Stories tagged: principle5

Mobile technology boosts farmer income in India

Agriculture is crucial to India’s economy, as it provides 23% of GDP and employs 66% of the workforce. However, most of India’s poorest people are subsistence farmers who have little or no access no technology and markets for their produce. Farmers lack knowledge on which markets to target and what price to charge.

Deepa Bachu, Director of Emerging Market Innovation at Intuit sought a solution to this problem. The research she carried out in Karnataka back in 2008 found that 40% of the time, farmers were accepting lower prices in order to sell perishable goods and up to 100% of the farmers she visited were unsure of whether the prices they were charging were correct.

As a solution, Deepa developed a free SMS based product called Intuit Fasal that connects rural farmers with buyers and provides them with real-time price information via mobile phone. It is described as ‘a basic supply and demand calculator’. Farmers register for updates by calling a toll free number and will then receive three text messages daily from the service. These messages are tailored to the farmer’s crop and location, thus helping them chose the right market to target in order to get the best price.

The service currently has more than 500,000 users who earn an average of 20% more income thanks to the technology.

Mobile technology has been used increasingly to enhance agricultural productivity. Access to up-to-date market pricing information is essential if farmers are going to increase their profitability, and in turn, increase production rates. (Farming First Principle 5)

New UK Government Report on Food Security for 2030

defraA 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.

UN Report: Low-carbon Farms Can Raise Food Output

According to a newly launched UN report, low-carbon farming can both curb climate change and boost food output in developing nations. The agency’s report, “Food Security and Agricultural Mitigation in Developing Countries,” suggests that because of this fact, low-carbon farms must be rewarded under a global climate deal due in December.

In a Reuters article, Leslie Lipper, FAO economist and co-author of the report said that financing remains a major hurdle to greater implementation:

“A key part of the problem is a lack of financing.  If adopted by farmers, many of these practices make them better off, but in the short run they may face reduced income,” Lipper said, using the example of removing cattle to allow grasslands to recover.

In terms of contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, the report estimated that farms accounts for 10-12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions directly.  It also estiamted that $210bn would be needed between now and 2050 to help farms upgrade sufficiently to meet future yield needs.

Developing countries could raise about $30bn annually toward this investment through carbon market financing.  Measuring such improvements to the carbon efficiency of farm production is currently being researched.

Farming First Launches Climate Change Recommendations to Copenhagen Leaders

climatechangeimageMore 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:

  1. Agriculture generally, and farmers especially, are vital to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
  2. 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.
  3. Adopting proven sustainable agricultural practices reduces greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and enhances the effect of natural carbon sinks.
  4. 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.

Farming First’s Lindiwe Sibanda and Ajay Vashee Discuss Agricultural Development Support with Voice of America

LindiweIn a recent interview aired on Voice of America, Farming First’s Dr. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda and Ajay Vashee spoke about the decline in agricultural development support over the past generation and how that has impacted the global food crisis, particularly in Africa.  Dr. Sibanda said:

“As a result of diminished resources and lack of funds for agriculture, we saw declines in productivity, we saw people moving out of farming to rely more on commodities like minerals, and rely more on imports of food rather than produce their own.”

Ajay Vashee also warned that the scale of the need is tremendous, and agricultural investments need to be sustained and expanded further in order to reap the anticipated outcomes.

The broadcast also addressed the structure of the Obama administration’s intended agriculture plan, which includes $3.5 billion over the next three years to help developing-world farmers produce more food and get their products to market.

Critical to heading off the food crisis in Africa is the prioritisation of research imperatives (per Farming First’s Principle 6). Joachim von Braun, Director-General of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, discussed the scale of the challenge facing global agriculture:

[I]f agricultural research and development were to increase from $5 billion a year to $15 billion, “10 years later we will have…300 million [fewer] people among the hungry poor. This is the largest benefit one can achieve with this type of investment.”

At a U.N meeting in September, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined the U.S. agriculture policy:

The strategy Clinton sketched out includes many of the elements experts say developing- world farmers need most: investments in research and development, access to improved seed and fertilizer, insurance programs for small farmers, as well as improved infrastructure such as roads and storage facilities to help farmers get their products to market.

The article highlights the fact that agriculture is a “good investment” for policymakers to make and that their efforts need to be farmer-focused and knowledge-based, aimed at diversifying the range of tools which they have at their disposal over the long-term.

Listen to the complete audio broadcast here:

[audio: voiceofamericafoodsecuritysibandavashee.mp3]

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 19th 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%.