Ella Mazani a smallholder maize farmer from Shurugwi, central Zimbabwe, uses her mobile phone to buy inputs, sell produce and understand the climatic conditions for the next cropping season. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe, Jul 17 2019 (IPS)

Ella Mazani is a mobile phone farmer.

“My mobile phone is part of my farming. It supports my farming and my family’s welfare through the services I get via the phone,” the smallholder maize farmer from Shurugwi in central Zimbabwe quips. 

Mazani grows maize and finger millet and keeps livestock. As a farmer she often waits for the next visit by an agriculture extensionist to her village so she can access advice on farming and what the next cropping season would be like. Extension officers are intermediaries between research and farmers, often providing them with advice on new farming methods and providing update on climatic changes etc.

That has changed. Mazani now buys inputs, sells her produce and maintains a funeral policy for her family, all with a tap on her mobile phone.

She subscribes to the EcoFarmer, a mobile platform developed by Econet Wireless, the largest telecommunication services company in Zimbabwe. The EcoFarmer mobile platform provides innovative micro insurance for farmers to insure their inputs and crops against drought or excessive rain. They access these services via sms and voice-based messages on their mobile phones.

Econet Wireless have partnered with the Zimbabwe Farmers Union (ZFU) – which represents more than one million smallholder farmers – to offer the ZFU EcoFarmer Combo, a bundled information and financial service.

Members pay one dollar for a membership subscription. Through it they receive crop or livestock tips based on their farming area as well as weather-based indexed crop and funeral insurance.

“I used to struggle with marketing of my crop but through EcoFarmer Combo, I receive money after selling my produce through my phone,” Mazani tells IPS.

“As a farmer I always want to receive money in cash so I can count it. I thought selling through the mobile phone would cheat me of my money but now I consider this gadget a helper. I dial *144 and get current information on the weather which allows me to plan my farming. I know when to apply fertiliser and when it will rain. I even get notifications of diseases like the fall army worm and [information on] how to treat it.”

Falling yields and rising technologies

As agriculture yields fall, digital services are providing smart solutions that are increasing smallholder farmers’ productivity, profits and resilience to climate change—a threat to agriculture.

“Climate change has necessitated changes in how farmers cultivate their land to be able to provide food and secure incomes in a sustainable manner; and climate smart agriculture has proven solutions which have to be scaled out to farmers,” Mariam Kadzamira, a climate change officer with Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), tells IPS on the side-lines of a recent meeting held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The meeting reviewed a CTA regional project where farmers from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe are receiving weather information via mobile phones.

The project, which aims to reach 200,000 smallholder farmers by end of 2019, is promoting the use of drought-tolerant seeds and weather-based index insurance to farmers as part of the climate smart agriculture interventions that are accessed by farmers through digital platforms.

Zimbabwean smallholder farmer, Phillip Tshuma relies on weather information via his mobile phone to aid his cropping activities. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

Digitalisation doing it for farmers

A new study titled The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019, published in June, found that an untapped market worth more than two billion dollars for digital services could support farmers improve their productivity and  income.

The study tracked and analysed digital solutions such as farmer advisory services, which provided weather or planting information via SMS or smartphone applications, and financial services, including loans and insurance for farmers.

Nearly 400 different digital agriculture solutions with 33 million registered farmers across sub-Saharan Africa were identified in the study by Dalberg Advisors and the CTA. However, the current digitalisation for agriculture (D4Ag) market is a tip of the iceberg with just a six percent penetration, the report authors say.

In 2018, the digitalisation for agriculture market recorded an estimated turnover of 143 million dollars out of a total potential market worth over 2.6 billion dollars, the study said.

The study found an annual growth of more than 40 percent for the number of registered farmers and digital solutions, suggesting the D4Ag market in Africa is likely to reach the majority of the region’s farmers by 2030.

 “Digitalisation can be a game-changer in modernising and transforming Africa’s agriculture, attracting young people to farming and allowing farmers to optimise production while also making them more resilient to climate change,” said Michael Hailu, director of CTA, as he urged private sector investment in increasing the adoption of this model to help farmers increase yields.

