The recent Durban Climate Change Conference is a follow on from Cancun which did not move a lot of things forward on key environmental issues ranging from CO₂ emissions, carbon sequestration and credits), to land and water resource management.

The important fact that the conference is taking place on the African continent for the first time should not just boil down to its mere presence in Durban. But just like key sub-Saharan African economies are emerging, Africa’s emerging voice on climate change policy is vital to a number of future developmental areas, not least of which is food security – including all of its pillars from food production to improving the continent’s ability to feed itself and using renewables to spur better agricultural energy use.

However, do Africa’s agriculture, environment and energy ministers talk to each other? And why aren’t more agricultural ministers included in the climate change discussion and vice versa? This needs to happen, but it is not – at least not regularly or in a comprehensive manner.

Smart solutions

Most experts recognize that both food security and climate change are affecting the continent more than any other region of the world. The food security-climate change linkage for Africa hopefully will be heavily on the table in Durban as these symbiotic impact indicators need to be addressed together.

Food security specialists from development organizations and civil society organisations (CSOs) to policy makers need to build climate change solutions into their programmes. Africa climate change leaders and activists need not forget that the lack of progress on key environmental issues will continue to affect Africa’s progress to resolve its food security challenges.

What are some of links between food and energy production and innovative ways to address these links? There are a number of positives noted below, which need to be more broadly implemented with country-specific adaptation on top of the need to create more new solutions. Some of the smart linkages connecting the symbiotic relationship between food security and climate change include:

• Renewable energy options for water use, such as wind or solar-powered drip irrigation, including storage of power gained through battery innovative techniques like those being used by companies like AES in West Virginia
• Hybrid seeds that help crops withstand climate stresses such as drought, which can also lead to new usages for traditional crops such as protein-enhanced cassava (I have visited donor-supported agribusinesses in Kano, Nigeria, that adds cow peas to enhance protein in cassava flour)
• Localize agribusiness supply chains by using small farm holders or cooperative crops, reducing transport energy, and manufacturing costs
• Climate change-smart agricultural production, such as bio-char – the process of burning plant-based remnants and making charcoal that is then used as renewable fertilizer in places like Congo, and Benin’s Songhai Integrative Farms. The Congo project also obtains carbon credits on CO₂ emissions which also further helps overall energy challenges – not just in the country but over the long term for our global community.

These global impact indicators – food security and climate change – should be addressed together to assist the people of Africa to have a better enabling environment for overall development, a subject I’ve highlighted on this blog before.  

It’s critically important because people are angry: African women smallholder farmers from 10 countries calling themselves the ‘Rural Women Assembly‘ demonstrated in Durban on December 3, 2011, on just this point – linking the affects of climate change on their ability to feed their families.

What to do?

The UN General Assembly this year called for improvement in sustainable energy by making 2012 the International Year of Sustainable Energy, with the goal of providing access to modern forms of energy, particularly for emerging markets and the developing world by 2030. But, if we do not improve our current efforts not only will this sustainability goal not be meet for Africa, but the food security-climate change symbiotic link will continue to be exacerbated as Africa’s population is estimated to reach 1.5Bn by 2030, and 2Bn by 2050.

Thus, we need to be more food security-climate change smart through innovation. We need more Africa-focused research and development like Ghana’s new bio tech facility, and by expanding the discussion circle so that both agriculture and environment policy makers, CSOs and development entities begin to come together and share in the same international, regional, community, and village fora to address these two global impact indicators.

This blog post is adapted and edited from an article that also featured in the Huffington Post.

About Robin Sanders

Dr Robin Renée Sanders, a career member of the senior US Foreign Service, is currently serving as the International Affairs Advisor for a non-governmental organization. She previously served as the US Ambassador to Nigeria from 2007-2010. Prior to that she served as International Advisor and Deputy Commandant at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, DC. Prior to this position, she served as the US Ambassador to the Republic of Congo (2002-2005) and as Director for Public Diplomacy for Africa for the State Department (2000-2002). She served twice as the Director for Africa at the National Security Council at the White House; and was the Special Assistant for Latin America, Africa, and International Crime for the Undersecretary for Political Affairs at the State Department (1996-1997). Ms Sanders holds a Doctor of Science Degree in Information Systems and Communication from Robert Morris University, Master of Art degree in International Relations and Africa Studies, and a Master of Science degree in Communications and Journalism from Ohio University. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications from Hampton University.

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

My first 13 years of farming saw endless lorry-loads of fertilisers and chemicals coming on to the farm. The controls on their usage, and the consequential problems, were evidently increasing. I re-examined what I was doing and who the gainers and losers were.

Conclusion: I needed to cut down the inputs, improve sustainability, stay friends with the consumer and re-enliven my soils.

