MALNUTRITION: UN: CLIMATE CHANGE: Staple food crops do not want global warming

  Photo: Manoocher Deghati/IRIN
Staple grains should not be taken for grantedCancun,

5 December 2010 (IRIN) - Taking steps to control global temperatures is a key issue at the UN talks on climate change in Cancun. Within the next four decades maize prices could rise by up to 131 percent, there could be 17 million more undernourished children in the poorest countries, and some African farmers might have to give up agriculture if the planet keeps getting hotter, new studies show.
“[We wanted] … to get countries in Cancun to take action now to keep the global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius by the turn of the century – otherwise we are headed towards a four degree rise if greenhouse gas emissions remain unchecked,” said Phillip Thornton, of the Kenya-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), who used climate models in a study showing the serious impact of a four-degree Celsius rise in temperature on food production in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2090s.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted in its latest assessment that a two-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by the turn of the century would have a catastrophic effect: water stress in arid and semi-arid countries, more floods in low-lying coastal areas, coastal erosion in small island states, and the elimination of up to 30 percent of animal and plant species.
Thornton said his study was prompted by a conference called '4 degrees and beyond' organised at Oxford University in 2009, where the UK Met Office had warned that a 4 degree increase in the global temperature was quite possible by the end of this century and even earlier.
Much academic attention in the agriculture sector has centred on 2050, by which time the global population is expected to increase from around 6.3 billion today to 9.1 billion, adding a third more mouths to feed, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
A comprehensive study led by Gerald Nelson and Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), projected the possible impact of climate change on three of the world’s main staple foods - maize, rice and wheat - from 2010 to 2050.
The study used various combinations of income and population growth juxtaposed with temperature and rainfall levels ranging from slightly to substantially wetter and hotter. Crop yields and prices fared best when global temperatures rose by one degree Celsius by 2050, IFPRI noted. Other scenarios saw rice yields plunging and maize production dropping considerably, even in countries such as the United States of America, while prices of the staples soared.
The IFPRI study showed that a perfect scenario of sustained higher incomes, lower population growth and effective cuts in greenhouse gas emissions had a dramatic effect on the number of malnourished children in developing countries, bringing it down by 45 percent between 2010 and 2050.

Incomes help
“Economic development also influences consumer patterns, as income growth in Japan after World War II has shown – the Japanese reduced rice consumption, opting for much higher value foodstuffs such as fruits, vegetables, meat and fish [rather than carbohydrate-rich grains],” Nelson pointed out.
[We wanted] … to get countries in Cancun to take action now to keep the global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius by the turn of the century
When incomes improved, people tended to produce fewer children, and were better able to provide good quality food and education. Similar patterns have begun to emerge in China, the IFPRI study said.
All these factors would have an effect on the demand for staples, bringing prices down. “But again, only in the case of water-intense rice, as the pressure on cereals - which can be used as animal feed, such as maize - could increase,” said Nelson. On the other hand, higher incomes would also place farmers in a better position to invest in new technologies to boost crop yields.
He also suggested that governments become proactive about family planning programmes and encourage the distribution of contraceptives.
Global temperatures could be kept below the two-degree Celsius tipping point if harmful greenhouse gas emissions were allowed to peak by 2015, and subsequently by 80 percent to 50 percent until 2050, the IPCC said.
The International Energy Agency warned in its World Energy Outlook 2010 that the demand for oil and coal – the two biggest causes of greenhouse gas emissions – would have to peak before 2020 to keep the global temperature increase below two degrees Celsius.

Out of Africa
Nearly all population growth by 2050 is expected to occur in developing countries, according to the UN, with Sub-Saharan Africa's population growing fastest - by 108 percent – adding 910 million people.
The IFPRI global projections were accompanied by more detailed studies of African countries, which used the same climate models to show that as populations increased and soaring temperatures hit crop production, the numbers of malnourished children climbed by millions, even in the more developed countries such as South Africa.
Only in Malawi, where the local modeller took into account nutrition policies currently in place, did the projections show that the number of malnourished children could fall by 2050.
Implementing policies to help countries adapt, make their people resilient to the impact of climate change, and reduce the risk of disaster was critical, said Lindiwe Sibanda, head of the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), an African think-tank.
Absalom Manyatsi, an agronomist and the lead author of the study on Swaziland, pointed out that his country, where the impact of climate change would be aggravated by a high incidence of HIV/AIDS, did not have a climate change adaptation policy. In fact, the government intended to increase sugarcane production for biofuel at the expense of maize production.
Neighbouring Mozambique has an adaptation policy but is extremely vulnerable to natural hazards - 20 of the country’s 128 districts are highly prone to drought, 30 to flooding, and 7 to both risks - exposing about 43 percent of the population to natural hazards said Genito Maure, lead author of the case study on Mozambique and a senior lecturer at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, the capital.
Agriculture’s contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP) of Mozambique had dropped quite sharply from about 45 percent in 1989 to 20 percent in 2000, and up to 2010 had stabilized at around a quarter of GDP. “The climate change projections show food production is going to plunge even further with temperatures going up,” Maure said.
Most people still depended on farming for an income and the country needed to make agriculture resilient, for instance by investing in infrastructure such as putting in a road network to improve access to markets and the flow of grain from the more fertile north to other parts of the country, he said.
Population growth would be a challenge in many African countries, said Delali Nutsukpo, a senior agriculture official in the Ghanaian government and lead author of the country’s case study. “We need to take measures to control population while investing in rural livelihoods programmes – but will that happen?”

