More Than a Buzzword? Resilience to Climate Change in Zimbabwe

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Author: Tawanda Majoni | Published: January 6, 2016

Climate change-induced disasters will keep on coming, as sure as the sun rises. But rather than governments and aid agencies swinging into belated – often chaotic – action after they’ve struck, the smarter move is to strengthen communities by building their resistance ahead of time.

It’s cheaper, faster, and devolves more control to the affected communities. But while resilience has long been a buzzword among aid agencies and governments alike, it’s difficult to gauge yet how effective the measures have been.

Zimbabwe is a good place both to highlight the need to develop people’s resistance to “shocks” and to illustrate how difficult it is to put that idea into practice.

Agriculture is a key sector of the economy. It employs 60-70 percent of the population, contributes to about 40 percent of total export earnings, and, in a good year, covers the country’s cereal needs.

But Zimbabwean agriculture is mostly rain-fed, and therefore vulnerable to climate change-induced drought. An El Niño event in 2015 has produced two consecutive seasons of failed rains. The cumulative result is that more than four million people are in need of food aid over the next three months, until the 2017 harvest comes in.

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How Cattle Can Fight Climate Change

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Author: Alexander Lykins | Published: January 12, 2017

In Nouakchott, a town on the edge of the Sahara in the North African country of Mauritania, lives a woman named Nancy Abeiderrahmane. In 1989 she founded an organization called Tvivski (PDF) (spring in Arabic) to connects local milk producers in Mauritania with the consumers.

Abeiderrahmane created Tiviski out of frustrations over having to rely on expensive powdered European milk. Today Tiviski provides affordable, locally produced milk to Mauritanians. For the thousands of families who produce milk, the dairy provides a livelihood.

In Richard Toll, a small Senegalese town rich with cattle, a veterinarian by the name of Bagoré Bathily had a similar dream. He founded La Laiterie du Berger, French for “the herder’s dairy.”

Despite Senegal’s having nearly 4 million herders, until 2006 almost all of the milk consumed in the country was imported, powdered milk from Europe. Now La Laiterie du Berger produces over 650,000 liters of milk a year, providing a stable income and food supply to nearly 7,000 people.

In Keffi, Nigeria, a dairy farm with a similar mission of improving development through local agriculture is even more impressive. Nagari Integrated Dairy farm was founded by Alhaji Abdullahi Adamu, a former governor, in 1982. In contrast to the previous two farms, Nagari is reported to be one of the largest single integrated dairy farms in Africa, boasting over 37,000 cattle on nearly 3,000 acres. However, Nagari has a similar vision for their organization, in which indigenous ownership, equity and sustainability are key components.

All three dairies have improved food security in their local areas and created economic opportunities for thousands of citizens. All of these dairies cite sustainability within their supply chain as a priority, and all have taken steps to work towards and measure their goals. The good news is agricultural businesses such as these are increasing in sub-Saharan Africa, as locals become invested in combating food insecurity and international funds from companies such as Danone arrive to support these efforts.

These dairies have, however, a less obvious opportunity to take advantage of: the opportunity to help the planet. They have access to tens of thousands of acres of land. All that they need to implement true sustainability is to recognize that the secret to reversing the impact of climate change lies in the soil. A style of grazing, holistic management, uses grazing animals to repair soil health, increase carrying capacity, sequester carbon in the soil, increase its fertility and capacity to retain moisture.

All of these features can hold back deserts and roll back climate change.

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Carbon Farming for the Individual

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Published: January, 2017

According to Eric Toensmeier, author of The Carbon Farming Solution, “carbon farming has the potential to bring our atmosphere back to the magic number of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide.” Encompassing agricultural practices that return carbon to the soil, carbon farming, undertaken on any scale, is an effective approach for reducing atmospheric carbon and maintaining a healthy soil ecosystem for growing. While farmers can undertake carbon farming on a larger scale, individuals can also play an active role in sequestering carbon by becoming carbon gardeners in their own backyards. The Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) provides an array of strategies for homeowners to policymakers on how to help restore carbon to the soil.

Jack Kittredge, policy director at NOFA Massachusetts, reports that minimizing tillage, planting cover crops, and practicing crop rotation are needed to build and keep soil carbon in the soil. “Probably the most important single lesson is that bare soil oxidizes carbon, while plants protect it,” writes Kittredge. “Green plants form a barrier between air and soil, slowing the process of carbon emission by microbes.”

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Agriculture and Food Security — Where Are We Headed in 2017?

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Author: Lisa Cornish  | Published: January 11, 2017 

As climate change impacts the global ability to grow food, both in quality and quantity, researchers in agriculture have become an important asset for establishing long-term food security as the world’s population continues to increase.

