Fecal Pellets As Fertilizer

“Decomposed excreta improves the soil structure, increases its water-holding capacity, reduces pests and diseases and neutralises soil toxins and heavy metals,” states the study done by Josiane Nikiema from the International Water Management Institute, Ghana.

However, there is a social barrier to using decomposed faecal matter.

In 2009, in Durban, South Africa, the eThekwini municipality developed the ‘LaDePa’ or Latrine Dehydration Pasteurisation machine to treat faecal sludge from the ‘Ventilated Improved Pit’ latrines. Here the sludge is extruded for the formation of pellets, which are then exposed to infrared radiation.

The final product is dried and pasteurised pellets that are safe to handle, with minimum exposure to pathogen risk. These are planned to be sold as an agricultural product.

According to a study, published in 2018 in South African Journal of Chemical Engineering, dried pellets can be reused in agriculture as organic fertiliser. The fertiliser has a high phosphorous content, which is essential for plant growth. The study notes that the pellets are also rich in carbon, which helps enrich the soil with organic matter.

Pelletisation of fertilisers also makes the process of application in the field very easy as the pellets are dust-free. The pellets release more nutrients to the soil in comparison to the traditional powdered fertilisers.

What’s stopping these pellets from becoming popular? It could be a problem of mentality...but the pellets have been “whitened” with additional colours to promote social acceptance.

Full article...

Rabbit Urine As a Pest Repellant

Farmers can reduce the money they spend on pesticide by using rabbit urine to wipe out whiteflies, sap-sucking insects that attack crops such as vegetables, coffee, macadamia, bananas and avocadoes, among others.

Alex Maina, who has been a rabbit farmer for more than four years has been  using the animals' urine to control the destructive insects on his banana and pawpaw crops, says he has been able to reduce his expenditure on insecticides to almost nil.

... insecticides only have a limited effect on whiteflies as most only work when they come in direct contact with the whiteflies and that harsh synthetic chemicals will generally kill all the natural enemies of the whiteflies before they kill the whiteflies themselves

... rabbit urine can be used in two ways; as a foliar fertiliser and as a pesticide or insecticide.

When used as an insecticide, a farmer would be required to mix two litres of concentrated rabbit urine with three litres of water and spray the mixture on affected crops after every two weeks three times to wipe the insects.

When used as a foliar fertiliser, one would be required to use a litre of concentrated rabbit urine and mixed it with four litres of water and apply it to crops three times every two weeks.

Full article...

Cameroon's Ndanifor Permaculture Eco-village in the news

Mostly away from the limelight, there are innumerable efforts by locals all over Africa to address the perennial issues of dealing with issues of declining soil fertility, yield losses due to climate change, poorly accessible and expensive farming inputs and many others that plague small scale farmers.

Permaculture is one such ideology/group of methodologies. Spoken of passionately by its practitioners as part of 'sustainable agriculture' particularly suited to small scale and resource-poor farmers, it is pooh-poohed by others as unrealistic romanticism by opponents of 'modern' agriculture.

 Ndanifor Permaculture Eco-village in Cameroon has been featured in an article by IPS. While the article delves a little into the motivations behind the founder's efforts, it is unfortunately very short of specifics about actual farming practises, lessons learned and challenges faced, or results. The photo used to illustrate the article shows little to give one the impression that the no doubt well-intentioned initiative is yet doing or achieving much. Perhaps it's early days for the effort.

 The website of the mother organisation, Better World Cameroon, is unfortunately not any more forthcoming on actual work going on, although there are pitches for donations of various resources and materials.

African Agriculture

Why agri-investors should consider sustainable farming and good community relations

Almost all the land deals that foreign investors are engaged in, whether in Africa or anywhere else, are based on typical high-inputs industrial farming, including extensive use of fertilizer and agro-chemicals. These methods have become standard for large scale farming everywhere, and the cost of inputs that are needed to get a certain return can be fairly narrowly calculated, helping investment decisions.

Alejandro Litovsky argues that in investment destinations where the soil is still relatively fertile, less inputs-intensive farming could offer benefits and should be explored.

He says, “Managing soil erosion, ensuring human security and keeping within ecological limits, especially regarding water, are risks to the long-term value of the land, the portfolios of investors and the economic competitiveness of host countries. As global agribusinesses face growing social and environmental pressures, investors seeking to manage the resulting risks will require an innovative approach to risk management: including ecological limits and human security in the agricultural equation.”

Litovsky says “Large-scale farming still operates in the bygone world of the Green Revolution relying on the heavy use of chemicals and intensive, mono-crop cultivation as a means to boost agricultural output.” He goes on to suggest that agro-investors might want to invest in organic farming instead, “to ensure the long-term value and resilience of the soil.”

What Litovsky suggests may be sound from many perspectives including even eventual cost-saving and profitability, but it arguably involves a mind set that is fundamentally different from that of most agri-business, where the land and every other chain of the process, including humans, are simply factors of production. While the need for a tractor maintenance budget may be obvious, stereotypical agribusiness thinking may not include the time, effort and resources to devote to soil maintenance.

One of the criticisms of agribusiness is that it is akin to mining: you keep extracting the natural resources until they are finished, and/or pump ever more ‘inputs’ to get outputs. The decline of natural soil fertility is countered with increasing application of fertilizer. That is just an accepted part of the whole philosophy of industrial farming which it would likely be very difficult to change for most agro-investors.

“So too agricultural models can better integrate networks of smallholder farmers into a radical rethink of their business models, to build the social resilience,” writes Litovsky.

There are certainly some agribusiness who use this ‘hub and spokes’ model, but for many others, it is simply too much trouble. They much prefer to have centralized production that is entirely under their control for all sorts of reasons.

Litovsky states, “Given the typically low levels of government accountability in sub-Saharan Africa, land investments, even if entered into by well-meaning investors, can have dire consequences for local communities. The unintended risks to human security may be significant, whether because these communities are forcibly evicted from the public lands they have cultivated, often without formal rights, for generations, or because new irrigation schemes jeopardize water availability for small-scale subsistence farming.”

This is all true enough. There has been so much negative global publicity about ‘land grabs’ that no investor can be said to enter into these modern mega deals without awareness of these issues. But to be aware of them is not the same as being concerned about them. For many investors, the consent and protection of the host government is all they care about. There are countless current examples of how Litovsky’s perfectly valid argument that to protect their long term interests, investors should pay heed to more than the bare minimum of their contractual requirements with their host governments is ignored.

As for building social resilience, where the agro-investment is as a result of some sort of land ‘grab’ by the host government from the local communities, the investor not only comes in with bad relations with those communities from the beginning, he may not much care about good relations with them. Investors whose holdings are protected by armed police or soldiers are not unheard of, which may make them feel physically secure but automatically sets them apart from locals and makes the investment more precarious in the event of political change. It would seem to make sense, even from a purely business level, for a foreign investor to cultivate ‘social resilience’ and good community relations, but this seems a priority for surprisingly few investors.

Litovsky understands that appeals to the common global good may not make much of an impact on the thinking of many investors eager to turn a profit, and seeing no particular benefit to questioning a decades old agribusiness model. His answer to that is that “Incentives for pursuing these innovations are more likely to arise from fully understanding the risk challenges involved in the current model than from appeals to global sustainability.”

Alejandro Litovsky’s article, ‘Farmland security,’ is a thought-provoking read.

