New Article for Student Reporter: Farming Ghana’s Shifting Landscape

PRIMUKYEAE, Ghana — A new eight-month radio program focused on helping farmers adapt to climate change began in this agricultural community last month.

The program was created through an international partnership between the Ghanaian Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the German Technical Cooperation and Farm Radio International (FRI). It will broadcast throughout the district of Kintampo, in Brong Ahafo, a region of Ghana that accounts for 75 percent of the country’s agricultural production. The program focuses on providing climate-smart agriculture tips, market information and weather forecasts.

FRI will draw on its experience with a similar program, CHANGE (Climate Change Adaptation in Northern Ghana Enhanced), to support farmers cultivating fields along the savannah’s edge.

Read the full article at Student Reporter: http://studentreporter.org/2014/06/radio-program-in-ghana-supports-farmers-on-the-front-lines-of-climate-change/.

Mexico emerges as a leader in organic agriculture production

The following is my first article as a Student Reporter Fellow. Over the next few months, myself and a handful of other fellows from around the world will be writing pieces that highlight global food issues. I couldn’t be more excited to contribute! 

It’s April in Indiana, the ground just beginning to thaw. Birds and buds are emerging after the long polar vortex of these past many days. The peas are just starting to sprout and the white blossoms of the fruit trees are all promise, of apricots and peaches and pears that will begin to ripen only when we’ve found our way to the other side of the summer solstice. As new life emerges, the refrigerators and fruit bowls of many in the Hoosier state are already full: of ripe mangoes and oranges and bell peppers, spinach, tomatoes, and basil. Even for the organic consumer, this abundance is now available year-round.

It’s April in Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. Here coffee is grown using traditional methods on over 11,000 hectares certified for organic production. The harvest is coming to a close, the beans packed in containers and ready for shipping to all points north. April in Baja California, Mexico, where organic tomatoes are being coaxed from the desert, they too shipped north to meet the growing demand for organics by American consumers.

Over the past decade, Mexico has emerged as a significant contributor to global organic agriculture, experiencing a ten-fold increase in organic production. The country’s rankings capture this significance: it is the world’s top producer of organic coffee and tropical fruits, the second largest producer of organic vegetables.

There is great potential for profitability in this growing market for export. However, organics should not be viewed merely as an extractive industry, a one-way street between production and consumption. Demand for organics has been growing in Mexico, as well.

This is a boon for farmers, who have seen their market share for traditional crops, like corn, fall since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994.

In some places, like Chiapas for example, this shift can mean agricultural cooperatives that allow farmers to capitalize on economies of scale, ensuring the most direct profit for their product. But, just as in the United States, organic agriculture can also have a very different meaning. It can mean mono-crops, and big business, and over-taxed aquifers. Such is the case in much of Baja, California.

While we continue to debate the merits of big business organics, we can be sure of one thing: production in Mexico will continue to grow. Just last year, on October 29, 2013 the government of Mexico instituted its own guidelines for organic production. The organic labeling program is similar in many ways to the program in the United States, with many of the same rules and regulations.

Read more in this great NY Times piece and on the USDA Foreign Agriculture Service website.

 

If only pirates have poles: the future of fishing on the high seas

On April 2nd, I was fortunate to attend a class with Rick Loomis. A photographer for the LA Times, Loomis is known for his work covering environmental issues and conflict zones. In 2007, he and team of journalists won a Pulitzer Prize for the piece Altered Oceans. Click on the photo to check it out, it’s worth a moment (or more) of your time:

   (Photograph by Rick Loomis)

Loomis captured startling videos and still photography, of beauty and of destruction. At one point he said to us, “There is nothing left, we’ve eaten it all.” And he is a man who knows. Who devoted years of his life to finding out.

There is a growing consensus, a growing concern:
We are running out of seafood. The sea is running low on life.

Like with so many environmental issues, the consensus runs short on a solution. One solution, proposed last week by a biologist and a resource economist, is elegant, simple, and on its face impossible — close the high seas, giving species time to grow and rebound.

The idea may seem outlandish but as Professor Crow White, one of the paper’s authors points out, “”All big ideas have to start somewhere.” And we do. Need to start somewhere. As soon as possible. If we hope to have fish in the future.

Check out this article on The Salt for more.

 

2014: Year of the Family Farmer

Hear ye! Hear ye! 2014 is the Year of the Family Farmer. Raise your glasses in celebration, and offer a toast to the everyday farmers, nurturing the food stuffs that nourish all of us.

