Population in Africa is set to almost double to two billion by 2050, and current food production systems in Africa will only be able to meet 13% of this increased demand (PDF).

At the same time, across Africa it is estimated that 80% of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. Transforming this sector’s markets will not only help address food insecurity and undernutrition, but it can also unlock Africa’s trade and development potential more broadly, if implemented responsibly and sustainably.

Ahead of hosting 2013’s G8 Summit, UK Secretary of State for International Development Justine Greening says agricultural development is a “win-win for development” by boosting food security and nutrition while working “to end dependency through job creation as a result of improved agriculture markets and systems”.

Market access can help drive sustainable productivity gains, improve livelihoods and reduce risks for smallholder communities; however, the process of building markets and making them more inclusive is no easy endeavour

Reportage

Two new reports take a closer look at previous efforts to link smallholder farmers to markets.

The first report Leaping and Learning: Linking Smallholders to Markets (PDF) was commissioned by Agriculture for Impact and produced by the Overseas Development Institute.  It offers a comprehensive review of previous efforts to link smallholder farmers to markets as well as guidance on how to scale up successes.

The second report, 8 Views for the G8: Business Solutions for African Smallholder Farmers to Address Food Security and Nutrition (PDF), as the name suggests, offers the perspectives and experience of eight leading agricultural organisations that are working to connect farmers throughout the food value chain.

Together the reports highlight a series of areas where donors, policymakers and development practitioners can work to improve markets access for smallholders, including:

1. Access – to inputs, finance and credit, storage and professional advice.
2. Institutional capacity – to self-organise and benefit from economies of scale.
3. Market information – related to quality standards, prices and other enterprise support and advice.
4. Public sector investment – to improve access to inputs, services, markets and research.
5. Stable policy environment – so that farmers do not experience unpredictable policy shifts, weak contract enforcement and restrictive policy environments.

Action this day

Many development organisations are already working to address these problem areas. For instance, the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) is working to create a conducive policy environment for high-quality seeds to reach smallholders in the southern Africa region.  Through its Harmonised Seed Security Programme (HASSP), they are working in four countries to align national seed policies, develop the capacity of smallholder farmers to produce quality seed, coordinate strategic partnerships and create engagement platforms for all stakeholders to share experiences.

In Malawi, the organisation Twin have been working with Malawian smallholder groundnut farmers to prevent contamination from aflatoxin – a carcinogenic mould which causes serious public health impacts – by providing education programmes, proper storage techniques, infrastructure investment and simple technologies. In Zimbabwe, SNV are working with agro-dealers to ensure they have adequate stocks of supplies and to help them with distribution to more rural areas occupied by smallholders. In Kenya, ACDI/VOCA established a network of 160,000 private-sector-sponsored demonstration plots for maize farmers and worked to help them get access to market price information, weather alerts and extension messages via SMS.

Some of these organisations have even begun operating as ‘social businesses’ themselves to deliver goods and services to smallholders.  For instance, Farm Africa have created a new franchise business model called Sidai, or ‘good’ in the Maasai language, to deliver products for livestock in Kenya. Its 32 franchises enable farmers to access affordable, quality inputs and technical advice, particularly in more remote locations. Similarly, One Acre Fund helps their smallholder farmer ‘clients’ to access affordable seed and fertilizer in the right amount by bulk-buying these inputs, distributing them closer to where farmers live and offering credit until harvest time.

Other organisations are working to equip and empower farmers who produce cash crops, from which they derive their incomes. Self Help Africa are working with mango farmers in Malawi and cashew farmers in Benin to improve productivity and crop quality. And TechnoServe have been working with over 195,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers to boost their incomes on average by 37% for their coffee.

Step by step

Smallholder farmers play a central role in global development – both as beneficiaries but also as catalysts for change. Connecting them to markets can create sustainable solutions to improve their lives.

But there are some caveats.  Firstly, not all smallholder farmers are ready to participate in markets; safety nets must remain in place for them or for those who try but fail.

Secondly, when scaling up, successful programmes must be adapted to for new agroecological zones and socio-economic conditions.

And thirdly, the market for higher-value cash crops can be more well-established than for staple crops so the latter may require more public stimulus, at least, initially.

Governments, donors, businesses, scientists and development practitioners should work together to help African smallholder farmers better access markets to increase production, productivity, nutrition and incomes, and to ensure that they are sufficiently safeguarded from the risks of doing so.

Add your comment

About Michael Hoevel

Michael Hoevel is the Deputy Director of Agriculture for Impact at Imperial College London.

Feeding people requires a lot of energy. Production, distribution and consumption of food accounts for 20-25% of the energy consumption in developed countries. The largest energy investments are made in the production of protein-rich produce, such as meat and fish. In beef production (PDF), for example, energy used (per kilo of whole animal produced) ranges from 38-48 MJ/kg-1 compared to meat derived from pigs (PDF) at 16-18MJ/kg-1.  

Fishing at sea requires much less energy than beef production. All the same, energy intensities in capture fisheries have increased six-fold in the last two decades to an average of 24 MJ/kg-1 of fish landed. This increase in energy intensity is due to longer distances travelled to reach productive fishing grounds and greater efforts needed to catch the same amount of fish as in previous years.

