During the launch of the Montpellier Panel Report last year I was inspired by the talk on women in agriculture presented by Vicki Wilde. She is the Director of the CGIAR’s Gender and Diversity Programme and the African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) project – a professional development program that strengthens the research and leadership skills of African women in agricultural science.

After Vicki’s speech, something inside me seemed to click and I decided from this point that I really wanted to help make a difference for women in African agriculture. 

My first point of research was to read the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) report, The State of Food and Agriculture 2010-11, which states that women comprise, on average, 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force in developing countries, yet they consistently have less access to helpful resources and opportunities for growth.  They operate smaller farms, keep fewer livestock, have a greater workload and are usually left with the lower status activities such as carrying water and fetching firewood. Women also usually receive lower wages for the same work than men, even when they have the same qualifications and experience.

I was also saddened to learn that most educated women in Africa don’t seem to make it past bachelor’s degree level. It is also very worrying that only one in seven women agricultural scientists are in leadership roles, according to a study conducted with the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators initiative that collates data on agricultural R&D investments and capacity in developing countries.

The benefits of closing the gap

Wilde stated at a recent Agropolis Foundation event that by closing this huge gender gap we could lift 100-150 million people out of hunger. She believes that with investment, awareness raising and a deeper focus on these issues, we can improve the working lives of African women, thus improving African agricultural development as a whole.

For example, the FAO report also states that plot yields managed by women are lower than those managed by men. Extensive evidence shows that this is not because women are worse farmers than men. They simply do not have access to the same inputs such as fertilisers, seeds and tools. If they did, their yields would be on a par with men’s and agricultural production would increase. Closing the input gap on the agricultural land held by women could result in an increase in production of 20–30 percent on their land, which in turn would contribute towards food security as a whole.

Also, closing the gender gap in agriculture would generate broader social and economic benefits by strengthening women’s direct access to, and control over, resources and incomes. Evidence from Africa (PDF), Asia (PDF) and elsewhere consistently shows that families benefit when women have greater status and power within the household. Increased control over income gives women a stronger bargaining position over economic decisions and when women have more influence over these decisions; their families allocate more income to food, health, education, as well as children’s clothing and nutrition.

Fast-track fellowship

AWARD’s goal is to empower women to contribute more effectively to poverty alleviation and food security in sub-Saharan Africa and offers two-year fellowships focused on establishing mentoring relationships by assigning a mentor to every woman researcher – a senior scientist or other professional who helps them realise their career goals – because young female researchers sometimes struggle to find role models of women who have already succeeded.

AWARD also helps women researchers to develop their leadership skills so they can achieve positions of influence and have a role in determining what research is conducted and how precious research funds are spent.

African women face particular challenges in continuing their science careers once they have a family to raise. To combat this, AWARD invites nursing mothers to bring their babies along to their training courses; they also offer a child-minding service and there is no cut-off age (usually 35) to enrol – allowing older women to fulfil their career aspirations.

Rebuilding the foundations

To me, gender is not just a side issue to a wider agenda, but in fact one of the most important issues to address in improving agricultural development in Africa. It seems to be a fundamental issue in Africa that governments, the private sector and the public are all failing to act on.

How can we build both agricultural and educational systems that work on such a shaky foundation?  How can we improve food security if half the population (and almost half of the farmers in Africa) are being so disempowered?

I believe that by championing initiatives such as AWARD and by further much needed time and investment in agricultural research and development for African women, we can create a paradigm shift which would help gain the support of the men out there and other organisations which might usually be resistant towards a gender revolution.

As Kofi Annan, Chairman of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and former Secretary-General of the United Nations, once said “a green revolution in Africa will happen only if there is also a gender revolution”, a statement that I am only to eager to agree with.

About Jo Seed

Jo has been the Project Administrator for Ag4Impact since July 2009. She has previously worked for the Universities of Sussex, Central Lancashire, and Manchester.

Just after Easter I gave my first public talk about the forthcoming reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) that is due to be introduced in 2013. 

Predicting and pontificating on the ideal form of future policies is every economist’s dream. You get to show how clever you are in your analysis, how balanced you in are in your appreciation of all relevant factors, and how much better the world would be if only the government would take your ideas on board.

As part of my research for the talk I read the latest European Commission documents on ideas for CAP and discovered that the main strategic aim of the new CAP is to ‘to preserve the food production potential on a sustainable basis throughout the EU, so as to guarantee long-term food security for European citizens and to contribute to growing world food demand’. Further down the list of strategic aims are the need to ‘combat biodiversity loss’ and ‘to mitigate and to adapt to climate change’. These aims are laudable and desirable, and who would vote against any of them? 

