilometres without seeing a house, as the families who depend on subsistence farming are spread out and isolated, on farms averaging 1.5 hectares in size.

Cassava is the basis of the local diet. The small farmers also grow maize, pumpkins, sunflowers and sweet potatoes for their own consumption, as well as cash crops: cotton, tobacco and cashew nuts.

The prospect of turning the Corridor into the country’s breadbasket, where agricultural exports are facilitated by the Nacala port on the Indian Ocean, is expected to intensify conflicts over land by attracting companies focused on large-scale, high-yield production on immense estates that displace traditional farming populations.

The arrival of these big investors is a terrible thing, Mohamad said. She is opposed not only to the changes directly brought about by ProSavana, but to others that could be accelerated due to the programme’s influence.

The coordinator of ProSavana, Calisto Bias, told IPS that peasant farmers will not lose their land. He added that the main objective of the programme is to support farmers living in the Corridor and help improve their production techniques.

But Sheila Rafi, natural resources officer with Livaningo, a Mozambican environmental organisation, said the way of life of local communities will be disrupted because the investors will bring in new employer-employee relations as local people produce crops for the companies, and monoculture will undermine the tradition of “producing a little of everything for their own diet.”

Generating jobs by means of investment and value chains is one of ProSavana’s stated missions. Another is modernising and diversifying agriculture with a view to boosting productivity and output, according to the website created by the Agriculture Ministry.

But the greatest fear, the biggest threat, is land-grabbing. Many are trying to protect their land by obtaining the “land usage right” based on customary occupancy (known as DUAT). But the certificate does not actually guarantee a thing, local farmers told IPS.

Under the laws of this southeast African nation, all land belongs to the state and cannot be sold or mortgaged. Farmers can apply to the government for a DUAT for up to 50 years.

Some 250 small farmers in Nacololo gathered Dec. 11 outside the home of the local chief to demand explanations about the alleged grabbing of nearly 600 hectares of land by Suni, a South African company.

The district of Malema, 230 km from the city of Nampula, is also experiencing turbulent times. Major agribusiness companies like Japan’s Nitori Holding Company operate in that area. Nitori was granted a concession to grow cotton on 20,000 hectares of land, and the people who live there will be resettled elsewhere.

Another of the companies is Agromoz (Agribusiness de Moçambique SA), a joint venture between Brazil, Mozambique and Portugal, which is producing soy on 10,000 hectares.

The lack of information from the government has exacerbated worries about what is going to happen. “We only heard from the media and civil society organisations that there’s a programme called ProSavana; the government hasn’t told us anything yet,” said Razão.

Costa Estevão, president of the Nampula Provincial Nucleus of Small-Scale Farmers, said “We aren’t opposed to development, but we want policies that benefit small farmers and we want them to explain to us what ProSavana is.”

The triangular agreement, which was reached in 2011 and combines Japan’s import market with Brazil’s know-how and Mozambique’s land, has already proved fertile ground for controversy.

Social organisations from the three countries have mobilised against ProSavana, rejecting it or demanding that it be reformulated.

Brazil wants “to export a model that is in conflict,” said Fátima Mello, director of international relations for the Brazilian organisation FASE and an active participant in the People’s Triangular Conference on ProSavana, held in Maputo in August.

Millions of landless peasants, a major rural exodus, fierce land disputes, deforestation and unprecedented use of pesticides and herbicides have been the result of the model that has prioritised agribusiness, monoculture for export and large corporations, say activists who defend family farming as one of the keys to food security.

An important component of that model is the Japan-Brazil Cooperation Programme for Development of the Cerrado, which got underway in 1978 in central Brazil and is now serving as an inspiration for ProSavana.

The technology that will be transferred to farmers in the Nacala Corridor comes from Brazil.

The Brazilian governmental agricultural research agency, Embrapa, is training extension workers and staff at Mozambique’s Institute for Agricultural Research (IIAM), in ProSavana’s first project, which will run from 2011 to 2016.

Brazilian participation is also decisive in the rest of the components of the programme: the master plan assessing the rural areas and crops with good potential in the Corridor, and the project for extension and models.

“The breadth and grandeur of the ProSavana Programme contrast with the failure of the law and the total absence of a deep, broad, transparent and democratic public debate,” says an open letter signed by 23 Mozambican social organisations and movements and 43 international organisations.