So can farmed freshwater fish offer a less energy intensive form of animal production? As John Forster has also argued on this blog, aquaculture has a potential increased efficiency compared to other forms of animal production. This comes from the ability for nutrients to be recycled and turn waste flows into feed resources, lowering the energetic costs associated with growing, creating and transporting feed products.

Aquaculture therefore can produce a greater amount of animal product for the same energy inputs than other forms of animal-sourced food. It is also worth noting that as well as providing a good source of protein, many types of seafood bring a whole range of nutrients to the diet including omega-3 fatty acids not found in other animal-derived food stuffs.

Net gain

Despite the long history of fish farming, many aquaculture systems are still emerging. Realizing the optimum efficiency of animal production depends on how the industry develops. Current estimates of energy used in food systems show that aquaculture products, for example Pangasius (often sold as ‘river cobbler’, 17-20 MJ/kg-1) and Tilapia (18-27 MJ/kg-1), can approach the energy efficiency, per kilo of animal produced, as broiler chickens (12 MJ/kg-1), one of the cheapest forms of animal protein.

However, the rapid growth of the industry means action must be taken to ensure that it remains sustainable and that energy input compared to output is kept low. If this is achieved, aquaculture could provide one of the most sustainable forms of animal protein production. Many aquaculture systems are already examples of this, such as salmon and tilapia.

Estimating the average energy input for individual fish species produced from aquaculture is difficult due to the range of farming practices, geographical and climatic conditions under which they are cultured. However when producing crustaceans and cultured fish such as tilapia, the majority of energy is used to produce feed. Processing may only account for 10% of energy used for many farmed seafood products while consumption typically contributes about 20-30% of total energy required. As the industry continues to grow, production methods in emerging species will become standardized.

Scale up

How these systems are intensified will be key. Using plant-based feeds can reduce energy input into feed ingredients for herbivorous fish such as tilapia or to supplement fishmeal as is occurring in salmon. Some fishmeal will always be required however and specialized industrial monocultures may become net producers of fishmeal (by utilizing by-products) reducing pressure on capture fisheries. Lowering energy inputs, in feed-production for example, makes the system more environmentally sustainable, and less vulnerable to fluctuations in local and global energy prices.

Rapid economic growth in emerging economies is leading to increased demand for animal protein, driving up food prices. Meeting this demand should favour energetically cheap systems within aquaculture, focusing on omnivorous or lower trophic level culture species. Filter feeding fish and shellfish such as mussels, that primarily grow on plankton and rely on little/no inclusion of fish- or livestock-derived materials are proven approaches to reducing environmental impacts and enhancing food security. Learning from the innovations of the producers themselves and combining this knowledge with that of scientists and business is likely to produce the highest gains.

If aquaculture is to be part of the solution and provide affordable, accessible food products, it needs to be developed in a sustainable way, which may mean reducing risks through the use of polycultures and considering reuse of byproducts from production and processing locally. Aquaculture enterprises as recycling hubs are emerging as an exciting opportunity in many diverse contexts. These may range from the local reuse of culture water as an irrigation source for horticulture to the manufacture of leather from fish skins, or products such as gelatin and chitosan from processing wastes.

Considering aquaculture from a value chain perspective is critical to assessing energy efficiency and its overall societal impact. Building greater sustainability into aquaculture needs to consider species trophic level, but increasingly will require nutritional and management innovation. These factors are often overlooked in favour of a focus on genetic improvement and health management strategies, which are themselves generally undeveloped compared to terrestrial livestock. Business and policy actors need to have a broader viewpoint for ensuring food security of aquatic products that transcends narrow production systems and embraces broader measures of efficiency and productivity

On the Sustaining Ethical Aquaculture Trade (SEAT) project, we are working to ensure that aquaculture continues its path to becoming an ethical and sustainable industry which can help feed the world.

Add your comment

About Dave Little

Professor David Little of the Sustainable Aquaculture Group at the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, has experience in tropical aquaculture with a strong background in hatchery development. His interest in aquaculture research for development has embraced both technical initiatives and broader interdisciplinary programs.

Dr Little coordinates the EU-funded project Sustaining Ethical Aquaculture Trade (SEAT, FP7) that aims to enhance the sustainability of production and trade in Asian farmed seafood with Europe. He is editor of the Sustainability and Society section of the journal Aquaculture, a Board Director of the World Aquaculture Society and Aquaculture without Frontiers, and on the Standards Oversight Committee for the Global Aquaculture Alliance.

In the business world, the motto “fail early, fail often” is frequently hailed as the formula for success. It is also the key tenet behind one of the most effective learning methods in the history of humanity – trial and error.

One can imagine how many errors were made as humans learned how to make and control fire, sow and harvest plants, build sturdy shelters. And it is the systemic process of trial and error that has allowed science and invention to produce history-altering discoveries and innovations like antibiotics, incandescent light bulbs, and the cellular telephone.

In the Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development team, we believe that innovation in science and technology has the potential to feed the world. One way we’ve tried to foster innovation is through our Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) program. GCE is an open call for proposals centred on specific topic areas in global health and development, and applicants must submit two-page proposal ideas for a chance to win a $100,000 prize.

The proposals do not include any identifying information and investigators are not required to have any preliminary data. They are judged on the ideas alone. The funding decisions are made by both programme staff and an innovation panel of broad thinkers from a variety of fields. Each innovation panellist gets one ‘gold star’, which is guaranteed funding and two ‘silver stars’, which he or she recommends for funding. It’s a champion system that allows risky but potentially transformative ideas to get off the ground.