Even more dismal
In the ILRI study Thornton painted a rather gloomy picture: crops failed every second year in parts of Southern Africa, and he was sceptical that international climate policies would succeed “in confining global warming to … [a rise of 2 degrees Celsius] - even this will require unprecedented collective will and collective action”.
Data collection and dissemination on the weather as well as the land would have to improve, so as to develop adaptation strategies. At the moment, “estimates of the cropland extent in Africa range from about 1 to more than 6 million sq km … depending on the choice of satellite … The uncertainty in such basic information ("where are crops grown, and how much of them is there?") adds considerable difficulty to the quantification and evaluation of impacts and adaptation options,” the ILRI study commented.
It also urged investment in preserving genetic diversity so farmers would have a bigger pool of choices to cross-breed, and in providing support for smallholder farmers by developing community-based adaptation tools that were easy to implement.
Previous IFPRI research has indicated that least US$7 billion per year should be spent on biological research, extending rural roads, and expanding irrigation systems and improving their efficiency, to compensate for the loss of food production brought on by climate change by 2050 and beyond.

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POVERTY: Better Data Key to Supporting Women Farmers

An accomplished farmer who won the coveted Woman Farmer of the Year Award in 2008, Thabile Dlamini-Gooday wants to uplift the standard of other women in agriculture. She believes that if women farmers were to work together they could fight hunger and significantly reduce poverty among themselves.But she faces one big challenge. "Women farmers are difficult to find because we don’t know one another," says Dlamini-Gooday. Often she runs out of stock and would like to refer her customers to other women farmers. But men end up taking the business because there is no national sex-disaggregated database to help her identify her female counterparts and the kind of products they sell. In fact, says Dlamini-Gooday, government cannot even begin to address the specific needs of women in agriculture because the Ministry of Agriculture keeps no such data. "As women we lack certain skills in farming such as rearing livestock which is traditionally considered a man’s job. But if government does not even know the number of women farmers out there then it cannot address these issues," she told IPS. In most African countries women, make up the majority of the poor, live in rural areas and are subsistence farmers. Yet Swaziland is not the only African country lacking sex-disaggregated data on agriculture. According to United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates, women make up 60 percent of the agricultural labour force while they produce between 60 and 80 percent of the world’s food crops. These women’s contribution to national development largely goes unrecognised and unpaid. Dr Lindiwe Sibanda, the chief executive officer of the Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources Network (FANRPAN), blames the World Bank’s economic structural adjustment programmes for the lack of disaggregated data. According to Sibanda, the requirement for countries to downsize their agricultural research and extension services under SAPS destroyed the whole infrastructure of data collection. Therefore, Africa continues to plan based on data that is not in touch with people’s lived realities. "In many instances, policies and programmes in rural areas, as implemented at the local level, are not responsive to women’s needs. In part, this is because planners and policy-makers are often not even aware that women farmers face special and specific challenges and those programmes need to be designed with their situations in mind," explained Sibanda.
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=51510

MALNUTRITION: Call for change in agricultural practices

NAIROBI, 10 May 2010 (IRIN) - Technological innovation is key to helping African farmers cope with the increasing challenges posed by climate change, say specialists.“Temperatures have increased and the danger is that agriculture is the backbone of [Africa’s] economies,” Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, chief executive officer of the South-African based Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), told IRIN. “The increase in temperatures means we have less water in some places and we are already a drought-prone region.”“The technologies that we have on the shelf… like the seeds, may not be compatible with the increased temperatures,” she added. “Malawi recorded world renowned success in terms of food security because we have experienced a fairly stable climate regime over the last 100 years. The technologies that were there [such as] the hybrid seeds… could be taken in, planted. As long they were accessible to the farmers, we could then register increases in yields. “But the challenge we face now is that there will be new diseases, new vectors and pests that we have not known or seen before …. All these challenges are being superimposed on a system that has not been food-secure,” she said.Africa spends at least US$19 billion on food imports annually yet it has the capacity to be the global breadbasket, she said. “Most of our farmers are smallholders and they are in the business of subsidizing the urban population [but] for as long as we are not creating an environment where they can increase their income and step out of poverty, we will always have [more] poor people yet we have the potential to be food-secure.”About one billion people worldwide were food insecure in 2009, according to estimates, with the food price crisis hitting millions. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, Achim Steiner, told the conference, organized by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research and the Earth System Science Partnership, that the response to the crisis was similar to the cause of the problem. “We are reducing soil fertility, continuing to bank on water, increasing reliance on fertilizer… the emphasis cannot just be this both from an environmental and cost basis,” he said.
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?Reportid=89081