Family farming, you say? Isn’t that just a relic, a simple nostalgia of bygone days?

For at least the last half century, we’ve heard the mantra that bigger is better when it comes to our farms. If we scale up and institutionalize, we can liberate ourselves from the land and hand over the pesky business of growing food to corporations with profits to maximize and innovations to innovate. But we have found so much to be lacking in this new food system that we are experiencing a backlash, a resurgence of food growers and producers and entrepreneurs.

In less developed countries around the world the advice for so long has been that agriculture is inextricably linked to poverty;that the way to transcend the poverty trap is to leave behind the business of subsistence agriculture for the promise of manufacturing, and eventually for a transition to knowledge-based economies. As though we will all one day be able to stop producing food, and then goods, so that eventually our only products will be knowledge.

But in this promise, we have again found so much to be lacking. As people increasingly move from rural areas to urban ones, job opportunities have not kept pace, leading to a rise in unemployment and urban slums. We also know that up to 80% of people in developing countries are still engaged in food production. Perhaps most importantly, we know that small farms are more productive than large ones, despite popular conceptions to the contrary.

We tend to believe that large farms are more productive than small ones, but the data tells a different story. According to data analysis by the Institute for Food and Development Policy, “For every country for which data is available, smaller farms are anywhere from 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit area.” And they are without a doubt more diverse: economically and ecologically.

In declaring 2014 the Year of the Family Farm, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is recognizing what we know and using it to challenge the prevailing claims. According to their website:

Families share everything. They share their living space and their mealtimes. They share their aspirations, dreams, successes and failures. Throughout the developed and developing world, farming families reap the benefits of sharing the workload too.
In fact, with over 500 million family farms in the world, this is the predominant form of agriculture, and it is inextricably linked to world food security.

Yet more than 70% of the food insecure population is made up of family farmers in rural areas of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Near East. They cannot reach their full production potential because they lack the access to natural resources, credit, policies and technologies they need.  

Check out http://www.fao.org/family-farming-2014/en/ for more info.

Sustainability Ultra-marathon

If you want go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

But what to do when you need to go far, fast? This is the question before conservationists and the sustainability community in general. It is clear to all who are paying attention that our voracious consumer desires and prodigious growth are quickly outpacing the rate at which resources can be renewed. Ocean stocks are dwindling as demand increases, forests are being leveled to make way for ranches and mono-crop plantations. Ask anyone who is paying attention, and they will tell you that we need to get far and we need to get there fast.

The conflict comes not in the if but in the how – a tension succinctly captured by World Wildlife Fund vice-president Jason Clay in his TED talk, where he lays out his vision of a sustainable economy. One where sustainability is not a consumer choice but an industry standard:

When you listen to him speak, it is easy to agree that we need to corral the 100 dominant businesses controlling the food system into making better choices. But maybe it makes you, like me, wonder if this just perpetuates a food system where 100 companies control the profits. We have seen what this model has to offer – and despite efficiencies – it’s not good.

Many would argue that we need to remake the food system – that we need to divest our dollars from McDonalds and Sysco, Cargill and Tyson; investing them in our local food economies instead. That we should be spending them directly on home-baked and family farm-grown. Indeed, regional food economies are growing at a rapid and inspirational rate.

And so you have to choose. Do you support McDonald’s in their promises to move toward ‘sustainable beef production’ and laude Pepsi’s commitments to end agricultural land grabs for sugar cane plantations in Brazil? Or do you advocate for local growers, family farmers, alternative agriculture and small-scale production? Do you get behind impact or authenticity? If you are Jason Clay, you have to choose. If you are an educator, an activist, a grower, a producer – you have to choose. But maybe as a society, we might not have to choose. In our growing, ever-shifting dynamic society we can push McDonald’s to adopt better practices and work to decrease their market share. Which is lucky for us – because we need to get far, and we need to get there fast.

Propaganda power, part II

A slightly different take on factory farming. Kudos to Chipotle for the creative criticism of industrial agriculture, but Chipotle as a roadside taco stand? Not so sure about that.

For more info, check out The Salt.

Space. Food.

Here on planet Earth, it was another bountiful day. On billions of acres of farm and forest, trillions of plants went about their humble business of turning sunlight into food, and food into….more food. Taproots stretched in earthy soil, stalks sprouted determined from the ground, leaves broadened, fruits swelled. Billions of times. On planet Earth. Today.

