Stories tagged: principle1

New UK Government Report on Food Security for 2030

defra A new report issued by the UK’s Department for Enviroment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra) outlines how the UK government intends to address future food security. According to the Guardian, the ‘Food 2030’ report takes the most comprehensive approach to agriculture policy since the Second World War.

The UK food industry is worth £80 billion and employs 3.6 million people. Driven by the triple threat of a growing population, the threat of climate change and a vulnerable supply of natural resources, the new policy by Defra outlines what the UK government perceives to be priority actions for the future, including:

increasing the amount of food grown in Britain
reducing the impact of agriculture upon the environment
reducing agricultural emissions by the equivalent of 3 million tonnes of CO₂ by 2020
reviewing the impacts of UK consumption on agricultural economies in the rest of the world
addressing the issue of waste through reuse, recycling or energy generation
informing consumers about healthy, sustainable food choices.

The policy also spells out plans to double its investment in agricultural research to £80 million by 2013, with a focus on helping farmers in developing nations. Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State of Defra, said:

By turning research into practical ideas, and by learning from what the best are doing, we can achieve a lot more. Science will also tell us when nature is under strain.

‘Food 2030’ seeks to improve the UK food industry from production to distribution, providing better resources to farmers, whilst using natural resources sustainably to help the global food industry. Benn said:

We need to increase food production to feed a growing world population – there’ll be another 2-3 billion people in 40 years.

The Financial Times reports that plans detailing how these changes will be effectuated, including any necessary new legislation, will be released in the coming months.

Farming First Launches Climate Change Recommendations to Copenhagen Leaders

More than a billion farmers and their families around the world are on the front line of climate change. Their lives and livelihoods are directly affected by its impact, and they are also vital to implementing many of the solutions we need to help delay and deflect it.

Members of the Farming First coalition believe that:

Agriculture generally, and farmers especially, are vital to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
Increasing farm productivity in a sustainable way and decreasing waste and losses can significantly mitigate the effects of climate change, prevent deforestation, and protect biodiversity.
Adopting proven sustainable agricultural practices reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhances the effect of natural carbon sinks.
Further research and innovation are essential to invent the necessary adaptation and mitigation solutions.

Download the action plan (PDF) Download the press release (PDF)

Therefore, farmers must be involved in implementing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. To support them, we must create sound and reliable incentives; we must share knowledge; and we must make adequate tools and technologies accessible to deliver both food and energy security.

As key stakeholders in agriculture, the world’s farmers, agronomists, scientists, engineers and industries are working together through an open coalition, to provide innovative solutions which reduce emissions from agriculture and adapt to climate change while increasing agricultural productivity to meet growing food needs.

Given growing food demands, we believe that rather than pursuing blanket reduction targets for GHG emissions in agriculture, governments should commit to climate change mitigation through improved and sustainable agricultural productivity across multiple factors including water use, carbon efficiency, improved nutrient use efficiency, and land-use intensity.

In response, the Farming First coalition would like to bring forward a series of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in accordance with its six-point action plan for enhancing sustainable development through agriculture.

The Farming First coalition calls on all governments active in the COP15 negotiations to:

1. Support the unique role of agriculture in the global climate change response.

Ensure that agriculture is included within the UNFCCC negotiations at COP15 in Copenhagen.
Refrain from setting an absolute emission reduction target for agriculture as an industry.

2. Encourage the use of all available and applicable climate change solutions.

Promote agricultural best practices, particularly Integrated Crop Management (ICM), conservation agriculture, intercropping and fertilizer best management practices.
Support increased investment in agricultural research, including links between agriculture and climate change, involving research centres, programmes and industry R&D.

3. Promote funding mechanisms which support the needs of all levels and forms of farming.

Urge agricultural inclusion within multilateral financial mechanisms, potentially including the UNFCCC’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation (JI).
Promote voluntary carbon credit systems for GHG offsets from agriculture and land use to reward farmers for their contribution.
Extend the scope of carbon markets to encompass the critical role of soil as a carbon sink.
Establish international technology assessment and sharing programmes for climate change, as well as capacity-building programmes, including the development of local and global centres of excellence.

4. Reward resource-based productivity improvements as a direct contributor to climate-change effectiveness.

Encourage productivity improvements – in a sustainable way – on existing agricultural land to avoid additional land clearing and give priority to the rehabilitation of degraded agricultural soils.
Recognise the positive contribution of sustainable land management practices through increased coordinated agricultural research.
Include robust methodologies and field-testing to overcome uncertainties around measurement, reporting and verification.
Provide incentives to farmers and other stakeholders which reward adoption of sustainable and responsible production systems, better performing technologies and the efforts of early adopters.

5. Invest in capability sharing to encourage all farmers to play a role in climate change while safeguarding local and global food security.

Enhance capacity building to implement sustainable land management policies and programmes.
Create a dedicated adaptation fund for agriculture accessible to farmers’ organisations in developing countries.

Read the full Farming First climate change policy on the Farming First site here.

Innovative Research Could Save Indian Potato Farmers Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Each Year

Potato blight is a disease caused by a fungus which targets potatoes both in the field and in storage. It can destroy an entire crop of potatoes within one or two weeks, and it can survive year after year in the tubers of infected potatoes, which release millions of new spores when the next rainy season comes around.

Potato blight has devastated potato crops for hundreds of years. In 2007, 70% of India’s potato crop and 50% of Bangladesh’s crop were destroyed. This blight was also responsible for the Irish potato famine, which killed millions of farmers in the mid 19^th century.

