USC Canada

Ecological Agriculture: Making the Case

USC Canada — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:31:38 +0000

USC Canada is part of a group of international organizations that contributed research to make a case for ecological agriculture.

A Viable Food Future was published this week by the Development Fund of Norway.

Download and read it here.

…And the Rains Came Down

USC Canada — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:44:04 +0000

“Notes from Nepal” is a series by Kate Green, who manages our Nepal program. Kate recently returned from a visit to Nepal, and is posting personal reports from her trip and follow-up reports from our partners.

Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive all the updates, or simply check back from time to time to catch up on Kate’s travels.

Chhatiwan is a village in Nepal situated in one of USC Canada’s new work areas. Laxman and other Parivartan staff have only been working with this community for about a year.

Like the region around the Kamala river, this valley floods and the rains erode the hillsides every year in the rainy season. So, based on their decades of work along the Kamala, Parivartan started implementing a series of watershed management activities to deal with this problem. This first year, they focused on reducing the open grazing of livestock and supporting anyone who wanted to try setting up stall feeding for their animals. With that done, they scattered local seeds and planted saplings within the river basin to slow the water (and thus, the erosion) and reduce the impact of annual floods.

The main school in Chhatiwan was a focal point during our visit back in April 2010. The school had been built at the foot of a small range of hills and, because of deforestation and erosion, the school was prone to flooding every year. The building and students all suffered from the annual mess.

In April, we spent an afternoon with the teachers. Parivartan staff went with them on a walk into the hills above the school and, in many places, it was clear that the erosion was quite bad, but they were encouraged that small measures could start to have an impact.

Before we left, the teachers talked about having a work-party day with the students, to plant some sapling and perhaps try to set up some small check dams up the gullies. At the end of August, I received the following pictures. It’s amazing how we can now be so connected, via e-mail and digital photography, that we can follow the community-led work on a daily basis, even though it’s so far away.

The school in Chhatiwan (450 students) floods each year because of the denuded hillside behind and the poor choice of the placement of the school.

This is the hillside just behind the school in Chhatiwan

Work party day from the school, to get rocks up into small check dams late May 2010.

After the first few rains of the monsoon in July, the soil and leaves were accumulating to slow the water.

Planting and protecting saplings up on the hillside above Chhatiwan.

Worth Trying on a Larger Scale

USC Canada — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:25:44 +0000

Subscribe to our RSS feed to receive all the updates, or simply check back from time to time to catch up on Kate’s travels.

About 8 weeks after my visit to Ranibas, Dinesh – the head of the program there – sent me some pictures of what the community had undertaken. They have indeed put in place close to 200 trenches of a variety of sizes on the hillsides above and around Ranibas.

Here’s a quote from Dinesh’s e-mail to me:

“The locals of Ranibas are very happy and positive about this work. No one is negative with this in the village. They say, ‘Even though we could not see any tangible changes to the water source recharge, we believe it will yet bring a positive impact later.’ Indeed it is too short a period to see actual change yet, but it’s good that the community has been so active. We will now wait for the rains.”

Here are some of the images that Dinesh sent:

After the rains started, we could see the plant growth and water in the trenches.

This is the trench we dug in April. The man in the picture is the community worker Ram Prasad.

This plant – teprocia – has grown really well on the bund. This was taken in July, after just 5-6 weeks of growth.

Smaller trenches and bunds above Ranibas.

The Kamala River in July. Note that the banks are not overflowing.

Without open grazing, and following some seed sowing, the soil from the river lodges in the grasses at the edge of the Kamala River.

Interview with Raj Patel

USC Canada — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:41:52 +0000

In a new interview with the Worldwatch Institute, small-scale farming advocate and author Raj Patel (Stuffed and Starved; The Value of Nothing) makes his arguments about why he considers industrial, for-profit agriculture to be incompatible with food sovereignty; a system rooted in democracy and inclusion. Read the full interview – and read more about USC’s work on Food Sovereignty in our 2010 issue of Jottings.

Word from the Wise

USC Canada — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:20:46 +0000

On a trip to Ethiopia in November 2009, journalist David Kattenburg visited one of the world’s great champions of farmers’ rights – and founder our Seeds of Survival Program – Melaku Worede. You can listen to a 30-minute interview with Melaku at Kattenburg’s website, Green Planet Monitor.

