Tag Archives: food security

Agriculture in Zimbabwe

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This piece was posted by Betty, Programmes Officer, FYF UK Office

Small scale Zimbabwean farmer

The future of farming in Zimbabwe?

On Thursday 18th March I attended a lecture by Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Ian’s subject was “New land, new livelihoods: agrarian change in Zimbabwe following land reform.”

I was interested to find out the current situation in Zimbabwe as FYF is involved in a planning exercise with several Zimbabwe NGOs with a view to supporting them in the near future.

Land reform commenced in 1979 with the signing of the Lancaster House agreement and was intended to redistribute land from the minority white to the majority black population. Before this, white people, who formed less than 1% of the population, owned over 70% of the arable land, including the best. Their subsequent eviction has been blamed for famine which left two-thirds of the population of Zimbabwe facing severe food shortages (Wikipedia).

Ian Scoones has conducted detailed research in Masvingo in the south-east of Zimbabwe which challenges a number of myths about the situation in Zimbabwe and found a much more complex and to a certain extent more optimistic situation than is usually portrayed. He agreed that is has been a tough decade with variable rainfall, a decline in GDP per capita, rampant inflation and a reduction in inputs to agriculture. But he challenged the view that agriculture has completely collapsed. What he found was that there had been a massive shift from large scale to small scale production, leading to a reduction in the amounts of the high value crops associated with exports such as wheat, tobacco, tea and coffee. There had been a corresponding increase in crops for consumption, figures for which are often not included in official statistics.

Farmers demonstrate the methods they have used

Demonstrating small-scale farmer innovation

He dispelled another myth – that there has been no investment in agriculture in Zimbabwe in the last decade. In fact he found that investment has averaged $2,000 per household, with some farmers accumulating cattle. This is a good hedge against inflation.

Although there were a significant number of workers displaced from the big estates around Harare, Ian has also found that there has been significant generation of agricultural work, although much of it is temporary, poorly paid and female.

Ian believes that there is great economic potential in agriculture in Zimbabwe, but that a major rethink is required among both policy makers and donors, to shift the policy discourse from the assumptions rooted in the colonial era to the current situation.

FYF’s participatory approach will enable us take up this challenge. Through our participatory planning process we aim to design a project that both draws on the skills and the knowledge that people already have and that responds to the needs they identify. As a result our work will make a lasting difference to their lives.

To read more the fact that we are returning to work in Zimbabwe please visit our website.

Deliberating costs lives

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There have been a couple of disheartening developments this week.
The World Food Summit in Rome represents an opportunity for world leaders to address the growing food security crisis. However it looks likely that leaders will be signing a vague declaration which lacks targets or deadlines for actions to reduce global hunger.

This strikes a familiar tune. Time has apparently run out for securing a legally binding climate deal at Copenhagen. On Sunday Barak Obama backed plans to delay a formal pact on climate change until next year. This will have a serious effect on food security. As UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon said in his opening speech at the World Food Summit “there can be no food security without climate security.”

1 in 6 people on the planet are already facing life-threatening hunger. Lack of targets and delayed deadlines could spell disaster for many more people living in developing countries. These aren’t just statistics – these are people’s lives.

Help challenge this situation! Here are a few things you can do. They may not seem significant but they are all a part of a vital wave for change.
• Make sure that the voices of some of the world’s poorest people are heard: Embed/ post/ e-mail a link our video ‘Climate change: Listening to the voices of rural women’
• Participate in The Wave on December 5th.
• Find out where The Age of Stupid is showing near you and go along with all your friends.

Reflection on Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution

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Fascinating debate at Times Online about the merits and drawbacks of the Green Revolution.

“For someone of my generation, growing up under postwar food rationing, the idea that food would always be plentiful and cheap seemed about as likely as a portable phone that you could carry around with you.

For many of us the dire predictions of Thomas Malthus were all too credible. Malthus had advanced the dismal theory that human populations would always grow faster than their food supply. It meant you could forget all your grand ideas about progress. Every social advance was destined to be brought to nothing by famine.

The singular achievement of the agronomist Norman Borlaug, who died at the weekend, was to take away this age-old fear, at least for those of us in the rich West”…..

