Investing in entrepreneurs will help make the food system more sustainable. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2016 (IPS)

Investing in new entrepreneurs who bring a holistic approach to food sustainability is one way that the food movement can overcome mounting global challenges from environmental degradation to food waste.

“I grow food, I feed people, body and minds. We must look at the food system at large,” Washington told IPS during the recent Food Tank Summit.

Karen Washington, is a 62 year old community activist who co-foundered the movement Black Urban Growers. After decades of working as a physical therapist in the Bronx, New York City, she decided to become a food entrepreneur advocating low-income communities to have inclusive access of to fresh, healthy food and a fair market.

“I am active, it is not about talk, it is easy for people to talk, you can look at my hands, I also talk but I farm as well.”

Washington is a member of a community garden in the Bronx and also grows collectively in a three acre piece of land in Chester, New York. She grows vegetables and flowers selling to local markets and restaurants.

As a health care professional Washington saw her patients having problems with their diet and, ultimately, with their health.

“They were developing diet related diseases like type two diabetes, hypertension and obesity. And all of this had to do with the food they were eating. I looked at my patients holistically and saw they were eating the wrong thing”.

An holistic approach to food systems must also address the racial divide in the production and consumption of food.

The face of agriculture in the United States is a white male farmer. As a matter of comparison, New York state has 55,000 white farmers but only 150 are black. “If you look at some states there are no black farmers, so we felt that this was something we had to bring out and expose, racism that continues to persist in the food system,” said Washington.

“We needed to have our own stories and seek for a black leadership on agriculture. There was no place like it, where black young people could see black leadership in action or have a conversation that affected black neighbourhoods, and also to find out we could get together and look at solutions,” she said.

Activists, entrepreneurs and food experts agree there is an urgent need to reinvent the cycle of food, empowering local based solutions and intersecting with economics, education, health, environment and, of course, “the four letter word ‘race’ that no one talks about”, said Washington. “We have to look to those intersections and move the full system in the right direction”.

Supporting entrepreneurs like Washington is one way that the food system can become more sustainable, experts at the two-day summit agreed.

“We have to create a new alliance of people wanting to ensure sustainability for the present generation and also guarantee the future generations can meet their demands and needs,” Alexander Muller, leader of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) hosted project TEEB for Agriculture & Food (TEEBAgriFood), told IPS during the summit.

“If we look at the whole cycle, we see we cannot guarantee that the future generations can feed themselves and, therefore, we have to act,” said Muller.

Around one billion people suffer from hunger worldwide, and more than two billion have food related health problems like diabetes and obesity. The global food system also relies on increasingly fragile resources. The world is losing 24 billion tons of fertile soils a year because of erosion and the food system is currently losing about 70 percent of all water withdrawn from natural cycles.

“Waiting would only increase the problems. We already see that major agriculture production systems are at risk. We need to know the true price of our food and have clear signals on the markets that sustainable food in the long-run is cheaper than unsustainable food,” said Müller.

The summit featured more than 75 speakers from the food and agriculture fields – such as researchers, farmers, chefs, policymakers, government officials, and students – that came together to discuss on topics including food waste, urban agriculture, family farmers, and farm workers.

They agreed that supporting sustainable agriculture is a a matter of urgency. The food movement is at the beginning of transforming a complex system with multiple actors, the time is now, warned Danielle Nieremberg Founder and President of Food Tank, a research organization dedicated to cultivating individuals and organizations to push for a better food system.

“A lot of innovations that farmers are using in the fields cover a great potential to be scaled up,” Nieremberg told IPS. “We have things like climate change conflicts, and we really need to move forward if we are going to make changes and leave this planet in good enough conditions for future generations,” she said.

For Jason Clay, the senior vice president of Food & Markets at WWF, there is a need to increase efficiency and change the way we value food.

“If we can reduce and eliminate waste, that would be half of the new food we need to produce by 2050. We have to double food production by that year. It also means 10 percent of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and more than 20 percent of water used to produce food that is going to be wasted,” Clay told IPS.

Clay said that bringing efficiency, conscious consumption and infrastructure to food distribution, especially in developing countries, are relevant strategies to help enhance the food cycle.

“Governments should also be investing in rehabilitating land rather than subsidising business as usual. This is an opportunity to do better,” said Clay.

For Clay and also for Muller, it is important to ensure that the positive signals from the food movements are growing faster than the negative signals of destroying the environment.

The attention on food and linking the act of eating to sustainability are the key issues. Without changing the food systems this planet will not become sustainable and the way society produces food cuts across the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed September 2015 at UN headquarters.

Stacks of confiscated timber logged illegally in the National Tapajos forest, Brazil. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 11 2014 (IPS)

At least half of global deforestation is taking place illegally and in support of commercial agriculture, new analysis released Thursday finds – particularly to supply overseas markets.

