DG Simeon Ehui visits IITA Semi-Autotrophic Hydroponic SAH, cassava multiplication section with Kenton Dashiell and Debo Akande facilitated by Mercy Diebru-Ojo, Assitant Seed Specialist (Right). Credit: IITA
by Guy Dinmore (st davids, wales)
Inter Press Service
ST DAVIDS, WALES, Aug 02 (IPS) – “My key message is really simple,” says Dr Simeon Ehui, the newly-appointed director general of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, which works with partners across sub-Saharan Africa to tackle hunger, poverty and natural resource degradation.
“The clock is ticking,” Ehui tells IPS in an interview from Washington DC on his last day at the World Bank, urging Africa’s leaders to recognise the “absolute, paramount” importance of increasing funding for agriculture.
Dr Ehui, who also becomes regional director of Continental Africa for CGIAR, a global network of food security research organisations, says Africa’s food security is worsening. He lists the challenges: the climate crisis and extreme weather events that are presently causing floods in the west and central Africa and drought in the east; relatively high population growth; migration to urban areas; and specifically, the Ukraine-Russia war that triggered soaring prices of chemical fertilisers and grain.
As the African Development Bank recently noted, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine resulted in fertiliser prices rising two to three times over 2020 levels, creating serious supply gaps across the continent and driving food inflation. In sub-Saharan Africa, households spend up to 40% of their budget on food, compared to 17% in developed economies. Africa, the bank says, is over-reliant on food staples and agricultural inputs, importing over 100 million tonnes of cereals a year.
Much of that food deficit and accompanying poverty is concentrated in several African states, led by Nigeria (where IITA is based in Ibadan), which is projected to overtake the US as the world’s third most populous country by 2050 with some 400 million people.
“My vision is thriving agricultural food systems in Africa,” says Dr Ehui, and, specifically for IITA and CGIAR, this means fostering the conditions to sustain centres of research excellence where scientists will be excited to work, with transparency of management and gender equality.
“We have to be able to respond quickly … We need to accelerate our research to respond to the needs of the people,” he adds.
While the global climate crisis is having a huge impact on food security, Dr Ehui agrees that political issues cannot be set aside. “We can’t divorce policy issues from the bigger agenda . The two go together,” he says, singling out land tenure, land grabbing, and obstacles to women having access to land.
IITA will provide analysis and options for policy-makers to improve access to land and boost investments in agriculture.
Asked whether he is concerned that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plays an overly dominant role in providing over half of IITA’s funding of “research and delivery” projects, Dr Ehui begins by expressing his appreciation of the foundation’s support, particularly in the development of Aflasafe to combat dangerous aflatoxin in maise, groundnuts and other crops. However, the new director general also says he wants to “diversify sources of funding and scale-up research”.
He also rejects criticism from some quarters of the “failure” of Africa’s Green Revolution as embraced by Bill Gates, saying India’s one-crop model of the “green revolution” and a lack of care for the environment had not been applicable to Africa and its own complex systems.
IITA and CGIAR are responding to the needs of smallholder farmers in Africa, Dr Ehui says, and that means agriculture that is sustainable and regenerative.
“The focus on regenerative agriculture reflects the importance of natural resource management and local eco-systems,” says Dr Ehui, a national of Cote d’Ivoire who worked for 15 years at CGIAR, managing multi-agricultural research development programs in Africa and Asia, and whose most recent post was World Bank Regional Director for Sustainable Development for West and Central Africa.
Asked if there was a genuine shift towards regenerative and sustainable practices for Africa, Dr Ehui said CGIAR had long been focusing on using local technologies for enhancing food security, for example, reducing reliance on chemical fertilisers for those who could not afford it and using locally available inputs instead. “When I was a young scientist, we were working on these technologies,” he notes.
The Dakar 2 summit on food security last January recognised how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had exposed Africa’s over-reliance on imports of chemical fertilisers. “We have the resources to make it locally,” says Dr Ehui, who chaired a summit session.
At the summit, Senegal’s President Macky Sall, then head of the African Union, declared that “Africa must learn to feed itself” and that at least 10 percent of national budgets should be spent on agriculture.
Dr Ehui says it has been shown that every dollar spent on agricultural research brings a return of 10 dollars and that such investment will go a long way to help improve the socio-economic conditions of the people. Meeting basic needs will also help stem migration across the Mediterranean to Europe, he says.
Despite the challenges, agriculture is growing in much of sub-Saharan Africa and remains the mainstay of most African economies and a major employer. With 65% of the world’s remaining arable land in Africa and with a youthful and dynamic population, the African Development Bank believes Africa is capable of feeding itself as the world approaches a total population of nine billion people by 2050.
But have the pleas heard at the Dakar summit been heeded? “There has been a shift,” Dr Ehui replies. Funding for agriculture is still “below optimum”, but “a few countries” have responded, and he feels confident that, with work, numbers will soon increase.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 02 (IPS) – In a groundbreaking turn of events, women in Bugiri District, Eastern Uganda, have defied societal norms and broken into the traditionally male-dominated fish farming industry.
Through the Women Economic Empowerment Programme launched by UN Women, these women have not only mastered the art of fishing but also revolutionized their economic prospects.
Rose Nakimuli, a resident of Bugiri, vividly recalls her journey into fish farming. “When I was selected to be trained in fish farming, I embraced the opportunity. I approached it as a job,” Ms. Nakimuli says with determination.
With the support of the UN Women project, she learned the ins and outs of aquaculture, swimming, and fishing, becoming a skilled fish farmer. Today, she proudly feeds her family and earns a descent livelihood from her newfound expertise.
Ms. Nakimuli is one of 1,400 women trained in fish farming. The Programme, initiated in 2019, has set ambitious goals to enhance women’s income security, promote decent work, and empower them with economic autonomy by 2025. The success achieved in the fish farming industry in Bugiri District stands as a shining example of the program’s impact.
With funding from the Government of Sweden and Standard Bank, UN Women partnered with the Bugiri District Local Government to support rural women in engaging in fish farming activities on the waters of Lake Victoria.
As a result, 28 cages brimming with Tilapia fish now stand as a testament to the women’s unwavering dedication and determination.
Amina Nakiranda, the project’s production manager, explains that it went beyond teaching women how to fish as the programme also equipped them with essential business management skills.
“Before this programme, many of us struggled with small businesses selling fresh produce or silver fish in local marketplaces,” Ms. Nakiranda reveals.
“However, through the comprehensive training provided by the project, we learned how to run our businesses efficiently, from start to finish.”
The cage fish project goes has strengthened the women’s capacity in governance, financial literacy, and the entire fish value chain. Inspired by their achievements, the women established a private company called “Women Economic Empowerment Bugiri (WEEB).”
Immaculate Were, the CEO of WEEB, proudly highlights the transformational journey of these women. “Although 85% of the beneficiaries are illiterate, they have become specialists in various aspects of fish farming, including feeding, harvesting, preservation, marketing, and trading,” Ms. Were remarks, adding that “Once a woman gets wealthy, that’s wealth for the whole nation.”
The project has also made significant strides in improving gender relations at the household level. With women contributing to the family budget and gaining financial independence, gender-based violence has notably reduced.
Judith, a member of the executive board of WEEB, shares her experience: “The project has reduced gender-based violence because we no longer sit home and beg our husbands for everything. We are no longer burdens; the project has empowered us.”
Beyond individual success stories, the fish farming project has made substantial contributions to the national GDP. With an impressive production of 508.5 tons of fish, the women have generated sales worth UGX 4.3 billion (approximately $1.15 million).
The project’s impact extends further, with UN Women providing essential support, including accommodations for working women, daycare services for their children, and necessary resources such as shelters, fish nets, life jackets, and a refrigerated truck for convenient market access.
“Thanks to UN Women, today we feel like heroes,” Ms. Nakimuli adds. ” Even the men view us as heroes, because fishing used to be a man’s job and we are excelling in it. It also gives us income to cater for our households.”
The journey of these resilient women serves as an inspiration, proving that with support and determination, barriers can be shattered, and new horizons can be explored.
Pearl Amina Karungi is Communications and Knowledge Management Officer, UN Women
Source: Africa Renewal: a United Nations digital magazine that covers Africa’s economic, social and political developments.
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jul 26 (IPS) – The needs of Afghanistan’s children and families are immense. So are the efforts of those supporting them: teams of community workers made up of family members, teachers in community-based schools, vaccinators, and health workers working around the clock to bring life-saving services in the face of an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
I recently traveled to eastern Afghanistan to meet some of the inspiring heroes who, this year already, helped UNICEF reach around 19 million children and their families with health and nutrition services.
UNICEF’s incredible health and nutrition response is supported by people across Afghan society. One of them is Mangal, a hero on two wheels. Every morning, Mangal picks up vaccines at a UNICEF-supported district hospital.
He carefully packs them in a cooler, which he straps to his motorbike before setting off to remote villages. Mangal braves rough, narrow roads, the scorching heat, and genuine security risks.
“I ride for nine kilometres every day to bring these vaccines to the people who need them,” he tells me. “They understand how important it is to protect their children from diseases. They don’t need any persuasion to come here. They greet me with gratitude and hope.”?
A doctor prescribes medicine for mothers and children during a UNICEF-supported mobile health and nutrition team visit. Credit: Karim / UNICEF
Some of Mangal’s supplies land here, with a UNICEF-supported mobile health and nutrition team providing services straight to the communities who need them most and who have no other way to access health care.
Like so much of UNICEF’s health and nutrition work across Afghanistan, these programmes are game-changers.