By using digital solutions, farmers saw improvements in yields ranging from 23 to 73 percent, and increases of up to 37 percent in incomes, the report found.

Models that bundled more than one solution, combining digital market linkages, digital finance, and digital advisory services were associated with yet further improved yields of up to 168 percent.

 Michael Tsan, partner at Dalberg Advisors and co-leader of the firm’s global Digital and Data Practice, said digitalisation for agriculture has the potential to sustainably and inclusively support agricultural transformation for 250 million smallholder farmers and pastoralists in Africa.

“Sound digital infrastructure that provides basic connectivity and affordable internet is a prerequisite for smallholder farmers to fully harness the opportunities of digitalisation in agriculture,” Debisi Araba, a member of the Malabo Montpellier Panel and Regional Director for Africa at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), tells IPS via e-mail. “To bridge the digital divide, rural communities need to be better connected to electricity reliable telecommunications and internet connections households, schools and workplaces.

The Malabo Montpellier Panel is a group of 17 African and international experts in agriculture, ecology, nutrition and food security. The panel guides policy choices by African governments towards food security and improved nutrition on the African continent.

“Africa now has the opportunity to leapfrog and leverage the potential benefits of digital innovation in the food system, while using targeted regulation to avoid the risks that digitalisation can pose,” Araba says.

A report launched by the Malabo Montpellier Panel at its annual forum in Rwanda last June highlights promising digital tools and technologies emerging in the agricultural value chain across Africa. The report, Byte by Byte: Policy Innovation for Transforming Africa’s Food System with Digital Technologies analysed the experiences of Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal who are at the forefront of applying digital technologies through policy and institutional innovation.

“Africa’s digital transformation is already underway, and the continent now has the opportunity to leverage the potential benefits of digitalisation and new technologies for agriculture, as well as to avoid the pitfalls that digitalisation can pose,” says Araba.

Governments and the private sector should consider emerging technologies to leapfrog more traditional infrastructure approaches; he says urging that the use of handsets and mobile internet should be affordable and accessible for all agriculture value chain actors.

High prices have a significant impact on the uptake and use of internet and mobile services among smallholder farmers. Although the price for mobile internet in Africa has dropped by 30 percent since 2015, the continent still has some of the highest prices for internet use globally, Araba laments.

Despite immense opportunities offered by digitisation, there are challenges that need to be resolved to maximise its impact in the future. For example, there is low update of digital services among women despite accounting for more than 40 percent of the agricultural labour force.

In 2017, women in sub-Saharan Africa were on average 14 percent less likely to own a mobile phone than men and 25 percent less likely to have internet access, according to the World Bank.

“The mobile phone platform has helped me improve my farming because of the timely information I receive and the ease I have to do financial matters which took a while before. Now I buy and sell without leaving home,” Mazani says.

Ndomi Magareth, sows bean seeds on her small piece of land in Njombe a small town in the coastal Littoral Region of Cameroon. Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance is a consortium of 30 bean-producing countries in Africa and its improved bean varieties has helped transition the legume from a subsistence crop to a modern commodity. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 2 2019 (IPS)

As the weather continues to change and land becomes degraded, the socio-economic security implications are vast. In an effort to tackle these issues, climate-smart agriculture is quickly gaining traction around the world.

According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), 12 million hectares of productive land become barren every year due to desertification and drought alone representing a loss of production of 20 million tons of grain.

Not only is this an economic blow to almost 80 percent of the world’s poor people who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, but hunger levels are also already rising globally.

Such challenges will only be compounded as we must increased food production by 70 percent by 2050 in order to feed the entire world population.

The need for sustainable, climate-smart agriculture is thus clear.

One practice that is gaining momentum is the development of improved, resilient crop varieties which help ensure both food and economic security.

“In light of changing rainfall patterns where the old varieties which are drought-susceptible can no longer be produced under drought conditions, the new varieties which are developed for resilience have made a complete difference by bringing more beans on the table for food security as well as more beans for the market to bring income to the farmers,” one of Pan-Africa Bean Research Alliance (PABRA)’s bean breeders Rowland Chirwa told IPS.

Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture’s Senior Scientific Advisor Vivienne Anthony spoke of the importance of connecting science to the realities on the ground.

“The community of scientists need to connect with the entrepreneurs and people that are investing in the future here in Africa and to work together to improve crops, create jobs, create markets and not sit back as scientists. They need to engage with the business,” she said.

From Theory to Practice

In collaboration with the University of Bern, the Syngenta Foundation has been working to improve Eragrostis tef, commonly known as teff—one of the most important cereals in Ethiopia where over 80 percent of the population live in rural areas.

The seeds have high protein levels and are much better adapted to drought conditions which is an increasingly common experience in the East African nation.

However, the teff plant produces low yields and harvests are not keeping pace with Ethiopia’s increasing population.

With modern genetics and improved farming methods, the project aims to increase yields, putting money into farmers’ pockets.

Demand and access to markets is also essential, Anthony noted.

“Designing a new variety is no different to designing anything somebody is going to buy. It involves understanding the marketplace, and who wants to grow it, use it, eat it,” she told IPS.

“The way to address some of the problems and challenges of agricultural sustainability in Africa is about encouraging markets to flourish that drive opportunity, innovation and entrepreneurship.  We fundamentally believe in market-based approaches as a way of trying to meet the Sustainable Goals, finding a business rationale where everybody wins and it keeps going,” Anthony added.

Similarly, PABRA is a consortium of 30 bean-producing countries in Africa and its improved bean varieties has helped transition the legume from a subsistence crop to a modern commodity.

Beans are among the most consumed and widely grown legume in Africa, taking up over 6 million hectares of land. Eastern Africa sees the highest consumption of beans with people eating as much as 50-60 kilograms every year.

However, one study found that without any adaptation strategies, the yields and nutritional value of common beans will dramatically decline by 2050.

“We have been following more of a preemptive breeding approach where we know the climate is changing and at the same time the needs of the people we are trying to provide products with are also changing,” bean breeder Clare Mugisha Mukankusi told IPS.

Chirwa echoed similar sentiments, stating: “We look at regionally in Africa and see which are the major market classes we can focus on and look at the capacity of our national partners…and develop varieties that are responsive to the environmental needs, human consumption needs, and market demand needs using a Demand Led Breeding (DLB) approach.”

In Rwanda, improved bean varieties increased yields by 53 percent and household revenue by 50 dollars. Without the improved beans, 16 percent more households would have been food-insecure, PABRA found.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), which coordinates PABRA, also helped develop drought-resistant beans which were provided to South Sudanese refugees in order to reduce their reliance on food aid and increase self-sufficiency.

From Sustainable Farms to Table

In addition to designing nutritional legumes that are heat-tolerant and disease-resistant, Mukankusi also highlighted the need to address the entire value chain to ensure there is productivity at the farm level.

This means promoting sustainable crop management practices such as intercropping, which involves growing two or more crops alongside each other, and crop rotation which can help increase soil fertility.

Anthony pointed to the importance of education in demand-led approaches and the business of plant breeding as the Syngenta Foundation in partnership with the Australian Centre for International Agriculture and the Crawford Fund work closely with African Centre for Crop Improvement in Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and Uganda so that local scientists can take the lead.

“Now we have a community of breeders who are trying to do this to really make an impact,” she said.

In light of environmental challenges, the world has already started to see a shift in consumption patterns as plant-based foods gain popularity. Crop breeding may therefore be more essential than ever.

“If we are going to sustain the supply, we cannot sit back but we have to keep pace with the changes. The breeding has to be there and responsive to current and future demands,” Chirwa said.

Heat-tolerant beans at CIAT. Beans and other pulses are called superfoods of the future due to their vast geographical range, high nutritional value and low water requirements. Credit: Ida Karlsson/IPS

By Ida Karlsson
CALI, Colombia, Dec 6 2016 (IPS)

A global food watchdog works around the clock to preserve crop biodiversity, with a seed bank deep in the Colombian countryside holding the largest collection of beans and cassava in the world and storing crops that could avert devastating problems.