Over the past decade, a majority of the illegal clearing of forests has been in response to foreign demand for common commodities such as paper, beef, soy and palm oil. Yet governments in major markets such as the United States and European Union are taking almost no steps to urge corporations or consumers to reject such products.“The biggest threat to forests is gradually changing, and that threat is today from commercial agriculture." -- Sam Lawson of Earthsight

Indeed, doing so would be incredibly difficult given the incredibly widespread availability of potentially “dirty” products, the new analysis, published by Forest Trends, a Washington-based watchdog group, suggests. In many countries, consumers are likely using such products on a regular basis.

“In the average supermarket today, the majority of products are at risk of containing commodities that come from illegally deforested lands,” Sam Lawson, the report’s author and director of Earthsight, a British group that investigates environmental crime, told IPS.

“That’s true for any product encased in paper or cardboard, any beef, and any chicken or pork given that these [latter] animals are often raised on soy. And, of course, palm oil is now in almost everything, from lipstick to ice cream.”

In the absence of legislation to prevent such products from being imported and sold, Lawson says, “There’s always this risk.”

Overall, some 40 percent of all globally traded palm oil and 14 percent of all beef likely comes from illegally cleared lands, the paper estimates. The same can be said of a fifth of all soy and a third of all tropical timber, widely used to make paper products.

Meanwhile, some three-quarters of Brazilian soy and Indonesian palm oil are exported. Such trends are growing in countries such as Papua New Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

While many case studies on these issues have previously been published on particular countries, sectors or companies, the new report is the first to try to extrapolate that data to the global level.

“Consumer demand in overseas markets resulted in the illegal clearance of more than 200,000 square kilometers of tropical forest during the first 12 years of the new millennium,” the report estimates, noting this adds up to “an average of five football fields every minute”.

While much this illegal clearing is being facilitated by corruption and lack of capacity in developing countries, Lawson places the culpability elsewhere.

“It’s companies that are carrying out these acts and they bear ultimate responsibility,” he says. “Big consumer countries also need to stop undermining the efforts of developing countries by allowing these products unfettered access to their markets.

Logging lessons

The ramifications of degraded forestlands, of course, are both local – impacting on livelihoods, ecosystems and human health – and global. Standing, mature forests not only hold massive amounts of carbon but also continually suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Between 2000 and 2012, the emissions associated with illegal deforestation for commercial agriculture each year was roughly the same as a quarter of the annual fossil fuel emissions in the European Union.

The new findings come just ahead of two major global climate summits. Later this month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will host international leaders in New York to discuss the issue, and in December the next round of global climate negotiations will take place in Peru, ahead of intended global agreement next year.

The Lima talks are being referred to as the “forest” round. Some observers have suggested that forestry could offer the most significant potential for global emissions cuts.

This rising global consensus around the importance of maintaining forest cover in the face of global climate change has led to significant international efforts to tackle illegal logging. And these have met with some important success.

Yet Earthsight’s Lawson says that some of the companies that were previously involved in illegally cutting tropical hardwoods are now engaging in the illegal clearing of forests to make way for large-scale agriculture.

“The biggest threat to forests is gradually changing, and that threat is today from commercial agriculture,” he says. “What we need now is to repeat some of the efforts that have been made in relation to illegal logging and apply those to agricultural commodities.”

The European Union, for instance, is currently in the process of implementing a bilateral system of licensing, in order to allow for legally harvested timber to be traced back to its source. Similar bilateral arrangements, Lawson suggests, could be introduced around key commodities.

Proven legality

Such a process would charge governments and multinational companies with ensuring that globally traded commodities do not originate from illegally cleared forestlands. In essence, this would create a situation in which the base requirement for entry into major markets would be proven legality.

Today, of course, the choice of whether or not to purchase a product made with ingredients potentially sourced from illegally deforested lands is up to the consumer – if that information is available at all. Yet such a new arrangement would turn that responsibility around entirely.

“All of this onus on the consumer bothers me – it really shouldn’t have to be so difficult to make these choices,” Danielle Nierenberg, the president of Food Tank, a Washington think tank focused on sustainability issues, told IPS.

“The fact is, consumers are still blind to these issues – despite the growth of the local food movement in Western countries, there remains significant demand for a range of inexpensive products. That’s why the real action has to come from the corporate side, and governments need to take a bigger interest.”

The United States has landmark legislation in place that bans the use of illegally sourced wood products in the country. By many accounts, that legal regime has been notably effective in cutting off the country’s massive market to those products.

Yet for now, Nierenberg says that there is no political appetite in Washington to do something similar regarding agricultural commodities.

“Instead, the real opportunity for government initiative comes from the developing world,” she says. “They need to invest more in small- and medium-scale farmers, protect their lands from land grabs, and invest in simple agricultural technologies that actually work. That’s where the real change could happen.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

The administration of President Barack Obama pledged to massively expand U.S.-protected parts of the southern Pacific Ocean. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Michelle Tullo
WASHINGTON, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

A first-time U.S.-hosted summit on protecting the oceans has resulted in pledges worth some 800 million dollars to be used for conservation efforts.