African Agriculture

For many Ethiopian farmers, sustainable farming more realistic, accessible than external inputs-based farming

Laura Rance, editor of the Manitoba Co-operator, Canada, recently went to Ethiopia on a media food study tour with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. She found that many of the farming methods that are taken for granted in Canada, and advocated in Africa by some, are simply not within the realm of possibility for many Ethiopian farmers.

For some poor farmers, lack of access to hybrid seed, fertilizer and mechanization means poverty and hunger. But training in various sustainable farming methods can make a big difference in the livelihoods of farmers, giving them independence over their operations, improved food security and chances for surpluses to sell.

Many African countries have over the decades embarked on various ambitious agricultural ‘modernization’ programmes involving hybrid seed, fertilizer and agrochemicals and modern farm equipment. Usually funded by external donors or with expensive foreign debts, few countries are able to sustain them.

“A row of derelict tractors on an abandoned state farm is a fitting reminder that industrialized agriculture has a checkered future in this populous East African country,” begins Rance. “With their faded red paint, gutted engines and rotting tires gradually being swallowed by the prickly underbrush, these 1970s-vintage symbols of progressive agriculture represent a technology that has little application for the majority of Ethiopian farmers who use oxen and hoe on plots of two hectares or less.”

Despite modernization projects that are conceived and much-hyped every few years, Rance is on target to say that “it is highly unlikely that high input agriculture will do much – at least not directly - to improve the economic welfare of the small holder farmers or for the 10 to 20 per cent of the population that is chronically food insecure.”

This is as true in most of Africa as is it is in Ethiopia. The reasons for these failures have been mentioned exhaustively, and do not need repeating here in any great detail.

Once a big loan or grant has brought tractors or combine harvesters in, who will maintain them? Are there qualified mechanics to do so? If so, are they available out in the rural areas where the tractors are, or hundreds of kilometers away in the capital city? Are the spare parts available? Are they affordable? The tractor carcasses Rance mentions are probably the remnant of some previous ‘modernization’ effort where such basic questions were not asked.

Rance mentions some of the other impediments to well-intentioned but poorly, unrealistically conceived and implemented modern farming efforts all over Africa.

Tractors don’t much help farmers who can’t afford fuel, maintenance, repairs. Rain-dependent farming places severe limitations, as does limited, insecure land access.

The advice to farmers to use hybrid seed and fertilizer has often been accompanied by drought. In particularly stressed environments (low rain, high heat, depleted soil, etc) the results are particularly disastrous; perhaps even worse than if the farmers had relied on their own adapted seed and on improving intrinsic soil fertility.

“Many producers have come to associate commercial fertilizer with their parched, eroded soil’s declining fertility,” writes Rance.

To cope with their environmentally and climate-stressed environments, farmers are being encouraged to take up well-known sustainable farming methods which many farmers have over the years lost knowledge of, with encouraging results: no till, mulching, use of manure. Previously desperate farmers have seen their maize yields as much as double from these simple but effective techniques.

Many agricultural modernists are scornful of these humble methods. But they are unable to come up with a sustainable modernization model that addresses the many inter-linked causes of the failure of many such previous efforts.

The obstacles to the success of ‘modern farming’ in many African settings has been/is basic questions like: After you donate the tractor, how is it kept running? When you provide subsidized seed and fertilizer, how much good will they do where farmers depend on declining rain for their production?

Humble, accessible sustainable farming methods will for many African farmers continue to be a much more realistic option for avoiding starvation than theoretically good interventions that are for them merely pie in the sky.

African Agriculture

Tanzania farmers advised on human manure use

by Meddy Mulisa

A group of 20 farmers from Kagera Region, Tanzania who recently visited Kabale District, in Uganda, were highly impressed by the use of human manure. The method is said to be environmentally friendly as opposed to the use of industrial fertilizers.

The farmers went to Uganda to learn agricultural methods being adopted by Ugandan farming communities who engage in sustainable farming.

One of the farmers in Kabale district, Ms Beatrice Twayangga, said, ''By using human manure, I have been able to double the maize production from three bags to 40 bags per hectare,'' she said.

Kabale's Africa 2000 Network Co-ordinator, Mr Polly Mubangizi told the visiting Tanzanian farmers that the human manure has to be mixed with ashes, urine and leaves from certain tree species to provide an ingredient that would not attract harmful insects to attack crops.

Farmers n Kagera region use very little fertilizer on their farms. Data indicates that during the 1988/89 season, a total of 478.1 tonnes of fertilizers were distributed to villages in the region out of which only 159 tonnes were used by the farmers.

In the 1991/92 season a total of 258.05 tonnes of fertilizers were distributed to villages but only 85.2 tonnes were utilized.

Daily News

Banana compost could boost crop yields

by Hazem Badr

Banana-based fertiliser could cut about 20 per cent of the water used in irrigating maize and lead to better yields and improved soil properties — such as availability of micronutrients and soil moisture — a researcher at Egypt's National Research Centre has found.
Banana trees — in fact a large herb — only fruit once and most of the farmers in Egypt, who plant more than 52,000 acres of bananas, burn the trees (stems) after they have borne fruit, even though they are hard to burn because of their high moisture content.

Now, Nesreen H. Abou-Baker, who was awarded a PhD last month for her research, says these trees could be put to better use.

She mixed banana residue with manure and microorganisms, such as yeast, and tested the compost in field experiments at the Noubariya Agricultural Research Station, north of Cairo, during four successive growing seasons of corn and beans.

"Using banana compost we get greater efficiency of nutrients in soil compared with other fertilisers, good aeration associated with the relatively low application of irrigation water, and decreased nutrient losses by leaching," said Abou-Baker.

The concentration of heavy metals — cadmium, lead, nickel — in the plants was also reduced when grown with banana compost instead of conventional mineral fertilisers.

The compost may be of use in other banana growing areas, outside Egypt, Abou-Baker said. It could either be prepared by farmers themselves or commercially produced and sold to farmers.

Salah Saad Zarad, associate professor at the agriculture division of the National Research Centre, said: "Mineral fertilisers are too costly to be used in large quantities for profitable production in developing countries so crop residues are a promising alternative for nutrient recycling in soil … easily and cheaply available on a farm".

Zarad said the findings are encouraging, and suggested it may be more cost-effective to set up commercial production of compost, instead of banana farmers producing it individually.

SciDev.net

Africa’s first microfinance fund for sustainable farmers launched

by Mariah Jen

Africa’s first specialist rural microfinance fund supporting fair trade and organic small business, FEFISOL, the European Solidarity Financing Fund for Africa, has been launched by the European Investment Bank, Agence Française de Développement and a broad grouping of development bodies, social investors and microfinance service providers. The EUR 15 million FEFISOL fund will provide much needed microfinance funds for poor rural households across Africa and help finance small scale investment in agricultural activities.

FEFISOL will fund microfinance institutions and producer organisations across the continent in local currency. African microfinance bodies will benefit from a subsidised loan provided by AFD that absorbs foreign exchange loss on local currencies. Dedicated support for fair trade and organic producer organisations will help improve the quality and development of their activities over the long-term, notably by gaining access to new market sectors. SOS Faim and the African Microfinance Institutions Network will assist in this process, along with specialist fair trade organisations based in Africa.