But these teams have their work cut out for them.
“Nearly half of all children under five in Afghanistan are malnourished, a truly devastating number,” UNICEF’s head of nutrition, Melanie Galvin, tells me. “Some 875,000 of them are expected to need treatment for severe acute malnutrition, the most lethal form of undernutrition and one of the top threats to child survival across the globe.”
Ramping up the response means staffing up the response, too. UNICEF has more than doubled the number of places where a child can be treated.
“Last year we put more nutrition nurses and nutrition counsellors into overflowing hospitals,” Melanie says. “We put them directly into communities where people live. We put them into mobile clinics that reach very small and isolated populations. We put them into day care centre spaces in poor urban areas.”
A child receives RUTF during a visit by a UNICEF-supported mobile health and nutrition team. Credit Karim/UNICEF
Mobile health and nutrition teams are critical in reaching rural areas with basic services like pre-natal checkups, vaccinations, psycho-social counselling, and ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF). It’s a heartbreaking condition to see up close. In this photo, little Zarmina receives an RUTF sachet from Melanie.
RUTF really is a magical paste – energy dense and full of micronutrients. Used to treat severe acute malnutrition, also known as severe wasting, RUTF is made using peanuts, sugar, milk powder, oil, vitamins and minerals, and has helped treat millions of children in Afghanistan.
As we tour a hospital, Dr. Fouzia Shafique, UNICEF Afghanistan’s Principal Health Advisor, explains how UNICEF has managed to support so many children, despite all the challenges.
“Health clinics, family teams of community workers, community-based schools, vaccinators, and trained female health workers,” she tells me. Donors such as the World Bank and Asian Development Bank have also been critical partners, helping UNICEF provide care even in difficult-to-reach areas of the country.
So many of the life-saving interventions I encountered on my mission are made possible by the tireless work of UNICEF staff such as Dr. Shafique and Dr. Nafi Kakar, who fill a multitude of roles, including inspecting vaccines and parts of the cold chain system that is used to store them.
Helping families access quality primary and secondary health care means supporting thousands of health facilities, covering operating costs, paying the salaries of tens of thousands of health workers, and procuring and distributing medical supplies.
Together, these efforts are helping UNICEF reach many of the more than 15 million children in Afghanistan who need support. It’s a difficult number to comprehend, but easier to appreciate when you meet some of those very same children.
There’s the baby fighting for her life in an incubator; the children working for their families in fields of unexploded mines; the children grappling with the anxieties and pressures of poverty; or the girls deprived of their greatest hope – education. Each child is like my own. Unique. Each child is special.
The smiles say it all: For Dr. Shafique and young girls in Afghanistan, it’s been a good day. But there remains so much to do. Supporting the health and well-being of people in Afghanistan isn’t only about access to health services, it’s also about the protection of rights – notably, ensuring rights and freedoms for women and girls.
Given the enormity of UNICEF’s role in the health and nutrition sector, it’s critical for UNICEF – and for children in Afghanistan – that funding is maintained. So that the country’s children can grow up safe, healthy and be the heroes in their own stories.
Source: UNICEF Blog
The UNICEF Blog promotes children’s rights and well-being, and ideas about ways to improve their lives and the lives of their families. It also brings insights and opinions from the world’s leading child rights experts and accounts from UNICEF’s staff on the ground in more than 190 countries and territories. The opinions expressed on the UNICEF Blog are those of the author(s) and may not necessarily reflect UNICEF’s official position.
James Elder is UNICEF Spokesperson in Afghanistan.
Marisol and Misael Menjívar pose next to the biodigester installed in March in the backyard of their home in El Corozal, a rural settlement located near Suchitoto in central El Salvador. With a biotoilet and stove, the couple produces biogas for cooking from feces, which saves them money. The biotoilet can be seen in the background. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
by Edgardo Ayala (suchitoto, el salvador)
Inter Press Service
SUCHITOTO, El Salvador, Jul 25 (IPS) – A new technology that has arrived in rural villages in El Salvador makes it possible for small farming families to generate biogas with their feces and use it for cooking – something that at first sounded to them like science fiction and also a bit smelly.
In the countryside, composting latrines, which separate urine from feces to produce organic fertilizer, are very popular. But can they really produce gas for cooking?
“It seemed incredible to me,” Marisol Menjívar told IPS as she explained how her biodigester, which is part of a system that includes a toilet and a stove, was installed in the backyard of her house in the village of El Corozal, near Suchitoto, a municipality in the central Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán.
“When the first ones were installed here, I was excited to see that they had stoves hooked up, and I asked if I could have one too,” added Marisol, 48. Hers was installed in March.
El Corozal, population 200, is one of eight rural settlements that make up the Laura López Rural Water and Sanitation Association (Arall), a community organization responsible for providing water to 465 local families.
The families in the small villages, who are dedicated to the cultivation of corn and beans, had to flee the region during the country’s 1980-1992 civil war, due to the fighting.
After the armed conflict, they returned to rebuild their lives and work collectively to provide basic services, especially drinking water, as have many other community organizations, in the absence of government coverage.
In this Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, 78.4 percent of rural households have access to piped water, while 10.8 percent are supplied by wells and 10.7 percent by other means.
With small stoves like this one, a score of families in El Corozal in central El Salvador cook their food with biogas they produce themselves, thanks to a government program that has brought clean energy technology to these remote rural villages. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Since November 2022, the government agency has installed around 500 of these systems free of charge in several villages around the country.
The aim is to enable small farmers to produce sustainable energy, biogas at no cost, which boosts their income and living standards, while at the same time improving the environment.
The program provides each family with a kit that includes a biodigester, a biotoilet, and a small one-burner stove.
In El Corozal, five of these kits were installed by Asa in November 2022, to see if people would accept them or not. To date, 21 have been delivered, and there is a waiting list for more.
In El Corozal, a rural settlement in the municipality of Suchitoto in central El Salvador, the technology of family biodigesters arrived at the end of last year, and some families are now producing biogas to light up their stoves and cook their food at no cost. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
“With the first ones were set up, the idea was for people to see how they worked, because there was a lot of ignorance and even fear,” Arall’s president, Enrique Menjívar, told IPS.
In El Corozal there are many families with the surname Menjívar, because of the tradition of close relatives putting down roots in the same place.
“Here we’re almost all related,” Enrique added.
The biodigester is a hermetically sealed polyethylene bag, 2.10 meters long, 1.15 meters wide and 1.30 meters high, inside which bacteria decompose feces or other organic materials.
This process generates biogas, clean energy that is used to fuel the stoves.
The toilets are mounted on a one-meter-high cement slab in latrines in the backyard. They are made of porcelain and have a handle on one side that opens and closes the stool inlet hole.
One of the main advantages that family biodigesters have brought to the inhabitants of El Corozal, a small village in the Salvadoran department of Cuscatlán, is that the whole process begins with clean, hygienic toilets, like this one set up in Marleni Menjívar’s backyard, as opposed to the older dry composting latrines, which drew flies and cockroaches. To the left of the toilet is the small handle used to pump water to flush the feces into the biodigester. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
They also have a small hand pump, similar to the ones used to inflate bicycle tires, and when the handle is pushed, water is pumped from a bucket to flush the waste down the pipe.
The underground pipe carries the biomass by gravity to the biodigester, located about five meters away.
The system can also be fed with organic waste, by means of a tube with a hole at one end, which must be opened and closed.
Once it has been produced, the biogas is piped through a metal tube to the small stove mounted inside the house.
“I don’t even use matches, I just turn the knob and it lights up,” said Marisol, a homemaker and caregiver. Her husband Manuel Menjívar is a subsistence farmer, and they have a young daughter.
In El Corozal, biodigesters have been installed for families of four or five members, and the equipment generates 300 liters of biogas during the night, enough to use for two hours a day, according to the technical specifications of Coenergy, the company that imports and markets the devices.
But there are also kits that are used by two related families who live next to each other and share the equipment, which includes, in addition to the toilet, a larger biodigester and a two-burner stove.
With more sophisticated equipment, electricity could be generated from biogas produced from landfill waste or farm manure, although this is not yet being done in El Salvador.
Marleni Menjivar gets ready to heat water on her ecological stove, watched closely by her four-year-old daughter, in El Corozal in central El Salvador, where an innovative government program to produce biogas has arrived. With this technology, people save money by buying less liquefied gas while benefiting the environment. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Saving money while caring for the environment
The families of El Corozal who have the new latrines and stoves are happy with the results.
What they value the most is saving money by cooking with gas produced by themselves, at no cost.
They used to cook on wood-burning stoves, in the case of food that took longer to make, or on liquefied gas stoves, at a cost of 13 dollars per gas cylinder.
Marleni Menjívar, for example, used two cylinders a month, mainly because of the high level of consumption demanded by the family business of making artisanal cheeses, including a very popular local kind of cottage cheese.
Every day she has to cook 23 liters of whey, the liquid left after milk has been curdled. This consumes the biogas produced overnight.
For meals during the day Marleni still uses the liquefied gas stove, but now she only buys one cylinder a month instead of two, a savings of about 13 dollars per month.
“These savings are important for families here in the countryside,” said Marleni, 28, the mother of a four-year-old girl. The rest of her family is made up of her brother and grandfather.
“We also save water,” she added.
The biotoilet requires only 1.2 liters of water per flush, less than conventional toilets.
In addition, the soils are protected from contamination by septic tank latrines, which are widely used in rural areas, but are leaky and unhygienic.
The new technology avoids these problems.
The liquids resulting from the decomposition process flow through an underground pipe into a pit that functions as a filter, with several layers of gravel and sand. This prevents pollution of the soil and aquifers.