The problem comes not in trying to achieve any of these alone, but rather achieving them in combination. This is a lot trickier today than in many of the reforms of the last 25 years because the desire to enhance food security is now so prominent. Many of the recent reforms have been able to give support to environmental and social aims, and these have gone hand in hand with policies aimed at reducing food mountains and encouraging less intensive methods of production.

But now we want to green the CAP and provide more food.

More, from less?

Devising a policy to give us more food is easy. We incentivise farmers to cultivate more land and to use resources in order to maximise production. This could be a good thing from the point of view of mitigating climate change, as generally products from intensive production systems have lower carbon footprints than do products from less intensive systems; as observed in systems as diverse as poultry, vegetables and beef. 

Unfortunately, such a policy goes totally against the philosophy of agri-environment schemes we have seen develop over the last 25 years, which have been built on the basis of extensification of production (i.e. fewer inputs and management, making production systems less intensive).

Given current knowledge and technology it is obvious to even the least sophisticated analyst that devising a policy to achieve more food, more biodiversity and fewer greenhouse gases is quite a challenge.

So what to do? First, governments should recognise the problems in trying to achieve all this in one policy. Second, conservationists need to consider this as an opportunity to totally rethink conservation policy within the CAP. 

Traditional agri-environment schemes have lots of support because they are cuddly and nice. They are familiar to farmers, good for lobby groups (PDF) and seem like a good idea – but they may not (PDF) work well. Indeed, the evidence supporting their effectiveness on the ground  is scarce. So lets be prepared to ditch them and try some new ideas. 

Third, clever people everywhere need to try and think of ways to mitigate climate change. Maybe an aspirational CAP can incentivise such a process – but maybe the practicalities of doing this within its seven-year expected life time are simply too great.

Finally, maybe its time for all of us to really examine some of the fundamental tenets of our lives, ranging from society’s opposition to new food production technologies (discussed recently by Les Firbank on this blog) through to issues of population control.  

If we fail to do this then we may discover the ultimate truth about food security – you can’t have your cake and eat it!

About Gareth Edwards-Jones

Gareth currently holds the positions of Professor of Agriculture and Land Use at Bangor University and the Waitrose Chair of Sustainable Agriculture at Aberystwyth University.  His current research interests focus around reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from agriculture and the food chain, and the economic aspects of conservation on land and in marine fisheries.

On 1 April 2011 Scotland became home to a brand new scientific research centre. The James Hutton Institute aims to be one of the world’s leading research institutes on land, crops, water and the environment and is the biggest, multi-disciplinary centre of its type in the UK.

Fittingly, its name has been taken from one of the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, James Hutton (1726-97). Hutton ranks as one of Scotland’s greatest scientists: a polymath, observer and interpreter of nature. He is regarded as the founder of modern geology and was also an enthusiastic experimental farmer. 

I am sure that the creation of The James Hutton Institute will have helped complete his return to prominence as a pioneering scientist and thinker – he recently featured in BBC’s Men of Rock documentary series.

But there is another reason why James Hutton as a figurehead is singularly appropriate. He was one of the first scientists to understand the concept of a living planet: ecosystems of incredible diversity which are deeply interconnected through sharing common resources. It probably would not surprise Hutton that the huge scientific and industrial advances of his life would have consequences for the well-being of all that makes up the living planet.

This was the subject of a UK Government report that outlined some worrying trends that are likely to impact on all of us. The Foresight report on Global Food and Farming Futures took two years to produce and involved leading scientists from 35 countries including Scotland. The alarming conclusion was that we have about 20 years to deliver something of the order of 40% more food, 30% more fresh water and 50% more energy to sustain a human population of something like 8.3 billion people without destroying the environment in the process.

We two are one

To tackle these problems, The James Hutton Institute has been created by two established scientific organisations active for many decades in the areas of food supply, land use, water and ecosystems: the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen and the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI) in Invergowrie, Dundee. 

Researchers at the Macaulay have a long track record in land management particularly with respect to the Scottish hills and uplands. They are responsible for the soil and peat surveys of Scotland and the Land Capability for Agriculture classification is the official agricultural classification system widely used in Scotland. They have also been active in advising the Scottish Government on major land use issues including reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy, and have provided major contributions to the recent Pack Inquiry into future support for agriculture in Scotland and the development of the draft Land Use Strategy for Scotland.

Products developed at SCRI are familiar names on supermarket shelves. They include popular raspberry varieties such as Glen Ample and Glen Lyon; potato varieties including Lady Balfour, Anya, Vales Sovereign, Vales Emerald and Mayan Gold. SCRI’s brassicas (swedes, turnips, kale etc.) dominate the UK market, and 50% of the world’s blackcurrant crop was developed at the Invergowrie site. Food security research is underway to help crops survive a changing climate both here and abroad; scientists from both institutes have been active in projects aimed at helping communities and farmers around the world.