To combat this disease, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison worked to isolate a blight-resistant gene in a wild relative of the potato. They then partnered with an Indian organization to insert this gene into potato cultivars grown across South Asia. Other collaborators on the project included the US Agency for International Development, Cornell University, India’s Central Potato Research Institute and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.

As highlighted in the 2009 Better World Report, a recent round of field trials has proven successful, and the new potatoes will be licensed to both private and public enterprises soon. This means that poorer farmers can also access the seeds through local distribution channels.

A team of economists estimates that farmers will be able to double their incomes as a result of this new development. They will require less chemicals to protect their crops, and they are more likely to have excess yield which they can sell as a cash crop. The labour required to farm potatoes is also expected to decrease by 11%.

Book Review: “Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty”

Two veteran Wall Street Journal reporters, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, have teamed up to write a book addressing one of the most pressing questions of the 21st-century: global hunger.

The authors ask why hunger persists when the technology and tools already exist to feed the world:

Since the time of the Green Revolution, the world has known how to end famine and tame chronic hunger. We have the information and tools. But we haven’t done it. We explored the heavens. We wired the world for the Internet…. Yet somehow we haven’t eliminated the most primitive scourge of all.

In the opening chapters, Kilman and Thurow introduce the work of Norman Borlaug, a Nobel Prize-winning plant scientist who died on Saturday at the age of 95. Back in the 1940s, Borlaug was assigned to a newly launched research centre in Mexico to train Mexican scientists how to boost farm productivity through plant breeding experiments.

Over the next two decades, Borlaug’s research helped boost wheat yields in the research areas almost seven-fold, from 11 bushels per acre in the early 1940s to as much as seventy-five bushels per acre in 1960. Borlaug then travelled elsewhere in the Americas and across to Asia to demonstrate the potential yields which these new varieties could produce and to convince policymakers and farmers to adopt them to feed their growing populations. (Apparently, the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ripped up her flower garden to plant the new wheat varieties.)

And thus, the Green Revolution was born. Demographic projections of mass famine and a population implosion were prevented, and the global supply of food exploded.

Yet around the same time, shifts in global agricultural policy began to shift. Starting in the early 1980s, newly independent former colonies in Africa and Asia started to see a reversal in the foreign assistance being given to agricultural development (inputs, infrastructure, extension training, and research support). In addition, the money being targeted at the alleviation of hunger came in the food of foreign-grown food aid shipped into areas of need.

A generation later, in the summer of 2008, the world went through a global food crisis where prices doubled and tripled for many staple foods and global reserve stocks of grain were reduced to dangerously low levels. Kilman and Thurow argue that the time is right for a broad reinvestment into agriculture, similar to how the United States rallied to support the Marshall Plan for Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

The authors argue that public sentiment is in favour of increased support to feed the hungry, and social and political stability are increasingly under threat from those without sufficient resources to subsist. They present a range of options, from investment in infrastruture and new seed technologies to policy reforms relating to how national budgets are allocated and how trade regulations are drawn up.

Africa is a particular target as it is seen as “the world’s final frontier of agriculture” where yields are still low and modern agricutural practices are often non-existent. Coupled with a rapidly increasingly population, African farmers will be expected to double their production by 2030 in order to simply meet their own people’s food demands. This will be no small feat, and it would require a coordinated, collaborative approach to see it through successfully.

Latin American Academic Programmes Teach Best Practice to Rural Schoolchildren

In Latin America, farming is often a family affair, and children are important actors in fostering the use and uptake of best practices.

As a result, CropLife Latin America has been very active in developing academic programmes targeted at schoolchildren and students, implementing the Scarecrow Programme to help young people develop awareness of ecological issues and of the need to protect natural resources.

The project now serves as a model educational system for bringing agricultural concepts into rural classrooms. It has been implemented in several countries, such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador and has also been updated to a follow up programme “Growers of the Future” courses for university students. Today, CropLife Latin America’s stewardship projects reach 18 countries, with a strong focus on multi-stakeholder relationships and reaching out to a wide audience, from farmers and retailers to families and health practitioners.

World Water Facts from a Newly Updated WBCSD Report

2959393208_f4fb74f682 A newly updated report from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) highlights many key facts and trends on how the world uses and manages its freshwater supply.

Agriculture-related activity is responsible for around 70% of freshwater use. Here are some other interesting facts from the report:

Less than 3% of the world’s water is freshwater. Of this freshwater supply, about five-sixths is frozen and thus inaccessible.

Almost 97% of the available freshwater is stored in underground aquifers, with the remainder coming from rainfall, natural lakes, rivers, and other man-made facilities.

Fewer than 10 countries possess 60% of the world’s available freshwater supply: Brazil, Russia, China, Canada, Indonesia, U.S., India, Columbia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Globally, roughly 15-35% of irrigation withdrawals for agriculture are estimated to be unsustainable. Susceptible regins include the western U.S., northern India and Pakistan, northern China, eastern South Africa, southeastern Australia, and parts of the Mediterranean.

India, China, and Egypt all use more than 80% of their freshwater for irrigation, compared to about 1% in the UK.

1.8 million people die every year from diarrhoeal diseases (including cholera)– the equivalent of 15 killer tsunamis each year or 12 Boeing 747 crashes every day.

U.S. average annual domestic consumption of water (per capita) is 215 cubic metres per year, 6.7 times the average in China and more than double the average in France.

Important trends impacting water use in the future include population growth, increasing global affluence, and climate change.