IEWY

First meeting of agroecology trainers in Africa

by La Via Campesina

The Shashe Declaration:

We are 47 people from 22 organizations in 18 countries (Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Central African Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Portugal, USA, France, and Germany).

We are farmers and staff representing member organizations of La Via Campesina, along with allies from other farmer organizations and networks, NGOs, academics, researchers, interpreters and others.

We have been meeting at the Shashe Endogenous Development Training Centre in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe to plan how to promote agroecology in our region (Southern, Eastern & Central Africa).

Here we have been privileged to witness firsthand the successful combination of agrarian reform with organic farming and agroecology carried out by local small holder farming families. In what were once large cattle ranches owned by three large farmers who owned 800 head of cattle and produced no grain or anything else, there are now more than 365 small holder peasant farming families with more than 3,400 head of cattle, who also produce a yearly average of 1 to 2 tonnes of grain per family plus vegetables and other products, in many cases using agroecological methods and local peasant seeds. This experience strengthens our commitment to and belief in agroecology and agrarian reform as fundamental pillars in the construction of Food Sovereignty.

Our region of Africa is currently facing challenges and threats that together undermine the food security and well-being of our communities, displace small holder farmers and undercut their livelihoods, undermine our collective ability to feed our nations, and cause grave damage to the soil, the environment and the Mother Earth.

These include local and regional manifestations of the global food price crisis and the climate crisis that have been produced by runaway neoliberal policies and the greed and profit-taking of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). Cheap subsidized food imports brought by TNCs, made possible by misguided free trade agreements, lowers the prices we receive for our farm products, forcing families to abandon farming and migrate to cities, while undermining local and national food production.

Foreign investors, invited in by some of our governments, grab the best farm land, displacing food producing local farmers, and redirecting that land toward environmentally devastating mining, agrofuel plantations that feed cars instead of people, and other export plantations that do nothing to build Food Sovereignty for our peoples, and only enrich a few.

At the same time, uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution from Developed Countries and from the global corporate food system based on long distance transport and industrial agriculture are changing the climate in ways that directly affect farmers. Our lands become more arid, with water ever more scarce, we face rising temperatures, and increased extreme weather conditions like severe storms, floods and droughts. The dates of the rainy season have become completely unpredictable, so that nobody knows when to plant anymore. The changing climate is also implicated in epidemics of communicable diseases of humans, crops and livestock. All of this hurts farming families and affects food production.

We face TNCs who want to force GMO seeds into our countries, whether or not we currently have GMO bans, and agencies like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) who conspire with TNCs like Cargill and Monsanto and with our governments to buy off national research and seed systems in order to sell GMO seeds. These seeds threaten the integrity of our local varieties and the health of our consumers. The same companies even manipulate regional farmer organizations to push GMOs, and we call on such organizations to resist being used in such ways.

While our soils, agroecosytems and forests are ever more degraded by industrial agriculture and plantations, and local seed biodiversity is lost, the costs of production under the conventional "Green Revolution" model are more expensive and out of the reach of small holder farmers. The price of chemical fertilizer on the world market, for example, has risen more than 300% in the last few years.

Faced with this bleak situation for small holder agriculture and Food Sovereignty in our region, as members of organizations belonging to La Via Campesina we take the following positions:

Positions of La Via Campesina in Africa Region 1:

We believe that . . .

Agroecological farming as practiced by small holder farmers, and Food Sovereignty policies, offer the only reasonable and feasible solutions to these multiple challenges facing our region.

Only agroecological methods (also called sustainable agriculture, organic farming, ecological agriculture, etc.) can restore soils and agroecosystems that have been degraded by industrial agriculture. Even chemicals do not work after severe degradation, but with agroecology we can restore soil organic matter and fertility, along with functional agroecosystem processes and services like nutrient recycling, soil biology, natural pest control, etc. We have seen that small holder agroecological systems have much greater total productivity than industrial monocultures, with little or no purchased inputs, reducing the dependency and increasing the autonomy and well-being of rural families while producing abundant and healthy food for our peoples. Global research by La Via Campesina demonstrates that Sustainable Peasant Agriculture Can Feed the World, based on endogenous knowledge and agroecology.

The global food system currently generates between 44 and 57% of global greenhouse gas emissions, almost all of which could be eliminated by transforming the food system based on the principles of agroecology, agrarian reform and Food Sovereignty. Sustainable Peasant Agriculture Cools the Planet, and this is our best solution to climate change.

In order to adapt to a changing climate we need the greater resiliency of diversified agroecological systems (and water conservation and harvesting, watershed management, agroforestry, ground cover, etc.) and the genetic diversity of local peasant seeds and peasant seed systems. We demand that our governments withdraw support from the corporate seed industry with its standardized and often genetically modified seeds, and instead support peasant seed systems based on recovering, saving, multiplying, storing, breeding and exchanging seeds at the local level.

Our national education and research systems are heavily biased toward the very industrial agriculture practices that are killing our planet and contributing to the failure of Africans to feed ourselves. We demand the reorientation of research toward farmer-led methods and agroecology, and the transformation of curricula at primary and secondary schools levels, and in higher education, to focus on agroecology.

We call for an end to trade liberalization and the renewed protection of domestic markets so that African farmers can receive the fair prices that will enable us to boost production and feed our peoples.

We call on governments to create comprehensive programs to support agroecological farming by small holders and to rebuild Food Sovereignty, including genuine agrarian reform and the defense of peasant lands from land grabbing, the reorientation of government food procurement from agribusiness toward purchasing ecological food at fair prices from small holders to supply schools, hospitals, institutional cafeterias, etc., as a way to support farmers and to provide healthy food to children, sick people and government employees, and programs of production credit for small holders engaged in ecological farming instead of subsidies tied to chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

At the COP-16 in Cancun, Mexico, the governments of the world (except Bolivia) met to conduct business with TNCs who traffic in false solutions to climate changes like agrofuels, GMOs, carbon markets, REDD+, etc., instead of meeting to seriously and effectively reverse global warming through real emission reductions by Developed Countries and the transformation of our global food, energy and transport systems. We demand that our governments behave more responsibly at COP-17 in Durban, South Africa, refusing to sign agreements imposed by the North and by TNCs, instead supporting the Cochabamba Principles on the Climate and the Rights of the Mother Earth.

Commitments of La Via Campesina:

While we demand that our governments act in all the ways mentioned above, and will turn up the pressure on them to do so, we will not wait for them. Instead we pledge to continue to build agroecology and Food Sovereignty from below. We pledge to take the following practical steps:

We will build organizational structures in La Via Campesina at the regional level to support our national member organizations in their work to promote agroecology among their member families. This includes regional training programs, exchange visits, the production and sharing of educational materials, and the identification and documentation of successful cases in the region so that all can learn the lessons they offer. Among the structures we will build is a network of agroecology trainers and practitioners in La Via Campesina in our region.

We will promote the creation of agroecology training programs and schools in our organizations, and farmer-to-farmer and community-to-community agroecology promotion programs.

Through our own organizations we will promote the creation and strengthening of local peasant seed systems.
We will document the experience in Zimbabwe of agrarian reform and organic farming by beneficiary families, as successful steps toward Food Sovereignty that we who are in other countries can learn from.

We will work to "keep carbon in the ground and in trees" in the areas under our control, by promoting agroforestry, tree planting, agroecology, energy conservation, and by fighting land grabs for mining and industrial plantations.

