I am co-author of a new paper – What next for agriculture after Durban? – published in the journal Science. Here are some thoughts from the article and the conference itself.

The 17th conference of the parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) ended two days late on 11 December 2011. The extra time was used by governments to agree the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (PDF).

The ’Durban Platform’ is simply an agreement to reach a new agreement by 2015 that would reduce emissions and put the world on track to limit global warming by two degrees and come into effect in 2020.

While this is welcome, as was progress in the Green Climate Fund (see footnote 1) and REDD+ initiative to reduce deforestation, much remains to be done to agree who cuts by how much and when, and then for 190-plus countries to agree this including the two largest global emitters – the United States and China.

Unfortunately, decisions on the specifics for agriculture and global food security did not live up to expectations.

Why was progress on agriculture and food security limited?

An agreement was reached on agriculture (see footnote 2) but this used vague, non-committal terms like ’exchange of views‘, ’to consider‘, ’with a view to‘, and ’to look at‘. This means that while agriculture is on the UNFCCC agenda there is no commitment to do anything about it.

Why wasn’t there more progress on agriculture and food security? It wasn’t because there hadn’t been a focus on agriculture and climate change in 2011. There had in fact been numerous meetings and reports. For example the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change, chaired by Professor Sir John Beddington, released a summary of its findings calling for urgent action. African agriculture ministers also issued a unified call for action (PDF) ahead of Durban. Scientists called for action at Wageningen conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture. UN agencies sent a common letter to UNFCCC asking the inclusion of agriculture.

In Durban, Kofi Anan (former UN Secretary-General), Mary Robertson (former President of Ireland), Jacob Zuma (President of South Africa), Meles Zenawi (Prime Minister of Ethiopia) and many other senior figures called for action on agriculture. Caroline Spelman, the Defra Secretary of State highlighted the importance of ‘climate smart agriculture‘ for all countries, including the UK, and again called for a work program on agriculture. (Robin Sanders also wrote about the need for climate smart agriculture in Africa on this blog.)

There’s a way – where’s the will?

Five hundred and ninety people attended the third Agriculture and Rural Development Day on 3 December. This looked at how to scale up successful examples of climate smart agriculture that:

• Delivers sufficient food, fibre, fuel and incomes
• Sustains the health of the land and increases productivity
• Does not degrade forests or biodiversity
• Sequesters carbon
• Reduces net agriculture and food greenhouse-gas emissions

So in Durban there was political support, compelling evidence on the need for action, and successful examples of investment in agriculture achieving multiple wins.

But progress was slow due to the political economy of UNFCCC negotiations. This is complex but in brief there are five issues:

• For some countries agriculture is more important in their economies than others, and it becomes a bargaining chip in the negotiations for those where it is less important or those that want a concession in another area
• Others are concerned that including agriculture may lead to trade barriers to agriculture exports, and/or trading in agriculture carbon which will only benefit rich farmers and not the millions of smallholder farmer
• Agriculture is seen as  too complex with limited awareness of  existing solutions that can be scaled up under UNFCCC  to achieve adaptation, mitigation, livelihood and economic benefits
• Forestry stakeholders worry that funding for forestry may be diverted to agriculture
• A bureaucratic hurdle – agriculture cuts across the two negotiating streams, one on adaptation and the other on mitigation, but it doesn’t work as it needs to do both causing.

I also believe there is sixth issue closer to home.

This is our failure as scientists that, while we have compelling evidence for urgent action on agriculture to achieve global food security, we need to do better at communicate this evidence to policy makers and the public.

We need a better understanding of the political economy surrounding policy decisions at the global, regional and national levels, and to do better at translating and communicating our research to influence policy.

If we don’t then many of the 1Bn people who will join us by 2025, 500M of them in Africa, will end up poor, hungry, and at greater risk from climate change.

Footnotes

1. Green Climate Fund – report of the Transitional Committee. FCCC/CP/2011/L.9. http://unfccc.int/2860.php
2. Paras 68 to 71 in Outcome of the work of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention to be presented to the Conference of the Parties for adoption at its seventeenth session. FCCC/AWGLCA/2011/L.4 – http://unfccc.int/2860.php

About David Howlett

At the time of writing, David Howlett was the Executive Director of Africa College and a visiting senior research fellow in climate change and agriculture at the University of Leeds. He has now returned to the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) where he is working on climate change adaptation. At Leeds he worked with research scientists across different faculties and with African research partners to increase the impact of their research including using their results to produce evidence to inform agriculture and climate change policies.

It’s been more than two years now since the Global Food Security (GFS) website, and this blog, was launched.

This short post I hope will serve as a big ‘thank you’ to everyone involved, highlight some of the content we have published during this time, and most importantly flag some recent improvements, such as the new blog post ‘notification by email’ box to the right, and our Twitter feed: @FoodSecurityUK.

This website covers a broad range of views, opinions and information from across the GFS programme, its Strategic Plan, as well as from partners and wider, global agricultural and food security-related disciplines.

Resource central

We’re pleased that since December 2009 this blog has published exclusive and original articles every fortnight written by a broad and talented community of people with an interest or professional stake in the issues – my hearty thanks from a grateful editor. (I’ve highlighted the wide range of our blog posts below).

There are, of course, other blogs about food security besides this one. Can you help us by letting us know of any that we could link to?

We already have a Resource Centre on this site that has a Bibliography of links to international and UK organisations, reports, as well as magazine special issues and statistics databases. If you publish or encounter similar material, please do let us know.

We’re particularly interested in highlighting other blogs, so if you enjoy other food security and agriculture-related blogs, let us know at web@foodsecurity.ac.uk and we’ll add them to the list of more than 20 we already have. (And if you also manage a similar resource, don’t forget to add us too.)