In our topic, Protect Crop Plants from Biotic Stresses from Field to Market, we funded 53 innovative ideas ranging from business cards embedded with treatment for bacterial infection, to disease diagnostics that can be stamped on maize leaves. We have yet to see the results from these projects, and the vast majority probably won’t yield anything. But we’re comfortable with this risk because we understand that if we want to see innovative ideas flourish, failure must be an option. And with 53 shots on goal, there’s a good chance that at least one or two will score.

Hedge your bets

Global food security is one of the world’s largest and most complex problems. To achieve the goal of feeding the nearly eight billion people that will inhabit the earth by 2030, we must push those in science and technology to think innovatively and boldly and we must not be afraid to fail.

And yet in order to receive funding, it is often the case that principal investigators in science and technology must virtually prove success for a proposed project even before they start. In the peer review process, proposals considered high risk or with little preliminary data are often the most harshly critiqued. This is understandable in some ways because many of the projects are truly affecting people’s lives.

But innovation only really thrives in environments where there is the freedom to explore new ideas, make new connections, and think in new ways. That state of freedom is rarely offered in a world of shrinking budgets and calculations of return on investment, where safer bets are inherently favoured.  But the cost of safety isn’t something often considered. What grand ideas are we missing out on when we play it safe? Where do researchers go with new ideas?

If we are to truly tap into innovative ideas to achieve global food security, we must also be comfortable with the accompanying risk. What would happen if we loosened the requirements of certainty and left ourselves open to failure? Would things fail? Yes. But would we learn from those failures? Absolutely.

And the things that didn’t fail might just be the bold ideas we need to feed the world.

Add your comment

About Christina Owen

Christina Owen is an Associate Program Officer in the Agricultural Development group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she has worked since 2010. She works on the development and management of Research & Development grants, with a focus on discovery science and innovation. Christina has a PhD from the University of Washington in evolutionary genetics of plants, and also has a strong interest in science communication and outreach.

“We have arranged for you to meet the Vice President at 10am on Sunday. Is this OK?”. That was it, my trip to Zambia was definitely on and I had just a few hours to prepare for my field visit and meet one of the country’s top politicians who was leading their efforts to manage a food security crisis.

But as you can see in the video below (which you can also watch on YouTube, or in a shorter 03:50 video feature), this visit turned out to be rather different from the rest.

For nearly twenty years now, I have been working on an infamous crop pest called the African armyworm. This small 3-4cm long caterpillar feeds on all of the major cereal crops, including maize, rice, sorghum and millet, as well as on pasture grasses where densities typically reach hundreds of insects per square metre.

Together with David Grzywacz at the University of Greenwich and Wilfred Mushobozi at Crop Bioscience Solutions (CBS) Ltd in Tanzania, I have been trying to develop a local natural baculovirus called SpexNPV as a biological pesticide against this serious pest. As part of our research, we have visited more than 60 armyworm outbreaks across Africa in the last four years and clocked up thousands of miles in doing so.

Our research has both applied and fundamental aspects to it. The applied work has recently culminated in the construction of a UK Government-funded biopesticides facility in northern Tanzania, run by CBS.  Through this route, production of the SpexNPV biopesticide should start very soon. And once we have a formulated product, this will be registered first in Tanzania and then hopefully throughout Africa.

Devil in the details

The basic science that underpins this applied work has largely been funded by the Sustainable Agriculture Research for International Development (SARID) programme, jointly supported by BBSRC and the UK Government’s Department for International Development (DFID).

There are a number of important questions that we wanted to address during this project: why is the prevalence of natural virus disease so variable and are there any predictable patterns? How much genetic variation is there in the SpexNPV virus and could this stop the build-up of resistance to the biopesticide in armyworms? How does the virus persist during the harsh dry season when there are so few armyworms? And how can we utilise this information to use SpexNPV more intelligently for Africa-wide control of armyworms?

To tackle these questions, we visited lots of armyworm outbreaks in Tanzania to assess the natural prevalence of viral disease, collected caterpillars that had died of the virus, and live caterpillars that appeared healthy. We also set up a network of pheromone traps to collect adult male moths – the males are attracted to the trap by the artificial scent of sexy females. We then took all these back to the laboratory in Lancaster and did lots of genetic analyses and bioassays, and found out some really interesting stuff – ecological details that could help us control armyworm. For instance, the presence of a bacterium, Wolbachia, increases their susceptibility to the virus. (See my publications page or this feature for more).

On the road again

As part of the SARID project, we also established a website called ArmyWeb, which acts as a ‘one-stop shop’ for lay people, scientists and other stakeholders to access information about the African armyworm and its control.

It was through this website that I was contacted in mid-December by Brother Paul Desmarais, Director of the Kasisi Agricultural Training Centre in Lusaka, Zambia. His email said that they had been “hit by armyworms” and that they had large commercial fields of organic maize that they wanted to protect without using chemicals. He had read about SpexNPV on our website and wanted to know where they could purchase some.

Although I had been to Zambia several times, I had never collected armyworms from there. So I replied to Br. Paul that although SpexNPV was not yet commercially available, I would like to visit him to discuss various options, collect some armyworm samples, and visit some other local farmers in the district who had been hit by armyworms. He put me in touch with his colleague Donald Zulu, who agreed to host my visit.

