Even as the world prepares for the grand climate meet at Copenhagen this December, a large part of South India has gone under water. And while talks have already begun on coming up with an equitable deal and the very fear that there may be none, over 300 people have already lost their lives while millions are displaced and missing in this global warming related freak weather event, predicted well in advance by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

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Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) may not sound snappy, but its long-term aim is easily expressed: to act as a vegetable ark.  Part of the treaty requires the developed world to fund the preservation of diverse species of food crop around the world.

The funding is provided by richer nations, which have often become variety poor, and given to other nations, which are often poorer but have a wide range of plants which could act as an ‘agricultural insurance’ by maintaining biodiversity in essential crops.

The crops being preserved in this way include potatoes in Peru, corn and beans in Cuba and oranges in Egypt. The varieties need to be preserved to ensure that the planet has a range of foods that are more likely to be able to adapt to challenges ranging from climate change to pollution, from salination to the loss of pollinators like insects to the ability to resist diseases and predators.

Up to 90% of vegetable variety has been lost

Four basic food staples: rice, wheat, corn and potatoes make up more than half the total foodstuffs eaten on the planet, and in this group of staple foods, less than 150 varieties are grown commercially. Wheat has just five major varieties now grown globally on a commercial scale, of the more than 700 recorded varieties, many of which have been lost and others of which are only grown by hobby farmers or in remote districts where the ‘big five’ will not thrive. China alone has lost nearly 90% of the wheat varieties that were grown across the country sixty years ago and India grows only 10% of the rice varieties that appeared in its fields a hundred years ago.

This is not just a loss of diversity – a limited range of varieties means that those grown are more liable to damage by pests or disease. It also leaves many countries open to price hikes in the recently globalised commodity markets, meaning that many people simply cannot afford to buy the staple foods that used to grow in the fields around their houses.

ITPGRFA set up the Svalbard seed-bank last year, and now that a repository for 1.1 million plant varieties exists, it is focusing on the very many crops that can’t have their variety maintained in a seed bank, such as tuberous crops like potatoes.

International treaties depend on funding and have no national accountability

For a long time this part of the ITPGRFA programme looked as if it would never get off the ground because for five years the parties who were funding the seed conservation initiative couldn’t agree how to finance the on-site part of the project nor on contracts that guarantee any commercial use of the diverse species will bring financial benefit to the nations that have been conserving them. And perhaps the best news of all, for those already involved in ITPGRFA, is that the USA may be willing to join the scheme after expressing no interest in it under the previous administration.

Corn varieties courtesy of alecim at flickr under a creative commons licence

Angola has been riven by conflict and it’s more than three decades since the government subsided sugar cane production, but now a 30,000 hectare area of land is to be planted with sugar cane in a dual attempt to establish a biofuel industry and to rebuild the poor agricultural sector which suffered after years of conflict.

Oil rich but food poor

Angola’s economy has been largely dependent on oil and diamonds since the civil war ended in 2002. Now the government aims to recreate some farming sectors. The country used to produce sugar, but for many years the entire sugar consumption of Angola has been imported. Now, in an attempt to decentralise industry away from Luanda, to boost farming and to create new jobs, the sugar cane project is taking shape.

It’s hoped the plantation will produce 280,000 tonnes of sugar from its own processing plant, and that the waste will be used, along with the ethanol harvested from the cane residue, to produce around 217 megawatts a year of electricity.

Foreign investment fears

While this is a multi-layered project, the tendency of African nations to invest in non-food crop is worrying the FAO which says that private and foreign ownership of large tracts of African land could destabilise local communities who will be deprived of access to water, food and other natural resources. The company managing the project, Biocom, is a three way partnership between Brazil’s Odebrecht, Angola’s Damer, and Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company. African governments need support to build the agricultural infrastructure that will allow them to become food secure, but partnership processes like this one are often viewed with suspicion by local people who fear that they will lose their land, or that the crops will be grown or processed in ways that have been outlawed in the developed world.

Sugar cane courtesy of Cristobal Alvarado Minic at Flickr under a creative commons license

Wangari Maathai

She was giving the keynote address at the second World Agroforestry Conference in Nairobi and her concern was that imported tree species often became invasive and when they did so, two things happened. Either the trees took over the ecosystem and then, when they were felled, left nothing behind, or they damaged elements of the environment that were essential to local people and wildlife. She used the example of eucalypts, which are often planted in African agroforestry programmes and said, ‘they [the trees] are over promoted for commercial reasons. These trees are good for beauty but consume a lot of water when they are planted along rivers, wetlands and water shed areas.’ Maathai fears that such plantings cause havoc in Kenya’s complex biodiversity.

