CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

A dramatic approach to Cocoa farming

Street/community dramas are often used to try to get a message across to a local audience, but have you ever seen a street drama about pesticide use? Well that’s what they’re doing in Nigeria – a dance/drama approach is being used by the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria (CRIN) to educate farmers about which chemicals the Government has either banned or approved for use on cocoa. An article by Adeogun Stephen, CRIN, in the latest issue of GRO-Cocoa, a twice-yearly newsletter on global research on cocoa produced by CABI and funded by USDA for the last 8 years, describes how the initiative has reached farmers in a remote cocoa-growing area of the country.

Is local food environmentally costly?

Many consumers feel that they should be buying “local food” to help combat climate change – but could “local food” actually result in more carbon emissions than food distributed through conventional supply chains? David Oglethorpe raises this possibility along with some other surprising ideas in a paper in CAB Reviews.

 

Oglethorpe, of the Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University points out that the economies of scale of major production networks do actually result in some environmental benefits. A study of sausages showed that using HGVs in efficient distribution chains resulted in a much lower carbon footprint per sausage than resulted from the many smaller journeys in smaller vehicles that were typical of local food production.

In attempting to be more “green”, many consumers feel that they should not buy food that is highly packaged. But Oglethorpe says that there is much higher food waste with food that is low on packaging. And the emissions associated with food decay, particularly methane, are much more significant than for packaging materials. So it might make more environmental sense to use more packaging. 

Some producers who supply local food also use more environmentally friendly farming or production techniques. However, this is not always the case, and studies suggest that while the association may be strong in the consumer’s mind, in reality it may be weak. There are also examples where local production is more resource-consuming than production in a geographical area more suited to a particular type of farming.  For example, there is some evidence that New Zealand lamb imported to the UK has a smaller environmental impact than that produced in the UK, despite the obvious transport-related emissions.

However, local food may have other benefits. It can provide an important boost to the local economy, offering employment, and attracting tourism, local festivals and the “vibrancy” of an area. The fact that consumers can meet face-to-face with producers may have positive effects on the local community. Some local foods are of better quality – e.g. “local” meat products tend to have higher meat content than typical mass distribution equivalents. However, some that target an “indulgent” consumer have high sugar or fat content, and thus could have negative health impacts.

 

So consumers should not be assumers that local is always best. However, there is currently no agreement on what “local” means, and the hidden environmental costs are far from obvious. As with many environmental analysis, research is only beginning to scratch the surface, and agreeing what is fair to count within the cost is a controversial business.

 

The paper, Food miles – the economic, environmental and social significance of the focus on local food by David Oglethorpe appears in CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2009, 4, No. 072, 11 pp.

Focusing food security efforts where they are needed

The current World Summit on Food Security , as noted in an earlier blog, is a major effort to focus agriculture to lower risks of starvation and economic insecurity. But how can researchers and planners work out what is needed where? John Dixon of ACIAR and his co-authors describe a major Food and Agriculture Organization – World Bank initiative to classify world farming systems to enhance food security and help reduced poverty in a new paper.

 

Writing in CABI Reviews, Dixon says that the framework characterizes farming systems in terms of land quality and market access.  These elements are crucial in shaping development of farming systems and household livelihood strategies in ways that boost farm income and ensure delivery of cereals that are central to food security.

In their review, Dixon and his co-authors look at the various strategies for reducing poverty and conclude that farm intensification and diversification look to be the most promising ways of achieving that in many cereal farming systems. They say that the importance of intensification and diversification in differing farming systems can be used as a basis for priority setting and targeting of agricultural research to enhance food security and reduce poverty.

In other words, classification can be a key tool in deciding which farming practices are most likely to help the poorest and reduce their exposure to economic and climatic change.

 

The review, “Forty years of farming systems classification for enhanced food security and poverty reduction” by John Dixon, Jon Hellin, Xiaoyun Li and Glenn Hyman appears in CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources 2009 4, No. 060.

 

Also published this month: "Challenges to ensuring food security through wheat" by R. Chand:  CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources, 2009, 4, No. 065.

 

For other recent reviews focused on food security, see the blog entry

“Food Price Hikes – Crisis and Opportunity?”

 

For other recent blogs on food security, click here

 

Mobile phone technology rings true

In the West, we live in a world of information overload. At our fingertips we have instant access to a wealth of knowledge, and then some…We struggle to keep pace with rapidly developing technology but this is only a problem for the well heeled. In the developing world the story is starkly different.

 
How we can help bridge the ‘digital divide’, particularly with the use of mobile phones, was discussed in the final session of the CABI Global Summit entitled ‘Information and Communication (ICT’s) in agricultural development’
 
Dr Stephen Rudgard, Chief, WAICENT Capacity Building & Outreach, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), highlighted AGORA – Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture, which he referred to as the “jewel in the crown” of the FAO’s ICT programmes. AGORA is a partnership between the FAO and over 60 publishers, including CABI, and gives free access to over 1300 journals in agriculture and related fields to 107 eligible countries. There are over 200 institutions registered in 90 countries.
 

Climate change – the influence on food security

“When it rains, it does not rain on one roof only”

 
This is a saying from the home village in western Kenya of my friend and colleague Dennis Rangi, CABI’s Executive Director for International Development. He said this in his introduction to the CABI Summit in London which I though was particularly apt as I listened to speakers talk about the impact of climate change on their part of the world. Dennis showed two photographs of Mount Kilimanjaro and described how he remembers growing up looking at the mountain, a powerful symbol of Africa thats snow-cap has receded in a stark reminder of the reality of climate change.
 