Evolution, not revolution

A minor revamp of the homepage and new content streams are in the pipeline.

With a few modifications we’ll be able to better highlight some of the content we’re adding to the site. A good example is the videos that are tucked away in some of the features that go up in the Current Research section, which is the place to go for more in-depth features and is one of the most regularly updated parts of the site.

We’ve added a video archive so you can see videos on everything from new world-class laboratories for animal virus research to field work on pollinating insects to targeting the next virus to eradicate after the successful eradication of rinderpest. But the new front page will highlight our latest videos, as well as further highlight our newest blog posts.

Partnerships

As mentioned, the Current Research section is home to articles about ongoing food security-related research. In each case, the research is funded by one or more of the GFS partners.

Hence, this section highlights research funded by all partners, such as NERC supporting examination of the damage caused by fish farms; DFID have been involved with helping farmers in Africa use insurance to safeguard their food security; EPSRC have pioneered e-Science digital technologies for remote farming communities; and there is also the ESRC-sponsored Food Climate Research Network, which is a great resource for investigating all matters related to climate change and food security.

Blogtastic

GFS partners have also contributed to the blog and we’d love to hear from new bloggers, not only from among our partners, but from within the academic community, and far beyond to farmers, food specialists and consumers. And of course, if you’ve already written for the GFS blog then we’d love to hear from you again.

If you have an idea for a blog post please send ideas to arran.frood@bbsrc.ac.uk and I’ll be more than happy to assist you if you’re new to blog posts – just think of it as an article in which you can use your personal opinions and experience a little more. The best posts often weave the author’s personal expertise with thoughts and feelings on a given topic, and backed up by a killer statistic or two.

Many food security blogs repost all sorts of articles, from features to press releases and interviews. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we want to make this blog one of the go-to websites for original, incisive articles that have more editorial vigour than perhaps some would expect on a corporate or academic platform.

We’ve had great posts on subjects as diverse as the need for alternatives to nitrogen fertilisers, the prospects of enhancing photosynthesis, the aquaculture debate, the potential of organic food, and the effects of commodity trading on food prices.

We’ve run reportage-style posts too, such as on the food crisis in West Africa, the Durban Climate Change Conference, G20 meetings, working for BBC Countryfile on ‘megafarms’, and research collaboration in Brazil by John Lucas.

I’m sure there aren’t that many sites that carry posts with a such a diversity of views from advocating GM technology alongside promoting organic systems, followed by a post by GFS Champion Tim Benton that argue that there is much more to the conventional vs organic debate.

And do bear in mind that we love comments on our blog posts. Don’t be shy! Have your say and let’s make this blog a fine forum for mature debate.

About Arran Frood

Arran Frood manages content for the Global Food Security website and is commission editor this blog in his role as Web Content Writer for BBSRC. The External Relations Unit of BBSRC delivers communications and public engagement for the Global Food Security programme on behalf of all the programme partners.

Frood has been working in science media since 2000. Prior to joining BBSRC, he was a full-time freelance science journalist and editor and has written for a variety of specialist and popular websites, books and magazines, including New Scientist, Nature and BBC Online, as well as newspapers such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent.

From 2005-2007 he worked for the science journal Nature, first as Web Editor and then as Web Projects Editor; during the later position he created the History of the Journal Nature website.

Before working for Nature, he worked at the Science Photo Library which was his first science media job after graduating from Imperial College in 1996 with a BSc in Biology and in 1997 an MSc in Pest Management (applied entomology) from where his interest in all things agricultural stems.

Follow him on Twitter: @arranfrood

It is now more than one month since I arrived in Brazil to spend a period working in Embrapa (the Brazilian Government agricultural research organisation) as part of the Labex (Laboratorio no Exterior) programme. 

For more than 10 years Embrapa have been sending scientists abroad to work in labs and organisations that they regard as of scientific and strategic importance, and a UK Labex base was established at Rothamsted Research in 2010. 

My placement is a reciprocal arrangement, sponsored by BBSRC and Rothamsted, to reinforce the partnership and further explore opportunities for collaboration between UK and Brazilian scientists working in areas relevant to sustainable agriculture, biotechnology, bioenergy and food security. For me it´s an exciting development and timely as negotiations are well advanced to put in place joint funding arrangements for UK-Brazil projects. BBSRC and CNPq (the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) have just announced their pump-prime partnering awards and a full funding initiative is expected early in 2012, and a BBSRC-FAPESP funding agreement, specific to Sao Paulo state, is already in place.

Research in action

My excitement at this opportunity is tempered by some realism about the size of the task. Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world; Embrapa has 47 centres distributed throughout, and then there are the numerous Federal and State universities and institutes engaged in biological research. Networking on this scale is a daunting thought, but there are already well-established links between UK and Brazilian research groups, and now an increased momentum to build on this.

I am based in Brasilia at Embrapa Genetic Resources and Biotechnology (Cenargen), a strategically good place to be, as it is central and close to Embrapa headquarters and several other sites. I have a research project working in conjunction with Patricia Messenberg and colleagues on host-pathogen interactions in Arachis (peanut) and related wild species. The disease in question is late leaf spot, caused by the fungus Cercosporidium personatum, a serious constraint on production of the crop in many countries. I am looking at the time course and extent of infection on cultivated peanut genotypes, as well as some wild relatives with resistance to the disease, together with transcriptome analysis to identify host genes expressed in response to infection.

It’s a new system for me, but relevant to my UK interests in diseases of wheat, as we are also using genetic and genomic approaches to study infection and host defense. It is good to be back in a lab coat again, although I have some catching up to do in terms of hands-on molecular biology. There is a healthy buzz around the place, with a large population of research students from the local University of Brasilia (UnB) and Catholic University. I already gave a seminar at UnB based on recent work in the pathogenomics group at Rothamsted and further talks, workshops and discussions are planned.