We will engage and pressure governments at all levels (local, traditional provincial, national and regional) to adopt Public Policies that favor agroecology and Food Sovereignty.

We will build a powerful small holder farmer and peasant voice to be present with other sectors of civil society at COP-17 in Durban, and at Rio +20 in Brazil, with the message that we oppose false solutions to climate change and demand the adoption of the Cochabamba Principles. We will insist on Small Holder Sustainable Agriculture and Food Sovereignty as the most important true solutions to climate change.

Masvingo District, Zimbabwe, 20 June 2011

For more information, visit viacampesina.org/en/

World Bank loans $ 70 million for Morocco’s sustainable irrigation

by Jen Balboa

Experts blamed drastic climate change for the drop in rainfall, which has resulted in widespread droughts all throughout Africa.

The World Bank has loaned $70 million to the Government of Morocco to help farmers maximize the Oum Er Rbia Basin’s critical water supply and avoid future water shortage.

The $115.5 million Oum Er Rbia Basin irrigated agriculture modernization project is divided into three components aimed at increasing productivity in the basin and promoting sustainable use of irrigation water.

The first stage will provide services necessary for high efficiency drip irrigation to participating farmers. The project will replace irrigation canals with pressurized systems and will also offer irrigation water on-demand, with a predetermined annual quota according to surface water availability.

The second stage involves giving participants better access to technology, financing and agricultural markets. Regional agricultural development offices will be given technical assistance to help farmers enter into partnership agreements aimed at securing markets for high value crops, use the new irrigation equipment and improve their agricultural practices.

The project will also provide mobile laboratory equipment to monitor the performance of the new irrigation systems.

Lastly, the project will assist implementing agencies such as the Ministry of Agriculture and Marine Fisheries with project management and monitoring. The agencies will receive computer equipment, vehicles and various forms of technical assistance to allow them to ensure good management monitoring and evaluation.

Oum Er Rbia Basin, populated by at least 4.5 million inhabitants, has been experiencing declining average rainfall. Based on figures tabulated as early as the 1950’s, rainfall in various parts of the basin dropped in the last two decades, with the largest drop recorded at -7.9 millimeters per year at the El Abid region.

Experts blamed drastic climate change for the drop in rainfall, which has resulted in widespread droughts all throughout Africa.

In fact, the United States Agency for International Development identified water scarcity as a key challenge and made preservation and environmentally sound development of the world’s water resources a top priority.

Ecoseed

The problem with factory farms

by Claire Suddath

If you eat meat, the odds are high that you've enjoyed a meal made from an animal raised on a factory farm (also known as a CAFO). According to the USDA, 2% of U.S. livestock facilities raise an estimated 40% of all farm animals. This means that pigs, chickens and cows are concentrated in a small number of very large farms. But even if you're a vegetarian, the health and environmental repercussions of these facilities may affect you.

In his book Animal Factory, journalist David Kirby explores the problems of factory farms, from untreated animal waste to polluted waterways. Kirby talks about large-scale industrial farming, the lack of government oversight and the terrible fate of a North Carolina river.

Q: What exactly is a factory farm?

A: The industrial model for animal food production first started with the poultry industry. In the 1930s and '40s, large companies got into the farming business. The companies hire farmers to grow the animals for them. The farmers typically don't own the animals — the companies do. It's almost like a sharecropping system. The company tells them exactly how to build the farm, what to grow and what to feed. They manage everything right down to what temperature the barn should be and what day the animals are going to be picked up for slaughter. The farmer can't even eat his or her own animals. People who grow chickens for Perdue in Maryland have to go down to the market and buy Perdue at the store.

We collectively refer to these facilities as factory farms, but that's not an official name. The government designation is CAFO, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation. Basically, it's any farm that has 1,000 animal units or more. A beef cow is an animal unit. These animals are kept in pens their entire lives. They're never outside. They never breathe fresh air. They never see the sun.

Q: What are the health and environmental hazards of CAFOs?

A: For one, you're often no longer feeding animals what they're genetically designed to eat. CAFO cows eat a diet of milled grains, corn and soybeans, when they are supposed to eat grass. The food isn't natural because they very often put growth hormones and antibiotics in it. That becomes a problem when you put that manure on the ground.

Q: And the fact that there are thousands of animals packed into one farm is also a problem.

A: Oh, definitely. There are simply too many animals in too small of a place. In a traditional farm, a sustainable farm, you grow both crops and animals. There is a pasture, and you have a certain number of animals per acre. But when you have 2,000 cows per acre instead of two, you have a problem. You can't fit them in a pasture — you fit them in a building. You can't grow enough crops to feed them — you have to ship in their feed. You don't have enough land to absorb their waste. It has nowhere to go.

Q: So what happens to it?

A: The manure is liquefied. It gets flushed out into an open lagoon, where it is stored until farmers can use it on what few crops they do grow. There's just so much of it, though. I've seen it sprayed into waterways and creeks. These lagoons filled with waste have been known to seep, leak, rupture and overtop. This stuff is untreated, by the way. We would never allow big, open cesspools of untreated human waste to just sit out on the ground near people's homes and schools. And yet because it's agriculture, the rules are different.

Q: You write at length about North Carolina's Neuse River. What happened there?

A: Hundreds of massive pig farms came into North Carolina in the 1990s. In Animal Factory, I tell the story of Rick Dove, a former Marine who retired and bought a fishing boat. One day he noticed the fish were dying in really weird ways. First there were the algae blooms. Algae creates oxygen during the day through photosynthesis and expels carbon dioxide at night. When that happens, there's literally no oxygen in the water. Everything comes crawling up to the shore in the shallowest part of the river, trying to pump water through their gills. By the morning, they're all dead. Everything — shrimp, crab, little fish called menhaden, eels, bass. People call it a "fish jubilee," 'cause they can just wade into the river and pick up free food.

Soon after this started happening, Rick Dove noticed the menhaden fish were developing round red circles on their flanks. They'd go into what was called a "death spiral." They just start swimming into little circles and just die. Nobody knew what was causing this. Pretty soon after that, the fishermen, including Rick and his son, noticed they were getting round red sores on their skin in the parts that touched the water. Then they'd get very disoriented. Fishermen would forget where they lived or where they'd docked their boats. Rick started to do some research. One day he read in a science magazine about pfiesteria, this very odd plankton that emits toxins that stun a fish so it can suck the fish's blood. That's what the lesions were. But the toxin also gets in the air, and that's why fishermen were getting disoriented.

Rick wanted to know the source of this problem, so he went up in an airplane. That's how I open Animal Factory, with him looking down at these massive pig farms. Sometimes you can even see the waste runoff going directly going into the water. Other times they're out there spraying night and day because nobody is watching them. You can't see this from the road. There are very few inspectors, and they're not going to go out there and monitor everyone.

Q: People probably assume this kind of stuff is regulated, but it's not. Or at least not enough. What should the government be doing?

A: A lot of the laws are on the state and county level, so it depends on the political will and political culture of the individual state. That doesn't mean Democrat or Republican. That means agriculture state vs. a state with not a lot of agriculture.

Q: What kind of laws have agriculture-friendly states passed?