Also, as a by-product of the decomposition process, organic liquid fertilizer is produced for use on crops.
Most families in the rural community of El Corozal have benefited from one-burner stoves that run on biogas produced in family biodigesters. Larger two-burner stoves are also shared by two related families, where they cook on a griddle one of the favorite dishes of Salvadorans: pupusas, corn flour tortillas filled with beans, cheese and pork, among other ingredients. CREDIT: Coenergy El Salvador
Checking on site: zero stench
Due to a lack of information, people were initially concerned that if the biogas used in the stoves came from the decomposition of the family’s feces, it would probably stink.
And, worst of all, perhaps the food would also smell.
But little by little these doubts and fears faded away as families saw how the first devices worked.
“That was the first thing they asked, if the gas smelled bad, or if what we were cooking smelled bad,” said Marleni, remembering how the neighbors came to her house to check for themselves when she got the latrine and stove installed in December 2022.
“That was because of the little information that was available, but then we found that this was not the case, our doubts were cleared up and we saw there were no odors,” she added.
She said that, like almost everyone in the village, her family used to have a dry composting toilet, but it stank and generated cockroaches and flies.
“All that has been eliminated, the bathrooms are completely hygienic and clean, and we even had them tiled to make them look nicer,” Marleni said.
She remarked that hygiene is important to her, as her little girl can now go to the bathroom by herself, without worrying about cockroaches and flies.
KIGALI, Jul 20 (IPS) – Scientists have recently unveiled a first-ever weather forecasting model using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions to help vulnerable African countries build resilience to climate impacts.
Researchers from the Kigali-based African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) are working on a new AI algorithm that allows various end users of weather predictions to make data-driven decisions.
According to climate experts, these efforts focus on building an intelligent weather forecasting system that is multi-dimensional and updated in real-time with a long-range and is a technology capable of simulating long-term predictions much more quickly than traditional weather models.
“Key to these interventions is to improve the accuracy of weather forecasting and help African governments better prepare for and respond to weather emergencies,” Dr Sylla Mouhamadou Bamba told IPS.
Bamba is the lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report 6 (AR6) for the Working Group 1 contribution: The Physical Science Basis and African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) – Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Science based in Kigali, Rwanda.
The AI model currently being tested by researchers from the Kigali-based Centre of Excellence focuses on analyzing huge data sets from past weather patterns to predict future events more efficiently and accurately than traditional methods commonly used by national meteorological agencies in Africa.
The first-ever machine learning model, which researchers are currently testing, focuses on analyzing huge data sets from past weather patterns to predict future events more efficiently and accurately than traditional methods to boost climate resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
Rather than working out what the weather will generally be like in a given region or area to get forecasts, Bamba points out that developing modern statistical models using a machine learning approach to forecast sunlight, temperature, wind speed, and rainfall has the potential to predict climate change with efficient use of learning algorithms, and sensing device.
Although most national meteorological agencies in Africa have tried to enhance the accuracy of their weather forecasts, scientists say that although current technologies can forecast weather over the next few days, they cannot predict the climate over the next few years.
“Many African countries are still struggling to take measures in preventing major climate-related disaster risks in an effective manner because of lack of long-term adaptation plans,” Dr Bamba says.
The latest findings by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) show that as the global climate further warms, the long-term adverse effects and extreme weather events brought about by climate change will pose an increasingly serious threat to Africa’s economic development.
The limited resilience of African countries against the negative impacts of today’s climate is already resulting in lower growth and development, highlighting the consequences of an adaptation deficit, it said.
Indicative findings by economic experts show lower GDP growth per capita ranging, on average, from 10 to 13 per cent (with a 50 per cent confidence interval), with the poorest countries in Africa displaying the highest adaptation deficit.
While projections show that climate change is likely to exacerbate the high vulnerability, the limited adaptive capacity of the majority of African countries, particularly the poorest, will potentially roll back development efforts in the most-affected nations, Dr Andre Kamga, the Director General of the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD). This highlighted the need to build high-resolution models.
Apart from exploiting processes to achieve early warning for all in the current climate value chain Dr Kamga stresses the pressing need to move to impact-based forecasts to enhance the quality of information given to users and to expect more efficient preparedness and response.
While Africa has contributed negligibly to the changing climate, with just about two to three percent of global emissions, the continent still stands out disproportionately as the most vulnerable region globally.
The latest report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) indicates that most of these vulnerable countries lack the resources to afford goods and services to buffer themselves and recover from the worst of the changing climate effects.
While AI and machine learning remain key solutions for researchers to overcome these challenges, Prof. Sam Yala, Centre President at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) in Rwanda, is convinced that these modern weather forecasting models are important to help manage challenging issues related to improving adaptation and resilience in most African countries.
Frank Rutabingwa, Senior Regional Advisor, UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Coordinator Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa Programme (WISER), acknowledges that for African countries to prevent and control major climate-related disaster risks effectively, it is important to improve their forecasting and information interpretation capacities.
Latest estimates by researchers show that the skill of numerical weather prediction over Africa is still low, and there remains a widespread lack of provision of nowcasting across the continent and virtually no use of automated systems or tools.
Scientists from AIMS are convinced that this situation has significantly affected the ability of national meteorological services to issue warnings and, therefore, potentially prevent the loss of life and significant financial losses in many countries across the continent.
In Africa, a study by Dr Sylla projected an extension of torrid climate throughout West Africa by the end of the 21st century. However, other African regions, such as North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa, lack this information.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning can play a critical role by filling these data gaps on the reliability of weather forecasts that undermine understanding of the climate on the continent,” he said.
Young woman sips an orange soda and waits for the rain to stop, on the porch of a small country store in a rural village in Bungoma County, Kenya. Credit: IFAD/Susan Beccio.
by Paul Virgo (rome)
Inter Press Service
ROME, Jul 20 (IPS) – The climate, conflict and economic shocks of recent years and their impact on food prices have landed a huge blow to the world’s hopes of achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of eliminating global hunger by 2030.
Indeed, rather than coming down, the number of people who faced chronic undernourishment in 2022 was around 735 million, an increase of 122 million on the pre-pandemic level of 2019, the United Nations said in the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report that was released earlier this month.
Although tragic, this increase is not surprising.
What one perhaps would not expect is for obesity rates in developing countries to be rising too.
According to a new report by the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), overweight and obesity rates across low and middle income countries (LMICs) are approaching levels found in higher-income countries.
In 2016, for example, the percentage of people in low-income countries who were overweight was 25.8%, up over five percentage points on 2006.
The percentage rose from 21.4% to 27% for low-middle income countries in the same period.
The reason is simple – money.
Steep price gaps between healthy and unhealthy foods, coupled with the unavailability of a variety of healthy foods, are driving rises in obesity rates in both urban and rural areas of developing countries, the IFAD paper found.
The report, which reviewed hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and examined data from five representative countries, Indonesia, Zambia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Bolivia, said that the price gap between healthy foods, which tend to be expensive, and cheaper unhealthy foods is greater in developing countries than in rich developed ones.
As a result, three billion people simply cannot afford a healthy diet.
According to one of the studies (Headey 2019) reviewed by the report, it is 11.66 times more expensive to obtain a calorie from eggs in poor countries than it is to obtain a calorie from starchy staples, such as potatoes, bread, rice, pasta, and cereals.
In those same countries, it is only 2.92 times more expensive to obtain a calorie from sugary snacks than from starchy staples.
In wealthy countries, the gap is much smaller: it is 2.6 times more expensive to obtain a calorie from eggs than it is to obtain one from starchy staples and 1.43 times more expensive to obtain a calorie from sugary snacks.
“While price gaps between healthy and unhealthy foods exist in nations across the globe, that price gap is much wider in poorer countries,” said Joyce Njoro, IFAD lead technical specialist, nutrition.
“Also, high-income inequality within a country is associated with a higher prevalence of obesity.
“If we want to curb rising obesity rates in developing countries, we need big solutions that address how food systems work.
“It is alarming to note that three billion people globally cannot afford a healthy diet.
“Preventing obesity in developing countries requires a comprehensive approach that addresses cultural norms, raises awareness of associated health risks, and promotes the production, availability and affordability of healthy foods.”
The report said research showed sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is on the rise in developing countries (Nicole D. Ford et al. 2017; Malik and Hu 2022), and global sales of packaged food rose from 67.7kg per capita in 2005 to 76.9kg in 2017.
It noted that packaged food tends to be processed, which often means increased content of added or free sugars, saturated and trans-fat, salt and diet energy density, and decreasing protein, dietary fibre, and micronutrients.
The report also mentioned cultural factors.
In some developing countries, fatness is seen as desirable in children as it is considered a sign of health and wealth, and consumption of unhealthy foods may also carry a certain prestige, it said.
Culture also plays a role at the energy-expenditure side of the equation in places where physical inactivity is associated with high social status.
The report added that women are more likely to be overweight or obese than men in nearly all developing countries.
Referring to a 2017 study (Nicole D. Ford et al), it said reasons included different physiological responses to early-life nutrition, different hormonal responses to energy expenditure, weight gain associated with pregnancies, lower physical activity levels, depression, economic circumstances over the lifespan, and differences in sociocultural factors – like those regarding ideal body size and the acceptability of physical activity.
The summit, hosted by Italy and IFAD and its sister Rome-based UN food agencies, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP), will highlight how food-system transformations can contribute to better and more sustainable outcomes for people and the planet and the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals ahead of the SDG Summit in September 2023.