Better farm productivity is not enough - We need to “talk more about losing less”

If humanity is to continue to avert disaster and the Malthusian nightmare as growing populations exert ever increasing pressures on scarce earth resources, then we need some new solutions to old problems in agriculture, and we need to use some of the old solutions a lot better. In particular we need to recognise that we can’t just go on indefinitely hoping to produce more food, we also need to look after what we’ve produced and reduce losses and waste.
 
The CABI Global Summit, being held in London today brought together some of the world’s experts on the issue of Food Security. In the first open session they directed their discussion to thoughts on how we might hope to achieve the first and potentially the most intractable Millennium Development Goal, to ‘Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger’.
 
The problem is stark: the current world population is approaching 7 billion, and is set to top 9 billion by 2050. Of these about 1 billion of the poorest people go hungry most days. “Those in poverty want the same as the rest of us, good education for their children, security and hope for the future, but most of all they want to know where their next meal is coming from”, said Dennis Rangi, CABI Executive Director for International Development. In the past year, prices in global food commodities have soared, in part as a result of the global economic crisis, and those that have felt the impacts most have been the global poor. Many producers of food in are often themselves acute sufferers of food shortages; smallholder farmers.
 

Food Security - helping to achieve MDG1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Representatives from more than 40 countries have gathered today to attend a day of presentations and debate. In a highly stimulating first session, a number of global thought leaders gave their views on food security into the future: can this be achieved and if so how?

 
CABI's Executive Director for International Development, Dr Dennis Rangi, indicated that in many countries close to 50% of crop production is lost to pests and diseases in the fields, or to post-harvest damages. He also described the issue of a retiring agricultural sector - both agricultural scientists and farmers are not followed-up by young recruits or descendents as the younger population associates farming with a non-rewarding livelihood. He closed his presentation with this message: people who live in poverty want a good life for their children, just as rich people, but above all, they want a good next meal. He closed by saying that CABI is committed to contribute to Millenium Development Goal 1 by helping farmers grow more and lose less.

Wallingford’s Part in the Revolution

If you walk just for a few minutes up the river from CABI’s headquarters near Wallingford, UK, you come across Jethro Tull Gardens. For people of a certain age this causes some confusion – why should the council have seen fit to commemorate Ian Anderson’s prog rock band with a street name? A little further down the street is a clue – the 17^th-century house where the real Jethro Tull lived. It turns out that the band took the name from one of agriculture’s pioneers.

 

  
Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull - sometime salmon farmer

but limited contribution to agricultural mechanisation

 

Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was very interested in the application of scientific method to agriculture. He noticed that hand-sown wheat seeds tended to be delivered in clumps rather than spaced at a more ideal even interval. His solution was a horse-drawn machine with a rotating cylinder with grooves cut in that meant an even flow of seeds were added as the machine was moved along. The seeds landed in three channels dug by a plough at the front of the machine, and then were covered up by a harrow at the back of the machine. This meant greatly reduced wastage of seeds.

 

 
Jethro Tull - church-organ vandal but major agricultural visionary

 

Tull’s prototype seed drill was built from the foot pedals of a local church organ. Tull’s was not the first seed drill, in that double-tube seed drills were in existence in China 2000 years earlier, and Italian inventors had patented simpler versions of the concept, but his took the idea to a new level of practicability. It was unpopular with farm workers who feared they would lose their jobs, and it appears that it was sabotaged. He later developed a horse-drawn hoe to remove weeds, which is described along with other ideas in “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry: An Essay on the Principles of Tillage and Nutrition”. Tull is now seen as a major figure in the British Agricultural Revolution, but his ideas took a long time to gain acceptance.  Mechanised seed drills were not widely used until the 19^th century.

 

CABI moved to Wallingford in the 1980s with the aim of centralizing its expertise in the appliance of science to agriculture. So it was a good omen that 300 years earlier, a local farmer was doing something very similar.

World Rural Women's Day - 15th October

(Credit: Paul Jeffrey/UMCOR)

Did you know...

• Women make up 51% of the agricultural labour force worldwide.
• A study of the household division of labour in Bangladeshi villages found that women worked almost 12 hours a day - compared with the eight to ten hours a day worked by men in the same villages.
• In many regions, women spend up to five hours a day collecting fuelwood and water and up to four hours preparing food.
• In Southeast Asia, women provide up to 90 percent of the labour for rice cultivation.
• In Africa, 90 percent of the work of gathering water and wood, for the household and for food preparation, is done by women.
• In Pakistan, 50 percent of rural women cultivate and harvest wheat.
• In the world's least developed countries, 23 percent of rural households are headed by women.

(source: FAO)

How synchrotrons could aid crop protection

Image courtesy of Diamond (www.diamond.ac.uk) 

2003 saw construction begin on a facility representing the UK’s largest investment in science for over 40 years. Diamond Light Source opened in 2007 and is an impressive structure on the South Oxfordshire landscape, 10 miles or so from where I’m sitting in CABI’s head office. It is a synchrotron and without synchrotrons scientists couldn’t have carried out groundbreaking research as diverse as studying the life cycle of the deadly malaria parasite in living red blood cells or following the crystallisation of pure cocoa butter to find out the optimum conditions for chocolate manufacture¹. Last week saw the 100^th structure to be identified by Diamond².