By Catherine Saez @ 6:29 pm The annual report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, to the sixteenth session of the UN Human Rights Council yesterday is unequivocal. There must be a global agricultural shift toward more productive, environmentally friendly, sustainable modes of production, using natural resources to remediate world hunger, away from industrialised agriculture. In short, the world needs a shift to agroecology.
The global food crisis which began at the end of 2010 mirrors the one in 2008 and the usual reaction to recourse to growing outputs in the hope that prices will go down is insufficient and short-sighted, said De Schutter at a press briefing yesterday.
The “real reason people are hungry” is poverty, he said, because “we have impoverished” small-scale farmers. Policies have favoured a small number of large producers, and now is the time to stray away from an unbalanced agricultural system that maintains poverty, leads to pollution and is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, he said.
Agroecology suffers from a lack of faith, although the international scientific community is showing growing interest, he said. There is a prevailing argument saying that only with the help of chemical fertilisers and pesticides can enough food be produced to feed the planet. But this is “a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” De Schutter said. “We never believed in other types of agriculture,” but the results described in the report show how productive agroecological methods are.
Based on a number of submissions received from region-based experts, and an international seminar, the report [pdf] advocates agroecology as the most likely solution to face a growing population. Agroecology is defined by De Schutter as both a science and a set of practices, created by the convergence of two cousin scientific disciplines: agronomy and ecology.
As an example, he said the push-pull strategy is a good alternative to pesticide use. This strategy, described in the report, was developed by Kenyan researchers and farmers. The strategy consists of “pushing” away pests from crops by inter-planting corn with insect repellent crops, while “pulling” the pests towards small plots of Napier grass, a plant that attracts and traps pests because of it sticky gum.
De Schutter said he is worried that at the policy level, agroecology is insufficiently recognised and used, and he recommended that the high level panel of experts established by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization compares the types of agriculture and their effects on development and long-term food security.
The High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition [pdf] includes governments, nongovernmental organisations, international agencies and the private sector, he said.
Agroecology should be discussed within the CFS, he said, as it is a forum that can benefit from shared knowledge and collective learning on the basis of successful experiments, and where this kind of knowledge can gain ground and acceptance.
Core principles of agroecology, the report said, include: recycling nutrients and energy on the farm rather than introducing external inputs; integrating crops and livestock; diversifying species and genetic resources rather than focusing on individual species. Agroecology is described as being based on farmers’ knowledge and experimentation rather than techniques delivered “top-down.” Crop breeding and agroecology are complementary, but agroecology is “more overarching as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems, not just drought-resistant plants,” the report says.
Past approaches have been based on boosting cereal crops, however this led to population having an inadequate diet only based on carbohydrates, the report says, and nutritional diversity is of particular interest to children and woman.
Too Much Attention on GMOs
De Schutter said yesterday he would not recommend genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a solution and also said that GMOs had received too much attention in recent years. GMOs have never really fulfilled their promise, he said, and one of the major problems for countries whose farmers are using GMOs is the extreme dependence of producers and countries themselves on the very concentrated economic power of some multinational companies, such as Monsanto.
He said he was extremely worried about a system where the food chain would depend on an economic power that is extremely concentrated and without any control, and in particular based on one US company.
On climate change, the report says that agroecology improves resilience to climate change because resilience is strengthened by agricultural biodiversity, and it also delinks food production from the reliance on fossil fuel, a major cause for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Poor Research on Orphan Plants
Not enough research has been carried out on orphan plants, those receiving little scientific research, such as sorghum, millet, or sweet potatoes, De Schutter said. He called for more public investment.
Since there is little hope of getting patents on good agricultural practices, the bulk of current agronomic research is focused on patentable biotechnologies, he said. Research should focus on good practices developed by farmers themselves, who invented and discovered adequate solutions in a context of scarce resources and repeated climatic shocks, he said.
Moreover, private research has favoured financially solvent markets, namely the richest farmers of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, who have been the beneficiaries of this research, he added.
Inputs Replaced by Knowledge
Farmers’ participation in agroecology is vital for the success of agroecological practices, as such techniques are best spread from farmer to farmer, the report says: “Farmer field schools have been shown to significantly reduce the amounts of pesticides use, as inputs are being replaced by knowledge.” Agroecology requires the development of ecological literacy and decision-making skills for farmer communities.
