Dr. Bukar Ali USMAN, mni

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged on President Obama’s proposed reforms to the US food aid system. The proposal centers on three long overdue changes: shifting a portion of aid programming from in-kind to cash-based aid, eliminating the requirement that U.S. food aid be shipped on U.S. flagged vessels, and ending the practice of monetizing food aid. As I noted at the time, the changes would have the effect of making US food aid both more efficient and more beneficial for recipient countries in the developing world.

Blogging at Triple Crisis, Jennifer Clapp points out another benefit.  As she notes,

This institutional change is what the US is currently attempting – to move food aid policymaking out of the clutches of the agricultural policymaking setting of the Farm Bill, and into the development policymaking arena of the US Agency for International Development.  Without this institutional shift, it is…

Tuesday, 30 April 2013 12:14 NewBusinessEthiopia.com

The African Development Bank Group says its new Ten-Year (2013-2022) Strategy launched this week emphasizes the quality and sustainability of growth and economic transformation of African continent.

The Directors’ approval followed a wide consultation process, within and outside the Bank, according to the press statement the bank sent to newbusinessethiopia.com.
“This document reflects Africa’s vision for itself – a vision of transformation that is achievable”, said Donald Kaberuka, President of the African Development Bank Group since 2005.  “It is a ten-year vision, which can make this continent – within another generation – the global growth pole that we know it can be and want it to be: a place fit for our aspirations and those of our children.”
“The Strategy reaffirms the Bank’s strategic choices around infrastructure, economic integration and the private sector.  It charts the way towards inclusive growth that spans…

This month’s issue of ‘Livestock Matter(s)’, explores around-up of livestock development news, publications, presentations, images and upcoming events from ILRI and its partners. Download a print version – or sign up to get Livestock Matter(s) in your mailbox each month.

Corporate news

Livestock research for food security and poverty reduction: ILRI strategy 2013-2022

In April, ILRI’s strategy covering the period 2013-2022 was published. Under the tagline ‘better lives through livestock’, ILRI will improve food and nutritional security and reduce poverty in developing countries through research for efficient, safe and sustainable use of livestock. www.ilri.org/mission

Project news

Zimbabwe: Crop and livestock researchers unite to improve smallholder agriculture
In 2012, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) launched a joint project called ‘ZimCLIFS’ to develop ways to increase agricultural production, improve household food security, alleviate…

Putting enough food on the table is a daily challenge faced by households around the world. Ensuring that the food contains enough protein and essential micronutrients is a further consideration, and animal products, such as fish and meat from livestock can go a long way to improving the diets of the world’s poor. In addition, small-scale production of animal source foods can be a pathway out of poverty for many communities.

While nutrition is often a priority for the hungry and under-nourished, food safety is also extremely important. As produce is transported from the farm to the market place, and onto the consumer’s dinner table, there are numerous opportunities for contamination. Foodborne diseases, chemicals, and heavy metals can all enter the food chain and pose a threat to human health.

WorldFish, in collaboration with its CGIAR research partner, the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is undertaking two complementary projects in…

This article in the journal Animal reviews the positive and negative roles of livestock in the developing world. Authored by several ILRI staff, the paper also discusses ‘key factors that are likely to determine the future contribution of the sector to food security, environmental protection and economic growth.’ It proposes actions for improving different aspects of livestock systems so that the positive roles outweigh the negatives.

The authors argue that ‘recognising the different roles played by livestock in the developing and the developed world is essential to understand the impact of livestock on livelihoods, economic development and the environment.

‘The importance of this paper lies in providing a balanced account [for] . . . the often, ill-informed or generalized discussion on the . . . roles of livestock. Only by understanding the nuances in these roles will we be able to design more sustainable solutions for the sector.

‘We are…

GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation. GRAIN says that it ‘works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.’

Here’s a report by GRAIN about the importance of milk to the livelihoods and health of poor people. GRAIN tells us about ‘people’s milk’, also known as the ‘informal sector’. Farmers and pastoralists sell milk directly to vendors. The vendors sell milk to people who want to drink it. I’m grateful to my fellow blogger Abdul Raziq Kakar at Camel, Food Security and Climate Change for drawing attention to this story.