Unfortunately, I was committed to speaking at the British Ecological Society (BES) meeting in Birmingham on December 20th, so I booked a flight to Zambia for the following day. As I was anxious to get back to the UK before Christmas, this also meant that I could only stay in the country for 32 hours if I was to get back in time. Together with the five flights, nearly 40 hours of flying, and around 10,000 air miles, it promised to be a rather hectic and long weekend!

Whilst at the BES meeting, I received an email from Donald, who said that they had arranged for me to meet the Vice-President of Zambia, Dr Guy Scott, who also chairs the Zambian Government’s Disasters and Mitigation Committee, on the morning I was due to leave the country “to explore different armyworm mitigation options”.

I also met Mrs Annie Matutu, an inspirational farmer who managed to save half her maize crop from armyworms by using conventional chemical pesticide, but lost overnight the other (unsprayed) half to a voracious hoard of caterpillars. Both Dr Scott and Mrs Matutu were keen to learn more about SpexNPV and I promised them that one day I would return with some for them.

Add your comment.

About Ken Wilson

Professor Ken Wilson is an evolutionary ecologist based at Lancaster University and is interested in the interactions between insects and their pathogens, especially baculoviruses. He has been obsessed with the African armyworm ever since his first field visit to Kenya in 1989, and has been ‘armyworm chasing’ ever since.

Only one country in Africa, Ghana, will meet the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty by 2015. New solutions to Africa’s food and resource scarcity challenges are thus being sought as the world develops the next set of global development goals post-2015.

One such solution, sustainable intensification, has proved controversial yet offers real promise, even to small-scale farmers, if it can be redefined and adapted to suit these farmers’ local contexts.

Sustainable intensification, an agricultural development pathway that aims to reconcile food production and environmental protection, is a highly politicised term that divides academics and practitioners alike. Although, when first coined by Jules Pretty, the term was a way of bringing often divergent priorities such as addressing declines in land and agricultural productivity, pollution and food insecurity together under a new paradigm, it has been since accused of being a ruse for big, industrial agriculture.

Redefining sustainable intensification

Now a new report, Sustainable Intensification: A New Paradigm for African Agriculture, authored by the Montpellier Panel, aims to revisit the paradigm of sustainable intensification as a practical approach for smallholder African farmers to tackle food insecurity. The Montpellier Panel, a group of African and European experts in the fields of agriculture, sustainable development, trade and policy, define sustainable intensification as “the goal of producing more food with less impact on the environment, intensifying food production while ensuring the natural resource base on which agriculture depends is sustained, and indeed improved, for future generations.”

The report breaks down the definition into two parts: intensification and sustainability. Intensification is defined as increasing farm outputs, production, income and/or nutrition, per unit of input (e.g. land, water, labour, fertiliser, pesticides or biodiversity). By qualifying the inputs and outputs to encompass this broader range of factors, the report seeks to expand the definition away from the perhaps more typical form of intensification of increasing crop yields through heavy chemical use.

But intensification alone is insufficient to address both resource scarcity and difficulties in accessing inputs. Intensification must also be sustainable. It must be prudent in its use of inputs, efficient in seeking returns and reducing waste, resilient to future shocks and stresses, and equitable to producers and consumers. Sustainable intensification thus encompasses a range of goals that must be achieved simultaneously.

Achieving sustainable intensification

Realising sustainable intensification at scale may seem a tall order, but the report outlines a variety of practical (and achievable) examples of sustainable intensification, many of which are generated by farmers themselves, under three headings:

• Ecological intensification is the utilisation and intensification of ecological processes to create sustainable forms of crop and livestock production. One such form of ecological intensification is intercropping, which grows two plants together in a way that reduces competition and increases mutual benefits between them.For example, Faidherbia trees are a leguminous species which, curiously, shed their leaves in the wet season – providing a natural nutrient source to crops such as maize planted underneath – which allows sunlight to pass through. Maize yields are boosted by the increased access to nitrogen from the legumes nitrogen-fixing bacteria, while the decomposition of the tree’s leaves into the soil also sequesters carbon. It is these win-win examples that sustainable intensification encompasses for smallholder farmers.
• Genetic intensification is the concentration of beneficial genes within crop varieties and livestock breeds. If sustainable intensification is to meet both current and future food and resource needs we will need to utilise existing methods, such as Faidherbia, as well as develop new game-changing technologies.One ongoing project, Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA), aims to develop some 15 new drought-tolerant maize varieties, which will be marketed royalty-free to smallholder farmers in Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda and Tanzania. Developed through conventional breeding, marker-assisted selection and genetic engineering, the next phase of the project is developing maize varieties also resistant to pests such as stem borers, which may present even more of a barrier to increasing agricultural productivity under a changing climate.
• Socio-economic intensification is the process of developing innovative and sustainable institutions on the farm, in the community and across regions and nations as a whole. African smallholders require equitable access to input and output markets and help with joining remunerative value chains. Markets can offer poor farmers better access to inputs, knowledge and credit while also helping to increase their income from selling surplus crops. Yet, most poor farmers are not linked to markets. Smallholders, in particular, often have little contact with the market and hence a poor understanding of, and ability to react to, market forces.One solution is to work with farmer associations to create and run village-level ‘grain banks,’ where farmers can safely deposit their grain. The store is usually fumigated against pests, some grain is kept in case the owner needs it later in the year, and the rest is sold when market prices seem right rather than immediately after harvest. In such a system in Kenya, the marketing depends on having a countrywide network of small and large markets. This network is supported by the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange (KACE), a private sector firm that provides farmers with prices and other market intelligence accessible to smallholders using simple mobile phone texts.