Last week Cenargen marked its 37th anniversary with a celebration and special award for two of its staff, Francisco Aragão and Josias Faria for their achievement in producing transgenic (GM) beans resistant to golden mosaic virus, a severe disease throughout the tropical region of the Americas, that impacts in particular on small-holder farmers. The GM beans, that utilize RNAi technology to control the virus, were cleared for field use in September. The refreshments included a stew made from the transgenic beans; I wondered how this might go down back home in my local branch of Waitrose?

Heading down to Rio

Two weeks ago I travelled south and east on a scoping trip to five other Embrapa centres. This was a whirlwind tour through Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Rio do Janeiro. The centres visited covered wheat research, swine and poultry, grapes and other fruit, soils, and agrobiology; one being where much of the work on nitrogen fixation by rhizosphere bacteria was pioneered by Johanna Dobereiner and colleagues in the 50s and 60s.

Fortunately I was accompanied by Alexandre Amaral, the UK Labex representative who has the contacts, as well as the language skills, to smooth such an expedition.

What struck us most about these centres was not just the range of research being done, but also the high proportion of new, young researchers starting programmes, and the investment in infrastructure, new buildings, and kit. But seeing as agriculture now accounts for up to 30% of Brazil’s GDP it’s not surprisingly an area high on the government agenda.

Space does not permit me here to comment on my daily life in this fascinating country, although I did wonder about the attractions of working at Embrapa Soils, sited in the luxuriant Botanic Gardens in Rio, at the foot of the spectacular Corcovado, and close to the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches.

One is almost tempted to write a song about it.

About John Lucas

Professor John Lucas is Head of the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Rothamsted Research. He works on plant pathogenic fungi and infection processes on host plants. He is also interested in mechanisms of pathogen variation and evolution in response to changes in host populations and use of fungicides. He is currently working in Brazil as part of the Embrapa Labex programme with the UK, supported by BBSRC and Rothamsted.

The November 2011 G20 meeting in Cannes last week, perhaps understandably, focused on addressing the eurozone crisis. However, behind the financial headlines lies a bigger crisis of global hunger and malnutrition.

The Horn of Africa famine has drawn heightened attention to the issues of food security and hunger, with many tens of thousands of people suffering from losses of food supplies and an inability to purchase food in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

However, this situation represents only the tip of the iceberg of a wider food crisis that affects almost a billion people.

Hunger levels have remained stubbornly high and have indeed increased during (PDF) and just after the 2008 food price spike. The Global Hunger Index (GHI) notes that the world produces enough calories per person to feed the world, but that hunger levels remain at ‘serious’ levels globally. Twenty-six countries in the world have hunger levels that are described as ‘serious’ or ‘alarming’.

The French government promised to place food security and agriculture at the forefront of its agenda when it took the mantle as President of the G20 in 2011.

So what happened, and what should we expect from the G20 in 2012?

Steps forward on global food security

French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s announcement that he will be taking forward a proposal on a financial transaction tax caused a flurry of excitement from some NGOs. There were incremental moves from G20 governments to close down secrecy of tax havens, as well as the need to invest in national social protection floors – important for improving the access to food for vulnerable people.

Regarding agriculture and food security, the French Presidency of the G20 acknowledged the need to regulate and improve transparency in commodity markets, through ex-ante position limits, a tool which ‘can cap the amount of the market that can be held by an individual trader’ and the creation of an Agriculture Market Information System, also known as AMIS.  These measures, if fully implemented, represent a step forward in attempts to intervene in opaque agricultural markets that many, such as Julian Oram on this blog, believe have amplified or directly contributed to food price volatility.

The outcome text and communiqué also refer towards the need to ‘foster investment in smallholder farmers’ as well as to promote farmers’ access to risk management tools to manage price risks. The members also pushed forward with a plan developed by the World Food Programme to initiate a system of emergency food (PDF) reserves in West Africa.

The world’s poorest people

However, with the political crisis in Greece overshadowing much of the agenda, food security was left as a footnote. The agenda was overambitious, and as a result led to an incoherent set of outcome documents that offered much in rhetoric but delivered little in commitments, particularly on agriculture and food security.

While the communiqué and declaration name-check the importance of investment in agricultural productivity, the text lacks details on the targeting of that support, for example to resource poor smallholder farmers and other marginal livelihood groups. The text also mentions the need to foster investment in agriculture, but there is no specific mention of the members investing in the resource poor farmers themselves.

Similarly, the members fail to mention the G8 L’Aquila Food Security Initiative (PDF) from 2009, where donors promised to invest in the country-owned plans agriculture and food security plans of vulnerable countries. Eighteen of the G20 (PDF) have signed up to this pledge, and it remains off-track, with only 22 percent disbursed so far (PDF), and 26 percent ‘on track’ to be disbursed.

Support for resource-poor smallholder farmers

A number of non-governmental organisations, such as Concern Worldwide, who have many years of experience in working on food security at the field level, believe that investment in smallholder farmers remains an effective method to reduce poverty and food security in rural areas.

Policy think-tank IFPRI suggest that support to agriculture, as well as complementary investments in education, health and social services is vital to meeting Millennium Development Goal target 1 on hunger through increasing the availability of food and improved dietary knowledge. Due to the predominately-rural nature of poverty, analysts suggest that growth in agriculture can be more than twice as effective (PDF) at reducing poverty as growth in other sectors, and that growth can be particularly pro-poor when it is based on small farms.

Investment in smallholder farmers can result in linkages with the non-farm economy, create job opportunities, and boost the local businesses. Agricultural economists in the Montpellier Panel have called this process a ‘virtuous circle’ where support to poor farmers leads to spillover effects in other parts of the economy.