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Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

The platforms, called camellones, can be up to eight feet above the level of the fields they support, have two purposes: they protect seeds and crops from being washed away by floods and the water stored in the canals can be used when the river system is low, to irrigate the crops.

The camellone construction system is pre-Columbian dating back to around 1000BC to AD1400, which shows that communities, then, as now, faced the problem of flooding succeeded by drought. And this may have been one of the causes of collapse for those ancient cultures, because when workers were diverted from building and maintaining agricultural systems to joining armies, there may have been famines. In modern day Bolivia, serious floods in the past three years have caused more than £119 million of damage to agricultural systems. It’s hoped that with climate change driving more river flooding and more drought, reverting to old technology could help communities cope with water levels rising even as rains reduce.

Around 400 families have been supported by local and international charities to create camellones in five areas to grow corn, cassava and rice.  The first results look good, as the Amazonian floods have now receded, and where the nutrients in the soil would normally be washed back into the river, the platforms have remained above the floods and conserved the rich vegetative topsoil that can grow better crops than the sandy subsoil.

The downside of ancient systems

If you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, you could very well be right. This kind of preliminary report on an agricultural or technological ‘throw-back’ is often followed by a bleak silence. The reasons for this are often more political than environmental and include:

1) The cost of investment in building and maintaining such systems, which is subsided by charities for three or five years and then the charity funding moves on and nobody is motivated to carry on the work
2) The transfer of local power from hierarchical systems (which are often based on government or international aid and support) to individuals who may be low ranking, illiterate and unable to drive forward change outside their own behaviour
3) The failure to recognise that while subsistence farmers claim to want to be self-sufficient, such projects tend to recruit the young, healthy and confident: all it takes is illness in the family, a child to win a scholarship or a vehicle or house to need substantial repairs and that family is likely to move away from growing crops to eat back into growing cash crops that generate income to meet their needs.
4) Calls on local labour – if a road or resort is built nearby, all the available labour may be pulled from agriculture to work on the cash-generating project.

What such projects need is a longer term investment, along with social support to ensure that the community recognises that the new systems can deliver everything that cash crops or illegal forestry did.

Bolivan market courtesy of PJFurlong06 at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.

Monsoon failure threatens farmers

In India, right now, the monsoon is failing to deliver. Yes, there has been rain most days between June and now, but the actual rainfall has been only a quarter of the usual vast deluge. Around 80% of India’s agricultural land is close to drought conditions, and the monsoon rains will end in September. The fear is twofold: that the rains won’t arrive, and that they will, telescoping immense rainfalls into the last few weeks of monsoon and causing flash floods and subsidence. This year’s rainfalls, so far, are the weakest since 2002, and 2002 was the worst year for Indian agriculture for more than fifty years. Food security is fragile in a country with a young population, greedy for consumer goods, and unwilling to spend hours on cultivating subsistence crops.

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The first food security assessment ever carried out by a UK government has been published, and it says that the country needs to change the way food is produced and the way it is processed, to maintain a healthy and affordable food ‘base’ in the future.

Food security story has changed

While Winston Churchill’s government did undertake food security surveys during World War II, these encompassed food production across the ‘Commonwealth and dominions’ so this new food security assessment is a snapshot of what the UK has been doing well and badly since the early 1950s.

The Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) says that the UK has a strong food system, which is typified by diverse food supplies and a strong distribution network, but will be challenged when it comes to maintaining sustainability in this food supply. The challenge of a growing and aging population is complicated by the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, both of which will require changes to the location of crops and the kind of food grown.  Water is a key issue and the depletion of fish stocks around British territorial waters is a concern.

Food and health

Another key concern is the relationship between food and health and the report says that ‘diet-related illness’ costs the UK ‘billions’ of pounds a year.

The report also contains draft indicators for the sustainability of the food system – once agreed, these indicators will be used to measure future food security issues and are hoped to serve as an early warning system. They will include recognising hikes in oil prices that affect the cost of food production severely.

A final substantial challenge is ensuring that current food production methods doesn’t damage or limit the natural resources on which future food production may depend.