Not so on the red planet. On the surface of Mars — well, I won’t pretend to be an expert here but — we can safely imagine that gases swirled and time sprawled out immemorial. As far as we know, not a single ray of sunlight was turned into chlorophyll and not a single drop of chlorophyll was turned into roots, stalks, leaves, or fruits. Not a single cow grazed and not a single chicken hatched.

Not a problem, you might say, because lucky for us it was another bountiful day on planet Earth. Chances are good that the startling lack of food on our great neighbor planet didn’t even cross your mind today. Unless, of course, you are one of the fortunate few planning the first manned mission to Mars. Then, you have probably been thinking about it a lot.

Today researchers ended a mock space mission, in which they spent several months isolated in a space dome on the big island of Hawaii. Their goal: subsist on freeze-dried, pre-packaged, and shelf-stable for 118 days, creating recipes, tracking moods, and monitoring health status. Because somehow, with all we know, we don’t know what happens to us when we go months without fresh food, let alone years. We’ve never had to know.

Explorers of the New Age will not be able to set forth with a pocket full of seeds or a hunting spear, like those past. They will need to gather their ingenuity, spices, and Spam if they hope to survive. For the first time, we need to figure out what will happen to those who leave Earth’s bounty in the rearview mirror. What an exciting and terrifying proposition.

You can read more at: http://news.discovery.com/space/mars-food-scientists-end-mock-space-mission-130814.htm or by using the incredible powers of Google.

Growing the Urban Harvest

Urban agriculture is without a doubt an expanding phenomenon, or you might even say (pardon the pun) — a growing field. While the abundance of available land in post-industrial cities is great so to are the barriers to an urban harvest. Issues such as lead contamination and mitigation, property rights, and garden ownership can limit the harvests of projects with grand ambitions.

Luckily, the quantity of food produced is one of many benefits of community gardening, seen in tandem with community building and neighborhood beautification. It is perhaps, however, the defining aspect of urban agriculture. As urban projects scale up from garden to farm, production becomes increasingly important. A recent BBC article asks the question, Can City Farms Feed a Hungry World?. Citing vertical farming and hydroponic innovations, the article concludes optimistically that, “Urban agriculture has the potential to become so pervasive within our cities that by the year 2050 they may be able to provide its citizens with up to 50% of the food they consume.”

No one knows what the future will hold, but another recent, well-written article in Next City also caught my eye. Beyond Adorable, Creating An Urban Ag System Smart Enough to Matter does a great job of bridging potential and reality in it’s assessment of Cleveland’s urban agriculture system. The learning curve is steep but little by little we are learning to grow food in our human-made ecosystems.

A view of the Ohio City Farm. Credit: MMW Horticulture Group.

Big-Business Organic: At Grocery Stores Everywhere

Phillip Howard, a professor and food systems researcher at Michigan State University, is creating information graphics that illustrate some of the complexities of our food system. For example, who really owns all those organic brands we’re picking up at the grocery store:

For a closer look: https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/organicindustryzoom.html

Whether or not the explosive growth of mainstream organics is a good thing is a matter that could, and should, be the subject of much debate. Looking at this graphic raises so many questions, not the least of which is: Why is Pepsi this country’s #1 food producer?To me, this exemplifies the beauty of infographics — with all the information laid out so clearly in front of us, we can put the speculations and assumptions aside, and let the real conversation begin.

To see more of Professor Howard’s work, check out his website at: https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/index.html

Bugs: They’re What’s for Dinner

Silk worms. Cicadas. Scorpions.

All of these and more were on the menu in Thailand, served up street-side, freshly fried and garnished with the ever ubiquitous chili sauce.

In Laos, people harvest nutritious ant eggs to supplement a diet often wanting for protein. In Tanzania, during that brief window before the wet season, when termites alight from their mounds searching for mates, they provide an abundant, if fleeting, food source. There is no doubt that people have, and still do, tap into the nutritious potential of insect protein.

And the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization would like to see more of it. A recently published report by the FAO, Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Food Security, begins:

It is widely accepted that by 2050 the world will host 9 billion people. To accomodate this
number, current food production will need to almost double. Land is scarce and expanding
the area devoted to farming is rarely a viable or sustainable option. Oceans are overfished
and climate change and related water shortages could have profound implications for
food production.

When put that way, the conclusion seems so obvious. If not from the land, and not from the ocean, well, then  from the sky. While citing many benefits, the report also identifies a major barrier to adoption of broader scale insect consumption: western attitudes toward the practice.

So, maybe we can all do our part for sustainability: with a net, a fryer, and a little daring. Maybe we’ll have to.