Ibrahim Mayaki, Africa Union Special Envoy for Food Systems
Opinion by Kingsley Ighobor (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 20 (IPS) –
Q: As the African Union Special Envoy for Food Systems, what is the scope of your mandate and what should Africans expect from you?
The role of special envoys of the AU is primarily to tackle a critical issue for which the AU needs support. A special envoy does not seek to replace or take over the responsibilities of the AU or the AU Commission (AUC). Instead, their role is to support and enhance their work by bringing additional value.
This is the first time the AU is designating a Special Envoy specifically dedicated to food systems. Previously, notable individuals such as Rwanda’s Donald Kaberuka served as Special Envoy for Financing and Michel Sidibé from Mali as Special Envoy for the African Medicines Agency.
Ibrahim Mayaki, Africa Union Special Envoy for Food SystemsThere are three main reasons behind this decision to designate a special envoy for food systems. These issues were thoroughly discussed when I accepted the designation.
Firstly, we could enter a post-Ukraine war era that will be characterised by a crisis in food systems.
Leaders must not only establish the food systems but should also ensure their effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes
The market has witnessed an unfavourable evolution, and African countries are suffering the consequences of that war. We have observed shortages of vital resources such as fertilisers, seeds, wheat, etc. The crisis and our response to it have revealed a lack of co-ordinated efforts.
Hence, the first reason for appointing a Special Envoy is to ensure preparedness for such a crisis, even as we anticipate more crises in the future.
The second reason relates to the many initiatives addressing food systems issues in Africa. We have some complexity in terms of initiatives, and this complexity necessitates better management and coherence.
Without proper co-ordination, Member States and their stakeholders may struggle to comprehend the direction we are heading in. Therefore, the appointment aims to foster preparedness and enhance coherence among these initiatives.
The third reason, closely linked to the previous two, pertains to resource mobilisation. Specifically, it refers to the need to mobilise domestic resources to address the challenges faced in food systems.
We also have the resources of multilateral development banks and other institutions that can support Africa’s endeavours in transforming its food systems.
Q: Apart from the Ukraine crisis, what other factors are jeopardising Africa’s food systems?
I will start by unpacking the concept of food systems. Previously, and still now, we talked about agriculture, agricultural production, rural economy, diversification, agricultural productivity, food security and insecurity.
We are talking about food systems now because it embraces the entire spectrum, in an integrated manner, of processes, from the farmer to the consumer, and, in-between, the numerous actors and sectors.
Kingsley IghoborEvidently, food systems are about production, nutrition, roads and other infrastructure, markets, and trade. It’s about connecting farmers to markets, about education and entrepreneurship, enabling small-scale farmers to become micro and small entrepreneurs. It’s about agribusiness.
Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of providing consumers with essential information and addressing the impacts of climate change, particularly in regions like Africa that suffer greatly despite being net zero emitters.
If we look at Africa today, it’s true that we have reduced extreme poverty in the past 20 to 25 years, but at the same time there is an increase in malnutrition.
Our food import bill is still very high, beyond $60 billion a year. The small-scale farmers who produce 80 per cent of the food we eat also suffer from malnutrition and food insecurity, which is abnormal.
We have utilised frameworks such as CAADP and the Malabo Declaration to address agricultural development. The Malabo Declaration is considered a precursor to food systems because it opened agriculture to other sectors.
It is a kind of CAADP phase two, and it has been well implemented with over 40 countries adopting national agricultural investment plans. The African Development Bank has started to develop compacts at the national levels to enable countries have frameworks that will attract financing.
So, we have the frameworks, but we need two radical things to occur.
The first one is to have a whole-of-government approach toward food systems transformation and not leave it to the agriculture or the environment ministries.
Secondly, we need to invest more in food systems to reduce food insecurity. I said at the Ibrahim Governance Weekend that food insecurity is not a question of production; it’s a question of poverty. At the end of the day the main aim is to tackle poverty.
FACT BOX
Africa’s food import bill is beyond $60 billion a year.
Africa will have approximately 2.5 billion people by 2050
We need a moonshot for Africa’s land restoration movement
The COP26 Africa needs
Now is the time to sprint if we want to end hunger, achieve other SDGs. Regarding CAADP, we see that many countries are still not meeting their commitment to invest 10 per cent of national budgets in agriculture and rural development?
You are right. Only around 10 to 12 countries out of the 50-plus have managed to reach the target of investing 10 per cent of their national budgets in agriculture.
However, some countries claim to meet the 10 percent threshold, but their expenditures include items that are not directly linked to food systems or the transformation of agriculture through a sound integrated plan.
When you have a head of state who prioritises agricultural transformation and provides the drive that leads to results and impact, that transformation happens. So, the issue of leadership is critical.
Technically, we know what needs to be done—agricultural techniques, access to market and finance, and increasing yields—but we need the political solution and determination to move forward.
Sometimes you have leadership but lack the necessary systems. Leaders must not only establish the systems but also ensure their effectiveness in achieving desired outcomes.
Q: How do you anticipate the AfCFTA’s potential to strengthen Africa’s food systems, considering the complexities and the need for an integrated approach?
The AfCFTA aims to resolve the issues of tariff and non-tariff barriers and to facilitate the flows of goods and services. These require working on normative issues such as rules and regulations.
But it’s not the AfCFTA by itself that will facilitate production. The success of the AfCFTA in enhancing our food systems transformation is contingent upon the availability of robust infrastructure such as roads, railways, and storage facilities.
So, the AfCFTA is an important instrument, but it must be complemented by sound policies and well-developed infrastructure.
Food insecurity is not a question of production; it’s a question of poverty. At the end of the day the main aim is to tackle poverty
Can that be done?
Again, I emphasize the importance of effective national leadership in addressing our prevailing challenges, as many of them necessitate solutions at the national level. While regional solutions are crucial, national governments need to embrace and implement these regional solutions.
Furthermore, it is vital to ensure coherence among all our initiatives. We should not adopt disparate approaches from various institutions, as this would create a landscape of competing initiatives. Instead, we must assert our strategic frameworks and urge our partners to align with these frameworks.
These frameworks include CAADP, the Malabo Declaration, and the African Common Position on Food Systems, which was developed through inclusive national dialogues involving over 50 countries.
Q: How does the Africa Common Position on Food Systems inform your preparation and participation in the upcoming UN Food Systems Stocktaking Moment?
At the UN Food Systems and Stocktaking exercise, each region of the world will present a position. Africa’s position will revolve around three key issues.
The first one is financing food systems transformation. It should be a priority for our partners that our capacity to mobilise domestic resources is not undermined.
The second is climate, which will need to be looked at in a very realistic manner. Despite commitments made at the various COPS, many of them remain unfulfilled. If these commitments cannot be respected, we must explore alternative approaches to climate finance.
The third is about our small-scale farmers. The farmers are a part of a private sector we are talking about. The private sector is not only agribusiness; it also includes small-scale farmers who have the capacity and knowledge to transform our food systems. They need to be supported, as it is done in the US and Europe.
At the stocktaking exercise, what will also be looked at is how far we have gone in implementing the conclusions of the 2021 Food Systems Summit and what lessons each region can learn from the others.
Q: With Africa’s projected population reaching approximately 2.5 billion by 2050, coupled with the existing challenge of over 250 million malnourished Africans, is there a sense of heightened concern among policymakers and stakeholders?
This question is extremely pertinent because Africa’s population is set to double by 2050. The most critical concern is the challenge of feeding over 1 billion additional people. Failure to address this issue with the necessary capacity and solutions will not only strain our existing governance systems but also heighten social fragility.
Given our demographic situation, the risk of encountering numerous political crises becomes imminent.
Urgency is paramount, necessitating an alarmist approach and accelerating the implementation of solutions, especially considering that a significant portion of the projected population growth already exists today.
This acceleration must be achieved through the appropriate policies and political determination.
Climate change poses a direct threat to small-scale peasants in Afghanistan, with soaring summer temperatures and frigid winters becoming increasingly challenging.
Inter Press Service
Jul 17 (IPS) – The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons.Baba Jan, 60, a farmer in Badghis Province in Afghanistan has been forced to leave his home, not because of the war but due to the worst drought he has ever experienced. It is the second time this year he has been forced to leave his cherished home and life in the rural area for capital city, Kabul.
“If I could have stayed in Badghis, and even if you would have given me all of Kabul, I would not have come here”, he lamented, adding, “I loved my peasant life very much, and I miss my peasant life”, he said, covering his sad face with a shawl.
However, Baba Jan is not alone. A large number of farmers have suffered the same fate. Their lives in the western provinces of Afghanistan have been upended, with the loss of their agricultural products, livestock, and water resources caused by severe draught, largely understood to stem from climate change.
Baba Jan is now living with his three younger children in a mud hut in Kabul. The adverse situation has forced him to send his four grown-up children to work in Iran.
“We don’t care much about the war”, he says. “We were happy and busy with our peasant life but our children faced the risk of dying of hunger due to drought caused by climate change”.
Afghanistan is one of the countries that has been severely affected by climate change. The United Nations declared in 2022 November that Afghanistan is the sixth country in the world that has been severely affected by climate change.
It is one of the major concerns in the life of the people of Afghanistan – apart from the four-decades war that has ravaged this country – especially for the farmers and ranchers who cannot properly engage in livestock rearing and farming activities.
Apart from scorching hot summers with temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius, the situation can also swing to the other extreme of freezing harsh winters. As a result of the cold winter, about 200 people have lost their lives this year; hundreds of livestock have also been lost.