It is the combination of all three groups of practical approaches to sustainable intensification around both technical and socio-economic interventions that makes this new paradigm radical in its thinking.

The way forward

Despite the variety of examples described, many are small in scale and scope and geographically isolated. What we need now is to link, combine and take to scale existing proven technologies, processes and systems while investing in new solutions for the future.

Although many African countries have experienced significant growth in agriculture and the wider economy in the past decade, the process of sustainable intensification, can help farmers to reduce hunger and poverty much further while managing environmental resources prudently in the long-term.

Add your comment.

About Ramadjita Tabo

Dr Ramadjita Tabo is a member of The Montpellier Panel and Deputy Executive Director of the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA).

You know the feeling – the end of a hard day at work, no time (and, in my case, no inclination) to cook. So you do what 30 per cent of Brits normally do: stop at a supermarket on your way home and buy a ready meal. Tonight I fancy lamb curry. Mmmm… looking forward to it!

But because of my research on environmental impacts of food, I know my lamb curry has the total carbon footprint from farm to plate of around 6 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2 eq.) per person*. It may be tasty and convenient, but by choosing and eating this curry I will have contributed to climate change, through the greenhouse gases emitted on its journey to my plate.

Should I worry about it? Probably not, if I was the only person in the country favouring convenience.

But I’m not, and the lamb curry ready meals eaten in the UK every year – just lamb curry, not the many others – have an annual carbon footprint equivalent to 140 million car miles, equivalent to 5500 car trips around the world.

Food facts

We’ve estimated this based on the figure of 30 per cent of adults in Britain eating ready meals at least once a week. Curry, as one of the nation’s favourites, accounts for up to 10 per cent of ready-meal sales, which have soared during the recession.  

Every stage of the lamb curry’s life cycle emits greenhouse gases. Rice paddies give off methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times stronger than CO2. Sheep (and cows) also emit methane because of their ruminant digestive systems. Fertilisers used on land emit nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent than CO2, and the vehicles that transport the ingredients to the manufacturers and take their products to the retailer burn fossil fuels, which in turn produce CO2.

And that’s before you’ve even driven to and from the shop and cooked your meal.

The main contributors to the carbon footprint are the meal’s ingredients, which emit around 70 per cent, with the lamb alone contributing more than half of the total. Meal manufacture adds a further 10 per cent and packaging five per cent.

Despite popular belief, the contribution of transport is relatively small, adding less than two per cent to the total. In contrast, refrigeration of ingredients and the meal contribute around 10 per cent, largely due to leaking refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases. You get a similar picture for most meat-based foods.

How do you measure up?

So what could we do to reduce the carbon footprint of the food we eat? Our research shows there are at least two things: eat less meat – particularly red meat – and cook more at home.

For example, if we were to eat the same ready-made curry made with chicken instead of lamb, the total carbon footprint would go down from six to around 3kg CO2 eq. per person – simply because sheep and cows emit methane while chickens and turkeys don’t.

The same lamb curry prepared at home would have a carbon footprint up to 15 per cent lower, mainly because you cut out meal refrigeration at the retailer, but also because you’ll typically waste less food.

We have found that even more elaborate meals made at home, such as a traditional Christmas dinner, have a lower carbon footprint than ready-made lamb curry, coming in at only 2.5kg CO2 eq. per person.

We are currently researching how we can reduce the environmental impacts of our food and diet across the whole of its life cycle, from agriculture to food processing to the way we prepare food at home. We have developed the free tool CCaLC (carbon calculations over the life cycle of industrial activities) to help the food industry and consumers find out the carbon footprint of hundreds of different food items.

You can use the tool to look up different meal ingredients, or to prepare your own meal virtually by adding the ingredients of your choice, ‘transporting’ and ‘cooking’ them. You can compare the carbon footprint of different meal options to help you choose the lowest carbon alternative. We have also developed a simplified version, CCaLC Lite, for android tablets and mobile phones, which is fun to play with (we think!). Of course, it includes the carbon footprint of lamb curry.

Which reminds me, I can hear the microwave beeping so I’d better go back to my dinner. Tomorrow, I may cook at home… just food for thought.

CCaLC tools can be downloaded from www.ccalc.org.uk.

*This measure includes all greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, emitted in the life cycle of this meal, from farm to plate. Some of these are stronger greenhouse gases than others, so they are scaled to give an equivalent measure in CO2.

Add your comment.

About Adisa Azapagic

Adisa Azapagic is Professor of Sustainable Chemical Engineering at the University of Manchester, where she leads the Sustainable Industrial Systems group.

Farmers have always been in a running battle with pests. We estimate using Defra statistics that in 2010, UK crops worth £715M were lost to insect pests. Chemical pesticides are crucial to controlling them, but the development of pest resistance, and key products being withdrawn amid fears about human and environmental health mean that alternative methods are increasingly important.

One solution is to promote native biodiversity that will kill pests within crops. Many native species have the potential to increase crop yields, so supporting biodiversity on farmland has more to offer than simply beautifying the countryside. For example, bees pollinate crops and predatory beetles eat pest aphids. In any case, the UK has signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires that “by 2020 areas under agriculture, aquaculture and forestry are managed sustainably, ensuring conservation of biodiversity”.