During the summit, held here in Washington, the administration of President Barack Obama pledged to massively expand U.S.-protected parts of the southern Pacific Ocean. In an effort to strengthen global food security, the president has also announced a major push against illegal fishing and to create a national strategic plan for aquaculture.

“If we drain our resources, we won’t just be squandering one of humanity’s greatest treasures, we’ll be cutting off one of the world’s leading sources of food and economic growth, including for the United States,” President Obama said via video Tuesday morning.

The “Our Ocean” conference, held Monday and Tuesday at the U.S. State Department, brought together ministers, heads of state, as well as civil society and private sector representatives from almost 90 countries. The summit, hosted by Secretary of State John Kerry, focused on overfishing, pollution and ocean acidification, all of which threaten global food security.

In his opening remarks, Kerry noted that ocean conservation constitutes a “great necessity” for food security. “More than three billion people, 50 percent of the people on this planet, in every corner of the world depend on fish as a significant source of protein,” he said.

Proponents hope that many of the solutions being used by U.S. scientists, policymakers and fishermen could serve to help international communities.

“There is increasing demand for seafood with diminished supply … We need to find ways to make seafood sustainable to rich and poor countries alike,” Danielle Nierenberg, the president of FoodTank, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“For instance, oyster harvesters in the Gambia have really depleted the oyster population, but a U.S.-sponsored project has been able to re-establish the oyster beds – by leaving them alone for a while. The same strategy – to step back a bit – worked with lobster fishers in New England.”

Nierenberg predicted that with diminishing wild fish, the future of seafood will be in aquaculture.

“What aquaculture projects need to do now is learn from the mistakes made from crop and livestock agriculture,” she said. “It doesn’t always work – for instance, maize and soybeans create opportunities for pest and disease. Overcrowding animals creates manure.”

*Seafood fraud*

The Obama administration also hopes to jumpstart the United States’ own seafood production capabilities. According to a White House fact sheet, the United States today imports most of its seafood, though highly regulated U.S. aquaculture is widely seen as particularly safe.

Early on in his first administration, President Obama created a new national ocean stewardship policy which also sought to streamline more than 100 U.S. laws governing the oceans and coordinating the country’s approach to these resources.

This week’s actions will further simplify aquaculture production, while aiming to ensure that U.S. aquaculture does not exceed the population size an environment can naturally support.

“The U.S. is really good at innovating, but not at producing, largely because of the amount of regulatory hurdles,” Michael Tlusty, director of research at the New England Aquarium, told IPS. “Roughly 17 different agencies have roles in aquaculture regulation, so streamlining the process will put all of them together at the same table to efficiently provide permits.”

Tlusty also applauded the administration’s announcement to create a comprehensive programme to deter illegal fishing and seafood fraud.

“We can’t turn a switch and fix the ocean – we need lots of different strategies,” Tlusty said. “Cutting carbon dioxide emissions is very important … as is cutting illegal, underreported and underegistered fishing.”

Advocacy groups have likewise applauded the initiatives.

“President Obama’s announcement is a historic step forward in the fight against seafood fraud and illegal fishing worldwide. This initiative is a practical solution to an ugly problem and will forever change the way we think about our seafood,” Beth Lowell, campaign director for Oceana, a watchdog group, said Tuesday.

“Because our seafood travels through an increasingly long, complex and non-transparent supply chain, there are numerous opportunities for seafood fraud to occur and illegally caught fish to enter the U.S. market.”

Oceana points to recent research noting that nearly a third of wild-caught seafood coming into the United States comes from pirate fishing.

The World Wildlife Fund, a major conservation group, called Obama’s announcements “a turning point” for the world’s oceans.

*Breakneck acidification*

Ocean acidification constitutes a particularly broad and worrisome danger to marine life, shellfish production and ocean-based food security, and received prominent attention at this week’s summit. This process has come about particularly from carbon dioxide emissions resulting from air pollution, which changes the delicate acidity level of the oceans.

“The entire ocean is acidifying, and at an incredibly rapid pace … more in the last 15 years than it has in the whole last 50,000 years,” Catherine Novelli, under-secretary for economic growth, energy and the environment at the U.S State Department, told IPS.

“If you’ve ever had a fish tank, you’ll know that it is an incredibly delicate balance. And once it gets out of balance, things can’t survive.”

Novelli pointed to innovate projects such as one undertaken by the Prince of Monaco, which aims to determine where acidification is taking place and to offer early warning systems for fish farmers.

“It absolutely affects shellfish farmers, as shellfish are very sensitive to these acidity levels,” said Novelli.

“There’s been some pioneering work done off the coast of Oregon, where shellfish farmers have worked with the state government to monitor the acidification. If the acidity level is changing, they can shut off their water intake from the ocean and preserve their shellfish until waves pass and go in a different direction.”