United Nations organizations have provided financial assistance to affected Afghans to alleviate their suffering, but they complain it is not enough for those in the drought-stricken areas, where what is needed most is assistance to drill wells in order to access fresh drinking water.
Even though current statistics are difficult to come by, says Obeidulla Achakzai, Director of Environmental Protection Trainings and Development Organization (EPTDO), a combination of reduced rainfall and frequent droughts have caused groundwater in Kabul to recede further from 20 meters thirty years ago to 120 meters currently.
The main source of livelihood for most Afghans is farming and if rain fails consecutively for four farming seasons, it causes huge food distress and population displacement. Climate change therefor exacerbates the poverty in a worn-torn country.
Obeidullah Achakzai says, for instance, that residents of Herat, Helmand, Uruzgan and other southern provinces of Afghanistan have lost their crops and have been displaced to other provinces within the country and into neighbouring countries.
Given this situation, people in Afghanistan are appealing to the global community to detach climate change from politics because environment is science and science is not political. In this regard, they call on the rest of the world to co-operate with Afghanistan – a reference to western countries denial of aid to the hardline Taliban regime.
Meanwhile, back in Kabul, Baba Jan like the other Afghans who have been displaced from their communities is fervently praying for the day he would be able to return home and continue his farming.
Ligoria Felipe dos Santos poses for a photo on her agroecological farm that mixes corn, squash, fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs. She is part of the women’s movement that is trying to prevent the installation of wind farms in the Borborema mountain range, in the northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
by Mario Osava (esperanÇa, brazil)
Inter Press Service
ESPERANÇA, Brazil, Jul 14 (IPS) – Zé Pequeno cried when he learned that the heirloom seeds he had inherited from his father were contaminated by the transgenic corn his neighbor had brought from the south. Fortunately, he was able to salvage the native seeds because he had shared them with other neighbors.
Euzébio Cavalcanti recalls this story from one of his colleagues to highlight the importance of “passion seeds” for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid low-rainfall ecoregion which extends over 1.1 million square kilometers, twice the size of France, in the northeastern interior of the country.
Saving heirloom seeds is a peasant tradition, but two decades ago the Brazilian Semiarid Articulation (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that emerged in the 1990s, named those who practice it as individual and community guardians of seeds. By September 2021, it had registered 859 banks of native seeds in the region.
Cavalcanti, a 56-year-old farmer with multiple skills such as poet, musician and radio broadcaster, coordinates the network of these banks in the Polo de Borborema, a joint action area of 14 rural workers’ unions and 150 community organizations in central-eastern Paraíba, one of the nine states of the Brazilian Northeast.
“These are seeds adapted to the semiarid climate. They can withstand long droughts, without irrigation, that is why they are so important,” he explained. They also preserve the genetic heritage of many local crop species and family history; they have sentimental value.
“Don’t plant transgenics, don’t erase my history”, is a slogan of the movement that promotes agroecological practices and is opposed to the expansion of genetically modified organisms in local agriculture. “Corn free of transgenics and agrotoxins (agrochemicals)” is the goal of their campaign.
In Paraíba, the name “passion seeds” has been adopted, instead of native or heirloom seeds, since 2003, when the state government announced that it would provide seeds from a specialized company to family farmers.
“If the government offers these seeds, I don’t want them. I have family seeds and I have passion for them,” reacted a farmer in a meeting with the authorities.
“‘Passion seeds’ spread throughout Paraíba. In other states they’re called ‘seeds of resistance’,” Cavalcanti said.
Agroecology is one of the banners of the Polo de Borborema, as it is for ASA in the entire semiarid ecosystem that covers most of the Northeast region and a northern strip of the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
“Passion seeds,” as heirloom seeds are known locally, ensure better harvests on semiarid lands, free of transgenics or “agricultural poisons,” according to Euzébio Cavalcanti, a small farmer, poet and musician who helped lead the struggle for agrarian reform and cares for the seeds in the highlands of Borborema, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Learning to coexist with semiarid conditions
This approach arose from a change in the development strategy adopted on the part of local society, especially ASA, since the 1990s. “Coexisting with semiarid conditions” replaced the traditional, failed focus on “fighting the drought”.
Large dams and reservoirs, which only benefit large landowners and do not help the majority of small farmers, gave way to more than 1.2 million tanks for collecting rainwater from household or school rooftops and various ways of storing water for crops and livestock.
It is a process of decolonization of agriculture, education and science, which prioritizes knowledge of the climate and the regional biome, the Caatinga, characterized by low, twisted, drought-resilient vegetation. It also includes the abandonment of monoculture, with the implementation of traditional local horticultural and family farming techniques.
The Northeast, home to 26.9 percent of the national population, or 54.6 million inhabitants according to the 2022 demographic census, concentrates 47.2 percent of the country’s family farmers, according to the 2017 agricultural census. There are 1.84 million small farms worked mainly by family labor.
Brazil’s semiarid region is one of the rainiest in the world for this type of climate, with 200 to 800 millimeters of rain per year on average, although there are drier areas in the process of desertification.
A stand at the ecological market in the municipality of Esperança, in northeastern Brazil, is a link between urban consumers and family farmers opposed to agrochemicals, monoculture and transgenic products. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Borborema, the name of a high plateau that obstructs the humidity coming from the sea, making the territory to its west drier, is the scene of various peasant struggles, such as the mobilization for agrarian reform since the 1980s and for small-scale agriculture “without poisons” or agrochemicals, of which the “seeds of passion” are a symbol.
Cavalcanti is a living memory of local history, also as a founder of the local Landless Workers Movement (MST) and an activist in the occupations of unproductive land to create rural settlements, on one of which he gained his own small farm where he grows beans, corn and, vegetables and has two rainwater collection tanks.
Women help drive the expansion of agroecology
Women have played a key role in the drive towards agroecology. The March for Women’s Lives and Agroecology is an annual demonstration that since 2010 has defended family farming and the right to a healthy life.
This year, on Mar. 16, 5,000 women gathered in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 inhabitants, to block the creation of wind farms that have already caused damage to the health of small farmers by being installed near their homes.
Borborema is “a territory of resistance,” say the women. About 15 years ago, they succeeded in abolishing the cultivation of tobacco.
The president of the Union of Rural Workers of the municipality of Esperança, Alexandre Lira (C) and other leaders pose in front of a poster declaring the union’s current goals: “Agroecological Borborema is no place for a wind farm,” he says about this area in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
When the citrus blackfly arrived, the government tried to combat it with pesticides, but “we resisted; we used natural products and solved the problem for our oranges and lemons,” said Ligoria Felipe dos Santos, a 54-year-old mother of three.
“That is agroecology, which is strengthened in the face of threats. Farmers are aware, they resort to alternative defenses, they know that it is imbalance that leads to pests,” she told IPS.
“Agroecology is a good banner for union activity,” said Lexandre Lira, 42, president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 people in the center of the Polo de Borborema.
It is also a factor in keeping farmers’ children on the farms, because it awakens the interest of young people in agriculture, said Edson Johny da Silva, 27, the union’s youth coordinator.
Maria das Graças Vicente and Givaldo Firmino dos Santos stand next to the machine they use for making pulp from native fruits little known outside Brazil, such as the umbu (Brazil plum), cajá (hog plum), acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), along with cashews, mangos, and guava. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Pulp, added value
Maria das Graças Vicente, known as Nina, 51, along with her husband Givaldo Firmino dos Santos, 52, is an example of agroecological productivity. On 1.25 hectares of land they produce citrus fruits, passion fruit, acerola (Amazon or Barbados cherry), mango and other fruits, as well as sugar cane, corn, beans and other vegetables.
Grafted fruit tree seedlings are another of the products they use to expand their income, as IPS was shown during a visit to their farm.
Using their own harvest and fruit they buy from neighbors, they make pulp in a small shed separate from their home, with a small machine purchased with the support of the Advisory and Services to Projects in Alternative Agriculture (AS-PTA), a non-governmental organization that supports farmers in Borborema and other parts of Brazil.
“Luckily we have a microclimate in the valley, where it rains more than in the surrounding areas. Everything grows here,” Santos told IPS.
But the couple created three reservoirs to collect rainwater and withstand droughts: a 16,000-liter water tank for household use, another that collects water on the paved ground for irrigation, and a small lagoon dug in the lower part of the farm.
But in 2016 the lagoon dried up, because of the “great drought” that lasted from 2012 to 2017, Vicente said.
The fruit pulp factory has grown in recent years and now has seven small freezers to store fruit and pulp for sale to the town’s stores and restaurants. The couple decided to purchase a cold room with the capacity of 30 freezers.
“I work in the mornings on the land, in the afternoons I make pulp and my husband is in charge of the sales,” she said.
Hiring workers from outside the family to reduce the workload costs too much and “we try to save as much as possible on everything, to sell the pulp at a fair price,” Santos said.
A view of the Canoas Wind Farm, owned by Neoenergia, the Brazilian subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola. Several wind farms with hundreds of turbines have already been built in the mountains of the Seridó mountain range, which vertically cross the state of Paraíba, in the Northeast region of Brazil, and are continuing to expand. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
by Mario Osava (santa luzia, brazil)
Inter Press Service
SANTA LUZIA, Brazil, Jul 07 (IPS) – “Anxiety, insomnia and depression have become widespread. We don’t sleep well, I wake up three, four times a night,” complained Brazilian farmer Roselma de Melo Oliveira, 35, who has lived 160 meters from a wind turbine for eight years.
Her story illustrates the ordeal of at least 80 families who decided to hire a lawyer to demand compensation from the company that owns the Ventos de Santa Brigida wind farm complex in Caetés, a municipality of 28,000 inhabitants in the state of Pernambuco, in the Northeast region of Brazil.