A: Some states say that if a company spills its manure, it doesn't have to pay to clean it up. The taxpayers pay. If you try to pass pollution standards, the industry complains that they're already too heavily regulated. They claim that if you force them to reduce how much they pollute, they're not going to be able to operate. They're essentially saying they can only make money by polluting and breaking the law. That should be unacceptable to everybody.

Q: You spent three years reporting this story. What stands out?

A: One time I visited a pig farm, a regular farm — not a factory farm — in Illinois. Right across the street was a hog CAFO. The owner didn't live there, of course. There's no farm house on a factory farm, just business offices. At night, all the workers would leave, and all I'd hear as I was trying to fall asleep was the sound of the pigs fighting each other, biting each other, squealing, screeching all night long. It was like nothing I've ever heard before in my life, and it just didn't stop. It sounded like kids being tortured over there. I'll never forget that sound. It was very sad.

Time

Get sustainable agriculture right this time, experts urge

by Kristi Heim

Food quantity or food quality? Can the world quell starvation now and still have a healthy ecosystem over the long term?

Tough questions for anyone concerned about agriculture and its relation to hunger and poverty.

In a keynote speech at the World Food Prize, Bill Gates said he supports sustainable agriculture, welcome words to experts in the field, who say there is no short term fix.

Much as he changed the landscape on health, the world's richest philanthropist is trying to spark a new revolution in agriculture. The first Green Revolution improved crop yields, but at the expense of the environment. This time, there may be a chance to get it right.

"Sustainability takes more time, more learning, more people," said John Reganold, Regents Professor of Soil Science at Washington State University. "In the long run it pays huge dividends. I really like the fact that here we have this huge philanthropic foundation and they're really trying to help Africa and South Asia," he said. "I don't mind hearing we want to feed people we want to raise yields, improve their income, get roads and markets in there."

But Reganold said he would like to hear more about how sustainability will be measured and valued. "We tend to go in and say wow, we improved yields," he said. "That's great because these people need to eat. At the same time I'd like to hear wow, we improved the soil so that down the road they're going to be better off."

"They say the right thing, but I'm not sure they're doing the right thing yet," said Hans Herren, a Swiss scientist who won the World Food Prize in 1995. Both Herren and Reganold are attending this year's conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

Gates said in his speech that in their zeal for an ideal environment, some "have tried to restrict the spread of biotechnology into sub-Saharan Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it."

Research into plant genetics is worthwhile, Herren said, but critics of its current usefulness in Africa shouldn't be vilified.

"What I think is wrong is to blame the people who question the utility now as the bad guys responsible for hunger," he said. "Look at the people who have quadrupled yield in perfectly good agriculturally sound systems. Why is this not taken as the example, not to multiply everywhere but as the basis to adapt to different systems?"

Herren took issue with the notion that ecological agriculture is a luxury for rich countries.

"The idea that is deeply ingrained is that the poor can't afford it. That's really a big problem and it's not true. To do it the right way is cheaper because you don't get in debt in the future," he said, by buying more expensive seeds and fertilizers.

More global investment is needed in sustainable agriculture, as well as policies to correct fundamental imbalances in trade and access to resources, he said.

Seattle Times

Malawi's agricultural success cannot be sustained under the present model

by Dan Taylor

A comment on The destruction of African agriculture. Any attempt to cover a very complex subject in the space of a few pages must inevitably be somewhat superficial in its analysis. Walden Bello’s ‘The ‘destruction of African agriculture’ is a good attempt to do so but suffers from a number of analytical shortfalls.

While the article starts with biofuel production it does not argue against the disastrous impact that biofuels has had on the global food crisis, and glosses over the fact that it is one of the major contributing factors at the present time. But I do not want to dwell on this and must myself be subject to the same criticism of trying to say too much in too little words.

The conflation in this article of structural adjustment, state failure and the more recent policies of global institutions in which privatisation has been mandatory for the developing world (together with the deforestation for, and use of, food crops for biofuel production) does little to clarify our current food crisis or the destruction of Africa’s agriculture.

Furthermore, the fact that African governments do little to promote agriculture either by investing a higher proportion of their national budget in this sector, or by enacting policies that link agricultural production to environmental and biodiversity conservation, raises some important issues of governance and accountability to their poorer citizens.

But all this is old news. The point that we wish to emphasise is that the rather predictable outcome of a privatisation process should not detract from the fact that business as usual, the industrial model of agriculture, is no solution – to repeat the findings of the latest IAASTAD Report - to the current food crisis.

In this regard we want to refer to the Malawi success story promoted in the article, one that is dependent on continued donor support, affordability in the face of growing fertiliser prices, and state patronage. In attributing the success of the scheme to farming inputs, insufficient attention has been paid to the fact that rainfall in Malawi over the past two agricultural seasons has been optimal. We are delighted that Malawi farmers were able to grow more food and our wish is for this to continue.

At risk of being harbingers of doom, it is clear that it cannot and will not continue – the sad fact is that Africa is susceptible to floods and droughts. The droughts will return, if not next year, then the year after, or the year after that. And at this point of time the crops will again fail. In any event donors will most probably have changed their priorities by then, but farmers’ reliance on an unsustainable model of agriculture will remain.

So what about sustainability? Part of the food crisis is the high costs of an agricultural model dependent on monocultures and fossil fuels at the expense of the environment. The threat of global warming tells us that we need to reduce risk and diversify agricultural production away from a reliance on single crops towards a diversified agriculture that is more in keeping with agricultural systems which have served Africa for millennia and more closely mimic the natural ecosystems.

Hence the use of readily available local resources using farmers own skills and knowledge – in other words a range of technologies, practices and systems that require few external inputs. The article shows little concern for the environment, while even the Malawi Government is recognising the unsustainbility of highly subsidised input packages in the current economic crisis. It is for this reason that it has asked us, through the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, to launch a national composting programme, to reduce reliance on an intervention that it cannot afford and neither can the farmers which it is designed to benefit.

So the World Bank, with regard to subsidies in this case, is right, even if it is not for the correct reasons. And while we must recognise the mistakes of the rather short-sighted policies of the past – of which structural adjustment provides us with a devastating example – we should look forwards not backwards. The positive role that the state must play should be re-emphasised in a policy context which recognises farmers as custodians of the environment and plays an affirming role in setting the policies that empower them while making them responsible for conserving the agricultural and biological diversity on which posterity depends. This is real agency for farmers as citizens and one in which they will no longer be subject to the fads and fashions of donor policies or the edicts of global multilateral institutions.

Pambazuka News

Prominent ecologist cautions against piecemeal approach to African agriculture

Caution needs to be exercised in developing African food production to avoid long-term social and environmental harm, according to an ecologist credited with averting mass hunger on the continent.

Hans Herren, president of the U.S.-based Millennium Institute, says that some of the prescriptions offered for extricating Africa from its current crisis over high food prices may ultimately cause more damage than good.

Best known for developing a system of biological protection against the mealybug insect that threatened to destroy cassava production in Africa during the 1980s, Herren took issue with recommendations made by Jeffrey Sachs, the prominent economist who is one of the top advisers to the United Nations on the fight against poverty.

Whereas Sachs has been advocating that fertilisers should be provided in bulk to African farmers, Herren noted the liberal use of chemical fertilisers can cause widespread pollution.