On a mission in Peru in the 1980s, Debouck narrowly escaped capture by guerillas.
Plants are the vital elements in our ecosystem that clothe us, feed us, give us the oxygen that we breathe and the medicines that cure us. But one in five of world’s plant species are at risk of extinction.

According to a report launched by experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in May, the biggest threats are the destruction of habitats for farming – such as palm oil production, deforestation for timber and construction of buildings and infrastructure. Global warming is also expected to reduce the areas suitable for growing crops.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that 75 percent of the world’s crop diversity was lost between 1900 and 2000.

“We do not [even] know what we have, and we are losing what we have. Why not try to correct that a bit?” Daniel Debouck of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia told IPS.

Seed bank head Daniel Debouck at CIAT, Colombia. Credit: Ida Karlsson/IPS

Only about 30 crops provide 95 percent of human food energy needs, according to FAO. Dependency on a few staple crops magnifies the consequences of crop failure.

Botanists are already taking extreme measures to save those plant species deemed useful. Some 7.4 million samples are in seed banks around the world, but huge gaps exist.

Way up north, in the permafrost, 1,300 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a so-called doomsday bank buried in the side of a mountain. Within the enclosure sit more than 860,000 samples, representing 5,100 different crops and their relatives.

And located among green sugarcane plantations near Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, a seed bank with the largest collection of beans in the world is housed in a former meat quality lab. The seed bank preserves some of humanity’s most important staple crops and contains over 38,000 samples of beans in all shapes colors, and sizes. Varieties developed at CIAT feed 30 million people in Africa. Every September there is a major shipment to Svalbard to keep copies at the seed bank there.

Beans can grow despite very tough conditions. They are cultivated everywhere except for the poles and infertile deserts. Credit: Ida Karlsson/IPS

The 300 scientists and support staff at CIAT have a mandate from the UN to protect, research and distribute beans and cassava, staple foods for 900 million people around the world. Altogether 500,000 materials have been distributed so far. After the war in Rwanda, CIAT put seeds back in the hands of farmers.

“The seeds from the Americas are absolutely critical for food security in Africa. Without cassava and beans, people would not manage,” Debouck told IPS.

The researchers have garnered seeds from around the world for their seed bank. On a mission in Peru in the 1980s, Debouck narrowly escaped capture by guerillas.

“But we came back with 300 varieties of popping bean and increased the CIAT collection significantly,” he said.

The popping beans can be prepared without cooking. It is enough if they are heated on a hot surface. This could be important in areas where fuel and kitchen facilities are lacking.

The seed bank also stores beans that can offer climate-friendly options for farmers struggling to cope with rising temperatures.

In the basement of an old lab near Cali, Colombia, there are 38,000 samples of beans stored in minus 20 degrees Celsius. Credit: Ida Karlsson/IPS

The heat-tolerant beans developed by conventional breeding by scientists at CIAT are crosses between the modern kind and the tepary bean, a hardy survivor cultivated since pre-Columbian times. Beans that can beat the heat could be essential to survival in many regions.

“The heat-tolerant beans may be able to handle a worst-case scenario of a temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius. Northern Uganda, southeast Congo, Malawi, and the eastern Kenya are not bean producing areas now because of the heat there. But what we have at present at CIAT could expand the bean production there,” Steve Beebe, a senior bean researcher at CIAT, told IPS.

The new findings would not have been possible without CIAT’s seed bank containing wild varieties and related species of the common bean.

Only 5 percent of the wild relatives of the world’s most important crops are properly stored and managed in the world’s seed banks, according a study published in March by the online journal Nature Plants.

Debouck says there is lack of education around food.

“We think we have food security but we are tremendously vulnerable. If the U.S. would experience drought and Europe would have excessive rains, we would all be in trouble,” Debouck said.

Agronomists used to act as a liaison between farmers and agricultural scientists. But during the last 20 years, many agronomists have disappeared and today mostly for-profit agribusiness firms reach out to farmers, according to Debouck. The companies are often interested in selling agrochemicals, he said.