The UK strategy for future food security will be published later in 2009, building on this report and on a consultation process that follows the report’s launch.

Food shop courtesy of Nick Saltmarsh at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Between 16 and 18 November 2009, a World Summit to consider issues of food security will take place at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

The Summit has three interlinked aims:

• To reverse the downward trend of investments in agriculture by returning them to the  17% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) achieved in 1980
• To insure this investment works to remove hunger which is now considered to be a daily experience for more than one billion people
• To double food production for a world population set to reach nine billion in 2050.

Food in crisis, food as conflict

In addition to Summit meetings on these issues, there will be roundtables and break-out meetings on the relationship between financial and economic crises and food security (especially in light of the current global economic downturn), the governance of food security on an international and global scale (an increasingly troubling subject, especially for Africa where the relationship between richer and poorer nations can become strained at borders where ‘food migrants’ cross, particularly, at present, in the case of Zimbabwe) and establishing an early reaction fund for food security.

Invited guests will include Heads of State and Government as well as many FAO and UN dignitaries and representatives of advocacy and third sector groups, and the costs of the summit, which are estimated to be around $2.5 million, will be met by Saudi Arabia.  

FAO Director General, Jacque Diouf said, “I am very grateful to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, for his generous offer to fund this important meeting …There are more than a billion hungry people in the world today and Saudi Arabia continues to be at the forefront of the fight against hunger and poverty.”

African child with kwashiorkor, a hunger related condition, courtesy of venetia joubert at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Leeds University has resumed field trials of genetically modified potatoes just a year after protesters tore up the previous crop.

400 potato plants are being grown to test their modified resistance to a microscopic parasitic worm called a nematode. The failure to inform the public has led to environmental groups claiming the project is ‘underhand’. However, the original three-year permission, granted by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is valid, so the crops can be replanted without having to provide further notice. The land has been protected by fencing and CCTV cameras surrounding the crop and by not telling the public the exact location of the potatoes. DEFRA also says that an independent advisory committee on releases to the environment has said that the experiment will not compromise human health or the environment. Plants on land alongside the research crop will be destroyed when the experiment has finished and the actual field will be left fallow to stop cross-pollination into subsequent crops.

Environmentalists fear contamination and cross-pollination

However, Friends of the Earth (FOE) has said that the potatoes could contaminate other plants near the research site and that farmers, gardeners and people living nearby should know about it the trials.

Food security drives experimentation

This is part of a much wider issue in which the British Government is being heavily lobbied by biotechnology companies who say that warnings of food shortages caused by population increase and climate change mean that biotechnology offers the best chance of food security for the future.

Potatoes courtesy of ColinD40 at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Traditional farming is about to make a come-back across Uganda, according the country’s Agriculture Minister, Hope Mwesigye. Traditionally, Ugandan’s rich soil and fairly abundant rainfall allowed farmers to grow a range of staple foods, from plantains, cassava and sweet potatoes through to grains like millet, sorghum and corn as well as beans, and groundnuts.

Since the 1980s, the major cash crop in Uganda has been coffee, closely followed by tobacco, and then tea and cotton, although the ‘70s and ‘80s saw collapses in the infrastructure which meant that cotton and tea in particular lost their markets and farmers started to sell their staple crops for cash in regional and local markets instead.

Diversification was the message of the 1990s and many non-traditional exports were attempted, supported by the World Bank and the Ugandan Development Bank. So why now does the government want to return to traditional farming practices?

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While you may never have heard of it, in Britain the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) carries a big stick. The Government of the day takes notice of its reports and individual ministers are called to account over failures in their departments if the PAC points them out. This month the PAC has applied its big stick to the British government’s initiatives in addressing the collapse of bee colonies and basically it said that the government’s failure was as catastrophic as the collapses it was meant to resolve.

Despite public awareness and media attention to the problem, less than half Britain’s beekeepers are registered for regular inspection. Furthermore, the research funding meant to help solve the problem is not having the expected effect because the way the funding stream was set up means it has to be shared with other research projects into other insects.

Bees matter in a recession

The situation is economically serious as well as environmentally – the PAC estimate that British agriculture could lose £200 million of crop production if bees continue their current rate of decline. Bees, and specifically honey bees, pollinate some of Britain’s major staple foods including the glaring yellow oilseed rape that fills most fields every summer, apples, pears, beans and raspberries.

