One of the items on the G8 agenda at the 37th summit being held May 26-27 in Deauville, France, is the transition to a green economy. Agriculture can play a substantial role in helping to stimulate growth, secure rural livelihoods and reduce poverty in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Prior to the G8 summit, Farming First has launched an online infographic The Story of Agriculture and the Green Economy. Using data from leading research organisations, the infographic tells the story of agriculture’s potential contribution to building a green economy, through more sustainable supply chains, knowledge-sharing, innovation and improved food security. It aims to demonstrate to world leaders that their priorities of both feeding a growing population and building a green economy can be addressed through agriculture.

Agriculture is a top economic driver. Image: Farming First

In 2009, the G8 made a pledge of $22 billion to food security by 2012.  Two years on, and with their commitments yet to be achieved, G8 leaders need to make concrete, transparent plans to fulfil their pledges to tackle food security and food price volatility, as well as contributing to the realisation of a green economy. This ‘double-win’ should take top priority for policymakers.

Agriculture’s solutions

Farmers are key to the future of a green economy.  They grow the crops needed to feed, clothe and produce energy for the world. By investing in farmers today, we can meet the needs of 9 billion people in 2050.

In his recent book The New Harvest, Harvard professor Calestous Juma identifies three major opportunities that could transform agriculture in Africa into a force for economic growth: advances in science and technology, the creation of regional markets in Africa, and more entrepreneurship. These three principles can be applied to agriculture across the world. 

As a sector, agriculture is critical to people’s livelihoods, accounting for 37 per cent of the world’s labour force. Of these, 97 per cent live in developing countries, where it is women farmers who grow the majority of food. Most of these farmers practice subsistence agriculture. Farmers need access to key inputs and training in better agronomic practices that will help them to improve the quantity, quality and diversity of their crops and combat changing weather patterns, soil degradation and pest problems. By investing in storage facilities to reduce post-harvest losses, transport links to access markets and communications systems to share knowledge, farmers can more reliably increase the amount of crops they grow and bring to market.  Better business boosts farmers’ incomes and stimulates local business, and has a ripple effect into the community, helping to improve local food security.

In the wider landscape, more sustainable agricultural practices can help protect the environment and the habitats within it. Worldwide, agriculture accounts for 34% of the land area and 70% of water consumption. A variety of practices, such as conservation agriculture, and technologies such as drip irrigation or improved rainwater harvesting, can help manage natural resources more sustainably. By increasing crop yields, natural habitats are protected from being cultivated, and forests can continue to capture carbon and mitigate overall emissions related to climate change.

From knowledge to action

Our infographic provides evidence of agriculture’s importance for demonstrating the complementary link between the environment and growth, and yet the sector is a victim of underinvestment.

G8 leaders need to support advances in agricultural research and development to further our progress towards the goals of food security and the green economy. Governments need to address the uptake gap that leaves the most vulnerable farmers unable to access the agricultural innovations that could radically change their productivity and their livelihoods.

Agricultural policies should be science-based and farmer-centred, allowing for a mosaic of solutions to be available from which farmers may choose according to their local needs.

About Isabelle Coche

Isabelle Coche is from CropLife International and is a Farming First spokesperson.

Put focused, transparent and accountable food security initiatives first for sustainable development, says Morgane Danielou of the Farming First coalition.

Last year in L’Aquila, Italy, G8 leaders pledged US$20Bn (since revised to $22Bn) to address global food security.

Since the food crisis erupted in 2008, a large number of global and regional food security initiatives have been launched or strengthened in response. The L’Aquila statement (PDF) and the subsequent launch in 2010 of the Global Agriculture and Food Security Programme (GAFSP) (PDF) are important illustrations of the commitment to action of countries around the world. 

Ahead of this year’s G8 summit, the Farming First coalition has compiled a comprehensive Guide to Food Security Initiatives, which uses an interactive map to outline the key policy objectives that each initiative has identified and how these policies should be implemented.

Food security is a complex issue requiring concerted efforts over the long term. The increased attention and leadership around this issue is a very positive development.

However, while this renewed attention and action are welcomed and needed, the proliferation of so many separate initiatives running in parallel requires that the risk of overlapping, competing or disjointed activities be addressed.

As we move towards action on these food security policies, Farming First urges G8 leaders to:

1. Promote a clear focus on a common goal for food security at the global level through policy and operational coherence
2. Encourage increased transparency on how much pledged funding has been committed, and to what types of programmes
3. Engage a wide range of stakeholders to ensure that efforts are coordinated, clear, collaborative and ultimately successful

How the many current programmes are coordinated and contribute to food security is unclear.