The letter, addressed to the leaders of Brazil, Japan and Mozambique and signed May 23 in Maputo, also called for the environmental impact assessment required by law.

The signatories demanded the immediate suspension of the programme, an official dialogue with all affected segments of society, a priority on family farming and agroecology, and a policy based on food sovereignty.

They also said that all of the resources allocated to ProSavana should be “reallocated to efforts to define and implement a National Plan for the Support of Sustainable Family Farming.”

Field of soy in Não-Me-Toque, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Credit: Nilson Konrad/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Crop yields in Brazil, an agricultural powerhouse, are set to decline as a result of climate change, according to the most complete diagnosis yet of climate trends in this country.

Brazil is about to overtake the United States as the world’s top producer of soy, which could see yields fall 25 percent by 2050. Drops in productivity are also projected for beans, rice, maize, sugar cane, coffee and oranges.

Some of these products already saw declines in this year’s harvests.

The first exhaustive report on climate change in South America’s giant predicts that temperatures could be three to six degrees C higher by 2100, and says agricultural losses will be one of the most notable effects.

The report’s chapter on agriculture estimates that the sector will suffer some 3.1 billion dollars a year in losses after 2020.

“If temperatures continue to go up and down, like what is happening, we will have strong waves of heat and cold and losses in agricultural productivity,” Eduardo Assad, a researcher with Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, and one of the authors of the report, told IPS.

Some of the food products mentioned in the report are staples of the Brazilian diet.

That means “we are without a doubt talking about food security,” Carlos Rittl, the head of the climate change and energy programme of WWF-Brazil, told IPS.

The report is the first of a series of three to be published by the Brazilian Panel on Climate Change, which was created in 2009 by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of the Environment.

This first volume, which focuses on the scientific aspects of global warming, is a compilation of studies by 345 researchers.

It was presented at the first national conference on climate change, held Sept. 9 to 13 in the southern city of São Paulo. The next two volumes will come out in October and November.

The data from the first volume will be included in the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, part of which will be published on Sept. 27.

The heat, aggravated by a shortage of rainfall, could reduce the water levels in the country’s rivers and lead to a decline in groundwater supplies if emissions of greenhouse gases are not reduced, the report says.

“We have already been affected,” said Rittl, who has a doctorate in ecology. “We are suffering increasingly frequent extreme meteorological events, storms, flooding, intense rains, associated with landslides and other disasters like the ones we had in the hilly areas of Rio de Janeiro (in 2011) or extreme drought like what we have seen in the Northeast,” he said.

These droughts can drag on “for years, leaving agriculture without water and people without drinking water, and accelerating the desertification process,” he added.

In the Amazon jungle, rainfall could decline by 45 percent. A drop in water in the rainforest, where a large number of hydroelectric dams are being built, would pose risks to the country’s energy supply.

In the pampas grasslands in the south and southeast, rainfall will rise 40 percent, causing more floods, Rittl said.

“In very poor areas of the Northeast, subsistence farming will suffer severe consequences, aggravating poverty and fuelling migration to urban areas,” he added.

Food supplies in Brazil depend heavily on family farming. “But in some regions, it won’t b possible to produce crops anymore,” he said.

Assad, however, stressed that the report did not reach the conclusion that food insecurity would increase in Brazil, although “a possible change in the geography of agriculture should be expected,” he said.

Researchers at Embrapa and the University of Campinas show that the coffee-growing areas of the southeast will no longer be suitable for the crop.

Embrapa is already working to develop more climate-resistant strains of coffee. It is also seeking more adaptable soy, maize and sorghum, as well as a kind of bean tolerant of high temperatures.

The report does not offer news with respect to climate scenarios, which have already been projected in Brazil. But because it systematises existing knowledge while revealing gaps in information, it is a roadmap for future research.

In 2009, Brazil committed itself to cutting greenhouse gas emissions between 36 and 39 percent, based on two scenarios of GDP growth.

The government says it is already two-thirds of the way towards that goal, thanks to the marked reduction in the deforestation rate.

But although advances have been made in that area, and a low-carbon agriculture plan (ABC) has been drawn up, climate change “is not a priority issue for the government” of Dilma Rousseff, according to Rittl.