Dozens of other families affected by the proximity of the wind towers have not joined the legal action, largely because they fear losing the rental income from part of their land where one or more wind turbines have been erected.
The company pays them about 290 dollars for each wind tower, which represents 1.5 percent of the electricity generated and sold, according to Oliveira. Those who were not offered or did not accept the lease are left with the damage and no profits.
Built in 2015 by the national company Casa dos Ventos and sold the following year to the British corporation Cubico Sustainable Investments, the set of seven wind farms, consisting of 107 wind turbines 80 meters high, has a total installed capacity of 182 megawatts, enough to supply 350,000 homes.
The wind energy boom has intensified in recent years in Brazil’s Northeast region, which accounts for more than 80 percent of the wind electricity generated in the whole country.
Severino Olegario, a small farmer impoverished by a plague that destroyed the local cotton crop, took advantage of the arrival of the wind towers on his family’s mountainous land to become the owner of an open-air restaurant, now a tourist attraction in the municipality of Santa Luzia, in the Northeastern Brazilian state of Paraíba. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Wind power boom
This expansion will be accelerated by plans to produce green hydrogen, which requires a large amount of renewable energy for electrolysis, the technology of choice. The region’s enormous wind and solar potential, in addition to its relative proximity to Europe, the great consumer market of green hydrogen, puts the Northeast in a strong position as a supplier of the so-called fuel of the future.
As a result, large energy projects are proliferating in the region, which is mostly semiarid and almost always sunny. The giant parks have triggered local resistance, due to the social and environmental impacts, which are felt more intensely in the Northeast, where small rural properties are the norm.
Brazil currently has 191,702 megawatts of installed capacity, including 53.3 percent hydroelectric, 13.2 percent wind and 4.4 percent solar. The goal is for wind, solar and biomass to contribute 23 percent of the total by 2030, with the Northeast as the epicenter of the production of renewable sources.
“We are not against wind energy, but against the way these large projects are implemented, without studying or avoiding their impacts,” Oliveira said. Renewable sources are not always clean and sustainable, say activists, especially movements led by women in the Northeast.
“Because they are considered low-impact, wind and solar farms obtain permits for implementation and operation more quickly and at a low cost, without in-depth studies,” said José Aderivaldo, a sociologist and secondary school teacher in Santa Luzia, a municipality of 15,000 inhabitants in the semiarid zone of the Northeastern state of Paraíba.
The Neoenergia company’s Renewable Complex; in the background can be seen a small part of the solar panels and the wind farm. The synergy between the daytime sunshine and nighttime winds generates enough electricity for 1.3 million homes in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“But solar energy has a greater impact, it is more invasive. A wind farm has little impact on livestock, which do lose a lot of space to solar, more extensive in terms of the land it occupies,” he told IPS.
His field of observation is the Neoenergía company’s Renewable Complex, a project that combines wind power, with 136 wind turbines in the Chafariz complex in the mountains, and 228,000 photovoltaic panels in the Luzia Park on the plains. The former generates more electricity at night, the latter during the day.
In total, they cover 8,700 hectares in Santa Luzia and three other neighboring municipalities and can generate up to 620.4 megawatts, most of it – 471.2 megawatts – coming from the wind in the mountains. They can supply electricity to 1.3 million housing units and avoid the emission of 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide gas, according to the company, a subsidiary of Spain’s Iberdrola.
One of the impacts was a reduction in the local capacity for the production of cheap protein from livestock farming adapted for centuries to the local ecosystem, in addition to extracting rocks for the construction of wind towers and damaging local roads with trucks for their transport, lamented João Telésforo, an engineer and retired professor from the public Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte.
“Neoenergía carried out all the socio-environmental impact studies rigorously in accordance with the country’s current legislation and global best practices. The distance between the homes and the wind turbines is in compliance with the law,” the company responded to IPS in writing, in response to questions about criticism of its activities.
Marizelda Duarte da Silva, vice-president of the Esperança Rural Workers Union, is one of the leaders of the women’s resistance to the installation of wind farms in the mountains of the Borborema Plateau, coveted for its strong, regular winds, in the state of Paraíba, in Brazil’s Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“In addition, it only leases the land, without purchasing it, which means people stay in their homes and in the countryside, and owners receive payments according to the contracts, with transparency, contributing to income distribution and local quality of life,” it added.
Local complaints
But Pedro Olegario, 73, laments that the remuneration has declined, explained by the company as a result of a drop in the energy generated. “The wind is still blowing the same,” he protested.
His wife, Maria José Gomes, 57, complains about the noise, even though the nearest wind turbine is about 500 meters away from their house. “Sometimes I can only fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning with the window tightly closed,” she said.
The couple lives on their share of a 265-hectare property, inherited and divided between the widow and 17 children of the previous owner, on one of the mountains of the Seridó range, part of Santa Luzia.
The 18 family members split the income from four wind towers installed on their land.
Not everyone is unhappy
On the other hand, Pedro’s brother Severino Olegario, 50, has a positive view of the Canoas Wind Farm, which also belongs to Neoenergia. The 2019 construction made it possible for him to open a restaurant to feed 40 technicians of the company who installed the mechanical components.
On the horizon can be seen one of the hills of the Borborema Plateua, whose occupation by wind turbines faces resistance from the Women’s Movement, which began holding annual marches for agroecology and in defense of the land in 2010. Nearly 5,000 women mobilized this year in opposition to wind farms in the Northeast region of Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“I sleep despite the noise and the remuneration is low because we had to divide it among a very large family,” he said. He also improved the road, which brings tourists to his restaurant on Sundays, after the construction work ended, and slowed the local exodus of people from the region.
About 1,000 families used to live in the three communities up in the mountains, due to the high level of production of cotton. But the cotton boll weevil (Anthonomus grandis) plague in the 1990s destroyed the crop and the value of the land.
“Today there are less than a hundred families left,” said Severino, who continues to grow some of the food that he uses to serve meals at his restaurant.
His perspective differs from the picture described by Oliveira to IPS by telephone from her rural community, Sobradinho, in Caetés, the result of a wind farm authorized before the government’s Brazilian Environmental Institute issued new rules in 2014.
The state government’s wind map points out mountain ranges favorable for wind energy. In red are the areas of greatest potential. The longest is the Seridó mountain range, to the west, already covered by dozens of wind farms. About 100 kilometers to the east, the second largest area, Borborema, has a women’s movement that aims to keep it free of wind farms. CREDIT: Government of Paraíba
Damage and unfavorable contracts
“There are cases of allergies that we believe are caused by the dust from the wind turbine blades, which also contaminates the water we drink, as it falls on our roofs where we collect rainwater in tanks,” Oliveira complained.
The alternative would be to buy water from tanker trucks which “costs 300 reais (62 dollars ) – too expensive for a family with two children who only harvest beans and corn once a year,” she explained, adding that growing vegetables and medicinal herbs is impossible because of the polluted water.
In addition to the audible sound, vibrations, infrasound (considered inaudible), shadow flicker (the effect of rotating turbine blades causing varying brightness levels and blocking the sun’s rays) and microparticles cause symptoms of “wind turbine syndrome,” according to Wanessa Gomes, a professor at the public University of Pernambuco, who is researching the subject with colleagues from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazil’s leading academic public health institution.
Local families have also been living in fear since a blade broke and fell with a loud bang. Many take medication for sleep and mental illness, according to Oliveira, whose testimony aims to alert other communities to the risks posed by wind energy enterprises.
On Mar. 16, she took her complaints to the Women’s March for Life and Agroecology, organized by the Polo de Borborema in Montadas, a municipality of 5,800 people, about 280 kilometers north of Caetés.
The Polo is a group of rural workers’ unions in 13 municipalities in the Borborema highlands in the state of Paraíba, whose windy mountains are coveted by companies.
“Our struggle is to prevent these parks from being installed here. If many families refuse to sign the contracts with the companies, there will be no parks,” Marizelda Duarte da Silva, 50, vice-president of the Rural Workers Union of Esperança, a municipality of 31,000 inhabitants in the center of Borborema territory, told IPS.
“The contracts are draconian, up to 49 years and renewable by unilateral decision of the company,” said Claudionor Vital Pereira, a lawyer for the Polo union. “They demand unjustifiable confidentiality, charge fines for withdrawing and make variable payments for the lease depending on the amount and prices of energy generated, imposing on the lessor a risk that should only be assumed by the company.”
Cecilia Menjivar, a tortilla maker in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, takes a break from cooking corn in a pot that is one meter high and 50 centimeters in diameter, heated by a wood stove. Many women in urban and rural areas run these small businesses, aware of the damage to their health caused by the smoke, but the economic situation forces them to use firewood, which is much cheaper than liquefied gas. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
by Edgardo Ayala (san luis la herradura, el salvador)
Inter Press Service
SAN LUIS LA HERRADURA, El Salvador, Jul 04 (IPS) – Using a few dry sticks as fuel, Margarita Ramos of El Salvador lit the fire in her wood stove and set about frying two fish, occasionally fanning the flame, aware that the smoke she inhaled could affect her health.
“I know that the smoke can damage my lungs, because that’s what I’ve heard on the news, but what can I do?” Ramos told IPS, standing next to her stove in the courtyard of her home in El Zapote, a village of 51 families in the coastal municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Paz.
Firewood, the fuel of the poor
“I cook with firewood out of necessity, because I don’t always have a job or money to buy gas,” added Ramos, 44, referring to liquefied gas, a petroleum derivative used for cooking in 90.6 percent of Salvadoran homes, according to official data.