While the conference looked at a variety of short- and medium-term possibilities for monitoring and adapting to such problems, the discussions also recognised that the issue will likely be subsumed under broader climate change negotiations.

Queuing for food at an NGO centre in Gaza. Credit: Erica Silverman/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 5 2013 (IPS)

As the international community fleshes out a new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be unveiled next year, civil society activists and U.N. officials agree their success will hinge on policies that address the nexus of poverty, hunger and environmental degradation.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is making a strong push for a politically realistic set of SDGs, points out the latest grim statistics: more than one billion people are still living in extreme poverty and over 840 million are perilously hanging on the edge of starvation and hunger."Industrial agriculture, resource extraction by corporations and the international trade system all work against the hungry." -- Anuradha Mittal

Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of the U.S.-based NGO Food Tank, told IPS, “The urgency of finding ways to alleviate hunger, obesity, and poverty in the world is more important than ever before.”

As the SDGs to replace the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are being developed, there is a real opportunity to fight the root causes of hunger – poverty and lack of access to and affordability of food – while also finding economically sustainable ways of protecting the environment, she added.

And government, businesses, farmers, and civil society all recognise that the time to act is now – especially as climate change is taking a bigger toll all over the world, said Nierenberg, a former director of the Food and Agriculture Programme at the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.

A U.N. high-level panel, co-chaired by heads of government from Indonesia, Liberia and UK, provided a roadmap last May aimed at eradicating poverty and hunger – possibly by 2030. How that target can be achieved will be left in the hands of an Open Working Group, comprising some 30 U.N. member states, which is expected to formulate its recommendations for SDGs next year.

The proposed SDGs will be an integral part of the U.N.’s post-2015 economic agenda and a successor to the MDGs targeted to end in 2015.

The MDGs aimed at reducing by half the number of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

But that goal is unlikely to be reached by most of the world’s poorer nations, primarily in Africa.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, assistant director general and coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organisation, told IPS the FAO, like the other Rome-based agencies, remains committed to the single goal on food security and nutrition.

“FAO has already committed itself to completely eradicating hunger and malnutrition,” he added.

Sundaram said it is always difficult to prove that the MDGs contributed to reducing the number of people living in hunger.

The 1996 World Food Summit had in fact committed to halving the number of hungry people, in contrast to MDG (1c) which set the target of halving the proportion or share of hungry people. By defining the original poverty line primarily in terms of what it takes to avoid being hungry, the MDG (1a) poverty target indirectly gave attention to hunger as well, he said.

And by setting up a High-Level Task Force on World Food Security in response to the food price spikes in early 2008, the secretary-general has also drawn attention to the MDG hunger target.

Last year, Ban appointed FAO Director General Jose Graziano da Silva as his vice-chair while announcing a “Zero Hunger Campaign” at the Rio+20 summit in June 2012.

Such efforts have continued to focus attention on the MDG hunger target, noted Sundaram.

Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute, told IPS agriculture and hunger are key elements of the discussion around a proposed new set of SDGs.

“It is essential for future agriculture and food security policies to be thought and designed in the context of climate change, environmental degradation and economic globalisation,” she added.

Nierenberg told IPS the fight against food loss and food waste is just one example of how farmers, businesses, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can work together to establish better infrastructure to protect crops or develop better ways of getting food that would have otherwise been wasted to people in need.

In the post-2015 agenda, there is great potential to look at agriculture as the solution to some of our most pressing social and environmental challenges, whether its unemployment, conflict, urbanisation, and even climate change, she noted.

Mittal pointed out that the most effective ways to reduce hunger and and poverty in the world are also recognised as the best ways to address the challenges of environmental degradation and climate change.

These include actions and policies in favour of sustainable, low-input agriculture, agro-ecological methods that should primarily target the rural poor in developing countries, and primarily family farms and herders.

“It is an opportunity to have an impact on several fronts. But it is also a challenge as industrial agriculture, resource extraction by corporations and the international trade system all work against the hungry and contribute significantly to environmental degradation and climate change,” Mittal said.

She said the U.N.’s new development agenda must recognise and address this threat, and take decisive steps against the current development paradigm dominated by the promotion of foreign investment, which often translates into extraction of resources versus actual development for the people.

Poland wastes at least 8.9 million tonnes of food every year. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Marina Lalovic
ROME, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

If all food loss and waste around the world could be recovered, half the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, could be fed. Yet people throw away a third of food produced globally, an issue that inspired the theme of these year’s World Food Day, sustainable food systems for food security and nutrition.

While World Food Day, held Oct. 16, set the goal of completely eliminating food waste before increasing food production, much of the global population remains uneducated and uninformed about the problem, so many obstacles must be overcome before such a feat can be attained.

“I come from a country where people don’t even try to harvest agricultural products because the price of these products is so low and the work is too hard,” Albanian chef Fundim Gjpali told IPS while working at the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s World Food Day event organised at EATALY, a slow food hub in Rome.