So-called ‘natural pest control’, also called biological control, can cut crop losses by 65%, and is worth an estimated £1.3Bn a year to UK farmers (derived from Defra stats and Losey et al. 2006, links above). £432M of this comes from invertebrates like parasitic wasps or predatory ground beetles. These invertebrate communities are diverse in the UK – we have identified nearly 60 species of predatory ground beetles that feed on pests in wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

A flower-rich field margin. The flowers provide food and shelter for pest-controlling invertebrates. Image: Marek Nowakowski

Yet for biodiversity to benefit agriculture, our native plants and animals need careful husbandry within farmed landscapes. Most invertebrates that help control pests cannot remain in fields throughout the year because ploughing and harvesting will kill them, so we need to sow new habitats where they can shelter before moving back into the crops.

One of the best ways of doing this involves sowing seed mixtures in thin strips around the field edges that provide crucial habitats for pest-eating invertebrates. For example, sowing tussock-forming grasses like cocksfoot will benefit beetles and spiders that hide and overwinter in them. Creating these habitats is an important part of European agri-environmental schemes, of which field margins represent one of the most widely-implemented approaches.

A helping hand

Insects play other roles in food production by pollinating flowering crops like oilseed rape and soft fruits. In the UK this is worth an estimated £400M per year and worldwide its value could be as high as £150Bn.

Yet we know very little about the role our native bee species play in this pollination. In recent surveys we were surprised to find that as well as the well-known honeybee (Apis mellifera), more than 30 species of native bees were pollinating oilseed rape crops. Native bees can account for at least as many flower visits as honeybees, so they are crucial in crop pollination, particularly if there are no longer enough honeybee hives, for example as a result of colony collapse.

A solitary bee covered with oilseed rape pollen that will increase pollination and crop yield. Image: Mike Edwards

And our observations suggest that native solitary bees may be particularly efficient in pollinating crops because they don’t clean pollen off their bodies to the same extent that bumblebees and honeybees do. By being messy eaters, the solitary bees are more likely to transfer pollen to the female reproductive part of the flower.

It is by gaining a more detailed understanding of which insects are pollinating crops that we can map their UK distribution. Using data collected by the volunteers of the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Scheme and the Biological Records Centre, we identified crop-growing regions that support limited numbers of native bee species.

It’s the kind of information likely to be increasingly important in the future for policy-makers to target land management that promotes beneficial insect pollinators. For example, a partnership with the agro-chemical company Syngenta helped create wide-reaching benefits for bees under the ‘Operation Pollinator‘ programme by planting field margins rich in flowers.

Future increases in crop yields will almost certainly not be achieved in isolation from the role played by ‘ecosystem services’ like pollination that are provided by native biodiversity. Farm-management techniques that enhance biodiversity need to develop in a way that is compatible with real-world agriculture, and must deliver a wide range of benefits including pollination, pest control, water protection and even locking up greenhouse gases in the soil.

This means management that promotes biodiversity to benefit crop production will be vital to the UK’s long-term food security, and the most successful approaches rely on communication between scientists, farmers, the agricultural industry and the government.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Planet Earth Online.

Add your comment.

About Richard Pywell

Professor Richard Pywell is a programme leader for research on biodiversity and ecosystem services across the Natural Environment Research Council’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) at Wallingford. He is a leading expert on the restoration and management of biodiversity within intensively managed ecosystems with over 60 peer-reviewed publications.

About Ben Woodstock

Dr Ben Woodcock is an Ecological Entomologist at CEH. He is involved in research that develops applied management solutions to enhancing ecosystems service delivery and biodiversity within arable and grassland ecosystems and has 45 peer-reviewed publications.

Other contributiors

Dr Mike Edwards of the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Scheme and Dr Marek Nowakowski of the Wildlife Farming Company also contributed to this article.

There is a need for more public sector, private companies, organizations and donors to come together to share both resources and expertise to develop new approaches to sustainable and successful development.

Innovative thinking needs to be done particularly in agriculture to address food security since land, water, and environmental management are not separate from agriculture sector development or long-term food security.

For the most part, public-private partnerships in the development world usually focus on linkages between a donor or NGO and the private sector. Rarely does it include public-to-public sector efforts. In particular, state-run organisations – meaning both public sector institutions and parastatals (entities partially owned by a government) – that have responsibilities for improving agriculture, housing, water and sewage management, the environment, and to spur manufacturing should examine opportunities outside of their stove-piped bureaucratic use of public monies. They should develop partnerships with others in synergistic sectors and use their respective budgets and expertise cross-cut on to development issues.

A new partner

I have previously discussed new and innovative approaches to both agriculture and public-private partnerships (PPP), arguing to expand the matrix of PPPs to include a fourth P: public-to-public sector partnerships, which is the point I am stressing above – synergistic public sector groups such as ministries of housing and water working together with their respective budgets can bring affordable housing with potable water.

In essence the PPPP or 4P approach (meaning not just adding public-to-public sector projects and policies, but having creatively different development partners) helps expand the ‘out of the box’ or even ‘next to the box’ thinking about development partnerships and partners. Partners need to be far and wide, from public sector-to-public sector to pulling in expertise from non-profit and for-profit organizations, companies, and international donors with the flexibility to work in a synergistic manner across sectors. 