In the UN system, the Secretary-General’s High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis (HLTF) represents an effort at giving an overarching direction but how non-UN efforts relate, for instance, to the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA) (PDF) developed by the HLTF, is not articulated.

In addition, despite a great amount of funding pledged by many countries to support food security initiatives, we do not know how much and in what ways it has been delivered. For instance, the L’Aquila statement included targeted investments as well as support for innovation, research and technology as essential components of long-term food security. But what investments? How much, and where?

Finally, how the relevant stakeholders required for successful policy implementation interact with these programmes is also in many cases undefined. Farmers, scientists, civil society and the private sector need to be involved in order to ensure plans meet existing needs and are successfully implemented. For example, Farming First suggests that GAFSP create a dedicated seat for farmers and the private sector on its Steering Committee given the essential role that the Committee will play in supporting initiatives around the world that will affect farmers.

Farming First urges G8 leaders to renew their commitments to food security at this year’s summit, and we welcome the opportunity for further collective action in addressing the hunger and poverty concerns at the heart of sustainable development.

About Morgane Danielou

Morgane Danielou is Director of Communications for the International Fertilizer Industry Association, based in Paris.  She works on behalf of Farming First, a global coalition of 131 organisations, representing the world’s farmers, scientists, engineers and industry.  For more on Farming First’s position on food security, visit www.farmingfirst.org/foodsecurity

Better data on how and where aid is spent is needed to make real progress on tackling hunger, argue Gordon Conway and Laura Kelly.

Holding global leaders to account has never been easy. But when they come together in the Muskoka region of Canada 25-26 June, G8 leaders claim they will report on their own progress on tackling global hunger.

During the Italian G8 Presidency in 2009 the G8 announced the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative, pledging more than $20B of aid over three years to agriculture and food security. Leaders agreed core principles to tackle global hunger and said they were “determined to translate these principles into action and take all the necessary measures to achieve global food security”.

Now, and as then, we welcome these commitments and like many others we are keen to see what progress has been made. Nevertheless, while we look forward to G8 leaders’ own assessments on progress, we think it important that we, and other independent researchers, are given access to timely and detailed information to allow us to do our own analysis.

We believe that access to better aid data is vital on this issue. After 30 years of underinvestment in agricultural development, we now have the political and financial momentum to make real progress on tackling hunger. But if governments do not deliver these new investments in a strategic and coordinated way, we risk dissipating efforts and missing a unique opportunity to deliver impacts on the ground for the one billion undernourished people that governments are seeking to help.

When engaging in the complex, interdisciplinary world of agricultural development, we need a better detailed understanding of what works. By investing time and money in better aid data now, governments will be able to work with their advisers, researchers and recipient country partners to understand how their investments correlate with real progress for those that need it most. This will enable more effective and coherent partnerships in the future.

Our own work with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) DAC database (OECD-DAC), which provides comprehensive data on the volume, origin and types of aid and other resource flows, has shown that at present the measurement and analysis of agricultural development assistance is fraught with challenges. Different governments classify and measure their agricultural assistance in different ways. For instance, some bilateral assistance is given through budget support, making it difficult to measure what if any support goes to agriculture.

Support to multilateral agencies is also hard to attribute to specific sector activity. And OECD-DAC is very slow to release data – detailed data for 2008 was released in March 2010 – so timely independent analysis is very difficult.

The OECD-DAC database is an important resource, and we believe that it should remain the primary channel for governments to report their development assistance spending. But it needs to be further improved: non-OECD government actions should be included, as should several additional multilateral organisations. Furthermore, we are not always able to measure what we want – amounts of assistance to smallholders, or large versus small irrigation investments for example.

We look forward to hearing how global leaders meeting in Muskoka have performed on tackling hunger over the last year. But if they want their agriculture investments to have a lasting impact, they should also commit to urgent action to get the data systems in place to measure and monitor how and where their agricultural development assistance has been spent so we can all see if it is successful.

This blog post is based on an article originally published on the Global Food for Thought blog, the official blog of the Global Agricultural Development Initiative.

About Sir Gordon Conway

Sir Gordon Conway is Professor of International Development at Imperial College London. For more information about his work please go to: www.imperial.ac.uk/africanagriculturaldevelopment

About Laura Kelly

Laura Kelly is Director, Policy of ONE Europe: http://one.org/international

On 10th May 2010, Imperial College and ONE hosted a joint workshop to discuss the challenges of measuring agricultural development assistance. For more information about this work please go to: www.imperial.ac.uk/africanagriculturaldevelopment/resources/monitoring