Greater than the sum of the parts

So why bring the two together? I could answer by saying why keep them apart. The two institutes can combine various scientific and management interests in arable and livestock agriculture, lowlands and uplands, farming and forestry, wildlife and environment, people and policy.

A large part of the work of the two centres is funded by the Scottish Government as part of its rural and environmental research strategy, and scientists from both organisations were already collaborating on some of the government-supported work programmes. The new James Hutton Institute will enable us to work together and serve our research customers in Scotland, the UK and Europe more effectively. 

For example, perhaps one of the most exciting challenges for the new institute is likely to be working with partner organisations to find ways of empowering rural communities, not just in Scotland, but around the world. The James Hutton Institute has active links and partnerships with more than 60 countries and has already been leading projects in Africa to help rural communities improve crop yields and ensure healthy seed stocks. We have also been active with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to produce a series of briefing papers: for example to raise the profile of the ecosystems approach in tackling not just climate change mitigation and adaptation, but also poverty alleviation, disaster risk reduction, biodiversity loss and many other environmental issues.

It certainly is not just about farming, forestry and livestock: we are equally keen to use our science to help provide a vibrant countryside that everyone can enjoy for living and recreational space. Science at The James Hutton Institute will also be used to study energy use and renewables, landscape planning and human health. We have plenty of evidence that our science will have a measurable and very positive economic impact in Scotland and further afield.

Let’s go back to that great son of Scotland, James Hutton. He was a man ahead of his time, as evidenced by his pre-Darwinian thoughts on natural selection processes. He looked at his surroundings, and the interactions of man and the earth, in a new way. He kept asking questions and when nobody had any answers, he used his powers of observation and analysis to suggest his own answers. 

Our new, Scottish-based but global-thinking institute will be proud to bear his name. We will also aspire to emulate his inquiring mind, his enthusiasm and his willingness to share knowledge and seek evidence: looking out and looking forward.

About Iain Gordon

Iain, who holds both British and Australian nationality, returned to Scotland to take up the post of Chief Executive of The James Hutton Institute after eight years working with CSIRO – the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation – in Canberra. Professor Gordon is native to Aberdeenshire and graduated with a Zoology honours degree from the University of Aberdeen; he was awarded his PhD by the University of Cambridge. He worked at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen, leading the Ecology Group, before moving to Australia in 2003.

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.

© The University of York

No one says to their children, “Go into the woods and eat anything you can find. It is all natural, so it must be good for you.” But for some reason when we walk into the supermarket ‘natural’ is a key selling point for all kinds of foods.

My favourite example is a sweetcorn you can buy that claims to be ‘naturally sweet’. This is an absurd idea. Naturally, seeds are tough and indigestible – they are not sweet. Seeds are a plant’s babies, and the last thing most plants want you to do is eat their babies.

Naturally, plants don’t want to be eaten at all. We know this. We know natural plants are potentially extremely dangerous and not at all generous in providing us with food, otherwise we would let our children eat whatever they find in the woods.

There are some interesting exceptions. Plants bribe animals to help them carry their pollen to another plant, or their seed to a new location, but for the most part, natural plants are bristling with defences. It is precisely this reason that 10,000 years ago people invented agriculture.

The crops that feed the world today are not remotely natural. It’s taken farmers 10,000 years of selection to breed out the defences and other features inconvenient for farming or consumption that natural selection spent millions of years putting in.

So if we know that plants were not put on the planet for our personal benefit, and indeed natural plants are dangerous, why are we beguiled by the supermarket sales pitch that natural food is good for us?

I think it comes from the very clear evidence that we are not living sustainably and we are not eating healthily. High input farming and highly processed foods are damaging to the environment and to us.

The easy-to-sell solution to these problems is that since the things we are doing now are bad and the things we used to do were good, everything would be better if we ‘went back to nature’.

But since nature, as everyone really knows, is red in tooth and claw, this argument makes no sense at all.

We should not do less things; we should do different things. We need science to help us work out how to do farming more sustainably and eat more healthily. We need to work hard at this, and it is going to be difficult and involve changes to our lifestyles that we will not like.

Buying products labelled ‘natural’ in a supermarket is not going to help. Trying to sell things on this basis merely exploits peoples’ desire to do the right thing when we need that energy and idealism to bring about genuinely positive changes.   

About Ottoline Leyser

Professor Ottoline Leyser CBE FRS from the University of York received the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award in 2007 for her work on plant hormones and how they control plant development, which led to the publication of the book Mothers in Science: 64 ways to have it all (PDF) to show how women can manage both science and family.