Today, Gjpali is fighting food waste in the land of abundance: Europe. For World Food Day, he specially prepared a dish of recovered food. “I took tomatoes, bread and Italian ricotta cheese that were about to be thrown away, and I made a very decent dish,” he said."In Cuba...until you have eaten everything you've bought, you don't go to the market."
-- Lesmer Oquedo Curbelo

Other countries, such as Cuba, represent the land of food recycling. “With the embargo in Cuba, we don’t have other choices,” Lesmer Oquedo Curbelo, a Cuban chef, told IPS. “A Cuban toreja, fried bread, is an example of how people could use stale bread.”

He compared food-buying practices in Cuba to those in Western countries. “In Cuba we buy food day by day,” he described. “Until you have eaten everything you’ve bought, you don’t go to the market.”

According to research by the FAO, nearly 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night. Even though food production will have to increase by at least 70 percent in order to feed a population that will reach 9 billion in 2050, the world wastes more than a third of the food that it is producing. And this waste affects everyone, regardless where they are born or live, and covers the entire food supply chain from the farm to the table.

According to FAO estimates, in developing countries, food waste tends to occur upstream of the food chain (six to eleven kilograms per capita in 2010), meaning that the food is lost just after production. In developed countries, however, loss occurs downstream, or in distribution, catering and domestic consumption (95-115 kilograms per person).

“While in the western world we only talk about the waste, in the developing countries the buzzword is the food loss,” Andrea Segrè, director of the Department of Agro-Food Science and Technology, University of Bologna and president of Last Minute Market, told IPS. Food waste differs from loss in that waste is literally throwing away food, while loss is due to a lack of storage. Many developing countries have plenty of food but no way to preserve.

“In India, for instance, the problem is not the lack of food but the storage,” explained Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Emma Bonino. She stressed that regardless of personal habits, people must be aware of different ways to reduce food waste.

“On an individual level, we are supposed to think about the size of our food portions. We should also think about what and where we are buying food,” José Graziano da Silva, director-general of FAO, told IPS.

Filling the gap

Andrea Segrè described to IPS a Last Minute Market, a spin-off society founded in 2000 that implemented the first professional system of recycling the unsold food of big distributors by filling in the gap between supply and demand. LMM doesn’t directly manage unsold food, instead offering services to prevent and reduce the production of waste.

“But our goal is to close the LMM, because we want to reach zero food loss,” Segrè added. “In that kind of world, we are not going to need projects like LMM.”

Federico Spadini from OXFAM Italy, offered IPS five ways people can help alleviate this issue: reduce the consumption of meat and dairy products, reduce food waste, be aware of how much water and electricity one uses while cooking, eat seasonal products, and sustain small farmers instead of corporate agriculture.

An estimated 800 million people working in agriculture around the world live below the poverty line, and approximately half of the world’s inhabitants who suffer from hunger are smallholder farmers.

“Supporting smallholder farmers will go a long way toward alleviating food insecurity and increasing incomes where most needed,” says Ellen Gustafson, co-founder of Food Tank, a non-profit working in environmentally sustainable ways to alleviate hunger and other food-related ailments.

Unique efforts to eliminate loss

Peruvian chef Elsa Javier, who deals primarily with ethnic food, has been devising creative ways to reduce food waste, such as by combining Italian Mediterranean food and Andean biodiversity.

“If we add Andean quinoa to Italian vegetable soup, you’ll have a perfect combination and this dish might last much longer than an ordinary one,” she explained to IPS. “In order to fight food waste, we have to unite gastronomic cultures. Ethnic food in developed countries is completely wasted and underestimated by the locals. So by unifying food cultures, we might help stop this kind of food waste.”

Others have turned to technology to combat food waste. ICT4G (ICT for Good), an Italian group that uses technology to foster economic and social development, has developed a smartphone application called “Bring the Food” that facilitates food donations.

“If I have a restaurant, thanks to this application, I can spread the word that I have, for instance, ten boxes of unsold pizza,” Pietro Molini, an  ICT4G collaborator, told IPS. “Our app users are mostly charity associations but also individuals not necessarily belonging to lower classes.”

More than 768 million people are without safe drinking water. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 2013 (IPS)

Just 17 years from now, nearly half the global population could be facing water scarcity, with demand outstripping supply by 40 percent.

“We must address unsustainable use,” U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared earlier this week at the Budapest water summit in Hungary. “This is the International Year of Water Cooperation. And we need joint efforts to guarantee a fair share for people and the planets essential ecosystems.”

As 2013 draws to a close, the world body itself is getting mixed reviews on the progress made in a more than decade-long effort to resolve the world’s water and sanitation problems.

The numbers remain staggering: more than 768 million people are without safe drinking water and over 2.5 billion without adequate sanitation worldwide.