Looking to 2012

G20 members should keep their promises to the world’s poorest people in 2012. Principally, it is imperative that the Mexican Presidency keeps food security on the agenda – in particular support for resource poor smallholder farmers. There are three concrete ways that G20 members can help to achieve this aim.

Firstly, the G20 governments should rigorously monitor the commitments of members that have committed to the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative from 2009. It remains critical that donor countries keep their commitments to support vulnerable countries to invest in smallholder agriculture.

Secondly, investments should be monitored against measurements that move beyond productivity and address poverty reduction and malnutrition indicators. This process would ensure that support is targeted at those people most in need, and can improve the effectiveness of aid delivery.

Lastly, despite an era of austerity, there remains a desperate need for further public sector investment in smallholder agriculture. G20 governments can help with this aim by supporting the country-owned agriculture and food security plans of countries vulnerable to food insecurity – small-scale producers in vulnerable countries expect nothing less.

About Robin Willoughby

Robin Willoughby is Policy Officer at Concern Worldwide (UK). Concern Worldwide is an international humanitarian organisation dedicated to reducing suffering and working towards the elimination of extreme poverty. In an effort to support these aims, Concern Worldwide (UK) has recently launched a campaign action, calling on members of the public to pressure the UK Government and other donors to keep their hunger promises.

Meeting the growing demands for both food and sustainability is a huge interdisciplinary challenge; the answer will not be found in a single discipline. As an interdisciplinary problem, global food security solutions must combine agricultural science (including crop improvement), farming management, understanding trade-offs in land uses (between ecosystem services and agricultural production for example) and a wide range of social issues concerning behaviour, consumption, economics and global trade.

The Champion for the Global Food Security (GFS) programme therefore needs to be someone with a breadth of interest, and understanding, across a wide range of disciplines and able to forge partnerships between people with very different interests and viewpoints.

So why me?

Food security and me

My first, and principal, interest in this role arises because I consider the challenge of ensuring global food security perhaps the most important environmental, biological and societal issue the world has encountered. For many, the impact of anthropogenic climate change will be most noticeable through food and water impacts.

As a result of this realisation, much of my research concerns the relationship between farming and the natural environment and the way we can conserve ecosystem function whilst maintaining or increasing productivity. (See the foot of this post for some of my recent publications.)

Second, I feel I can see outside my own disciplinary perspective for this important interdisciplinary problem. I have taken on a number of strategic roles – I have been Research Dean, responsible for research strategy, and am a member of strategy boards for two UK Research Councils – and am comfortable with taking a broad overview of areas and help set the required direction to achieve goals.  

That food security is a problem that requires solutions from a number of fields, and not just the scientific, cannot be overstated. Hence, my third reason for taking on the role is because as I have developed my academic career, I have seen it increasingly essential to interact across many disciplines and also to engage with external partners and stakeholders.  I have considerable experience in stakeholder engagement. For example, in the last few months I have spoken at the European Parliament, the EU Environment Directorate General, from a panel event on farming and biodiversity in Brussels, to the European Crop Protection Association, to Oxfam in Leeds, and to a local secondary school – all concerning sustainable food security.  

My fourth reason for taking on the champion role is that I am an interdisciplinary researcher and research-leader.  For example, I have helped lead The Africa College Partnership, a 100-strong academic partnership based in Leeds, which spans nutrition, crop science, ecosystem services, climate change and social sciences with two major global agricultural organisations (the CGIAR institute partners IITA and ICIPE). 

It is important that GFS is firmly evidence-based in terms of setting the research agenda, or influencing strategy and policy. So, my fifth reason is that I am experienced at synthesising data and assessing science quality, as evidenced by my experience as a journal editor-in-chief, grant panel member, external examiner at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and long-term teacher of statistics and analysis. I therefore have the skill to assess the evidence base (and evidence gaps) in food security-related topics.

So, in conclusion to the “why me?” question, let me just say that I have always been committed to engagement with non-academic audiences and that even as a research leader in agriculture-environment interactions, I’m confident that I’m able to take a broad view, think strategically, and build lasting productive partnerships.

I will never be an expert in all the core disciplines that contribute to GFS, but my interests are very broad, and my willingness to learn is unbounded. The joy of being a ‘systems’ person is that the system of interest can always be expanded: my initial interest in ecology expanded to agri-environmental systems, then global land use patterns…  I bring a real enthusiasm for thinking about the whole, not just a small part.

Why global?

I am often asked “we’re OK in the UK, so why worry about global issues?”  The answer is that we depend on the rest of the world for much of our food, and that local choices have important implications elsewhere in the world.

Global food security necessarily involves consideration of global issues of supply and demand.  Many people interested, like me, in the natural world suggest that reducing the intensity of farming, even at the expense of yield, is the route to a sustainable farming future – because they believe that the shortfall in yield can always be made up through imports or changes in our consumption patterns. Reducing the production of food in Europe will almost certainly mean that production elsewhere needs to increase to supply our demands, leading to the potential of exporting environmental impacts. Furthermore, whilst increasing imports of food may be available at the present time, they may not always be as other countries’ production systems adapt to the challenge of increasing their own food supply. Therefore, choices made in the developed, global north clearly influence the global south, and we need to understand this linkage more in developing both national and EU approaches.

There is often a tension between farming and environmental sustainability, exemplified by the ‘intensive or sustainable’ viewpoints (or the “organic vs conventional” farming). My own view is that sustainable intensification is possible: i.e. maintaining or increasing production whilst increasing sustainability.  One route to removing the tension is with the concept of sustainable farming landscapes, instead of sustainable fields or farms. Some of my own work has shown that you potentially get more production and more ecosystem services out of a landscape with a mix of intensive farms and land managed for ecology, rather than from a landscape entirely managed extensively. I wrote a previous post for this website outlining my thoughts on this.