The point of viewing agriculture as part of an ecosystem that includes better land, water and environmental management is a good example of the 4P approach and new thinking.

Agriculture is not a standalone sector

The argument that agriculture is part of an ecosystem is such a critical point given that many projects have not had sustainable success despite the vast amounts of money that have been pumped into the sector over the last 30 years.

So what is the problem? What have we been doing wrong?

One thing I think has been missing is a more synergistic agricultural paradigm. One cannot approach agriculture as a single sector and organizations and government ministries need to pull resources together to sustainably address this area of development. This to me is the new public-private partnership – or the 4P mentioned above.

There are a few projects out there that include water, land environmental management, and renewables as base design elements in the execution of their agricultural programs, or have atypical partners in their public-private efforts.  A few pioneering models on agriculture and pulling in atypical partners are Songhai Integrative Farms Systems in the Republic of Benin, which has built-in water, land, environment, and technology as fundamental aspects of agriculture. Then there is the value chain and job creation focus of projects with private sector businesses like USAID’s Markets Initiative (external pdf). These both change the age old paradigm that agriculture projects focus on food product, and not the other sectors that are important to making agriculture sustainable.

Songhai sees the importance of a systems approach to agricultural development, adding training and technology as well as an incubator framework to help farming entrepreneurs, and then build linkages with academic, research, and international institutions around the world. The Market’s Initiative has pooled together small cooperatives and the private sector to increase agricultural production, create jobs, and advance value chain components such as rural roads, and trade linkages.

However, very few large international donors yet have the flexibility to incorporate these 4P approaches, particularly for agriculture. The UK development agency DFID probably comes closest because it has more flexibility to adapt more quickly to these new ideas than some other western nations’ agencies such as USAID. Country donors like the Japanese and south-south nations like Vietnam are also closer than others to appreciating the seminal point that agriculture is part of an ecosystem; they too are more open-minded and flexible to adjust to these new ideas and are doing so, particularly in Africa and Latin America.

Efforts to ensure food security and combat the cycles of drought and famine need the ecosystem and 4P approach. I would encourage countries, donors, public sectors, companies, NGOs to see the ecosystem and 4P approach as the way forward and a true paradigm shift for successful development – particularly for food security and agriculture.   

Add your comment.

About Robin Sanders

Dr. Robin Renee Sanders owns FE3DS, LLC Advising Firm, and is also founder of the FEEEDS Advocacy Initiative, which works on economic development projects and business strategies for Africa. Prior to this, she served as the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria 2007-2010 and Republic of Congo 2002-2005 and U.S. Permanent Representative to the West African Regional Organization ECOWAS. Dr Sanders also has experience in the non-governmental arena having served as the Director of the International Affairs and Communications Departments at AFRICARE.

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.

Read her blog and follow her on Twitter.

The meeting in London on 10-11 December 2012 was held under the Chatham House Rule, which forbids identification of speakers, so you may find this a rather frustrating blog.

One speaker asked participants the key question: why was the meeting talking about the sustainable intensification of agricultural production when the world already produces enough for everyone; when one third of all food produced ends up as waste; when an estimated 40% of corn in the US in 2013 is going to biofuel; and up to 90% of soya produced globally is used for animals not humans? And why produce more food when 1.4 billion people are overweight?

Yes, the world’s population is increasing but today there is no actual shortage of food (on a global scale) and every reason to believe we can produce enough food to feed more, climate change permitting. If the focus is on intensification of production and not on the real problems of getting food it where it is needed – on poverty and waste for instance – then we are not addressing the real issue: that every man, woman and child has access to food for a healthy life.

There may be a need to intensify crop production but that is primarily of relevance to the 500 million smallholder farm producers around the world, many of whom are women. They need to be able to double or triple production in a sustainable fashion – which may not require much new technology but application of what is already known. Sometimes, the speaker noted, it does require thinking out of the box. We saw this with Sustainable Rice Intensification (PDF), which uses different water and crop management practices to sometimes double yields.

Right focus?

The focus on smallholder farmers was often repeated. But there was a sense from the scientists and the businesses that what they really wanted to do was get on with the latest technologies and extend to the markets they haven’t been able to reach, without much interference.

There were predictable calls for less regulation on businesses involved in delivering new technologies, and to let the public sector scientists (who say they can clearly see there were no problems with genetic engineering) just get on with it. Was this their chance to engage with others who took a different view, and have a dialogue? No. Merely, a roll of different people stating their views.

There were opportunities for questioners to raise issues, including about major institutional changes that might be needed. To the intellectual property system, for example, or to the economics underlying the drivers of the innovation and the science, as well as the priorities for research and development. Possible game-changing technologies from lab-manufactured meat to making biofuels more efficient were also laid out.

But the question I think needs asking is: what game are these aiming to change? For without dealing with the systemic and deeply embedded issues that some speakers spoke about all they will do is continue the inequalities not address them. As was pointed out, for people to be nourished to their full potential – and so many are not – implies that there are deep structural challenges to the food system.

Some argued that we need to think about different scales; not simply farm and field level, but more narrowly on landscapes and more broadly to the different requirements for rich and poor countries. They pointed out that we need to face up to the trade-offs that may have to be made. But sometimes it seemed as if people wanted to go down the sustainable intensification route to avoid these other things that are really rather more difficult to tackle, because it just focuses on science and technologies not societies, economies and ethics.