MALNUTRITION: Need for improved agricultural technology

NAIROBI, 10 May 2010 (IRIN) - Technological innovation is key to helping African farmers cope with the increasing challenges posed by climate change, say specialists."Temperatures have increased and the danger is that agriculture is the backbone of [Africa's] economies," Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, chief executive officer of the South-African based Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) [http://www.fanrpan.org/], told IRIN. "The increase in temperatures means we have less water in some places and we are already a drought-prone region.""The technologies that we have on the shelf. like the seeds, may not be compatible with the increased temperatures," she added. "Malawi recorded world renowned success in terms of food security because we have experienced a fairly stable climate regime over the last 100 years. The technologies that were there [such as] the hybrid seeds. could be taken in, planted. As long they were accessible to the farmers, we could then register increases in yields. "But the challenge we face now is that there will be new diseases, new vectors and pests that we have not known or seen before .. All these challenges are being superimposed on a system that has not been food-secure," she said.Africa spends at least US$19 billion on food imports annually yet it has the capacity to be the global breadbasket, she said. "Most of our farmers are smallholders and they are in the business of subsidizing the urban population [but] for as long as we are not creating an environment where they can increase their income and step out of poverty, we will always [more] poor people yet we have the potential to be food-secure."About one billion people worldwide were food insecure in 2009, according to estimates, with the food price crisis hitting millions. The UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, Achim Steiner, told the conference, organized by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research and the Earth System Science Partnership, [http://www.ccafs.cgiar.org/index.php] that the response to the crisis was similar to the cause of the problem. "We are reducing soil fertility, continuing to bank on water, increasing reliance on fertilizer. the emphasis cannot just be this both from an environmental and cost basis," he said. "We need to rethink agriculture as a platform from which the world will learn to ensure that 50 years from now we can produce food to feed nine billion," he said."Clearly increasing yields is paramount, but we cannot look at the development of agriculture driven by the horizontal approach; slash-burn, moving to new frontiers [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=84320 ]... this paradigm is deceptive. You only have so much for horizontal expansion." He proposed the "vertical expansion of agriculture" through methods such as plant breeding with perennial food crops, and improved farm management practices to increase soil fertility and moisture retention. Perennial crops are less disruptive to the soil structure as there is less tilling and they help trap nutrients."Farming in the future will not just be about food production but other services rendered captured in an economic model. If we can prove that a certain farming system is better at reducing carbon emissions, what is there to stop farmers from being paid for their efforts five to 10 years from now?" Steiner posited. "By all means let us have a green revolution [http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=86350 ] but let us give it a capital 'G' this time."India's experience India saw food production rise from about 65 million tonnes in the 1960s to 230 million tonnes in 2008 due to higher yielding varieties, said Pramod Aggarwal of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. But large yield gaps remain, with India accounting for 25 and 40 percent of the world's hungry and malnourished women and children, respectively.Aggarwal said improved crop, pest and risk management as well as changes in sowing dates, improved crop varieties; irrigation and fertilizer efficiency could further mitigate climate effects while increasing production.William Clark, professor of international science and public policy at Harvard University, called for more field-based experimentation. "The world is changing in timescales faster than programmes and feedback. There is a need for safe spaces [for researchers] that encourage innovation," Clark said. "We need to acknowledge that work like this will be inefficient. We don't have the map; we are inventing it as we go along. we should agree on a target rate of failure in R&D [research and development]."He added that research ownership was crucial. "What research we can do reflects the power structure. When knowledge influences decisions, knowledge is power. Who sets the research agenda, who says what evidence counts, whose interests are science programmes actually and appearing to serve? Those who feel that their interests have not been taken into research are unlikely to accept the findings ."Learning by doing"We are at a stage where we need to learn quickly. Climate adaptation is a classic case of learning by doing," Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), said. "We used to think of adaptation as localized. We are now thinking in-situ in the short term. Planned migration due to rising sea levels, where people may move further inland, may have to be considered in the long term. [We] need a new way although we don't know what this new way is." He also urged climate and agriculture researchers to link up with universities to train practitioners. "Climate change is a vast area, no one can deal with it alone," he said.At present, the New Partnership for Africa's Development under its Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme [http://www.nepad-caadp.net/] has prioritized agriculture in four themes: sustainable land and water use, markets and infrastructure, food security, research and technology adoption, with countries expected to commit at least 10 percent of national budgets to agriculture.FANRPAN's Sibanda said: "We are excited by the new commitment [to agriculture] but time will tell whether there will be[an] impact and [whether] the impact will be to reduce the number of people going to bed hungry."