Finding ways to remove the ‘intensive or sustainable’ tension will help the debate, as well as moving policy and strategy forwards. We need agriculture to be both high yielding and sustainable; the good news is that routes to this destination do exist.

About Tim Benton

Tim Benton is Research Dean in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, University of Leeds, and is Chair of the Africa College Partnership, an interdisciplinary virtual research institute concerned with sustainable agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. He has worked on the links between farming and biodiversity (and ecosystem services) for many years.

Selected Tim Benton publications

• TG Benton, DM Bryant, L Cole and HPQ Crick (2002)  Linking agricultural practice to insect and bird populations: a historical study over 3 decades. Journal of Applied Ecology. 39(4), 673-687
• Benton, TG, Vickery, JA, Wilson, JD (2003) Farmland biodiversity: is habitat heterogeneity the key? Trends in Ecology & Evolution 18: 182-188
• Gabriel, D., S J. Carver, H Durham, W E. Kunin, R C. Palmer, S M. Sait, S Stagl, T G. Benton (2009). The spatial aggregation of organic farming in England and its underlying environmental correlates.  Journal of applied Ecology 46: 323-333
• D. Gabriel, S.M. Sait, J.A. Hodgson, U. Schmutz, W.E. Kunin, T.G. Benton (2010) Scale matters: the impact of organic farming on biodiversity at different spatial scales.  Ecology letters. 13: 858-869
• Hodgson, J; Kunin, W E.; Thomas, CD; Benton, TG; Gabriel, D (2010) Comparing organic farming and land sparing: optimising yield and butterfly populations at a landscape scale. Ecology letters13: 1358-1367
• Elisabeth Simelton, et al (2010) Climate Change and the Socioeconomics of Global Food Production: A Quantitative Analysis of how Socio-Economic Factors Influence the Vulnerability of Grain Crops to Drought CCEP Working Paper 29 (PDF)
• TG Benton, AJ Dougill, EDG Fraser & DJB Howlett (2011) How to use the global land bank to both produce food and conserve nature: examining extensive vs intensive agriculture.  World Agriculture 2:14-21
• Lee-Ann Sutherland, Doreen Gabriel, Laura Hathaway-Jenkins, Unai Pascual, Ulrich Schmutz, Dan Rigby, Richard Godwin, Steven M. Sait, Ruben Sakrabani, Bill Kunin, Tim G. Benton and Sigrid Stagl.  (in press) The ‘Neighbourhood Effect’:A multidisciplinary assessment of the case for farmer co-ordination in agri-environmental programmes. Land Use Policy

In the 21st century, one of the potential consequences of climate change and free global trade is that animal and plant disease may pose increasing threats to our food supplies.

It’s important to understand the biology of the pathogens and pests involved, but it’s equally important to fully consider the human dimension, and the part that people and their behaviour play. That has been the basis of the Rural Economy and Land Use (Relu) Programme’s research on animal and plant disease, culminating in their latest briefing paper “Growing concerns: animal and plant disease policy for the 21st century (PDF)” .

Past policies

Even a cursory examination of government policy on disease reveals how unsystematic our present approach seems to be. Its origins are rooted in a different historical landscape and policy has grown up in a way that often seems illogical today.

One obvious example is the way in which animal disease is categorised as ‘exotic’ or ‘endemic’ and how this determines the political response. Public money and effort go into addressing -exotic- diseases such foot-and-mouth disease, while persistent infections such as Johne’s disease and infectious bovine rhinotracheitis are regarded as industry problems, attracting no compensation for farmers and no particular efforts to eliminate them.

Yet these endemic diseases are impacting significantly on food production, farmers’ profits and animal welfare. Research carried out by a Relu team at Warwick (PDF) has concluded that making more information on disease status and history available to livestock buyers could help to address this. For example, knowledge of the disease risks within the herd would have an effect on prices, giving the low-risk animal a higher value, and providing more incentive for farmers to eliminate disease.

The new Animal and Health Welfare Board for England needs to apply a systematic framework for risk and cost sharing that has the backing of stakeholders. At the moment, anomalies persist not only within the categorisation of animal disease, but between animal and plant disease.  These two factors still seem to be addressed within self-contained silos and carry very different consequences for farmers. There are surely many lessons, not only on cost and responsibility, but on other aspects such as disease risk management, that could be applied more widely between the animal and plant sciences.

All the right friends

One of the major findings of the Relu programme is how involvement of stakeholders can strengthen research and it can also make implementation of policy more effective.

The UK Government’s approach to the appearance of bluetongue in Britain in 2007 provides a good example of this. By working closely with the farming community they developed a control strategy, and a communications campaign implemented with help from veterinary and industry bodies raised awareness of the disease and the actions that needed to be taken.

But we really need an even wider engagement with society on these issues, even if it may sometimes make us feel uneasy. The 38 Degrees organisation for example, has an approach that some might regard as provocative on arguments such as bovine TB and the culling of badgers, but it does encourage involvement beyond the obvious groups.

There are new disease threats to our food all the time and the Relu report calls for a fresh approach from Government. Food is a concern for everyone and we should all be taking an interest in UK and world food security as price rise and supply become less secure.

About Wyn Grant

Wyn Grant is a graduate of the universities of Leicester, Strathclyde and Exeter. He joined Warwick University in 1971 and was chair of the Department of Politics and International Studies from 1990 to 1997.  In recent years he has been actively involved in research projects with members of the Department of Life Sciences at Warwick where he also teaches.  He is vice-president for Europe and Africa of the International Political Science Association.