But neither of the demands is expected to be met fully when the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – primarily to reduce and eradicate extreme poverty and hunger – reach their 2015 deadline.

Barbara Frost, chief executive of WaterAid, told IPS the MDG target for drinking water – reducing by half the number of people lacking one of the world’s finite resources – has been met globally.

“And the U.N. and its agencies should be rightly praised for their major contribution to this achievement,” she said.

Still, many African nations, and the African region as a whole, are off-track in meeting this commitment to their people, she added.

Last month, a petition with more than one million signatures was delivered to world leaders who were in New York for the General Assembly, urging them to amplify the global need for access to safe sanitation and drinking water – “basic human rights that millions of people are dying to obtain every day.”

The petition was created by a coalition of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including WaterAid, and led by End Water Poverty.

The signatures came mostly from South Asia (670,000) and Africa (180,000) – two regions that have some of the lowest levels of access to sanitation and water.

“Every signature collected offered an opportunity to inform and educate people to their rights as well as highlight the commitments that have been made by governments to improve access,” Frost said.

According to the U.N. chief, water holds the key to sustainable development.

“We need it for health, food security and economic progress. Yet, each year brings new pressures,” Ban said Tuesday.

Ban said water is wasted and poorly used by all sectors in all countries. That means all sectors in all countries must cooperate for sustainable solutions.

“We must use what we have more equitably and wisely. We cannot expect governments to do this alone,” he added.

Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, told IPS while the world has been able to meet the MDG of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, there are still some the 768 million people who don’t have clean water.

“That’s roughly twice the population of the United States,” she pointed out.

Nierenberg said much more needs to be done to ensure that clean water gets to the people who need it the most – in places like Haiti, Bangladesh, Niger, and other countries, where not only clean water is scarce, but also adequate nutrition is non-existent.

Research organisations, governments, and the funding and donor communities need to put more investment in making sure agriculture – which makes up 70 percent of water use – conserves water, she said.

“Until the world invests in innovations – agroforestry, cover cropping, more efficient irrigation, and other practices – we won’t be able to make sure everyone has access to clean water,” she said.

The solutions are out there, they just need more attention, more research, and ultimately more funding and investment, she stressed.

In July 2010, the General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring water and sanitation a basic human right.

Asked what progress has been made since then, Frost of WaterAid told IPS the latest figures show that between 2010 and 2011 nearly 100 million people gained access to water while over 70 million gained access to sanitation.

“While much of this progress has been taken up through similar increases in population, we should acknowledge that these services are being provided in large numbers to those who don’t have,” she said.

Recognition by the General Assembly has also been important for those who do not have formal rights to the homes and land that they live on – like the over 800 million living in slum areas, Frost noted.

The right to water and sanitation has given these communities a counterweight with which they can argue more forcefully that they should still have their right to water and sanitation realised through the provision of these services, she added.

Frost said in order to ensure that everyone, everywhere has access to safe water and sanitation, the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda must include a specific goal and the enabling targets for universal access to these basic but essential services by 2030.

Without everyone, everywhere having the essential access to water and sanitation, the dream of eradicating poverty in our lifetimes, will remain just that, a dream, she said.

An estimated half of fresh produce in Papua New Guinea is lost between harvesting and marketing. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

A quarter of all food calories grown for human consumption is being lost or wasted, either purposefully or otherwise, according to new estimates.

With high food prices now widely seen as a new normal even as food demand across the globe continues to rapidly expand, advocates and development experts here are calling for concerted national and international action in a way that has not yet been seen.“To a great extent, the scope of this food waste is a technology failure." -- WRI's Craig Hanson

“The world faced an analogous failure of efficiency in the 1970s with energy,” states a new working paper produced jointly by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Resources Institute (WRI), an environment and development advocacy group based here.

“In the face of record oil prices and growing demand, the world waged war on energy efficiency. Yet a ‘war on waste’ has yet to be waged when it comes to food.”

The study estimates that the amount of land used to grow this wasted food would equal the size of Mexico and use some 28 million tonnes of fertiliser. The reasons behind this squandering of resources, however, are multifarious – running from inefficiencies in storage on farms and during transportation to market, to consumer confusion over how to deal with “old” food.

The new findings coincide with the release of surprising new statistics on the extent of hunger across the globe. According to a series of studies published Thursday, malnutrition is responsible for some 45 percent of all deaths of children under five years old – far higher than the roughly one-third that was previously believed.

“To a great extent, the scope of this food waste is a technology failure, with, for instance, farmers in Africa still not having the electricity that they need for cold storage,” Craig Hanson, a WRI co-author of the new working paper, told IPS.

“On the one hand, we can say that there are many low-cost ways that donors could help out in this situation. But we also need to recognise that agricultural research into post-harvest issues has been tiny – just five percent of overall investment. That’s a huge imbalance.”

Hanson says that even if donors and philanthropists could double that figure, to just 10 percent of overall agricultural research, “you’d get a huge gain in the available calories for people.”