He compared the 1.6 billion dollars spent by the government on ABC in 2011 and 2012 to the nearly 50 billion dollars in agribusiness incentives.

“The big investment is still in traditional agriculture, which produces emissions,” he said.

Agriculture and energy “together account for 90 percent or more of the country’s emissions,” the expert said.

Assad mentioned things that are being done, such as investment in mixed agricultural systems – farming, livestock and forestry, recovery of degraded grasslands, greater use of direct planting or no-till farming, and biological fixing of nitrogen.

“We are implementing systems that capture, instead of emitting, carbon,” he said.

The aim is to reach 2020 with 20 million hectares cultivated using these methods. ”If monoculture continues, we’ll have problems, because with more rain and moisture, there will be more pests and plant diseases,” he said.

The expansion of the main monoculture crop, soy, is one of the causes of soil degradation and deforestation.

“The big agricultural sectors that used to believe that climate change wasn’t important now see that they are also vulnerable, and have become our allies,” Assad said.

But all of these methods and plans will fall short if the different ministries, “which do not communicate among themselves, do not start working together,” said Rittl. “We have to be much more prepared for the consequences if we’re going to confront this.”

A family farm in the state of Rio de Janeiro, with a crop system adapted to the local impacts of climate change. Credit: Fabiola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 25 2013 (IPS)

It took Brazil four decades to overcome food insecurity and earn a place as a major global food supplier. Now its experiences will contribute to the evidence base for a new initiative that seeks to reconcile agriculture and the conservation of biological diversity.

“Although there are some who consider Brazilian agriculture to be aggressive and destructive, we want to share another vision for the rest of the tropical belt, which is home to the poorest countries and those who suffer the greatest food insecurity,” Maurício Lopes, president of the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency EMBRAPA, told Tierramérica*.

The Bridging Agriculture and Conservation initiative was launched in July in Rio de Janeiro by a group of global agricultural, conservation and sustainability leaders. Lopes was one of them.

The Brazilian Foundation for Sustainable Development (FBDS) and Bioversity International, a non-profit research-for-development organisation based in Rome, created the initiative.

The goal is to gather, over the course of two years, scientific evidence from the work of 25 researchers in different parts of the world, and present the international community and governments with economically viable measures.

“Brazil managed to transform large tracts of poor and arid soils into fertile areas. That was our first revolution,” said Lopes. “Then we ‘tropicalised’ crops: we brought genetic resources from different parts of the world and created the concept of tropical agriculture.”

The current challenge for Brazil is to promote another revolution integrating agricultural and forestry systems.

“The country still has 60 percent of its natural virgin forests, and we want to keep them that way, by managing them intelligently. No other country has an agricultural sector that is moving so determinedly towards sustainability as Brazil,” he added.

EMBRAPA estimates that between 50 and 60 million hectares of degraded pasture land – areas that were occupied between the 1970s and 1990s – have now been rendered productive again through recovery technologies.

“Most of the developing countries in Africa have been given only solutions based on the classical industrial model of agriculture,” explained Emile Frison, the former director general of Bioversity International. However, he noted, “the majority of the farmers are small-scale farmers and the solutions that have been provided so far have not addressed their needs. They are still poor.”

There are no “magic solutions” that can be applied everywhere, so what is needed is a new approach in which scientists and farmers work together, he told Tierramérica.

Ann Tutwiler, the new director general of Bioversity International, stressed the need to solve “multiple equations”.

The aim of the new initiative is “to look at different solutions that can help solve more than one equation, both local and global. We can identify production practices that can conserve biodiversity, reduce environmental impact and maintain or improve yields. We can identify crops that will improve nutrition and provide ecological services,” Tutwiler told Tierramérica.

The Bioversity International director criticised the “artificial division” between the nature conservation community and the agricultural sector, which is responsible for supplying the world’s population with food.

One point that everyone agrees on is the need for an agenda with incentives and government policies.

“If we don’t have that supporting policy in environment and agriculture, it is very hard to engage business, farmers and others,” said Tutwiler.

Previous efforts have proven unsuccessful.

Between 2005 and 2008, the pioneering International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was carried out, resulting in a final report signed by 60 governments which called for the promotion of policies guided by the best scientific knowledge available. Nevertheless, the initiative soon fell into oblivion.