On 10 February the UK’s major public funders of food-related research published their coordinated research plan to help the world avoid a food security crisis.

The UK Research Councils, Government departments and other public bodies are co-ordinating their research activities related to food and agriculture through the Global Food Security (GFS) programme, the blog of which you are reading.

The GFS programme aims to provide the world’s growing population with a sustainable and secure supply of safe, nutritious and affordable high quality food from less land and with lower inputs. A short video that encapsulates the problem can be seen on the front page of this website. 

The programme has now published its strategic plan (PDF 1MB). This outlines how the programme partners intend to work together across four cross-disciplinary research themes for food security: economic resilience, resource efficiency, sustainable food production and supply, and sustainable, healthy and safe diets.

Running through each of the four themes is a commitment to take into account the sustainability of ecosystems that relate to food production, both for the future of food security, and to consider how to reduce the negative environmental impacts of all aspects of the food system. Key priorities are reducing waste and greenhouse-gas emissions from the food chain.

The strategic plan puts flesh on the bones of the GFS programme launched last year. It builds on the existing activities and strategies of all the partners, adding value through coordination and provides a focus for collaboration. The strength of the programme is the breadth of its scope and the commitment of the partners to work together on multidisciplinary, whole food systems approaches to meet the food security challenge sustainably. Through the strategy we are also committing to increase the effectiveness of translation of research findings in practical applications and policy advice.

A flavour of the future

The GFS strategy publication follows the recent release of the Foresight report, The Future of Food and Farming. This highlighted the complex and multifaceted causes of food insecurity and the need for holistic approaches in meeting the challenges of feeding a growing world population and reducing hunger and malnutrition in developing countries over the next 20 to 40 years.

I am also delighted to announce the appointment of Lord Cameron of Dillington as the first Chair of the GFS Strategy Advisory Board. Lord Cameron has an established interest in agriculture and food.  He is a farmer in Somerset, a Lawes trustee at Rothamsted Research and chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Agriculture, Food and Development.

The programme will shortly be strengthened though the addition of the Welsh Assembly Government as a new partner. It brings significant expertise, resources and research challenges to the programme, many unique to the food and farming landscape in Wales, and the GFS programme is in discussion with other funding bodies to further widen the areas it includes.

About Professor Janet Allen

Professor Janet Allen is Director of Research (since October 2008) at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and is provisional Chair of the Programme Coordination Group for the Global Food Security programme.

Professor Allen trained initially in biochemistry and medicine. In addition to her highly successful career in senior appointments in medicine and academic research, she has held research directorships in the global pharmaceutical sector (with Parke Davis/Pfizer) and with an innovative biotech SME (Inpharmatica). She has also established a spin-out company (Ligand Xpress Ltd).

Professor Allen’s own research was primarily in cell and molecular biology. In 2000 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2002 was appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Glasgow and at Imperial College School of Medicine, London.

Articles

• The Guardian: Failure to act on crop shortages fuelling political instability, experts warn (external link)
• NPR: Rising Food Prices Can Topple Governments, Too (external link)
• Climate Progress: Food insecurity (external link)
• The New York Times: Droughts, Floods and Food (external link)

I don’t consider myself to be an especially intuitive person and I’m pretty sure I’d make a lousy detective. But a few years ago something happened on an international scale which roused my suspicions: the price of food was rising fast.
Between January 2007 and June 2008, maize prices shot up by 74%, wheat prices by 124%, and rice by 224%. In Britain, this led to grumblings about the rising cost of a loaf of bread. But across Asia, Africa and Latin America, riots erupted as the price of basic foodstuffs became unaffordable to poor households and millions went hungry. It was, without doubt, a major world crisis.

On the surface, there was a convincing ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances behind the rising costs: a combination of poor wheat harvests in Australia, rising demand or bio-fuels, high oil prices, changing farming conditions in the face of global climate change, and a surge in demand for grains from India and China.

But what bugged me was that the sudden and dramatic nature of the price rises just didn’t seem explicable by these factors. As I searched for clues, I picked up on a theory that the spike in food prices had as much to do with financial markets as it did with  food markets.

The big bang theory

The theory goes something like this. Since around 2000, deregulation in the US and Europe along with changes in the financial services industry had greatly expanded the role of banks in trading in commodity ‘derivatives’. 

Commodity derivatives were invented over a hundred years ago in the US to provide a means of risk protection for farmers and food buyers. Producers could take out a contract to sell their crops in the future for a pre-arranged price. For decades, regulations had been in place which ensured that the trade in these ‘futures’ contracts were largely the preserve of those involved in trading physical commodities.

But since 2000, commodity derivatives had become increasingly popular as an ‘asset class’ for investment banks and hedge funds, who were now treated by regulators as no different to farmers or flour millers. In the early part of the last decade, the number of commodity-based index funds as well as ‘over the counter’ (bank-to-bank) swaps in commodity futures jumped dramatically; to the extent that financial speculators became the dominant presence (PDF) in these markets.

The problem was that commodity markets are relatively small beer in global financial markets terms, say, in comparison to stock markets. As the US sub-prime mortgage market began to unravel in late 2006 and early 2007, banks began to redirect large amounts of capital into the relatively safe haven of commodity futures. Because of the vast amounts of money flooding into these markets, demand for futures contracts soared, leading to massive inflationary pressure on both the future and immediate ‘spot’ price of commodities, including food and oil (PDF).

But in summer 2008, with the jury still out on this theory as the finger was pointed at other factors such as biofuels, the credit crunch suddenly hit the world’s richest countries. Food and oil prices nosedived. For the global media, the issue of food prices and hunger suddenly ceased to matter. Now it was serious. Now it was about money.

But in much of the developing world, the impacts of the food crisis continued to hit the poorest people again and again like the aftershocks of an earthquake. In 2009, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that the number of chronically hungry people globally had crossed the inauspicious 1 billion mark.