10 billion more

On the face of it, the levels of food wastage appear to be broadly similar between developed and developing countries. Around 56 percent of total wastage is taking place in industrialised countries, versus around 44 percent in the developing world.

Indeed, South and Southeast Asia are responsible for nearly a quarter of all food waste globally, while the countries of industrialised Asia are accountable for another 28 percent.

Yet those figures mask far greater per capita discrepancies, particularly with regards to North America. The U.S. government estimates, for instance, that the country alone wastes around 40 percent of its food supply.

Most of the world’s regions are wasting between 400,000 (South and Southeast Asia) and 750,000 (Europe) calories per person every day, the new report states. Yet in North America, that figure jumps more than 1.5 million, based on 2011 statistics.

According to current international standards, an active adult requires between 2,200 and 3,000 calories per day.

Yet “Big efficiencies suggest big savings opportunities,” the paper notes. “Reducing food loss and waste could be one of the leading global strategies for achieving a sustainable food future.”

Of course, the looming spectre in this issue is the roughly 10 billion more people that may live on the planet by 2050 – and the estimated 60 percent more calories required to feed them, over 2006 levels.

Simply cutting today’s rate of food waste in half, to around 12 percent, by 2050 would save around 22 percent of that projected shortfall, the new investigation suggests.

Still, the onus appears to be on producers, transporters – and consumers, found to be responsible for around 35 percent of all food waste. Yet experts say these characteristics open up important opportunities for targeting women, who around the world are primarily responsible for both agriculture- and home-related decision-making.

“Women produce, process, cook and distribute food, and so helping them find ways to reduce food waste and loss in the field, in storage, at the consumer level and at home is key,” Danielle Nierenberg, a co-founder of Food Tank, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“The more that they can have access to resources, education and infrastructure, the more they’ll be able to prevent loss and waste – benefiting not only their families, but their incomes and the environment.”

50 percent reduction

Here in the United States, food wastage has reportedly grown by 50 percent over the past four decades. On Tuesday, the country’s central environmental and agricultural agencies announced a major new initiative aimed at educating consumers and companies about the scale of the country’s food waste problem.

The European Union has gone still farther, setting a goal of reducing its food wastage by half by 2020. That’s tremendously optimistic (it’s still up to individual E.U. countries to figure out how to implement the goal), but according to WRI’s Hanson, European companies are expressing significant enthusiasm over the target.

“Targets do amazing things,” he says. “The current awareness-raising is the first step – I think we still have to get to the wave of people realising that we have a real issue here. But setting a target will need to be the next step, and even voluntary is a good start.”

With the recent publication of a report by a United Nations-appointed panel, discussions on the next phase of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) framework is now taking concrete shape. One of the draft goals proposed in that report would include reducing “postharvest loss and waste” by a certain percent, which is yet to be agreed upon.

Hanson suggests 50 percent for that goal.

He and his fellow researchers are also calling for an international protocol that would offer a standard methodology for countries and companies around the world to ascertain how much food is getting wasted and where.

“I’m a big believer in the idea that what gets measured gets dealt with,” he says. “Just like we saw with regards to climate change and emissions a decade ago, the same thing now needs to take place with food loss and waste. We’re not going to start getting a handle on this unless we know how much we’re losing and where it’s being lost.”

Women working in their vegetable gardens at the Capanda Agroindustrial Pole in Angola. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

When the United Nations launched its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) back in 2001, two of its primary objectives were to halve extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 and promote gender empowerment worldwide.

But the links between the two remain unhinged, warns Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of Food Tank, a food think tank “focused on feeding the world better”."Unfortunately, women typically lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension services." -- Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank

Asked about the relationship between the two, she told IPS: “Without improving gender equity and women’s empowerment, it will be impossible to improve food security.”

She pointed out that women make up at least 43 percent of the global labour force working in agriculture; and in some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, women make up 80 percent of all farmers.

“Unfortunately, women typically lack access to land, credit, markets, inputs, education, and extension services, making their role in food production much harder than it has to be,” she said.

Nierenberg said recent findings from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) suggest that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, yields would increase by 20-30 percent, helping raise agricultural output in developing countries and reducing the number of hungry people in the world by 12-17 percent.

“The MDGs on gender equity and food security need to be more intertwined because we can’t have one without the other,” she said.

“I hope when the new set of Sustainable Development Goals (under the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda) are announced, food security will also include women’s empowerment,” said Nierenberg, who is an expert on issues relating to sustainable agriculture and food.

Asked about the upcoming 38th FAO sessions in Rome Jun. 15-22, she said, “I think it’s extremely relevant. I know FAO has made huge efforts to put a gender lens on many of its projects, while I don’t see women farmers specifically mentioned in the agenda.

“I think they would be remiss in not discussing the importance of women in agriculture,” she added.

Among the substantive policy matters to be discussed at the upcoming conference is FAO’s gender policy and the U.N. system-wide Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (SWAP).