We all want to produce sufficient food to supply the full nutritional requirements of the human species, whilst attempting to live in harmony with the natural environment and its finite resources. Simple… except it’s not.

Livestock farmers appreciate that every farm has a maximum stocking rate, beyond which animals will be underfed without importing food. We need to reduce the numbers of animals farmed, because the supplies of grain and proteins are going to become pressurised by the reducing quantities of available fertilisers, oil and other inputs.

We need to appreciate the finite nature of natural key resources upon which agriculture depends. Oil, phosphate fertiliser and access to fresh water being the principal inputs. The use of ‘fossil’ water reserves illustrates the problem, and whilst it’s not a problem in the rainy UK, it is in many countries from which we import food, often to feed livestock – as seen in the staggering scale of imported GM soya from Brazil to feed British cows for example.

Farmers are the largest consumers of these resources. With what responsible logic can we justify feeding livestock tonnages of grains and proteins? As Simon Fairlie has described on this blog and in his book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, it’s a horribly inefficient way to produce food. If only we could stand back and assess it logically and not feel threatened by our own, as farmers, vested interest. 

Big problems

Why not embrace the findings of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development  which concluded that “business as usual” was not an option? 

Reducing feeding grains and proteins to livestock will save natural resources, and indirectly improve people’s health. Furthermore, huge areas of currently crop-producing land would then grow grass, still to support livestock, enabling preservation of fragile and diminishing soils by minimising soil erosion.

Some may think these policy shifts equate to less food for most people. It may for a few, but it won’t necessarily for the majority. And would that be a bad thing? Astonishing food wastage occurs through over consumption – people becoming fat – also known as the obesity epidemic in politically-correct language. We now have more obese people in the world than hungry, and the vast majority of this is avoidable. When did this become acceptable?

Perhaps these policy shifts would make food more expensive. Then we’d all eat different diets, with less meat, and those over-consuming will necessarily reduce intake. This would also lead to less waste minimisation during food processing and domestically: nobody in 2011 should accept the 18 million tonnes of food waste. Whilst some is unavoidable, a huge amount is careless at best.

By using less land to grow feed for animals, substantial areas of current cropland could be afforested, recreating the lungs of the world, and some land can switch to energy production to be used locally.

Furthermore, these significant changes would dispense with the temptation to tinker with nature’s genetics by utilising GM crops. Other nicely developing breeding techniques, such as marker-assisted breeding, will enhance yields and improved resistance to attack, whilst keeping our customers onside.

Hard solutions

Delivering radical change is difficult. Nobody would suggest otherwise. But we don’t have the choice, and the sooner we start the less Draconian the action will need to be.

If we won’t do this for society, and ultimately for our children’s sake, and continue to prefer prevarication then we drive the car towards a cliff edge. Either we make a reasonably gentle turn now, or continue taking risks, hoping for unknown options for our salvation will appear later.

Are farmers big enough to do this? It will obviously have negative implications for the capital values of many of our businesses. But, do we, as part of a bigger society, have any realistic alternative option?

About Oliver Dowding

After leaving agricultural college in 1976, Oliver returned home to the family farm in South East Somerset, a traditional dairy and arable farm, extending to over 900 acres. 

In 1989 the decision was made to convert the entire farm, including 300 dairy cows and 200 youngstock immediately to organic status, which became the subject for a TV programme. The farming area has subsequently shrunk and the dairy disbanded.

Oliver has been involved with a variety of national agri-political posts and interests, including chairing the NFU organic committee, and as vice-chairman of the leading organic dairy co-operative, OMSCO. 

He is an active journalist and campaigner, particularly on health and environmental issues.

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.

I recently spent several years investigating the environmental impact of livestock production for a book called Meat: A Benign Extravagance, which stimulated the debate on the real carbon foot print of rearing animals for food, particularly when the Guardian’s George Monbiot wrote his ‘Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’ critique.

The first lesson I learnt was not to trust any of the statistical clichés that are passed around like a relay baton. For example, the commonly cited figure of 100,000 litres of water required to produce a kilo of beef is nonsense: it refers to the total amount of rain falling upon the land grazed by the cow, rain which would fall – and drain away or be transpired or excreted by living creatures – whether or not the cow was on the field.

Similarly, the inefficiency of livestock at converting vegetable food into animal protein is habitually exaggerated by opponents of meat eating. Globally, for every kilo of meat or dairy protein produced, approximately 1.4 kilos of vegetable protein are ingested by livestock. Since meat protein is viewed by many consumers and food analysts to be superior, and since meat provides variety in a diet, this level of inefficiency is arguably acceptable.