The president of the FBDS, Israel Klabin, believes that the IAASTD and the policies recommended were definitely a step in the right direction.

In his view, the assessment “served to inform new policies in several countries and certainly in the UN agencies, the GEF (Global Environment Facility) and the World Bank,” Klabin told Tierramérica. However, the added, “the process of transformation is a long-term process and needs to be continuously reinforced.”

“We are seeing several global efforts and initiatives underway such as soy and beef roundtables, which are multi-stakeholder initiatives involving the mainstream industry aimed towards responsible production that does not harm nature or people,” he noted.
After a lengthy consultation process, the IAASTD report presented different options and scenarios. It highlighted the need to rethink agricultural science not just to achieve yield gains and lower costs for large-scale farming, but also to focus agricultural research towards the needs of small farmers in diverse ecosystems and to areas of greatest needs.

Klabin stressed that a key difference between the IAASTD and the newly launched initiative is that the latter is a bottom-up effort, guided by scientists, business and organisations devoted to these issues, as opposed to a top-down initiative driven by governments or the UN.

“Our initiative is based on studies backed by the best existing science in terms of both agricultural technologies and environmental considerations, including climate change, the decarbonisation of the agricultural sector, and changes in the use of fertilisers, of which the most harmful are nitrogen fertilisers,” he said.

According to Tutwiler, “it is important to engage the large farmers. There are some things that they can do to change their practices and make better use of biodiversity. There are solutions, but you have to change the mentality.”

For her part, Marion Guillou, a board member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), believes the first step will be to overcome obstacles, challenges and risks.

“Then we have to choose what we will do as an original body and choose the nexus between agriculture and biodiversity. We will gather scientific evidence of where we should insist and then a set of recommendations,” she said.

The group will meet at international community forums and hopes to influence discussions on the Millennium Development Goals, climate change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

“We will be having discussions in international forums in the next years, and we will have something to say. We know it will take two years to gather all that,” said Guillou.

For U.S. biologist Thomas Lovejoy, the man who introduced the term biological diversity to the scientific community in 1980, the novelty of the new initiative is the integration of conservation and agriculture to avoid a conflict that could be detrimental to both the planet’s future and agricultural production itself.

The idea is to look at agriculture as embedded in a natural landscape, added Lovejoy, the biodiversity chair of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

“We need to produce tighter systems. The ideal agriculture is the one that doesn’t produce any waste or pollution. This is a really serious issue in agriculture worldwide and it ends up going to hydrological systems and coastal waters, creating dead zones without oxygen,” Lovejoy told Tierramérica.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Field of soy in Não-Me-Toque, in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Credit: Nilson Konrad/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 30 2013 (IPS)

Ten years ago, Brazil yielded to agribusiness pressure and legalised the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) soy. Today it is the world’s second leading producer of GM crops, surpassed only by the United States.

Transgenic soy had been grown clandestinely in Brazil since the second half of the 1990s.

In 2003, the adoption of Decree 4680, which stipulated the labelling of foods with a genetically modified organism (GMO) content of at least one percent, was considered a landmark decision.

But the most definitive step in this direction was taken by the administration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) through its authorisation of GM soy through successive “provisional measures”, which temporarily allowed the legal sale of crops that were being illegally grown in the south of the country with GM seeds smuggled in from Argentina.

Finally, in 2005, the adoption of the Biosafety Law established the National Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio), which is responsible for assessing and approving or rejecting applications for the cultivation and sale of GMOs.

Two years later, another law created the National Biotechnology Commission to coordinate and implement a general policy on biotechnological development.

Plant diseases, pests and invasive species are the main causes of financial losses in agriculture, especially due to the difficulty of monitoring and controlling them, according to agricultural engineer João Sebastião Araújo, from the Department of Agronomy at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

“In this context, in 1996 a new technology was introduced, transgenesis, with a variety of maize that contained proteins derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt),” providing the maize with the bacterium’s insecticidal properties, Araújo told Tierramérica.

“It became one of the most commonly used technologies in agriculture in the United States, and quickly came to account for the majority of maize crops grown in that country,” he added.