For a number food economists, activists and market analysts the issue was by no means put to bed. It became like an unsolved crime.

On the case

One of the principal investigators on the case has been the Indian economist Professor Jayati Ghosh. She examined the evidence and concluded that financial speculation was indeed one of the main culprits for the 2007-08 food crisis.

Her arguments are varied, but for me two key things stand out. First, that activity in the over-the-counter commodity derivatives market in the period from late 2006 to mid 2007 went into overdrive, corresponding almost exactly with the price in food prices. Second, that none of the explanatory factors put forward by those arguing that the 2007-08 crisis was down to the ‘fundamentals’ of supply and demand can account for the dramatic peaks and troughs of food price movements over recent years, and in particular for the price crash in the late summer of 2008.

Since 2008, studies by various international institutions, academics, hedge fund managers (PDF) and former commodity traders (PDF) have all identified financial speculation on food commodities as causal factor in the increased cost and volatility of food prices. Gary Gensler, the head of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Commissioner Michel Barnier, the head of the European Union’s Directorate for Internal Markets, have reached the same conclusion. So too has Olivier de Shutter, the UN’s own Special Rapporteur on the right to food, in his briefing note of September 2010 (PDF).

Although there are those who still dispute this, I believe the weight of evidence now sits firmly on the side of those who would declare the financial services industry as guilty as charged.

The path to progress

A verdict needs a court and judge, and in the real world this means a political opportunity and a government willing to take action. In the US, the recent Dodd-Frank ‘Wall Street Reform’ Act has introduced strong laws making commodity derivatives trading more transparent, and limiting the role of purely financial speculators.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Barnier has instigated a review of the main EU regulatory instrument government commodity derivatives, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID). These reforms have the potential to toughen up Europe’s regulatory oversight of the commodity speculators and harmonise the rules here with those in the US legislation. The French government are strongly backing this, and the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is also onside.

Less clear is the UK government’s commitment to tackling the issue. Correspondence sent to the World Development Movement from government ministers and the Financial Services Authority has indicated a lack of concern over the role of financial speculation in increasing volatility and level of food prices. With the City of London keen to maintain the status quo, Britain has thus far adopted a resistant stance on most areas of potential new financial regulation across Europe, including derivatives.

Which is where we come in. Over the coming months, the World Development Movement will be campaigning hard in the UK to ensure that the voices of millions of ordinary people who suffer from food price inflation – and particularly those living in chronic food insecurity in the global south – are heard louder by our government than those from the City of London. By taking action with us to support new regulations in the UK and Europe, we can help make gambling on hunger what it should be: a genuine crime.

About Julian Oram

Dr Julian Oram is Head of Policy and Campaigns at the World Development Movement and leads their advocacy work on global justice issues, including food commodity speculation. Prior to this role, Julian was head of the trade and corporate team at ActionAid, specialising on international trade, food rights and corporate accountability. Julian previously headed the ‘transforming markets’ programme at the New Economics Foundation, and developed practical proposals for delivering a more sustainable economic system. Before that he led a research programme on globalisation and food security at the International Famine Centre, in Ireland. Julian has a doctorate in Geography from University College Cork, and has lived and worked in the UK, Ireland, the Philippines and the US.

In achieving global food security, agriculture is part of the problem and part of the solution to climate change.

While we need to better understand greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture we do know they are significant. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that direct emissions are about 14% of global emissions (similar to those from transport) and emissions from deforestation are 17% of global emissions – but because farming is a major driver of deforestation the majority of these are due to agriculture.

The total of emissions from agriculture is even higher when the indirect emissions from energy for fertilisers and other agrochemicals, irrigation, agro-processing and packaging, and transportation are taken into account.

While we don’t have accurate or definitive figures we can realistically say that over a third of global emissions are due to agriculture.

However, using our existing knowledge on better land practices and husbandry we sequester carbon into soils and plant biomass. Again, it is estimated that potentially agriculture could sequester up to 6000Mt CO2 per year, or 88%, of its total annual CO2 emissions.

We know that agriculture, especially in developing countries, will be seriously affected by climate change but on the degree and locations of these impacts we are less certain. But unless we put in place adaptation to climate change many millions of the poorest in the world will suffer the most.

Game plan

We therefore need to look for triple wins –mitigation, adaptation and food security benefits.

To achieve this we are going to need radical change. As Richard Jacobs mentioned in his post ‘Don’t write off organics’ on this blog, organic and ecological approaches can improve yields especially in places where yields are low.

However, while these approaches are essential we will need to marry these techniques with the best of the most modern scientific approaches to produce the food we need. We need to become more efficient in how we use energy to produce our food and consider emissions from the whole food chain, which is much more than simple food or air miles.

This is a common agenda for developed and developing countries even though smallholder farmers and their communities in the developing world have specific challenges and lower carbon footprints than their developing world counterparts.

We need to put aside polarised arguments on whether GM crops and ‘industrial agriculture’ or ecological and organic approaches are the solution. It’s time for a radical rethink on how we can feed the world and to do it sustainably this has to combine the best of all approaches.

Out of Africa

We are looking to help do this at the Africa College – a research partnership between the University of Leeds and research institutions in Africa that are working on food security and human health.

Africa College is tackling these problems in a number of ways. For example, at a ‘landscape scale’ what matters is production of both food and the level of biodiversity (especially for the services that help produce food such as pollination).

The optimal way to design a landscape that produces food and biodiversity depends on a number of factors. Sometimes, using the whole land farmed extensively does best (e.g. organic agriculture). Sometimes, you get both more food and more wildlife if you separate areas out for specialised conservation areas and conventionally farm the rest; this allows some areas to be farmed for high productivity.