The loss of bees in the past two decades has been in part due to varroa mite: a parasite that attaches itself to the drone bees that move from hive to hive. The varroa mite was transmitted to Europe via imports of the Asian honeybee – because the European honeybee does not groom as often as its Asian counterpart, the mite has the opportunity to expand numbers rapidly once it obtains a foothold. These mites then feed off the bees, weakening them and transmitting pathogens and viruses into the bees’ bodies. Untreated colonies die out fairly swiftly unless control measures are undertaken, which is why registering beekeepers is so important. But there are other factors too: loss of habitats such as wild flower meadows, roadside verges and orchards, climate change, multiple pesticides used on pollinated crops and Colony Collapse Disorder. Around 30% of bees disappeared in the 2007/2008 winter and this year’s figures could be as bad, meaning that the UK has only a third of the bees it had four years ago.

Bee schemes don’t please old beekeepers

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has set up a National Bee Unit to provide advice to beekeepers, and created a Healthy Bees Scheme which has resulted in the registration of 1,500 beekeepers with BeeBase, the National Bee Unit’s beekeeper database. Most of these beekeepers are new converts though, rather than those already keeping bees.

There is no answer in sight to Colony Collapse Disorder which is the one cause that might bring those old school beekeepers into a registration scheme. As things currently stand, they fear government intervention and ‘meddling’, being told to move or destroy hives if they are seen as potentially infected or too old to meet current standards, and they can’t see why they should sign up for a scheme that has no discernable benefit to the beekeeper.

Rural beehive courtesy of strife at Flickr under a creative commons licence

You may not have heard of Ug99 yet, but, if its rapid spread continues unchecked, chances are you will not only be hearing about it, but you’ll be paying for it too. That’s because this fast-spreading strain of the fungus that causes stem rust–a seemingly unstoppable plant disease–and is now spreading around the globe and threatening to devastate the world’s wheat harvest.

One hopeful remedy may in fact lay in certain native, durum wheat species (”landraces”) found only in certain African nations–in particular, Ethiopia–which are believed to possess “slow rusting” genes. These native durum wheats are stronger (durum is Latin for “hard”) than7  other strains and originally evolved under much different environmental conditions than European and Western Hemisphere varieties. These durum landraces have most likely evolved slight gene variations as a result. These variations in gene sequences (and/or their expression in the wild), it is believed, can confer survival advantages to the plants when transplanted in a different locale.

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Nigerian forces have been fighting on the Niger delta since May, but international awareness of the problem seems slight. The military have been attacking resistance fighters hiding there, and around thirty thousand civilians are caught in impossible circumstances. They have little food and water, and very little opportunity to get information about their situation out to the wider world.

Are oil companies causing humanitarian crises?

Nigeria has a large population and is also a major oil producer, with over 90% of the oil it exports coming from the Niger delta region. Last week, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) claimed to have cut both the Shell and Agip pipelines in Beyelsa state, but the Nigerian military says this is not true. Shell stated that it was investigating the claim and Agip refused to comment.

An independent report, commissioned by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation in 2006, says that the Niger delta region is one of the five most polluted places on the planet, in large part due to oil spillages. An untestable assertion is that, in the past decade, more than a million tones of oil have been spilled in the delta, damaging the mangrove eco-system that is the fragile margin between saline and freshwater environments in this part of the world. It is also claimed, but unverifiable, that gas flaring from petroleum extraction has led to a level of airborne toxicity that causes acid rain, cancers and birth defects.

These claims cannot be tested because access to the delta is difficult to obtain. For many years the Nigerian government, whether elected or otherwise, has been fighting against a variety of groups who have found the delta an ideal hiding-ground as well as the place in which the government in Lagos is easiest to hurt – you could say that the delta is Nigeria’s wallet. There are further, somewhat more testable claims that oil companies have provided finance and weapons to successive Nigerian governments to help them quash opposition to their regimes. US Subcommittees have heard that US oil company sites in the delta were given police and military protection, often resulting in deaths of local people and razing of local housing to provide ‘safe operation zones’.

Mangroves polluted, fisheries failing?