The ‘informal’ selling of milk doesn’t involve large corporations such as Coca Cola. This catches my attention after another blogger, Tegan Tallulah at Earth Baby, wrote about the soft drinks industry. Tegan described Coca Cola ‘digging wells in water-deprived areas, taking all of the clean water for their factories…

The WorldWatch Institute published a report yesterday noting that global food prices continued to increase in 2012. After a protracted period of declining prices between 1960 and 1999, global food prices have increased at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent between 2000 and 2012. The report includes the usual wide range of factors contributing to the general trend: the volatility inherent to agricultural commodities markets, weather, climate change, biofuel policy, increasing energy and fertilizer prices, export restrictions, increasing global food demand (especially from China) and low global food stocks.

Normally I’m a big fan of the WorldWatch Institute. But in this case, I think their report suffers from two errors.

First, I’m always suspicious of the blame often placed on Chinese (and sometimes Indian) food demand. Yes, meat consumption in China and India is increasing, leading to increased demand for soy and other animal feed crops. But…

A student group asked me to speak at a screening of the film Fresh last week. The 2009 documentary focuses on the role of farmers, activists and entrepreneurs pushing for a more sustainable food system in the United States.

Fresh is an interesting film, and it helped to generate some great discussion following the screening last week. Although it addresses questions at a fairly broad level, it touches on many of the key themes and debates surrounding our contemporary food system. And it ends with a strong call to action—a sort of “we’re all in this together” with a bit of “we can do this” and an uplifting soundtrack to boot.

The shortcoming, I think, was in the call to action. Like much of the alternative food movement, Fresh frames its call to action in terms of consumerism. Buy the right food, at the right place, and the shortcomings of…

The first International Conference and Exhibition on Water Storage and Hydropower Development for Africa entitled “Africa 2013” was held for three consecutive days, from Tuesday to Thursday, at the African Union Commission (AUC).
Ethiopia received accolades for being the leader in water resources development at the conference, which more than 600 participants from about 70 countries from all over the world, attended. As infrastructure plays a key role in economic growth and poverty reduction, and lack of infrastructure leads to increased production and transaction costs, the African Union Commission (AUC), the Secretariat of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) are implementing a Program for Infrastructure Development for Africa (PIDA) initiative to optimize efforts and utilization of resources enabling African stakeholders to converge on a common agenda; infrastructure development.

PIDA will also merge…

A Mixed Blessing

If we don’t watch out, agriculture could destroy our planet. Here’s how to grow all the food we need with fewer chemicals.

By Dan Charles

As part of the United States President’s Feed the Future Initiative in Ethiopia, the U.S. Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), launched the Camel Milk Value Chain Development project in Fafan Village, Somali Region. 

Thursday, 25 April 2013  NewBusinessEthiopia.com

The project launched today (April 25, 2013) is expected to improve the production and market competitiveness of camel milk products in the Somali Region to improve incomes and nutrition for up to 50,000 targeted households in the Siti (Shinile) and Fafan (Jijiga) zones.

Speaking at the project launch event, His Excellency Abdifatah Mohamud Hassan, Somali Regional State Vice President, said, “The Camel Milk Value Chain Development project is an innovative project that addresses cultural wealth of the pastoralists and contributes to the Ethiopia Agricultural Growth and Transformation Plan.”

The project, implemented by Aged and Children Pastoralists Association, will…

This week’s summary on the news stories, reports and blogs that have grabbed our attention. We welcome your thoughts and comments on these articles.

After 2015 – Toward zero hunger and sustainable food production? SIANI

Science and NGO practice are closer than they appear, SciDev.Net

Sustainable Intensification: Getting the Most from the Land, Agri-Pulse

Scientists Unite to Share Ag Data and Feed the World, USDA

DNA double helix: discovery that led to 60 years of biological revolution, The Guardian

Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources, FAO

Incremental change is not enough – climate, business experts, Thomson Reuters Foundation

Europe’s other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions, PNAS

New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: Part 2, ONE

It is “far better to accommodate dreams than assuage nightmares”

This is a quote taken from Roger Thurow’sbook, The Last Hunger Season, one of our favourite books from 2012. It is a record of the lives of four farmers in western Kenya over the course of one year, encompassing both hunger and harvest. The book documents the hardships these farmers face and provides an insight into their lives. While one person can never fully understand the life of another, we do all aspire to the same things: health, wealth, happiness and security.