Launching FAO’s flagship annual report Tuesday, Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said while the world has registered some progress on hunger, there was a still a long way to go.

“FAO’s message is that we must strive for nothing less than the eradication of hunger and malnutrition,” he said.

The report points out that while some 870 million people (out of a global population of seven billion) remained hungry in 2010-2012, this was just a fraction of the billions of people whose health, well-being and lives were blighted by malnutrition.

The social and economic costs of malnutrition are “unconscionably high”, amounting to perhaps 3.5 trillion dollars per year, or 500 dollars per person globally, says the FAO director-general.

In a report to the Human Rights Council last December, Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, underlined the range of human rights instruments, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which guaranteed the right to food “without discrimination”.

But despite these requirements, he noted, discrimination against women remains pervasive in all spheres of life, resulting from laws that are themselves discriminatory.

The report singled out unequal access to productive resources such as land and to economic opportunities such as decent wage employment; unequal bargaining position within the household; gendered division of labour within households; and women’s marginalisation from decision-making spheres at all levels.

“A successful strategy for strengthening the rights of women in support of the realization of the right to food requires a whole-of-government approach, coordinated across various ministries, including those responsible for health, education, employment, social affairs and agriculture,” the report said.

Asked if eradication of poverty and hunger can be resolved without empowering women, Nierenberg told IPS: “Absolutely, not.”

She said until women have the same access to resources as men, “our efforts to alleviate hunger and poverty will be stymied.”

She said De Schutter has clearly outlined how lack of women’s empowerment is directly related to food insecurity.

“Improving food security and women’s rights have to go hand in hand to make sure that women, children, men, and whole communities and countries are well-nourished and improving their incomes,” Nierenberg said.

She said women are the key to food security and investing in their role as food producers and providers of food will be crucial to helping reduce hunger and improving nutrition.

“And we need to recognise women’s multiple roles – not just as producers and providers, but that they’re also business women who need to make a fair wage, they’re innovators sharing their knowledge with others in their communities, and they’re stewards of the land who deserve to be recognised for the ecosystem services they provide that have long-ranging benefits,” she added.

By Joan Erakit
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 8 2013 (IPS)

Over 40 million children under the age of five were overweight in 2010. In fact, since 1980, the worldwide prevalence of obesity has doubled, according to the British medical journal the Lancet.

Danielle Nierenberg

Food Tank co-founders Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafason see deep systemic problems with our food system that go beyond simple shortages or overindulgence.

From poverty to unemployment, women’s empowerment to education, Food Tank believes that solutions are most readily available when communities have basic information on the best practices to address local agricultural, environmental and social problems.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: At Food Tank, you guys bring up an interesting disparity that our generation faces these days: some people not having enough food while others eat too much. What do you see happening?

A: It’s ironic. We produce more food than ever before, but the world still has nearly one billion people – or one out of every seven – who go to bed hungry each night. In addition, there are another 1.5 billion people that are overweight or obese. These might seem like opposite problems, but they’re part of the same problem – a food system that doesn’t nourish people. We have been using calories and yields as our only measurements.

Most of the research and investment in agriculture is focused on starchy staple crops, instead of crops that are nutrient dense, or protect water supplies, or enhance soils, or promote gender equity, or empower youth.

Q: Do you see African nations embracing sustainable solutions in regards to combating hunger? Are there ways in which local communities can start on a smaller scale in implementing solutions?

A: African farmers are more than just farmers – they’re businesswomen and businessmen, they’re entrepreneurs, and they’re stewards of the land who deserve to be recognised for the ecosystem services they provide that at have widespread, global benefits.

African farmers and communities are implementing solutions, including rainwater harvesting, solar drip irrigation, planting preventing post harvest losses, planting indigenous crops, etc. that are helping improve nutrition, increase incomes, and protect the environment.

But farmers need more investment, research, and investment. African governments, however, need to start investing in farmers. Since the 1980s, agriculture’s share of global development aid has dropped from over 16 percent to a meager four percent. And only a handful of African nations allocate 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture as part of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program, or CAADP.

Q: How do you suggest reaching out to women about global food issues?

A: Women make up to 80 percent of the agricultural labour force in sub-Saharan Africa, but they don’t have the same access to credit, land, and extension services. In places like Zambia, traveling theatre groups are using plays to show communities the important role that women play in farming.

Q: What can you tell us about the environment and its relationship to global food issues?

A: Water scarcity is increasing, soil fertility is decreasing, and climate change is the likely culprit in more extreme weather events, like the devastating drought that hit the United States last year and the disastrous floods that killed or displaced millions of farmers in Pakistan in 2010 or the drought that is taking place in the Sahel now.

Food production is dependent on predictable rainfall, nutrient rich soils, and predictable weather. Although agriculture contributes about 30 percent of all greenhouse gases, it is also the human endeavor most dependent on a stable climate.

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