Youth: The Seeds of Change

USC Canada — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:02:39 +0000

Amidou Boureima, from Burkina Faso, is one of many young farmers for whom our SoS program offers training and technical support.

August 12 was International Youth Day – a day of celebration for youth, but also a great opportunity for these future stewards of our fragile planet to take action to help make the planet a healthier place.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us get to take it easy.

Young people represent more than 80% of the population in developing countries – where the richest levels of biodiversity are located. But that diversity is disappearing quickly. Every one of us depends on it for survival and well-being – for food, medicine, shelter. And although our young people aren’t responsible for the situation, they’ll be left with the consequences if we continue to lose life on Earth.

Ensuring a healthier and brighter future for rural communities is one of the key reasons USC Canada’s Seeds of Survival Program supports training and technical support for young farmers, encouraging them to remain on their lands – connected with nature, able to gain a respectable living, and be valued for the work they do to feed the rest of us on this planet.

It’s also why we signed onto the International Youth Accord on Biodiversity; to help the world’s young people raise their voices.

In these ways, USC is tapping into the youthful determination in the global South; a passion and desire to confront the growing hunger, conflict, and climate chaos worldwide. With their help – with their ideas, energy, and skills – we can breathe new life into an inter-generational campaign for a healthier, more caring global community.

World Bank Warns on ‘Farmland Grab’

USC Canada — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:19:36 +0000

A controversial leaked report by the World Bank exposes exploitation with programs that promote investment in agricultural lands, particularly in poorer nations. The Financial Times online reports, “The draft highlighted a few successes in land acquisition…but the overall picture it gave was one of exploitation, warning that investors either lacked the necessary expertise to cultivate land or were more interested in speculative gains than in using land productively.”

Official data around farmland deals is hard to come by, often relying on information from local media, but the leaked report does offer official data for a few countries, including 3.9m hectares transferred in Sudan and 1.2m in Ethiopia between 2004 and 2009.

The report offers recommendations to improve transparency, urging the establishment of a “consistent format for reporting on land acquisition,” and committing governments, mainly in developing countries, to disclose information about land acquisition. But the Oakland Institute, a US-based think-tank, says the WB report contradicts its own advice to developing countries.

In a related story in the Wall Street Journal, Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, gives further warning. “Investment is needed…but not investment under any conditions. You don’t want to encourage or allow a market for speculators,” He says, adding that the arrival of big outside investors “often pushes the original land users off the land.”

Challenging GM Crop Success

USC Canada — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:59:46 +0000

A new report from International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Application (ISAAA) suggests the global food crisis has prompted an expansion of genetically modified crops, especially in developing countries.

But read on to the end of this story and you’ll learn of another report, released by Friends of the Earth on the same day. This second report challenges these claims of success and offers its own data. Read the full article here.

Tackling the Global Food Crisis

USC Canada — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:49:43 +0000

A Mission Unaccomplished

A new report, The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger, released by the UK Hunger Alliance and the Oakland Institute, reveals that a major initiative on food security launched by the G8 a year ago has failed to address the global hunger crisis, which currently affects more than a billion people.

The report explains that a sustainable agriculture agenda should be promoted to boost food production in the poorest countries, with less reliance on external inputs, enhanced management of natural resources, and more investment in favor of small holders, rural poor, and marginal groups.

This requires that agricultural policies to guide investments and support measures be developed at the regional level when relevant. Humanitarian organizations should invest more resources in programs and in advocacy to support sustainable agriculture and access to land and natural resources.

Read the press release and download the report PDF for more recomendations on ensuring a durable boost in food production.

Students Debate Food Security

USC Canada — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:20:03 +0000

This year, the Peel District School Board – one of the largest in the country – invited USC-Canada Executive Director Susan Walsh to deliver the keynote address for their 15th Annual Student Model United Nations (UN).

Global food security was the hot topic, and Susan provided some valuable insights into world food issues. The Peel District serves a large and diverse suburban region just west of metropolitan Toronto.

Read the full story here.