The emergence of this technology was followed by a new escalation in the use of fertilisers, new crop varieties, agricultural machinery and the introduction of entomotoxic (insecticidal) molecules, “all aimed at achieving bigger crop yields,” said Araújo.

This new technological package was then promoted by transnational corporations in countries like Brazil, which is viewed as “an exceptional market” due to its vast areas of soy, maize and cotton plantations, he explained.

As a result, considerable pressure was exerted by these corporations to gain government authorisation for the use of transgenics, with the promise of greater efficiency and lower costs.

According to Céleres, a consulting firm that specialises in the agribusiness sector, GM crops occupied 37.1 million hectares of land in Brazil during the 2012-2013 agricultural year, which reflects an increase of 14 percent (4.6 million hectares) over the previous year.

The leading GM crop is soy, with 24.4 million hectares planted in 2012, accounting for 88.8 percent of total soy production.

GM varieties accounted for 87.9 percent (6.9 million hectares) of the winter maize harvest. As for the summer maize crop, transgenic varieties cover 5.3 million hectares, or 64.8 percent of the total area planted.

Meanwhile, GM cotton makes up just over 50 percent (547,000 hectares) of the crops planned for the 2012-2013 agricultural year, according to Céleres.

Araújo noted that Brazil is highly competent in agricultural research and that its scientists have achieved “exceptional results” and contributed to crop yields that were unimaginable in the past.

However, despite the technological advances made, there are still insufficient answers for a number of concerns about GM crops, he said.

“Caution is needed so as not to use this technology without the necessary discretion. Today, Europe is convinced that its impacts go much further. We are talking about a very recent technique. In Brazil it dates back only 10 years, in Europe, 13 years, and in the United States, 17 years,” he added.

Maurício Lopes, president of the government agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, emphasised another aspect.

The tropics are the world’s most challenging region for agriculture, due to the impacts of climate change and the need to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by this human activity, he said.

“We need to make use of the entire technological arsenal available to us. We believe that modern biotechnology, nanotechnology, new sciences and new paradigms are important. Brazil cannot say no to these techniques, because the current challenges are enormous,” Lopes told Tierramérica.

Lopes believes that the results of these past 10 years have been positive overall, but that it is important to make intelligent, planned and careful use of these new tools.

“We are in favour of transgenesis. We understand that there is a framework of methods and procedures for using it safely,” he noted. At the same time, however, he is critical of the fact that biotechnology remains under the control of a handful of global actors, such as agrifood corporations.

EMBRAPA is currently working on the development of new varieties of beans, tomatoes and papayas.

“We are testing a GM bean that is resistant to a terrible disease, known as bean golden mosaic virus, which is transmitted by an insect. This product has already been developed by EMBRAPA and we are now testing it,” said Lopes.

The next frontier will be vegetables. Brazilian scientists have already obtained a modified lettuce that contains large concentrations of folic acid.

“Folic acid is a key component in the diet of pregnant women, because of its importance for the nervous system development of the foetus. We are testing it and it will have to pass a long battery of tests. But it is a product which might be on our tables in the future,” he said.

While the proponents of GMOs claim that they can be a tool to combat hunger and reduce the use of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and micro-fertilisers, environmentalists warn of the risks they pose for agricultural biodiversity.

The environmental organisation Greenpeace says the release of GMOs into the environment can lead to the loss of plants and seeds that constitute the world’s genetic heritage.

“We defend a model of agriculture that is based on agricultural biodiversity and does not use toxic products, because we understand that this is the only way we will have agriculture forever,” says a Greenpeace statement.

Moreover, the group stresses, there is no consensus in the scientific community regarding the safety of GMOs for human health and the environment.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Biofortified food crops growing in a municipal garden in Itaguaí. Credit: Courtesy of EMBRAPA

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 17 2013 (IPS)

In less than 10 years, consumers throughout Brazil will have access to eight biofortified “superfoods” being developed by the country’s scientists. A pilot initiative is currently underway in 15 municipalities.

Biofortification uses conventional plant breeding methods to enhance the concentration of micronutrients in food crops through a combination of laboratory and agricultural techniques.

The goal is to combat micronutrient deficiencies, which can cause severe health problems like anaemia, blindness, impaired immune response and development delays. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, micronutrient malnutrition affects two billion people around the world.