In December, agriculture and food security researchers visited Canberra for high-level discussions on development matters with the Australian Center for International Agricultural Research and Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. And as 2017 will be an important year for establishing long-term goals and making important inroads into advances within the sector, Devex spoke with attendees to better understand where we are headed.

Crosscutting agriculture and food security across the SDGs

The adoption of the sustainable development goals has provided the agriculture and food security sector with a greater understanding of the development sector’s focus over the coming decades. According to Andrew Campbell, CEO of ACIAR, the sector want to be involved more widely in development discussions and a focus in 2017 is establishing greater ties across all development issues.

“The 17 Sustainable Development Goals capture the challenges well,” Campbell told Devex. “Australia’s Foreign Minister [Julie Bishop] wants us to take leadership role within the Indo-Pacific region climate change mitigation and adaption and there are important links to the effects on food production. But gender, the empowerment of women and girls, is also important because there is clear evidence that creating equal opportunities for engagement based on gender, you get better outcomes — and we want to create opportunities through business or employment.”

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Regenerative Agriculture: Our Best Shot at Cooling the Planet?

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Author: Jason Hickel | Published: January 10, 2017

It’s getting hot out there. For a stretch of 16 months running through August 2016, new global temperature records were set every month.[1] Ice cover in the Arctic sea hit a new low this past summer, at 525,000 square miles less than normal.[2] And apparently we’re not doing much to stop it: according to Professor Kevin Anderson, one of Britain’s leading climate scientists, we’ve already blown our chances of keeping global warming below the “safe” threshold of 1.5 degrees.[3]

If we want to stay below the upper ceiling of 2 degrees, though, we still have a shot. But it’s going to take a monumental effort. Anderson and his colleagues estimate that in order to keep within this threshold, we need to start reducing emissions by a sobering 8-10% per year, from now until we reach “net zero” in 2050.[4] If that doesn’t sound difficult enough, here’s the clincher: efficiency improvements and clean energy technologies will only win us reductions of about 4% per year at most.

How to make up the difference is one of the biggest questions of the 21st century. There are a number of proposals out there. One is to capture the CO2 that pours out of our power stations, liquefy it, and store it in chambers deep under the ground. Another is to seed the oceans with iron to trigger huge algae blooms that will absorb CO2. Others take a different approach, such as putting giant mirrors in space to deflect some of the sun’s rays, or pumping aerosols into the stratosphere to create man-made clouds.

Unfortunately, in all of these cases either the risks are too dangerous, or we don’t have the technology yet.

This leaves us in a bit of a bind. But while engineers are scrambling to come up with grand geo-engineering schemes, they may be overlooking a simpler, less glamorous solution. It has to do with soil.

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Modern Agriculture Cultivates Climate Change – We Must Nurture Biodiversity

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Author: Olivier De Schutter and Emile Frison | Published: January 9, 2017 

As a new year dawns, it is hard not to be dazzled by the current pace of technological change in food and agriculture. Only last month, news emerged of a crop spray with the potential to increase the starch content in wheat grains, allowing for yield gains of up to 20%. This development comes hot on the heels of major breakthroughs in gene-editing technologies – using a powerful tool known as Crispr – over the course of 2016.

A future of continually increasing food supplies and ever more sophisticated manipulation of agro-ecosystems seems to be upon us.

However, there is a risk that these technologies blind us to the very real problems facing modern agriculture – problems that are rapidly undermining the previous round of technological advances.

While global crop yields rose rapidly in the early decades of the “green revolution”, productivity is now plateauing in many regions of the world. A 2012 meta-study found that in 24%-39% of areas growing maize, rice, wheat and soybean, yields either failed to improve, stagnated after initial gains, or collapsed.

Only slightly more than half of all global rice and wheat areas (57% and 56% respectively) are still experiencing yield increases. The areas where yields have stagnated include some of the wealthiest, most industrialised and most hi-tech production systems: more than one-third of the wheat crop in the US (mostly in the Great Plains) is affected, along with more than a third of the Argentine wheat crop, and harvests all across Europe.

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Research Center Proposes Carbon Tax on Unsustainable Food

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Author: Nithin Coca | Published on: December 2, 2016

Agriculture has a huge negative impact on the environment, including being responsible for 11 percent of global carbon emissions. Could a carbon tax on food, as proposed by the International Food Policy Research Institute, help make our food system not only more green, but healthier too?

In a report published in the journal Nature, researchers from the institute argue there is immense climate mitigation potential if we just change our diets.