Public policies should give priority to public goods, such as infrastructure, storage facilities, easing access to regional and local markets, rather than on private goods such as fertilisers or pesticides that farmers can purchase only because they are subsidised.
==============================
Save climate and double food production with eco-farming
Uxbridge, 8 Mar (IPS/Stephen Leahy) -- Eco-farming could double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change, according to a new UN report released Tuesday in Geneva.
An urgent transformation to "eco-farming" is the only way to end hunger and face the challenges of climate change and rural poverty, said Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, following the presentation of his annual report focusing on agro-ecology and the right to food to the UN Human Rights Council.
"Agro-ecology mimics nature, not industrial processes. It replaces the external inputs like fertiliser with knowledge of how a combination of plants, trees and animals can enhance productivity of the land," De Schutter told IPS, stressing that, "Yields went up 214 percent in 44 projects in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa using agro-ecological farming techniques over a period of 3 to 10 years... far more than any GM [genetically modified] crop has ever done." Other recent scientific assessments have shown that small farmers in 57 countries using agro-ecological techniques obtained average yield increases of 80 percent. Africans' average increases were 116 percent.
"Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agro-ecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," De Schutter said.
Agro-ecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems. It enhances soil productivity and protects crops against pests by relying on the natural elements.
Eco-farming doesn't require expensive inputs of fossil-fuel-based pesticides, fertilisers, machinery or hybrid seeds. It is ideally suited for poor smallholder farmers and herders who are the bulk of the one billion hungry people in the world. Efforts by governments and major donors such as the $400 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to subsidise fertilizer and hybrid seeds will produce quick boosts in yields but are not sustainable in the long term, De Schutter said.
Malawi is touted as an AGRA success story by funders such as the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation who have massively subsidised fertilizer and created a corresponding improvement in food production. However, the country simply cannot afford to continue those subsidies and is shifting its strategy to agro-ecology. "The [Malawi] government now subsidises farmers to plant nitrogen-fixing trees in their fields to ensure sustained growth in maize production," he said.
De Shutter says AGRA is looking for quick results and is getting them. He has found it difficult to overcome AGRA proponents' suspicions about the effectiveness of agro-ecology, despite the mounting evidence. "I expect countries to express scepticism towards these solutions because they are not in accord with the dominant paradigm," De Schutter said.
The dominant view of agriculture is the industrial approach - of maximising efficiency and yield. However, that system is utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and never having to be held accountable for environmental degradation and other impacts. One the most under-acknowledged but astonishing impacts is on the global climate. "It is fair to say that between 45 and 50 percent of all human emissions of global warming gases come from the current form of food production," De Shutter says.
Climate-damaging emissions from industrial agriculture are more than just carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. They include massive amounts of the super-heating greenhouse gases like methane from animals and nitrous oxide from chemical fertiliser. Add in deforestation - which is mostly done to increase farmland or plantations - and that's around a third of all emissions. Now, add on the emissions from food processing and the long distance transport of foods around the world and it comes close to half of all human emissions.
The food system doesn't have to be a major source of emissions, the problem is just the way we have designed it around cheap fossil fuel energy, he said. Eco-farming can produce more food for the world's poorest people, while also resulting in a fraction of the emissions. It can even store carbon in the soil.
"The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis," said Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN, an international non-governmental organisation that produced a report in 2009 showing that industrial agriculture was by far the biggest source of climate-disrupting emissions of greenhouse gases.
"There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will," Hobbelink told IPS. Trade, economic and agricultural policies are all skewed in favour of the current industrial food production system. And many of those policies are pushing small farmers - the ones who are by far the most efficient in terms of carbon emissions and energy use, according to GRAIN - off the land.
De Shutter says the techniques and benefits of agro-ecology are now well established, so his role is to push governments to change policies and support the transformation of food production. His report offers policy-relevant recommendations for countries, such as increasing public funding for research and training.
"Private companies will not invest time and money in practices that cannot be rewarded by patents and which don't open markets for chemical products or improved seeds," De Shutter said. "If we don't radically transform the direction of the global food system, we will never feed the billion who are hungry," De Shutter warns. "Nor will we be able to feed ourselves in the future." +