This is the situation faced by many women in El Salvador and other parts of the world, especially in the countryside, where dire economic conditions as well as ingrained habits and traditions lead families to cook with firewood, with negative repercussions on their health.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in 2019 approximately 18 percent of global deaths were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and 23 percent to acute respiratory infections.
Ambient pollution, including wood smoke, plays a decisive role in respiratory diseases, especially among rural women, who do the cooking in line with the roles of patriarchal culture.
Back in 2004 the WHO warned that about 1.6 million people were dying annually from charcoal and wood smoke used in cooking stoves in many developing countries.
In El Salvador, 29,365 cases of acute respiratory infections per 100,000 inhabitants were reported in 2022, well above the 19,000 reported in 2021. Pneumonia reached 365 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the same period, and the case fatality rate stood at 13.6 percent, up from 11.4 percent the previous year.
Ana Margarita Ramos fries two fish for dinner on a wood stove in El Zapote, a coastal village located in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura, in the Salvadoran department of La Paz. Due to economic difficulties she frequently has to cook with firewood, and she fears that she might get asthma from exposure to the smoke. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Ramos showed IPS the gas stove she has inside her house, with a cylinder that lasts approximately 40 days.
But when the gas runs out and she can’t afford to refill the cylinder, she has to cook with her wood stove. In her courtyard she has a table in a makeshift shed, where she keeps the wood and a metal structure that holds her pots and pans.
Official figures indicate that 5.9 percent of households in this Central American country use firewood for cooking.
However, in rural areas the proportion rises to 12.9 percent, while 84.4 percent cook with gas and the rest use electricity and other systems.
Ramos, 44, has no steady job and as a single mother, scrambles to provide for the needs of her two children.
Twice a week she cleans upscale apartments at a resort near her home, in Los Blancos, a well-known beach on El Salvador’s Pacific coast, also in La Paz. When she does well she cleans two a day, earning 24 dollars.
Sometimes she also washes other families’ clothes.
“Right now I have run out of gas, I have to use firewood,” she said. A cylinder of liquefied gas costs between 12 and 14 dollars.
She generally collects firewood on the banks of the estuary, from the branches of mangrove trees, since hers and other poor families live in a shantytown located between the Pacific Ocean and the Jaltepeque estuary, one of the country’s main wetlands.
Poverty affects 26.6 percent of the population at the national level in this small Central American country of 6.7 million inhabitants, according to official figures. But in rural areas the proportion rises to 29.6 percent, and of these, 10.8 percent live in extreme poverty.
At her house in the coastal village of El Zapote, Ana Margarita Ramos luckily has a yard where she has set up her wood stove, thus reducing her exposure to smoke, in a country like El Salvador where many women suffer from respiratory diseases due to the effects of cooking with firewood. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Cutting costs with firewood
Meanwhile in San Salvador, the country’s capital, Cecilia Menjívar runs her small tortilla-making business partly by using firewood, which she collects from tree branches around the Los Héroes community where she lives.
She also uses wood left over from construction sites and sometimes buys it as well, at a cost of one dollar for about three “rajas” or axe-cut tree branches.
Tortillas are round flat bread made from corn dough, which are baked on metal plates generally heated with the flame from liquefied gas.
But Menjívar does not use gas to cook the 68 kg of corn she uses daily to run her business, as she can’t afford it.
“That’s why we prefer firewood. We don’t like it, first of all because of the damage to our health, and also because our clothes are impregnated with the smell of smoke and the walls of the house too, they look dirty,” Menjívar, 58, told IPS.
“We do it to save on the cost, which would be very high, and we wouldn’t make any profit,” she added, while behind her the 68 kg of corn for the day rattled in a boiling pot, black from the wood smoke.
Tortillas are part of the staple diet of the Salvadoran population. Most households cook their food on gas stoves, but they don’t make their own tortillas, because it is a complex and time-consuming process.
That is why so many women, like Menjívar, go into the tortilla business to meet the high level of demand, cooking the corn on wood stoves, usually located in the open air in their courtyards.
But during the May to November rainy season, they cook the corn inside the house, in a back room.
Because of the amount of corn and the size of the pot, the improvised wood stove made of wood and a metal structure has to be set on the floor.
The tortilla business has shrunk, she added, due to the increase in the cost of corn, which climbed from 15 dollars per quintal (45 kg) to 32 dollars.
“With this business we earn enough to buy our food and other basic things, but not for other expenses,” she said.
One of Ana Margarita Ramos’ two sons, in El Zapote, a coastal settlement in southern El Salvador, stands near the firewood that is always on hand in case they can’t afford to buy liquefied gas. About 13 percent of rural Salvadoran households cook with firewood, which poses serious health risks. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Chronic bronchitis and pneumonia
Menjívar said that she fell ill with pneumonia in 2022, and she did not rule out that the cause could have been precisely the smoke she has been inhaling for decades, although she pointed out that the doctors who treated her did not inquire about it.
“Since I was a little girl I have been exposed to smoke, because my mother also used to make tortillas using firewood,” she said. “When she couldn’t find dry branches, my mom would burn anything: old shoes, old clothes or paper.”
When she got pneumonia, she had to stop working for three months, and she had to leave the business in the hands of her teenage daughter.
Burning firewood releases toxic gases and polluting particles that end up causing ailments that in medical terminology are grouped together as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pulmonologist Carmen Elena Choto told IPS. These gases include carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide.
“We also see other harmful particles, there may even be hydrocarbons, because they not only burn wood, but also dry cow dung, corncobs, paper, anything to make the fire,” said the expert.
Damage to the bronchi, or chronic bronchitis, and to the alveoli in the lungs, or pulmonary emphysema, are some of the diseases associated with exposure to smoke, including tobacco smoke, she added.
“Due to the burning of biomass (firewood and other products), the most frequent disease is chronic bronchitis,” said Choto, and older women are the main victims.
People with bronchitis have a constant cough “or wheezing or shortness of breath because there is obstruction due to mucus plugs in the airway,” she said.
Patients, she added, feel tired and suffer from dyspnea or shortness of breath from low oxygen levels, which in severe cases requires hospital care.
Menjívar began to feel these symptoms after spending years making tortillas.
“I felt very tired, I suffered from hot flashes, I was short of breath, I felt like I was having a hard time breathing,” she said.
After she was diagnosed with pneumonia, Menjívar stopped working for three months.
“That’s why I try to stay farther away from the smoke now,” she said. “But the smoke spreads through the house.”
For her part, Ramos, in her coastal village, has put her stove in the yard outdoors, to reduce exposure to smoke. She worries that she could suffer from asthma, like her sister.
A resident of the coastal hamlet of El Salamar, in the municipality of San Luis La Herradura in southern El Salvador, cooks pasta for lasagna on an ecological stove called a “rocket”, which is much more efficient in producing heat and emits less smoke. This kind of stove has been used for decades in rural communities in the country, with good results in alleviating the health risks posed by wood stoves. But they have not become widespread, due to a lack of government investment and campaigns to encourage their use. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS
Eco-stoves, an alternative
One possible answer to reduce exposure to smoke, especially in rural areas, is the spread of eco-stoves, which due to their combustion mechanism are more efficient in producing energy and release less smoke.
These stoves have been around for decades in developing countries, including El Salvador, but they have not yet become widespread enough to make a difference, at least in this country.
There are socio-cultural aspects that hinder the expansion of the stoves and lead to the continued use of wood-burning stoves, environmentalist Ricardo Navarro, of the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology, a local affiliate of the international organization Friends of the Earth, told IPS.
For example, he mentioned the practice by small farmers of placing corn or beans on bamboo or wooden platforms on top of wood stoves, so that the smoke prevents insects from eating the food.
“The problem is that sometimes we approach the issue as an energy or health problem, without considering these socio-cultural aspects,” Navarro said.
Eronildes da Silva proudly stands next to a bunch of bananas on his farm, whose large size is the result, he says, of the effective fertilizer of reusing waste water. In addition to farming, he drives a school bus and builds rainwater tanks in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
by Mario Osava (afogados da ingazeira, brasil)
Inter Press Service
“The rainwater tanks are the best invention in the world for us,” said Maria de Lourdes Feitosa, 46, who recalls the deadly droughts of the past in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region.
“There has been a reduction of many diseases” that came from the so-called “barreros”, puddles and small ponds that are the result of the accumulation of water in muddy holes in the ground that people shared with animals, Feitosa, a farmer from a rural community in Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 inhabitants, told IPS.
Feitosa owns a six-hectare farm and is less dependent on water than some of her neighbors because she produces agroecological cotton, which requires less water than horticultural and fruit crops.
Nearly 1.2 million tanks that collect 16,000 liters of potable rainwater from the roofs of homes now form part of the rural landscape of the semiarid ecoregion, an area that covers 1.1 million square kilometers and is home to 28 million of Brazil’s 214 million people, which extends throughout the interior of the Northeast and into the northern fringe of Brazil’s Southeast region.
The water tanks are a symbol of the transformation that the Northeast, the country’s poorest region, has been undergoing since the beginning of this century. During the longest drought in its history, from 2011 to 2018, there was no repeat of previous tragedies of deaths, mass exodus of people to the south and the looting of businesses by desperate people, as seen in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to the Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA), a network of 3,000 social organizations that created the program, adopted as public policy by the government in 2003, some 350,000 families are still in need of water tanks.