Describing fertilisers as only "an interim solution", Herren added: "Yes, we need phosphates in some areas that are too poor, but with nitrogen we have to be careful because it very easily pollutes rivers. What I fear is that the whole crisis around food and food prices will just promote quick fixes that are not really dealing with the causes (of the underlying problems for African agriculture)," Herren he said. "We have to deal with all this as an ensemble. You cannot just pick out something."

Referring to the ongoing Doha round of world trade talks, Herren contended that dismantling tariffs that are designed to ensure that farmers in poor countries are not submerged by imports, will not prove beneficial. "In Europe we have barriers, so why should a Kenyan farmer not be protected from imported maize?" he asked.

A somewhat different analysis was offered by Akin Adesina, the Nigerian-born vice-president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

"Fertiliser use per hectare in sub-Saharan Africa is the lowest in the world," said Adesina. "It is the only region in the world with a huge fertiliser deficit. Fertiliser is not the only solution but without it no agriculture grows."

Nonetheless, Adesina argued that efforts to develop farming must pay heed to ecological concerns. "What Africa needs is a uniquely African 'green revolution', one that recognises biodiversity and one that takes issues of the environment very seriously," he argued, alluding to a process of growth in farming that began in Mexico in the 1940s before being emulated by other poor countries such as India.

Adesina also lamented that Africa has been "enduring a silent hunger for so long" and that the "only reason we are talking about it today is that it has spilled out of the rural areas into urban areas" where unrest has occurred because of public anger over price increases. He suggested that high food imports in Africa -- which climbed from 88 billion dollars to 119 billion dollars between 2006 and last year -- has hampered the development of agriculture on the continent. "Why should Africa be the only region in the world that is begging for food?" he asked. "That is totally unacceptable."

IPS

World Bank lends Malawi $40 million for sustainable agriculture

The World Bank has approved 37.8 million U.S. dollars for Malawi, to support government investments aimed at improving food security and the growth of sustainable agriculture.

The approved amount consists of a 32-million-dollar International Development Association (IDA) credit, and a 5.8-million-dollar Global Environment Facility (GEF) grant provided by the regional GEF investment program for sustainable land management linked to Africa.

The government of Norway will contribute an additional 10 million dollars, while the Malawi government will put in the equivalent of 2.3 million dollars in kind. The total value of the ADP-SP will be 53.3 million dollars over a five-year period (2008-2013).

The objective of the ADP is to improve food security and generate agricultural growth through increased production of food and cash crops, while ensuring sustainable use of natural resources.

"We believe that through this project both agricultural productivity and food security will be improved, and that Malawi will be cushioned from the adverse impacts of the rising prices of agricultural commodities," said Timothy Gilbo, the World Bank country manager for Malawi.

Xinhua

Sustainable development advocates enslaving African farmers in grinding poverty

by Dominic Lawson

Sometimes an entire philosophy can be glimpsed in a single remark. So I am grateful to Andrew Dorward of London's School of Oriental and African Studies for his explanation of why it would not be in the interests of Africans to adopt genetically modified herbicide-resistant crops. Dr Dorward told the Financial Times that this would be "disastrous for many poor households" because such crops would "allow the replacement of hand-weeding, which is a big source of income for many."

This is the sort of argument which would have dismissed the invention of the printing press as endangering the livelihood of monks and quill manufacturers. The monks, at least, were not engaged in back-breaking labour-- unlike the sub-Saharan subsistence farmer, who under the blazing sun might spend up to 120 days weeding a single field, instead of utilising the time saved in cultivating new crops or tilling new fields. Yet this is the sort of grinding, life-shortening labour in which the advocates of so-called "sustainable development" wish to keep Africans enslaved – the sort of life which no Westerner would tolerate for himself or his family.

It is characteristic of the double standards which the international aid establishment has been promulgating for years – and which has been evident during the Rome food summit over the past few days. Thus John Hilary, of War on Want, claimed both that it was the "liberalisation" of agricultural markets which lay behind the international food crisis, and also that the Western world should end its protectionist farming policies.

He's right that we should do so – yet for some reason he will not utter a word of criticism against the much-higher agricultural tariffs that exist between the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, and which have an obvious and immediate role in making food more expensive for some of the poorest people on earth. Import controls in the developing world are a dramatic contributor to "food poverty" – so why is "market liberalisation" such a terrible idea?

Such impoverishing policies are defended by the likes of War on Want on the grounds that such actions by governments in the developing world are a proper exercise of "food sovereignty." In practice this actually means nothing more than the right of landowners – who tend to be government ministers – to extort monopoly rents at the expense of those less fortunate.

If I were a cynical man, I would wonder whether the international aid agencies had a vested interest in maintaining such a failed political and economic system, since it keeps entire populations in the state of dependence which justifies their own existence, and their regular appeals to our charitable conscience.

The Common Agricultural Policy remains the most organised conspiracy to maintain global food prices at an artificially high level.

Douglas Alexander, the British Government's Secretary for International Development, was quite right to tell the Rome food summit: "It is unacceptable that the rich countries still subsidise farming by $1bn a day, costing poor farmers in developing countries an estimated $100bn a year in lost income."

It would have been even better if he had mentioned the Common Agricultural Policy, specifically, in that statement. More to the point, I wonder why Gordon Brown – who recently sought to blame the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) for the high cost of petrol and diesel in our filling stations – has not attacked the much more single-minded cartel known as the Common Agricultural Policy for its contribution to the cost of food in Britain's high streets. Oh, I remember why, now: our country is a member of that infamous cartel.

This is in part why I query the remarks by the Foreign Office minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, after Robert Mugabe had dropped in to make a speech to the gathering. Malloch-Brown declared that "Zimbabwe is one of the few countries whose food crisis is not due to climate change or global prices, but due to disastrous policies."

It's true that Zimbabwe is an extreme case, in which corrupt government policies of land requisition have turned the former African "bread-basket" into a basket-case. Yet across the world, almost every distortion of food production, every misallocation of resources, can be attributed to the interventions of governments, whether as extorters of tax on food, or as lackeys of landowners – or a bizarre combination of both.

In other words, it's not the unfettered free market and globalisation which has caused the world food crisis, but governments who insist that markets can not be trusted – unlike them, of course. What is truly terrifying is that they continue, decade after decade, to get away with it.

The Independent

Food crisis drives more attention towards long neglected traditional crops

Latin America's vast biological diversity has contributed little to the region's commercial agriculture, despite being the birthplace of two of the world's four most widely consumed food crops: maize and potatoes.

The current global food crisis has fuelled the debate about agricultural production and trade, including the sharp decline in the diversity of commercial crops.

Over the course of human history, people have consumed more than 7,000 species of plants. But in the last 100 years, about 75 percent of food crops have fallen by the wayside and now just three staples -- wheat, maize and rice -- make up about 70 percent of our caloric intake, according to United Nations figures.

Many ancient crops, like amaranth (Amaranthus) and quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), both promising Latin American species, are grown by few farmers today, while rice and wheat cultivation continue to expand. As the older crops disappear, the knowledge associated with them vanishes too, weakening farming and nutrition, say experts.

Amaranth was declared "the best food of plant origin for human consumption" in 1979 by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences because of its unique proteins and amino acids and because it is relatively easy to grow, not requiring much water or especially fertile soil. Extensively cultivated by the Maya, Aztecs and Incas, it had been largely forgotten until the 1960s, and today it is only planted on 2,000 hectares.