The FAO’s calculation that livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions is, at the very least, a heavily massaged statistic. Most of the CO2 emissions they attribute to all livestock are derived by applying out of date emissions for Amazon deforestation caused by beef cattle which comprise barely one per cent if the world’s livestock. Their figures for methane and nitrous oxide take account of the emissions caused by livestock, but do not factor in the replacement nitrous oxide and methane emissions that would occur if we did not farm livestock, such as nitrous oxide from the fertilizer needed to replace manure to produce crops, or the methane emitted by wild animals or forest fires resulting from undergrazing.

The correct figure is more likely to be 10 per cent or even less. So why do the FAO economists plug the inflated figure of 18 per cent? It appears to be because they want to depict extensive livestock, especially cattle, as the villain of the piece and so argue that intensive farming of pigs and poultry in factory farms is a more viable alternative.

Less is more

Once one has winnowed out all this anti-livestock and anti-ruminant bias, the fact remains that the model of livestock farming currently pursued in the industrialized countries is flagrantly unjust and unsustainable.

To feed the entire world the levels of meat currently enjoyed in the USA, Europe and the OECD countries would require massive quantities of grain to be fed to livestock wastefully at a conversion efficiency of about four to one.

My key conclusion is that within every agro-economy there is a certain amount of meat – what I call default livestock production – that has very little environmental impact because it is basically a byproduct of an agricultural system designed to produce grains and other vegetable products. This includes meat from livestock such as pigs and poultry fed on crop residues and food waste, cattle, sheep or goats fed on grass or legumes that are an integral part of the arable rotation, and animals fed on surplus grain necessary to provide a buffer in the event of a poor harvest.

Any meat consumption above the default level requires dedicated feed crops to be fed to livestock at an inefficient rate, involving extravagant use of land, fertilizer and water. To provide this diet for all of the world’s nearly seven billion people is not sustainable; and to feed, as we do, vast quantities of grain to livestock to provide luxury goods for consumers in industrialized countries is manifestly unjust when a billion people in the world are undernourished.

About Simon Fairlie

Simon Fairlie worked for 20 years as (among others) an agricultural labourer, vine-worker, shepherd and fisherman. He was co-editor of The Ecologist magazine for four years before joining a community farm in 1994 for 10 years. He now runs Chapter 7, an organization that provides planning advice to smallholders and low income people in the countryside and is the editor of The Land, an occasional magazine about land rights.

Organic and conventional agriculture can both contribute to a sustainably farmed landscape, says Tim Benton.

The world’s population is predicted to increase by 35% (PDF) by 2050. Simultaneously, per capita food demand is rising because as individual wealth increases, consumption (especially of meat and dairy) also increases. Although there are uncertainties, the most widely cited prediction for future demand is that 70% more food (PDF) will be required by 2050. 

Simultaneously with demand increasing, there is recognition that agriculture needs to become more environmentally sustainable. An important utilitarian argument for sustainability is that ecosystems provide a range of goods and services, the value of which is only just beginning to be appreciated. A recent study, for example, showed that, across four US states, natural enemies control soy bean aphids to a value of $239 million per year. 

Organic farming is often cited as an exemplar of sustainable farming because the environmental impact per unit area of farming is typically less than intensive systems.  However, such extensive farming systems also yield less: in a recent like-for-like comparison organic winter cereal fields yielded <50% of conventionally managed fields.

This exposes a very real tension. Global food demand is rising, but so is the societal demand for lower-yielding extensive farming. To meet global demand by farming extensively is not possible as it would require more land than is (realistically) available. It has been noted that without recent decades of yield growth three times the cropped area would be needed globally and that land is not available without destroying millions of acres of rainforest. 

Is sustainable farming always extensive?

To explore this tension, it is useful to think of agricultural landscapes as systems that produce two sorts of products: food and other economic goods, and ecosystem services (which may relate to biodiversity, water, carbon storage or environmental health).

In a simplistic sense, there are two basic land management strategies: land can be farmed extensively over the farmable area thereby producing less food but more ecosystem services on the same land (land sharing), or farmed intensively over a smaller area and the remaining land can be saved to be managed exclusively for ecosystem services (land sparing).

Recent research indicates that when a set amount of food is needed, land sparing strategies may often be better in terms of balancing food production while maintaining overall ecosystem services at the landscape level. In other words, if your landscape has areas specialising in food production, and areas specialising in production of ecosystem services, you get more of both than if you farm extensively over the whole landscape and try and produce both food and services from the same land.

This argument may apply at larger scales than the landscape: were Europe to increase organic farming to 20% of the total farmed area, about 10 million hectares (PDF) elsewhere (approximately the area of Portugal) would be needed to make up for the lost production. Given that this extra land is likely to be in the more biodiverse and fragile tropics, Europe may gain environmental benefits by exporting and amplifying the environmental costs elsewhere.

Future farming landscapes

Whether a land sparing or land sharing strategy is the optimal way to produce both food and ecosystem services varies from place to place and depends on the relative cost to yield converting from intensive to extensive versus the gain in ecosystem services. 