Bean researcher Beebe pointed out that beans and other legumes are self-pollinated plants and seed need only be sold once.

“That is why the industry is not that interested in promoting them,” he told IPS.

A field day conducted to share information with farmers. Credit: Lucía Gaitán

By Kwesi Atta-Krah and Reynaldo Bismarck Mendoza
MANAGUA, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

For Roberto Pineda, a smallholder farmer in the Somotillo municipality of Nicaragua, his traditional practice after each harvest was to cut down and burn all crop residues on his land, a practice known as “slash-and-burn” agriculture.

A widespread practice on these sub-humid hillsides of Central America, it was nonetheless causing many negative environmental implications, including poor soil quality, erosion, nutrient leaching, and the loss of ecosystem diversity. Slash-and-burn allows farmers to use land for only one to three years before the plots become too degraded and must be abandoned.The programme offers farmers like Pineda an easily established yet biologically complex option, combining traditional knowledge with new insights into sustainable land management to maintain crop productivity for many years.

“We used to work in our traditional way, pruning everything down to the ground, and if there was anything left we would burn it,” he said. “The land would be destroyed and things weren’t getting better.”

But about three years ago, Pineda and a group of farmers became involved in an agroforestry programme overseen by a group of partners including the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) as well as Nicaraguan, American, Austrian and Colombian institutions.

The programme works with farmers to enhance the eco-efficiency of their rural landscapes, helping them to introduce stress-adapted crop and forage options and improve crop and livestock productivity and profitability. This helps smallholders not only to improve local ecosystems but also to adapt to extreme climate conditions and safeguard soil fertility and food production over the long term.

“Now we have seen a change,” Pineda said. “We used to yield 10 quintals per manzana, and now we produce between 30 and 40 quintals per manzana. We have improved our natural resources, and trees have grown. Before, we had no trees and there was no rain.”

How it works

The programme offers farmers like Pineda an easily established yet biologically complex option, combining traditional knowledge with new insights into sustainable land management to maintain crop productivity for many years.

Farmers are encouraged to plant a scattering of trees in their croplands, thereby stabilising the hillsides and minimising soil erosion. The trees also capture carbon dioxide, help fix nitrogen in the soil and draw up essential crop nutrients such as phosphorous and potassium from deeper soil layers.

The trees are pruned regularly, and the cuttings are laid around the crops as nutritious mulch, providing them nutrients and retaining moisture to protect them against periods of drought while reducing nutrient leaching. The remaining required nutrients are supplied by eco-efficient use of chemical fertilizers.

The overall result is a more productive, resilient farming system that can withstand the increasingly variable climate conditions of Central America, ranging from extended periods of drought to intense rain, and thus improve income and food security for the rural families.

This is especially important as climate conditions are becoming more unpredictable as a result of climate change. For instance, over a three-year period, the yields of key staple crops such as maize, beans and sorghum increased; farmers obtained secondary incomes from selling surplus wood; and in most plots soil loss was converted into net soil accumulation of 40 tonnes per hectare, as a result of the new methods introduced.

What next?

The project started implementing its activities with a sample size of 16 farm households in north Nicaragua. As these trials proved successful, the system was disseminated to around 300 farmers in the area through Farmer Field Schools and guided visits.

Programs like this are good examples of a new holistic approach to agricultural research put forth by Humidtropics, which looks at the system as a whole – from farm, landscape, province, agro-ecological zone, region – in order to understand how these components interact with each other, and better manage the synergies, trade-offs and overall integrity of the ecosystem within which the farming takes place.

The farmer and her community are central in this research approach, including exploring the specific roles and opportunities for women, men and youth and focusing improving their resilience.

Ultimately, this programme has the potential to reach 10,000 smallholder farmers to help them boost their productivity through the sustainable intensification of their limited resources. Furthermore, its methods can be disseminated through community radio stations and local television networks to reach over 200,000 farm households in Nicaragua and Honduras.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

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