Right now we, as a planet, have an unsustainable food system. We take up huge swaths of the earth for intensive, chemical-laden food production. The least sustainable food, the researchers insist, is red meat. But the problem is that these very foods are, often, the cheapest choices.

This is something all of us experience every day. The true impacts of food are not included in the price we pay at the store, not at all. Go to your local grocery, and you’ll see that organic produce is far more expensive than a factory-farmed piece of red meat, despite the fact that the former has a far smaller carbon footprint. It is why a healthy sit-down, farm-to-kitchen meal is far more costly than a trip to McDonald’s.

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Why Owning Your Own Farm Isn’t Necessarily a Ticket for Financial Well-Being

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Authors: Michael Colby & Will Allen | Published on: December 10, 2016

These are economically tragic times for America’s farmers. This year, the average on-farm income for a farm family will be -$1,400. Yes, negative. In other words, they’re paying to produce the nation’s food and fiber. And it’s been going on for decades, all the result of a food system, from production and processing to sales and regulations, that is dominated and controlled by a handful of integrated corporate behemoths. That control, coupled with an economic model centered on the devaluation of production (farming!), has spelled nothing but doom for farmers.

While it’s happening everywhere, we live amidst its damage in Vermont, seeing firsthand the impact commodity-priced dairy is having on our agriculture. It’s a horror, really, with thousands of farms lost in the last few decades, all squeezed and pinched and eventually forced to leave the only thing they knew—working the land. And again, it’s all the result of a cheap food model, dictated by the corporate few and allowed by a largely shrugging public.

There’s plenty of money in food. It’s just not getting to the farmers. Vermont’s dairy industry, for example, is dominated by two well-known corporate giants: Ben & Jerry’s and Cabot Creamery. Last year, Ben & Jerry’s grossed around $600 million and Cabot and its parent, Agri-Mark, grossed nearly a billion dollars. Both have bragged in financial reports about how well they’re doing, with increased executive pay and all kinds of bells and whistles for the office set. Ben & Jerry’s makes so much money that they have a foundation to give some of it away.

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Industrial Farming Threatens Food Security in the US

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola | Published: January 10, 2017

It is indisputable that we are negatively affecting our air, soil and water in a way that is drastically impacting the earth itself.

If you look down while on an airplane, you can’t help but notice the vast exposure of soils into perfectly-carved squares below. These exposed soils are a tragic sign of an unsustainable practice that leads to erosion, runoff pollution while also decreasing soil organic matter and impacting our air quality.

Please use my search engine to find previous interviews with experts like Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, Will Harris or other articles related to regenerative agriculture.

Agriculture has undergone massive changes over the past several decades. Many of them were heralded as progress that would save us from hunger and despair. Yet today, we’re faced with a new set of problems, birthed from the very innovations and interventions that were meant to provide us with safety and prosperity.

For decades, food production has been all about efficiency and lowering cost. We now see what this approach has brought us — skyrocketing disease statistics and a faltering ecosystem.

Fortunately, we already know what needs to be done. It’s just a matter of implementing the answers on a wider scale. We need farmers to shift over to regenerative practices that stops depleting our soil and fresh water supplies.

Frustratingly, farmers are often held back from making much needed changes by government subsidy programs that favor monocropping and crop insurance rules that dissuade regenerative farming practices.

Will American Farming Create Another Dust Bowl?

The Great Depression of the 1930s was tough for most Americans, but farmers were particularly hard hit. Plowing up the Southern Plains to grow crops turned out to be a massive miscalculation that led to enormous suffering.

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Why Better Farming Is Vital for Textile Companies Like Patagonia

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Author: Seb Egerton-Read | Published: January 5, 2017 

Creating farming techniques that don’t use heavy amounts of chemical fertilisers and pesticides or tillage –preparation of soil for planting through mechanical agitation of various types, such as digging, stirring and overturning – is becoming increasingly regarded as crucial for an abundant and secure food supply in the future. The development and scaling of regenerative agriculture may be just as crucial for the clothing sector, where cotton, which is dependent on the same linear growing practices, is a critical material input.

There are some positive signs that clothing companies are taking notice. Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario recently wrote that regenerative organic farming, “includes any agricultural practice that increases soil organic matter from baseline levels over time, provides long-term economic stability for farmers and ranchers, and creates resilient ecosystems and communities”.

Defining regenerative agriculture, as Marcario has aimed to do, is particularly important in a context where the words restorative, regenerative and organic are used frequently, interchangeably and without attachment to a clear set of principles. Highlighting the confusion caused by these inconsistencies as one of the reasons for the slow growth of regenerative practices, she makes the case that the conversation needs to be introduced into the clothing and textiles sector.

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