"There is a culture that creates a preference for other products with fewer nutritional benefits," said Alberto Martínez, secretary of the Amaranth Product System, a cooperative of 250 low-income farmers who live in an area south of the Mexican capital. In 2007, they sold 300 tonnes of amaranth, whose current price of 1,000 dollars per tonne is twice the 2006 price.

Amaranth is also grown in the United States, China and India, but only on a small scale.

"In relying on no more than six crops, the population is more vulnerable to crises of stocks, supply and demand," especially the poor, according to Juan Izquierdo, senior plant production officer for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Latin America.

That is what is happening now, with the dramatic hikes in food prices around the world, which threaten to drive up the number of people suffering hunger globally from 850 million to 950 million, according to the World Food Programme. Violent protests over food shortages and high prices have already broken out in dozens of countries.

This panorama is the result of processes that have made more than 100 countries heavily dependent on imported food, starting with food aid. Since the 1950s, food production patterns have been transferred to poor countries, says Jean Marc von der Weid, coordinator of the non-governmental Alternative Agriculture Project Consulting and Services, in Brazil.

Then, the "unequal" trade liberalisation of the past few decades allowed Europe and the United States -- girded with their protectionist policies -- "to flood the world with cheap foods," which was welcome for a time, until the crisis revealed the trap, Von der Weid told Tierramérica.

The loss of crop biodiversity is another consequence. Fonio, or finger-grass (Digitaria), is a nutritious and tasty cereal from West Africa, which ended up confined to rural areas. In Brazil, wheat replaced most of the manioc, maize and bean consumption.

The problem affects crop species and varieties, causing genetic "erosion" that makes them more vulnerable to disaster. Just two types of black beans dominate the Brazilian market, for example, said Von der Weid.

THE ROLE OF PEOPLE

Women play contrary roles in food diversity. As consumers, and often overwhelmed with long hours of work, "they contribute to homogenisation," because they look for foods that are quick and easy to prepare, Emma Siliprandi, an agronomist and sociologist who researches the relationship between gender and food, told Tierramérica.

But in agriculture, women are "depositories of biodiversity, seeds and knowledge" about numerous foods, infusions, and household gardens, while men tend to follow the logic of the market, casting aside the "trifles", she said.

It was women who, as part of the Vía Campesina international network, launched the movement in defence of seeds as a heritage of humanity, added Siliprandi.

Meanwhile, the concerns of indigenous peoples go beyond that.

"Not only is it essential to recover the erroneously named 'old crops with high nutritional value', but also to reaffirm our conception of Mother Earth," Senator Ramiro Estacio, of the Indigenous Authorities Movement of South-western Colombia (AICO), told Tierramérica. That means "recuperating an entire system that implies reinforcing knowledge, culture, and productive and nutritional variety, and which allows the reaffirmation of millennial wisdom," he said.

Recovering diversity depends on efforts in family farming and requires agro-ecology practices and agrarian reform, said Von der Weid. Also indispensable is food education, because entrenched eating habits prevent the diversification of food, as has been seen in the failed attempts to disseminate vegetable crops in Brazil, he added.

However, a Chilean project for urban gardens, which included education about nutrition and vegetable types to be grown in different seasons, was highly successful.

Agro-ecology, which rules out the use of chemical or synthetic inputs, is "an interesting proposal," but only serves niche markets and does not replace large-scale commercial farming, said Ariovaldo Luchiari Junior, assistant director of the environment centre at the Brazilian government's agricultural research agency, EMBRAPA.

Luchiari noted the increased demand for less harmful farming products, the decreased demand for non-renewable fertilisers, and the positive results in agrosilvopastoral combinations and vegetables. The demands of today's market, he said, show preferences for products of higher quality, security, tradability and added value, ranging from shredded and packaged carrots to soybeans with higher content of isoflavone, which eases symptoms of menopause in women.

Meanwhile, commercial crops have an increasingly wide array of uses: maize provides food for people and livestock alike, and is a raw material for many products, including ethanol fuel. Sugarcane has long been produced for more than sugar. It is a fertiliser and the source for some types of plastic. Wheat is not just bread, but also crackers, pastas and sweets.

Latin America's biodiversity could generate new products of mass consumption, but it will be a long process of investment and research to respond to nutritional and environmental standards -- "not an easy road," said Luchiari.

FAO expert Izquierdo said that productivity, uniformity and processability are the necessary traits of a "useful" crop.

Enough awareness to take advantage of opportunities is another factor, he says. The United States is the world's leading producer of quinoa because in one county of the central state of Nebraska it is planted on 25,000 hectares. The harvest is destined for one of the Nestlé Corporation's foods for infants.

"The crops that have been subject to the most intense genetic improvement, like maize, rice and wheat, yield much more per surface unit," said Edmundo Acevedo, expert in agricultural production at the University of Chile, adding that without similar improvements, it would be difficult for native species like amaranth and quinoa to compete on the market.

In Mexico, despite maize shortages, corn tortillas are still the dominant staple food. "If maize prices climb higher, it will hit everyone’s pocketbook, but it is impossible to imagine that people will stop eating tortillas, because a millenniums-old culture sustains that diet," Marcelino Vela, a consulting economist to food companies, told Tierramérica.

IPS

Sustainability must be part of African agricultural innovations

by William Moseley

Urban West Africa is Ground Zero in the global food crisis. From Dakar to Abidjan, the cities in this zone have experienced more protests against rising food prices than any other region in 2008.

The solution pushed by many global leaders is to increase crop yields in Africa via a new green revolution. They point to the apparent success of the last green revolution in the 1960s and '70s, a concerted global effort in Asia and Latin America to disseminate a high-yield crop package of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. The problem, they argue, is that these innovations never reached Africa. They are wrong.

The green revolution did touch Africa -- in the form of cheap Asian rice, which began flooding African markets in the 1980s. I have been working or conducting research in West Africa on food and agriculture for more than 20 years. When I lived with a family on the outskirts of Bamako, Mali, in the 1980s, they still largely ate small grains (millet and sorghum) produced in the surrounding countryside. Today, they mostly purchase rice from Thailand, having developed a taste over several years for this (until recently) relatively cheap import.

Research shows that this pattern has been repeated in cities across West Africa, constricting markets for locally produced grains and forcing farmers to switch to other crops (such as cotton) as a source of cash or abandoning farming altogether for a life in the city.

The green revolution also was not of great benefit if you were a small, poor farmer in Asia. While the new package of hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides did dramatically increase yields, the cost of such inputs was prohibitively expensive for the poorest farmers. The result was a silent reorganization of the Asian countryside: The poorest of the poor couldn't compete, so they went to work for wealthier neighbors or moved to the city. Even wealthier farmers faced growing input costs as insects developed resistance to the most common pesticides, forcing the farmers to apply more and more chemicals or switch to expensive alternatives.

Global leaders are correct in asserting that the agricultural sector in Africa deserves more attention and support. The green-revolution approach, however, is flawed. For starters, many of the inputs required for higher-yielding crops, especially fertilizers, are petroleum-based. The cost of these inputs will only rise in step with the general upward trend in energy costs. Use of imported seeds (hybrid or GMO) and other inputs also concentrates power in the boardrooms of global agrochemical firms rather than in the hands of small farmers.