These efforts in Brazil began a decade ago, when the government agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA, initiated the BioFORT project as part of an international alliance for the development of crop varieties with higher concentrations of essential micronutrients.

EMBRAPA chose eight foods that are staples of the Brazilian diet: rice, beans, cowpeas (black-eyed peas), cassava, sweet potatoes, corn, squash and wheat.

“We are working on increasing the iron, zinc and provitamin A content. These are the nutrients most lacking not only in Brazil, but in the rest of Latin America and the world as well, the cause of what we call hidden hunger,” food engineer and BioFORT coordinator Marília Nutti told Tierramérica*.

Iron is key. Half of Brazil’s children suffer from some degree of iron deficiency, said Nutti.

The scientists are working on the breeding of plants of the same species, choosing seeds that exhibit the best traits in terms of micronutrient content.

“This is not transgenics. We want a varied diet. Biofortification attacks the root of the problem and is aimed at the poorest sectors of the population. It is scientifically viable and economically viable as well,” she stressed.

The project is supported by HarvestPlus and AgroSalud, research programmes that are operating in Latin America, Africa and Asia with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and various international development agencies.

How much more nutritious are these new foods? The iron content of the beans, for example, has been raised from 50 to 90 milligrams of iron per kilogram. The cassava, which normally contains almost no beta-carotene, now contains nine micrograms of this Vitamin A source per gram.

The beta-carotene content of sweet potatoes has been boosted from 10 micrograms per gram to a whopping 115 micrograms. And the zinc content of rice has been enhanced from 12 to 18 milligrams per kilo.

In Itaguaí, an industrial municipality 70 kilometres south of Rio de Janeiro, some 8,000 preschool children are already benefiting from these extra nutritious “superfoods”.

With a population of around 110,000, Itaguaí has an annual gross domestic product of 14,000 dollars, with most salaried workers earning two minimum wages, about 600 dollars a month. These conditions made it an ideal location for EMBRAPA to kick off the project, distributing the food grown to the municipality’s public schools, where it is used to prepare school lunches.

For now, the municipality is growing sweet potatoes, squash, beans and cassava on a one-hectare plot that is also used to train the family farmers who supply the schools.

“Itaguaí is a model municipality. This is the third year in a row that we have won the award for the best school lunch management. We have very ambitious plans to quickly reach the entire municipal education system in partnership with all of the family farmers,” said Ivana Neves Couto, the municipal secretary of environment, agriculture and fisheries.

The system encompasses 62 schools and 17,000 students. In 2010, the local authorities incorporated the nutrient-enriched foods in school lunches at 13 preschool centres, with a total enrolment of around 8,000 children.

The goal now is to include all of the municipality’s family farmers in the project, and within two years, to offer biofortified foods in all of its schools, as well as stores and public markets in the city.

One factor that works in favour of the new foods is the natural curiosity of children. “When we tell them that these foods have more vitamins, and they see the deeper colours (of the biofortified crops), they are eager to try them out,” Couto told Tierramérica.

Brazil is the only country working with eight biofortified crops. Bangladesh, Colombia, India, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda are all conducting research on one crop each.

The challenge, said Nutti, is for biofortification to be adopted as a matter of national policy for the promotion of food security, following the example of Panama, which has already incorporated it on the government agenda.

The Brazilian initiative is currently in the pilot stage of cultivation, with crops now being grown in 11 states. A total of 15 municipalities are currently using the foods for school snacks and lunches.

Although the project was initiated in Itaguaí, the focus for the future is on states in the Brazilian Northeast, such as Maranhão, Piauí and Sergipe, which are the country’s poorest.

In total, there are now some 67 farming units and 1,860 family farmers directly involved in the production of biofortified crops.

This is a rather small scale for a country with 5,570 municipalities and a population of around 200 million.

A diet lacking in iron and zinc can cause anaemia, reduced work capacity, immune system impairments, development delays, and even death. Anaemia is the leading nutrition-related problem in Brazil.

Some 10 million dollars has been invested in the EMBRAPA project, which currently involves 15 universities, as well as a number of research centres and municipal governments.

In 2014, the agency plans to carry out an assessment of the project’s nutritional impact on the population, by measuring the results achieved with its “superfoods” in comparison with conventional food crops.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.