Because it’s almost impossible to get into some parts of the delta, both environmental and human rights organisations struggle to assess the true extent of the human suffering and environmental degradation that is happening in one of the most oil-rich regions of Africa.  What is certain is that what was once a fertile region of rotational farming and small scale aquaculture is now no longer agriculturally productive – while around 50% of fish eaten across Nigeria is harvested in the delta, the higher value shrimp and other crustacean fisheries have well nigh collapsed.  The planet cannot afford to lose fisheries: as the developed world struggles with the collapsed cod stocks, and the imminent collapse of the blue-fin tuna fishery, it’s disturbing to discover that complex ecosystems in Africa, including fisheries, maybe disappearing without public recognition or much attempt to save them and the people who depend on them.

Niger delta courtesy of 300td.org at Flickr under a creative commons licence

During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’.  Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.

Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve

Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers.  The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years.

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Last month, Canada, the United States, and Australia announced unprecedented plans to join forces and commercialize genetically-engineered wheat, saying that biotechnology was crucial to the future of the wheat industry. The National Farmers Union of Canada, however, immediately refuted the tri-country claim, pointing out “the overwhelming majority of farmers in Canada are still opposed to the introduction of genetically-modified wheat.”

On June 1, fifteen organizations across Canada, the United States and Australia publicly confirmed that opposition with the release of “A Definitive Global Rejection of Genetically Engineered Wheat“, a powerful document speaking out against biotech wheat.

But the battle against GM wheat is not a simple one, nor is it restrained to select countries.

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This is nothing new. The company’s glufosinate-resistant LL62 genetically modified rice isn’t commercially grown, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t already entered the global food supply.

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Two conferences reveal the nature of the problem

Between 15—19 May, a Vatican organised ‘study week’ looked at ‘Transgenic Plants for Food Security in the Context of Development’ – a title that gives some idea of the expected outcome of a more pro-GMO stance, however there won’t be an official position statement on GMOs and both sides of the argument claim to have a degree of Papal support. In the no-to-GMO camp are quite a number of social justice activists who fear that native crops and native peoples could be dislodged by the cash-crop power of GMOs and they share an uneasy alliance with some bishops and theologians, whose view is that GMOs are both a threat to the environment and human health and a possible step on the path to usurping the role of God as Creator. On the opposite side are many agribusinesses, some other development campaigners and some other theologians, who see GMOs as the logical tool to destroy poverty, feed the hungry, and maintain stewardship of the environment.

Some watchers have said that several of the speakers at the conference have financial links to Monsanto, one of the world’s largest GMO producers. The counter-argument is that with GMOs being big agribusiness, it’s inevitable that most people working the field will have had funding or sponsorship from one of the very few companies at the top of the GMO tree.

Uganda seeks to change policy, and minds

And in Uganda, another conference is currently exploring  the production of GMO crops in Africa. The participants are looking at the gap between policy and research, and giving evidence on how investment in GM technology could benefit the continent. One claim being made at this event is that the widespread adoption of GMO agriculture could ‘significantly reduce’ the cost of food in developing countries by 2050. However, this could only be achieved if consumer preferences were changed, a transformation that has happened without protest in the USA and patchily and with massive protest, in much of Europe.

Vatican courtesy of David Paul Ohmer at Flickr under a creative commons licence

There are any number of reasons that we should worry about bees: not least that without them, some agronomists predict that the planet could only survive for four years, before the catastrophic failure of crop pollination led to a similarly catastrophic collapse of human civilisation. Forget tsunamis, changes in the Earth’s magnetic core, the arrival of aliens or the mutation of some native species to giant size—our biggest risk is that we lose those small, aerodynamically impossible, stripy creatures so famous for their eccentric flight, useful wax and delicious honey. It’s estimated that 35% of our crops, globally, require bees for pollination.

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Now there are a number of questions relating to this advertising campaign, not least of which is how you define locavore: is it somebody who only eats food grown fifty miles from their home, fifteen miles, five blocks? But setting that one aside, another key question is how a national company like Frito-Lay can claim, let alone prove, local production. The route they are taking is pretty blunt: five farmers will appear in five advertisements, shown in five different states, each saying that they grow potatoes that Frito-Lay then turns into ‘local’ chips. Of course, each state gets to see only its own local advert, not the other four, which could rather spoil the impression …

Frito-Lay isn’t making clear how transparent its supply chain is, where the frying oil comes from, for example, or whether potatoes are shipped from one state to another if there are production shortages. But all of that could be sorted out with adequate labelling, a proper supply chain audit and some decent environmental auditing. The locavore term, coined around 2005, is anyway, open to much interpretation.

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