Summing up

I wonder increasingly about the value of this kind of set piece discussion. Can a few questions and answers from the floor be a good way of taking us forward to actually address the real problems? Instead, more often than not they seem a way of allowing the powers that be to structure the debate, merely tipping their hats to people with perhaps different views from the mainstream.

On a more positive note, there were many inspiring practical examples of changes being wrought by rural peoples in different places around the world that improve their lives and livelihoods and yields.

I’m left convinced that there is a clear challenge to rethink the way we spend our research and development money; the way the public and private sector needs to support small farmer innovation and improvements of their livelihoods and yields and tackle the systemic issues. Will conferences like this make this more likely? Hard to tell. But to be judged successful, they need to.

I was there as a trustee of the Food Ethics Council, which published some of our materials including the special issue of the Council’s magazine on Sustainable intensification: unravelling the rhetoric. You can read more articles like this on my blog.

Add your comment.

About Geoff Tansey

Geoff Tansey has worked on food, agriculture and development issues for over 35 years. He has degrees in soil science (University of Aberdeen) and the history and social studies of science (University of Sussex). He helped found and edit the journal Food Policy in the mid-1970s, has worked on various agricultural development projects in Turkey, Mongolia, Albania and Kazakhstan. Since the early 1980s, he has been an independent writer, consultant, and occasional broadcaster. In June 2005, he received one of six Joseph Rowntree ‘Visionaries for a Just and Peaceful World’ Awards. He is a member and a director of The Food Ethics Council.

There is hardly a year that starts without at least somebody at the Oxford Farming Conference lamenting the gulf between agricultural research and practice, and calling for it to be bridged. The difference this year is that these calls may now be getting some answers.

The past few months have seen an upsurge in efforts to address this gap including Feeding the Future, a review of research priorities for farmers and growers up to the year 2030 which was commissioned by four organisations at the heart of UK food production: RASE, AHDB, the NFU and AIC. There has also been action from GFS partners, with NERC launching a Knowledge Exchange Programme for sustainable food production and teaming up with BBSRC to develop a new industry focused initiative on sustainable agriculture.

By and large, the new initiatives focus on co-ordinating the demands of farmers so they become more effective ‘research clients’, or boosting efforts to translate research from academia and journals into language and conversations that directly reach primary producers.

Welcome as this is, the lesson from other disciplines and other countries is that we can set our sights higher, involving the intended beneficiaries much more fully in decisions and the research that is pursued in their name.

Peer-to-peer learning

Medical research funding shows how extended peer review can involve those with a stake in science even more fully than respecting their demands as ‘clients’, valuing the knowledge that users and beneficiaries can bring to decision-making.

Perhaps the best-known example is the Alzheimer Society’s Research Network. It involves 200 dementia sufferers and their carers directly in shaping a substantial research funding programme, setting research priorities, reviewing applications, sitting on selection panels, monitoring projects and spreading the word. They’ve run the scheme for years now with a community who face clear challenges in participating, and it seems to be working a treat, investing tens of millions of pounds and yielding important results.

Back in agriculture but in the global south, farmer-led alternatives to traditional extension services suggest there’s another way of making sure new knowledge is practically relevant, besides changing the language and locus of discussion. In farmer field schools participants learn simple but effective DIY research skills, sharing know-how peer-to-peer, for example to identify and encourage insects that feed on serious pests. The focus here is less on translating research for farmers than helping them pick up the language for themselves.

Applications welcome

The challenges and opportunities facing agricultural research in the UK are at least as different from those facing the smallholders in Asia, Africa and Latin American who have pioneered farmer field schools, as they are from those in medical science.

At the Soil Association we think there are lessons to learn from both these examples. Under our Duchy Originals Future Farming Programme, jointly with the Organic Research Centre and supported by the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation we’re experimenting with research funding and knowledge exchange inspired by these approaches.

Our new research fund, which has just announced its first call and requires expressions of interest by 10 February, centres on challenges in sustainable production put forward directly by farmers, ranging from tackling weeds that dog low-input systems to advancing techniques for pasture cropping – drilling the next season’s crops directly into the clovers and other plants that build fertility in a rotation.

The process match-makes applicants with interested farmers to design projects together, and involves other farmers alongside scientists in reviewing research proposals. This extended peer review in no way dumbs down the science – the winning research will need to be top-notch scientifically and practically relevant to people at the sharp end.

We have also been piloting ‘field labs’ to help small groups of farmers team up to try techniques and technologies that interest them, which are structured to provide a hands-on crash course in designing effective trials. DIY experiments will never substitute for larger-scale hard science, but farmers in the UK test and tinker all the time, so honing their research skills makes more of the time and money they are already investing. We’ve started eight field labs so far, with producers testing new ways of cracking challenges like maintaining sheep fertility on red clover, reducing antibiotics in dairy and eliminating peat from seed propagation.

The fund and the field labs focus on upping the performance of low-input, agroecological systems and their productivity, environmental benefits and nutritional quality. As organic and non-organic farmers can learn from each, both schemes are open to all. And as they’re experiments in their own right, we will be monitoring progress carefully.

To get involved or find out more please contact our Research Manager, Euan Brierley at  ebrierley@soilassociation.org

Add your comment.

About Tom MacMillan

Dr Tom MacMillan is Director of Innovation at the Soil Association.