Read more

Trees “vital for food security” in Africa

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Integrating fleshy plants and trees into farming systems can help overcome food security challenges

NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (IRIN) – Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry – integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say.

Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors.

“How do we, in a world of more than six billion people, rising to perhaps over nine billion, feed everyone while simultaneously securing the ecosystem services such as forests and wetlands that underpin agriculture, and indeed life itself in the first place?” Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), posited at the second World Congress on Agroforestry in Nairobi.

“We can empower people – not to wait for others to do something for them – but to take the initiative, one tree at a time,” Steiner said. “Trees are one of nature’s most ingenious answers to many of our problems.”

Agroforestry helps supply fodder, fruit and nuts as well as trees and shrubs that produce gums, resins and valuable medicines.

Steiner said agroforestry may have many roles to play in the new landscape of rewarding countries for their natural or nature-based services.

“Firstly it offers the potential for maximizing sustainable food production in the zones surrounding natural forests while also boosting biodiversity and other ‘natural infrastructure’.

“Secondly, it offers an opportunity for timber production and thus alternative livelihoods to meet perhaps a supply gap that may emerge under a fully-fledged REDD [Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation] regime.

“Thirdly these agroforestry areas can also potentially secure flows from carbon finance in their own right.”

Better REDD

REDD is a strategy to help local communities conserve forests, including funding these efforts through governments and market-based mechanisms, such as trading the carbon stored by forests as credits to greenhouse gas-emitting industries.

Trees such as the Faidherbia albida, a leguminous acacia-like tree, are especially useful.

“Faidherbia goes dormant at the beginning of the rains and deposits abundant quantities of organic fertilizer on to the food crops to provide nutrients and increase yields, totally free of charge,” said Dennis Garrity, World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) Director-General. “They are fertilizer factories in the food crop fields.”

The leaves and pods of the Faidherbia, which are adapted to a wide array of climates and soils from deserts to humid tropics, provide fodder in the dry season too.

Garrity said: “The much higher food prices… have exacerbated the pain of hunger in hundreds of millions of households. The standard solutions just aren’t working. The question is, what are we as agroforestry scientists going to do about it? What are we going to contribute to sustainable solutions?”

With shrinking forests, he said, “the rising demand for tree products will have to be met from farm-grown sources. Clearly, agroforestry science has much to offer in overcoming the food security challenges in Africa, and elsewhere in the world.”

Tree cover

According to a 24 August report by ICRAF, “tree cover is a common feature on agricultural land”, and represents over one billion hectares of land.

“Agroforestry, if defined by tree cover of greater than 10 percent on agricultural land, is widespread, found on 46 percent of all agricultural land area globally, and affecting 30 percent of rural populations,” stated the report.

Namanga Ngongi, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), said: “Seventy-five percent of Africa’s farm lands are degraded, and deforestation is taking place at four times the global average, destroying 1 percent of our forests every year.”

Agroforestry alone could remove 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 50 years, meeting about a third of the world’s total carbon reduction challenge, according to ICRAF studies.

Carbon payback

Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai suggested that subsistence farmers might be more willing to invest in farming trees if there were carbon credit revenue guarantees.

UNEP recently launched a Carbon Benefits Project in the catchments of Lake Victoria, Niger, Nigeria and China, which seeks to find a standardized way of assessing how much carbon is actually locked away in vegetation and in soils under different land-management regimes.

This has been a major challenge for African smallholders seeking to access the carbon market. Preliminary findings are expected within 18 months.

According to Steiner, economic incentives are required to reverse deforestation and forest degradation.

“…Simply locking away forests to secure their carbon as if they are the Queen’s jewels, or putting up the modern equivalent of a Berlin Wall between forests and people, is almost certainly folly and almost certainly a recipe for disaster,” he said.

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‘Feeding Africa’ – Find Your Feet in The Guardian

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FYF Director Dan Taylor was asked to write a comment on an article in The Guardian ‘Feeding Africa.‘ Visit the comment for a fascinating debate on the future of agriculture in Africa.