This potentially gives a route forwards: we need both high productivity and sustainability. Moving to a greener agriculture is necessary for sustainability (e.g. precision farming, low-input, no-till) but this need not entail a wholesale conversion to organic methodologies.

At the scale of the plot, some of our research indicates that GM crops and those developing non-GM biotechnologies can help make farming more sustainable. Crops can be modified to enable them to grow in conditions they otherwise wouldn’t, places prone to drought for example, and be resistant to pests that would otherwise require spraying with insecticides. Such crops may provide high yields and also require less chemical and energy input.

GM crops will carry a risk that needs proper evaluation; however, not using them also carries a cost: more land will be required to grow the food needed, and conversion of the extra land to farming may impact heavily on the local environment.

We are also working with our African partners on the use of biotechnology, including GM, to benefit smallholder farmers. For example bananas are a staple food for over 60 million Africans whose food security is at threat when yields are reduced by plant diseases and pests. This includes nematodes, and the growth of bananas at high density for several years over large areas increases nematode populations and consequently the severity of the crop damage; it is estimated that losses exceed 35% in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most edible bananas are sterile and produce no seeds slowing their natural evolution and improvement by conventional plant breeding. Africa College partners are working together in public research using plant biotechnology to provide nematode resistant cooking bananas and plantains to benefit smallholder farmers in Africa.

About Mr David Howlett

David Howlett is Executive Director of Africa College and a visiting senior research fellow in climate change and agriculture at the University of Leeds. He is currently working with research scientists across different faculties at Leeds and with African research partners to increase the impact of their research. He is working to turn research results into evidence to inform agriculture and climate change policies.

Before joining Leeds, David worked for the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID) where he worked on food and climate change policies. Prior to this he led DFID’s agriculture research team. David has lived and worked in Asia and Africa and most recently was a United Nations Development Programme adviser based in the Vice President’s Office in Tanzania. He has undertaken research on sustainable land management while working for international and national research organisations in Africa, Asia as well as the Pacific.

It’s said that you can’t force people to have fun, but can you help a group of people to be creative?

The answer is yes. But it depends largely on the people present and the environment they are in.

The Ideas Lab on enhancing photosynthesis, jointly organised by BBSRC and the National Science Foundation in the US, and held at the Asilomar Conference Center, California, Sept 13-17 aimed to create an environment conducive to creative,  ‘out of the box’ thinking. The idea was to bring together a diverse group of people from different disciplinary backgrounds and to use their unique perspectives and expertise to generate novel and potentially ground-breaking ideas in a similar format to a ‘sandpit’.

But this was no ordinary workshop: up to $8M was available ($4M each from the UK and US) for transformative high-risk high-reward research proposals.

Transatlantic and multidisciplinary research teams were strongly encouraged, as the challenge of enhancing the natural process of photosynthesis, which converts the energy of incident sunlight into leaf biomass with an efficiency of up to 6% in most crops, requires the brightest minds to tackle the problem from all angles.

To help us meet the food and energy demands of the future it’s clear that a step change in knowledge is required that will, in turn, lead to a step change in productivity. Transformative research such as this does occur periodically through normal funding mechanisms, but the challenge of sustainably producing 40% more food by 2030 to feed a growing population requires concerted action now to catalyse the process.

The Ideas Lab was guided by a team of five mentors – experts in fields relevant to photosynthesis who were not eligible for funding; their role was to challenge participants’ thinking and stimulate the development of new ideas.

The week began with participants getting to know each other and building relationships. A provocateur was brought in to provide a different perspective on the problem and challenge conventional thinking. The participants then started to explore the problem space, dealing with any potential barriers by turning them into questions: “how might we?” or ”what if we could?”. These questions were then clustered into distinct challenges across the photosynthetic pathway.

These challenges were continually presented back to all participants at the Ideas Lab for further exploration and development, and it was here that participants shaped each other’s thinking with their own unique perspectives.

Participants were then given free rein to work on any challenge they wished and could change group at any time up until the final presentation on the last day, or be part of more than one group. Evolving project teams regularly gave presentations to all Ideas Lab participants on their developing projects and they received anonymous feedback. This presentation-feedback process highlighted expertise missing from a team that could be provided by another participant, but importantly allowed for continual peer review of projects as they developed. In this way, every participant had a hand influencing the direction of the emerging projects. Team feedback was also provided by the mentors throughout.

On the last day project teams gave a final presentation and submitted their outline proposals. The mentors took on the role of an expert panel and assessed the proposals, making recommendations on which projects to invite back to the full proposal stage.

There was a very high standard of proposals and four multidisciplinary, innovative and potentially transformative research projects were invited back.

Most of these projects exploit the fact that plants, algae and cyanobacteria all have slightly different photosynthetic machinery. This allows these organisms to absorb light at different wavelengths and, in the case of cyanobacteria and algae, to pump in carbon dioxide to improve the efficiency of carbon fixation. The focus of some of the projects is to optimise these beneficial features and incorporate them into plants.

Interestingly, plants can only absorb light in a fraction of the solar spectrum (absorbing around half of the incident sunlight), and when they reach saturation, any further light absorbed is dissipated as heat as the plant is unable to use it. Maximising the use of these untapped sources of light energy is also a strong feature of some projects.

The result, if just one of these projects is successful, could be a transformational change in our capacity to produce significantly more with less.

About Riaz Bhunnoo

Riaz Bhunnoo is Senior Programme Manager for Food Security at BBSRC. His main task is taking forward the development of the Global Food Security programme. However, he also manages BBSRC activities on enhancing photosynthesis. Riaz has worked at BBSRC since 2005, and has worked within the RCUK Strategy Unit on cross-Council research coordination and policy.