For the four featured farmers life is about to change. Immediately prior to when the book is set, Rasoa, Leonida, Francis and Zipporah signed up to the One Acre Fund Programme. This programme, set up by Andrew Youn in 2006, provides smallholder farmers in Kenya, Rwanda and Burundi with certified seeds, fertiliser and training, inputs…

Does sustainable intensification mean large-scale, industrial agriculture, or can it build on the traditional methods of many African farmers?

Tomatoes for sale in the central market in Mali, 2013. Could sustainable intensification increase crop yields in Africa? Photograph: Joe Penney/Reuters

This week in Dublin, world leaders, policymakers and civil society representatives met to discuss the urgent and interrelated issues of hunger, nutrition and climate justice that are faced by the poorest people and nations. In parallel, the global community is already discussing the goals and metrics that should shape sustainable development once the millennium development goals expire in 2015.

It is time to place sustainable intensification at the heart of African agriculture, and ensure that development goals deliver on the agenda opened in Dublin. Sustainable intensification involves producing more crops, better nutrition and higher rural incomes from the same set of inputs – such as…

Today is World Water Day 2013, celebrating the International Year of water cooperation. A paradigm of the world’s water challenges is that although agriculture accounts for approximately 70% of global water resources, around one billion people are chronically hungry.

As water for irrigation and food production constitutes one of the greatest threats to the sustainability of the world’s freshwater resources, we discuss four methods of reducing water use in agriculture, methods that can reduce water use without limiting, and sometimes increasing, food production.

Grow crops that use less water. This can mean either crops that due to their physiology require less water. For example growing grapes and olives requires significantly less water than tomatoes or bananas. Or it can mean crops bred to require less water such as the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project.  Of course the choice of crops grown is also dependent on environmental…

‘Villages without agriculture’ is a term my friend from JNU, Rajnish, coined to describe his native village of Narharpur in Bihar. He was saying that agrarian distress in Bihar villages is so high that majority of people have diversified their sources of income. Share of agricultural income to total income is often quite small and it has a lot of do with the overall low profitability from agriculture.

We were in Rajnish’s village at that time and planning to commission a survey on groundwater economy in three neighboring villages.  Before a survey, we decided to do a complete house-listing of all households in our three study villages in Vaishali district. The idea was to use this census results for further sampling. The preliminary results of the census are just in and yes, agricultural incomes are indeed a relatively small share of total income. Our villages are perhaps not entirely representative…

On 4th of March 2013, the 30th edition of the Brussels Development Briefing took place, the topic being “Agricultural resilience in the face of crisis and shocks”. Organized by CTA in collaboration with the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) Secretariat, the EC/DEVCO, Concord, and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and hosted by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), in Brussels, international experts and agriculturalists, including Gordon Conway discussed the concept of resilience and proven approaches to achieving it.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, Honourable Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria, outlined his plans for increasing resilience and boosting agricultural productivity. He began by reminding us how susceptible we all are to the forces of nature be they climate, health, market or environment related. Food security is a key component of ensuring humans, households and systems are resilient to the impact…

At the recent meeting on ‘Integrating Nutrition into the ASEAN Food Security Framework and Strategic Plan of Action on Food Security in ASEAN Region’, Michael Phillips, Malcolm Beveridge and Stephen Hall made a presentation on fish and food and nutrition security; fish as food; and fish, food and nutrition security scenarios in the ASEAN region.
Key messages include:

• Fish is important for ASEAN food and nutrition security
• Fish is a preferred item in the diets of many, especially poor, people
• It is an important source of quality and highly bioavailable protein, but more importantly of essential fatty acids and micronutrients: at key life stages (e.g. the first 1000 days). Its importance should be measured in relation to consumption of other foods, intra- household food distribution
• The species we eat are changing, as is the method of production
  • the rise of aquaculture
  • intensification of culture methods
• Changes impact nutrient content; implications…