An approach emphasizing local or national food provision and appropriate technology is more sustainable and empowering for small West African farmers. Agricultural experiments comparing intensive African methods (involving the use of manure and compost as inputs and the intelligent mixing of multiple crops) to conventional Western cropping strategies have repeatedly shown the former to be more efficient in terms of energy consumed per unit of output. These methods have been inhibited by cheap imports and by agricultural agencies that emphasized industrial approaches to crop production.

While some emergency measures will be needed to address the food crisis in the short term, we can do better than another green revolution in the medium to long term. This will involve building on the knowledge of local farmers to develop agricultural approaches that are sustainable and accessible to the poor. It may also mean protecting national and regional food systems from unfair competition.

For years, global and national food policies have had an urban bias in that the provision of cheap food has almost always trumped environmental or social costs in the countryside. The results have been predictable: more underemployed urban residents hailing from rural areas and fewer small farmers. West Africa has some of the best small farmers in the world. We should support, not subvert, their genius.

Star Tribune

Benefits of cover crops for pest management become more apparent

The benefits of cover crops continue to grow. Touted for conserving soil while filling forage needs, some plant varieties also have the potential to suppress soybean cyst nematode populations in no-till fields.

Ohio State University researchers in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science have found that Italian ryegrass (also known as annual ryegrass), when planted as a fall cover crop, reduces soybean cyst nematode egg populations 30-50 percent in a single growing season.

Additionally, researchers discovered that Italian ryegrass reduces weed populations by as much as 50 percent, including purple deadnettle, which is a prolific overwintering host for soybean cyst nematode.

Kent Harrison, a weed ecologist with the university’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, said the findings offer an additional tool for managing soybean cyst nematode, a small round worm that can cause significant yield reductions in soybeans.

Soybean cyst nematode is the No. 2 soybean pest in Ohio, behind Phytophthora root rot.

“A rotation with nonhost crops still works as the best tool for managing soybean cyst nematode populations. We are not advocating growing cover crops as a substitute for annual crop rotations in pest management,” said Harrison. “We see this work as just providing another tool for managing the pest with something that has multiple uses, benefits the soil, as well as acting as a short-term grazing crop. Italian ryegrass can do all of these.”

Harrison and his colleagues conducted the work over a five-year period at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center’s Waterman Farm in Columbus, Ohio, inoculating a small no-till plot with soybean cyst nematode and then planting half the field with Italian ryegrass and leaving the other half untouched.

Harrison said the fieldwork was inspired by lab work conducted in Canada that found certain cover crops, such as perennial ryegrass and white clover, suppressed soybean cyst nematode populations. Italian ryegrass produced the strongest results.

“It is possible that the presence of Italian ryegrass causes soybean cyst nematode eggs to hatch prematurely, in the fall rather than in the spring, depleting egg numbers and killing off populations because they have no winter host to feed on,” said Harrison. "The ryegrass grows quickly, produces a massive root system and harbors beneficial organisms that eat weed seeds, so it just out-competes other weeds in a no-till field, including purple deadnettle.”

Harrison and his colleagues haven’t figured out yet why some soybean cyst nematode eggs hatch prematurely, but they speculate it might be chemically driven.

“Soybean cyst nematodes hatch in the presence of purple deadnettle. There’s got to be some chemical signaling involved that says a host is present, and it’s possible that Italian ryegrass is mimicking this chemical signal,” said Harrison. “Other cereal grasses do this, as well, but to a lesser extent.”

Like most other cover crops, Italian ryegrass must be burned down in the spring before crops are planted. Though a beneficial crop in the fall and winter, come spring and summer it can become a nuisance weed if allowed to go to seed.

Researchers are expanding their work on the effects of fall cover crops on soybean cyst nematode populations to cereal rye, oats and wheat.

Farm and Dairy

As calls for green revolution mount, others look to organic agriculture

When he started tending this field, not long after the end of his country's long civil war in 1992, Mozambican farmer Joao Jongue's neighbors thought he was foolish, even crazy.

He didn't burn the cornstalks at the end of the season, but left them on the earth to rot. He mixed tomatoes and peanuts in with the corn. When mice started eating the decomposing vegetables, rather than clear the field, he brought in cats.

"My partner, he didn't agree with this sort of farming," says Mr. Jongue, smiling in the shade of his wide-brimmed straw hat. "So I did it myself."

Now, 15 years later, the soil of Jongue's machamba (small field), is still moist brown, and the corn reaches toward the cobalt-blue sky. His neighbor's plot is dusty and red, but Jongue's yields are still large enough that he can sell half of his crop at the outdoor market in this sunny, brightly painted town. Meanwhile, representatives of international development projects are coming to visit – asking how, in this overly farmed region, he's had such success.

Jongue's plot is a model of what many local aid projects would like to repeat across this region: organic farming, African style.

For many Americans, the idea of "organic food" is connected with high-end grocery stores. But here, "organic" has a different face. A growing number of development experts, as well as local agriculturalists, see organic farming as a way to achieve food security and slow deforestation – two big challenges in rural sub-Saharan Africa.

"There are more and more people interested in it," says Anne Boor, the international project manager for the International Federation of Or­ganic Agriculture Movements. "It is the only sustainable means of production."

Ms. Boor says that organic farming in Africa involves more than being chemical-free, which is already status quo. "The so-called traditional agriculture needs to be developed," she says. "It's no longer sustainable.... Organic agriculture means putting a strong focus on the soil and taking care that the soil is healthy and fertile."

For generations, farmers in rural Africa have used slash-and-burn methods. They clear a small section of land and burn the underlying brush in order to plant corn or sorghum. At the end of each harvest, farmers do another burn, to clear the dying stalks and undergrowth.This is tough on the land. Fire depletes soil nutrients, and rain washes away rich topsoil unmoored on bare fields. After a few years, the soil turns reddish and crumbly, and crops no longer thrive.

Traditionally, that's when a farmer moves on and cuts another plot. He leaves the original field fallow, letting nature slowly reclaim and replenish it. In a decade or so, it's ready for crops again. But population growth in Africa, which is among the fastest in the world, has caused this system to break down. In some regions, there is simply not enough land for the growing number of small-scale farmers to constantly clear new fields. In other places, such as central Mozambique, villagers short on traditional farmland have moved into ecologically crucial forest areas. Here, a deforestation crisis now threatens the area's river systems and weather patterns.

Some local governments and international donors say fertilizer is the answer. Africa was largely left out of the "Green Revolution," where scientific improvements to agriculture, particularly fertilizer, increased food production dramatically in the mid 20th century.

Other development groups and re­­search­­ers say organic farming will be just as effective at increasing yields – and more sustainable. For instance, last year University of Michigan researchers published a report that showed organic farming could produce up to three times the yield of traditional farming methods in developing countries.

"My hope is that we can finally put a nail in the coffin of the idea that you can't produce enough food through organic agriculture," said Prof. Ivette Perfecto, one of the study's authors.

Here, near Vila Gorongosa, the politics of organic versus fertilizer takes a back seat to the facts: Land is scarce; crop yields are falling; no fertilizer programs is in place. And the forest is disappearing.

Meanwhile, Jongue didn't start his organic farming method because an organization told him what to do, he says. He simply saw another local farmer tending his crops this way and decided to give it a try – and found success.

He says many of his neighbors are wary of moving away from the traditional methods practiced by their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. But some of them are starting to change their practices.

"Look at this soil," he says, gesturing to the ground. "They see that it is good."

Christian Science Monitor