In the Guardian’s editorial (Feeding Africa, 29 July) the suggestion is made that, without improved seed varieties and fertiliser, African agriculture is a lost cause. This cannot go unchallenged. Farming in the UK elicits a peaceful picture of sheep grazing on green pastures, large fields of crops, and tractors. This image is far from the reality of the farms that produce the majority of Africa’s food. The average African farm is less than a hectare, the farmer is normally a woman and her main implement of cultivation is the hand hoe – this situates African agriculture in a very different context.

The editorial cites “subsidised seed and fertiliser” as the reason for Malawi’s farming transformation, “more than doubling productivity in a single year”. More than 25 years of working in rural Africa has taught me that this is an oversimplification of a very complex set of structural constraints and one that lulls us into a false sense of security. The suggestion is that if you get modern seeds and fertiliser to farmers then Africa’s food insecurity is solved. This modernist assumption that the industrial model of agriculture can solve Africa’s problems simply returns us to the failed policies of the 1960s and ignores the deleterious environmental impact of high input agriculture.

This puts Malawi’s “success” story in a different light. Malawi’s over-dependence on maize for national food security is short-sighted. Input subsidies do not target the poorest and the strategy depends on continued donor support, thereby raising questions of affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices. Since the scheme is subject to state patronage, it breeds farmers’ dependence on the state.

In attributing the success of the Malawian scheme to farming inputs alone, your leader pays insufficient attention to the optimal rainfall that Malawi experienced over the past agricultural seasons. Droughts and floods in Africa have put paid to best intentions; at some time in the future crops will fail again, at great cost to Malawi’s farmers.

The conclusion that “growing more food … is the part that matters most” is unhelpful since it overlooks the question of longer-term sustainability. Hunger is an abomination, but alleviation in the short term is merely food aid in a different form. A permanent solution is required. We need alternatives to monocultures and fossil fuels. My organisation, Find Your Feet, promotes agroecology – agricultural systems that more closely mimic the natural ecosystems that have served African farmers for millennia. These resource-conserving approaches reorient attention from single crops to diversified risk-reducing strategies that mitigate the effects of climatic unpredictability, and return control to Africa’s farmers.

Business as usual is not an option: new solutions to new problems are needed and science and technology must play a role. Agroecology challenges us to acknowledge the perspicacity of Africa’s farmers and resist the inclination to transfer to Africa more of the same old package – the technologies, market freedoms and mindsets – that created the food crisis in the first place.

Back to Business? – the G8 Food Security Initiative

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It is expected that the G8 states will be signing up to a new food security initiative this Friday (10th July 2009), with the aim of replacing food aid with more sustainable aid to farmers in the developing world. The US and Japan will lead the way on this initiative, providing $6-8 billion of the proposed $12 billion fund.

At Find Your Feet we are really pleased to see this emphasis on providing more long-term funding for agriculture. However there doesn’t seem to have been any shift from a ‘business as usual’ approach to agriculture that relies on industrial farming methods and free-market agricultural policies. To quote Japan’s prime minister Taro Aso “recipient countries [must be supported] to develop growth strategies with renovated agro-industries.”

According to Olivier De Schutter, the OHCHR Special Rapporteur on the Right to food, the issue isn’t one of merely increasing budget allocations to agriculture, but rather “that of choosing from different models of agricultural development which may have different impacts and benefit various groups differently.”

This echoes our belief that, in the light of a changing climate and increasing pressure on the world’s resources, decision makers at the G8 must, as the IAASTD report puts it “dramatically increase their investments in smallholder ecological farming systems.” This could have a serious impact on food security in Africa because, as an important UNCTAD and UNEP study Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa showed, organic or near-organic agriculture practices in Africa outperformed conventional production systems based on chemical-intensive farming. (visit our website to read more)

The same goes for free-market agricultural policies. A recent report by Action Aid ‘Let Them Eat Promises: How the G8 are failing the billion hungry’ says that “developing countries must shift their focus away from export crops, back to sustainable local production for local markets.”

“If the G8 is indeed serious about its commitment to confront hunger,” writes Anuradha Mittal in Foreign Policy in Focus, “the member countries must stop the steady drumbeat of proselytizing for free markets and technological solutions to hunger.”