Even in land sparing landscapes, where intensive methods are optimised for production, farming vistas of the future will be different from today because conventional agriculture needs to change to reduce agriculture’s carbon footprint and chemical inputs. A greening of conventional agriculture may link agronomy, information technology and remote sensing to allow low-input, low-environmental impact, but productive farming, linked with spared land managed to provide ecosystem services.

The area of spared and managed land will probably be most efficient as a network crossing the agricultural landscape, allowing the field-scale provision of ecosystem services and the resulting value for farmers, conservationists and society at large. In a nutshell, a future intensive landscape may look a bit like an existing extensive landscape.

A key policy goal is to find levers to incentivise land managers to cooperate to produce the optimal landscape. There are many routes to incentivise landscape design such as the usual tool of using agri-environmental schemes to reward land managers financially for producing ecosystem services (which they currently try to do with mixed success). The difference would be that management appropriate to the specific landscape should be rewarded, and success at delivering such objectives monitored. 

I don’t think that there needs to be a societal choice between producing sufficient food with high environmental impact or producing insufficient food in a sustainable way. The landscape view of farming is a tool towards aligning the traditionally opposing camps; either extensive or intensive farming systems can contribute to a sustainably farmed landscape.

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.

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)

An interesting and potentially very useful contribution to the thinking and discussion around food security has appeared in the form of an open access paper The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture.

It is too easy to be sceptical and say what we need are 100 answers, but if you start with good questions you are more likely to generate good answers. The questions in this paper were produced by a wide consultation process involving 45 institutions and finally 55 authors based in 21 countries.

The paper, published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, seeks to stimulate dialogue and improve understanding between agricultural researchers and policy makers. The paper proposes the 100 most important questions that need addressing if global agriculture is to deliver nutritious, affordable food more sustainably for upwards of nine billion people by the middle of this century.

Beg the question

The paper raises many issues. Agriculture’s agenda has widened in a few decades from one of simply maximising productivity to one that is significantly more complex.  Indeed the scope of the paper is broader than simply agricultural production and covers topics ranging from natural resources and biodiversity to social questions, the economics of global food markets, and consumer choices.

In the twenty-first century, agriculture needs to optimize output in the face of varied and sometimes conflicting demands on the available land. On a local scale some people choose to eat organic food and want to conserve biodiversity; on a global scale rural livelihoods and traditional ways of life need to be respected. People around the world are becoming more concerned about environmental problems and social justice, more aware of food tariffs and trade imbalances. As our world has effectively shrunk its population has exploded and consumption even more so. That consumption includes energy, and, although estimates vary, agriculture and the food supply system are a major consumer of energy and emitter of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Food is no longer just about eating.

Hence, the questions in the paper are set out in four major topics that embrace elements of the whole food production system: 1) natural resource inputs; 2) agronomic practice; 3) agricultural development; and 4) markets and consumption.

In the first section, natural resource inputs, questions range from the specific, such as ‘what would be the global cost of capping agricultural water withdrawals if environmental reserves were to be maintained?’ to the very practical in ‘how can salinization be prevented and remedied?’ to the implied warning: ‘what are the world’s mobilizable stocks and reserves of phosphate?’

The second section, agronomic practice, asks questions such as ‘what part can reclamation, restoration and rehabilitation of land play?’ and ‘what are the best integrated cropping and mixed system options?’ for a number of habitats, before pondering ‘how can increasing both crop and non-crop biodiversity help in pest and disease management?’

Agricultural development, the third section, brings in many of the wider issues ranging from the impact of agricultural subsidies to the best options for the sustainable intensification of agriculture, the demographics of farmers in 2050 and their status with the land (as well their landlords).

The final section, on markets and consumption, poses questions such as the efficiency and resilience of supply chains, food waste in developed countries, and the effects of consumer choice and the effectiveness of different types of learning programmes in promoting public health.

Answer the call

The 100 questions paper is one of the outputs of the UK government’s Global Food and Farming Futures project, which falls under its Foresight programme that aims to help the state think systematically about key issues 10-80 years into the future so that science and technology can be best employed within society.

The Global Food Security programme, the blog of which you are reading, aims to bring greater coherence to the wide range of research supported by the programme’s partners (the major UK public funders of food-related research). The questions posed in this paper will be invaluable in helping to inform the development of the programme and ensuring that future research is focused on topics than can really make a difference in meeting the challenges the world is facing.

I’m sure this paper will generate much discussion in many scientific and policy circles, as well as being of wide general interest. There is a comments field below, and we welcome constructive dialogue and debate with all interested parties.

About Professor Janet Allen

Professor Janet Allen is Director of Research at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) since October 2008 and is Chair of the Programme Development Board 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.

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.