This 16,000-liter concrete slab tank stores rainwater collected on the roof and uses pipes to provide drinking water for Josaída Nunes and Eronildes Silva, in the Sertão de Pajeú, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Another battle is to increase fourfold the more than 200,000 “technologies” for collecting water for production, or “second water”, which already benefit family farming and are decisive for food security and poverty reduction in the region.
Reusing household water
Josaida Nunes da Silva, 38, and her husband Eronildes da Silva, 41, resort to reusing water from the bathroom and kitchen in their home, faced with shortages aggravated by the altitude of the hill they live on in Carnaiba, a municipality of 20,000 people bordering Afogados da Ingazeira.
A complex of pipes carries the wastewater to the so-called “fat box” and then to the Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket (UASB) reactor and a tank for “polishing”, exposed to the sun, and another for the water ready for irrigation.
This system filters contaminating components, such as fecal coliforms (bacteria), and prepares the water with fertilizers for irrigation of the fields and fruit trees. “We grow lettuce, onions, cilantro and other vegetables, as well as bananas, corn, cassava, papaya, guava, passion fruit and even dragon fruit,” said Nunes.
Dragon fruit comes from the cactus family, of Mexican and Central American origin, and has recently become popular in Brazil.
The large size of the banana bunch is “proof” of the fertilizer’s effectiveness, said Nunes’ husband, who adds cow dung. “The treated water is a blessing. Besides providing us with water, it gives us good fertilizer,” Nunes said.
A “stone tank” that takes advantage of holes in the rocks to store rainwater is one of the technologies used to coexist with the scarcity of rainfall in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast ecoregion. In the background can be seen the mountainous landscape of the Sertão de Pajeú, in northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Her husband Silva is also a bricklayer and has built many water tanks in the region. He also drives school children from the rural area in an old van and keeps fodder for his ten cows in hermetically sealed plastic bags.
“The drought hit us hard. We had to bring water from the ‘barrero’ on the plain, up the mountain in the ox cart. We bought a cow, when she was still a calf, for 2500 reais and had to sell it for 500 reais (104 dollars),” lamented his wife.
The couple owns 8.5 hectares of land, a large property in the region where most farms are only a few hectares in size, the result of the frequent divisions between heirs of the large families of the past. But since the terrain is mountainous and rocky, the cultivable area is limited.
Nunes and Silva have three children, although only the youngest, 17, still lives with them.
Farmer Aluisio Braz (L) dries and threshes beans, accompanied by his wife, Joselita Ramos, on the terrace of their house that collects rainwater to fill the 52,000-liter tank at the back for agricultural irrigation on their farm in Carnaiba, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Coexisting with semiarid conditions
The techniques that benefit family farmers so that they can “coexist with the semiarid conditions” and prosper have been disseminated in the municipalities of the Sertão de Pajeú by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches.
Pajeú is the name of the river that crosses 17 municipalities, whose basin is home to 360,000 people. The mountains surrounding the territory include the headwaters of several streams and creeks, which dry up in the dry season, but ensure greater humidity compared to other areas of the semiarid Northeast.
Agroecology practices are one of the focuses of Diaconia, whose agricultural technician Adilson Viana has dedicated 20 of his 49 years to supporting farmers and who accompanied IPS on visits to families involved in the program.
A tank that collects 52,000 liters of rainwater for production is the treasure of Joselita Ramos, 49, and her husband Aluisio Braz, 55, on their two-hectare farm, also located in Carnaiba.
The UASB reactor is an important component in the system for reusing bath and kitchen water for family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
The rainwater falls on a concrete terrace on the ground that is about 200 square meters in size and is slightly inclined to fill the water tank. Braz uses it to dry and thresh string beans, which are typical of the Northeastern diet.
The couple grows fruit trees that Ramos uses to make pulp using mango, guava, acerola cherry (Malpighia emarginata) and a fruit native to the semiarid region, the umbu or Brazil plum (Spondias tuberosa), that comes from a small tree native to Northeast Brazil.
Ramos is taking a break from the activity “because it is not fruit season in the region and the energy to run the refrigerator is very expensive.” Another difficulty is that the city government’s payments for the pulp supplied to the schools have been delayed. “I only received a payment in November for sales from early last year,” she complained.
To boost the production of grains, such as beans and corn, as well as cassava, Braz grows them on his father’s four-hectare farm, about six kilometers from his own farm.
Ivan Lopes, an enterprising family farmer, shows a soursop plant that is highly productive thanks to irrigation with reused water and natural fertilizers, on his farm in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Agroecological productivity
An exceptional case of entrepreneurial vocation and availability of water is that of Ivan Lopes, 43, who together with his brother grows fruit, including bananas, pineapple, mango, grapes, avocado, passion fruit and many more, on nine hectares of land.
Water is pumped from a lagoon on the property to four reservoirs located at the higher elevations, which make gravity irrigation possible. That is why electricity is one of the farm’s biggest expenses. “I plan to install a solar power plant to save money,” Lopes told IPS.
Honey is another product they make. “The last harvest totaled 40 liters,” from dozens of hives distributed throughout the orchard. Sugarcane is grown for the sale of sugarcane juice in the cities.
The farm is also a kind of laboratory for the dissemination of organic tomato cultivation in greenhouses. “At the agroecological market in São José do Egito (a neighboring city of 34,000 people) people line up to buy my tomatoes, because they are known to be clean, pest-free and tasty,” Lopes said.
To achieve his high level of productivity, the farmer makes his own fertilizer from earthworm humus. The success he has experienced in farming prompted him to get rid of his 10 cows in order to focus on crops and beekeeping.
ROME, Jun 30 (IPS) – Get yourself a nice big pot full of water, dice some onions and throw in the meat of your fancy, followed by chopped tomatoes, tomato paste, dried okra powder, garden eggs and chilli peppers.
Leave the pot to boil and, when simmering, add some fish and locust-bean-and-chilli mix, grind in some fresh okra and give it another stir.
Toast some fonio in a saucepan until it’s warm, add some water, put on a lid and cook on a low heat for 20 minutes.
Leave the fonio to rest so it comes out nice and fluffy and serve with your stew.
Delicious and easy-peasy!
This recipe for soupu kanja with fonio was recently presented by celebrity chef Fatmata Binta to launch the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Global Chefs Challenge.
The aim of the online challenge is to show the multitude of ways fonio and the other cereals belonging to the millet family can be used in order to encourage people to put them back on the menu.
Millets, a diverse group of small-grained, dryland cereals, are an excellent source of fibre, antioxidants, proteins and minerals, including iron.
They are diverse in taste and gluten free, meaning they are safe for sufferers of celiac disease, and the residues from their harvests can be used as livestock feed.
Despite these virtues, demand for millets has declined in recent decades, with a knock-on effect for production, as other cereals have become widespread and dietary preferences have shifted.
The FAO is trying to reverse this trend as it sees millets as an ideal way for countries to increase food self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on imported cereal grains.
Millets can grow on arid lands with minimal inputs, they are resistant to drought and tolerant to crop diseases and pests, making them resilient to changes in climate.
Their ability to grow in poor, degraded soils can also provide land cover in arid areas, reducing soil degradation and supporting biodiversity.
So as agrifood systems face big challenges to feed an ever-growing global population, these cereals provide an affordable and nutritious option and a potentially precious resource to help small-scale farmers to adapt to the climate emergency.
“Fonio is not only nutritious and delicious, it can grow in tough climates and could help to end world hunger” said Binta.
“So enjoy my fonio recipe and I challenge you to share your millet recipe!”
A native of Sierra Leone, in 2022 Binta became the first African to win the Basque Culinary World Prize for chefs who improve society through gastronomy.
Now based in Accra, Ghana, she received the prize for her ‘Dine on a Mat’ pop-up restaurant initiative showcasing the culinary traditions of the Fulani people of West Africa.
“If you’ve been following my work, you’ll know that I’m very passionate about African gastronomy, highlighting underutilized ingredients, and most importantly, taking inspiration from women in rural areas,” said Binta, whose Fulani Kitchen Foundation helps women farmers grow fonio as a crop.
“I collaborated on a recipe with some beautiful women from a town called Kolda, in Senegal.
“I encourage you all to try millets, to try fonio, add it to your diet, and let’s keep this challenge going”.
Anyone can join the chefs in taking part in the challenge.
All you have to do is make a video of yourself preparing a millet dish, explaining the recipe, the type of millet being used and the nutritional benefits.
Then put the video on social media using @FAO and the hashtags #IYM2023 and #YearofMillets in the post.
The potential of millets to save livelihoods and lives is demonstrated by story of Pudi Soren, a 27-year-old woman from the eastern Indian state of Bihar.
Pudi recently started growing finger millet after initially receiving seeds from a project administered by the FAO’s International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources and implemented by an NGO called Public Advocacy Initiatives for Rights and Values in India.
This has proved vital as it is a crop that she can plant near her home when rain from monsoon season is insufficient.
“We have forgotten about some crops,” said Soren.
“When we were children, we saw crops such as finger millets too, but people stopped their cultivation for many years.
“My husband and I have a small piece of land, but we did not grow much previously, because we lacked the necessary resources.
“Three years ago, the project gave us seeds and encouraged us to do farming. Now I am proud to be a farmer.
“We can grow finger millet in the rice fallow season and summer, and they do not need fertilizers; some cow dung is sufficient.
“It is a good source of protein in our meals, and my children like the biscuits that I make with the flour.
“In the past, we bought oil, wheat and pulses from the market and spent 500 to 600 rupees every month.
“Our expenses have been halved since we started cultivating these crops. I use the money for the education of my children.
“There are problems that we face as smallholder farmers.
“Rainfall is reducing. And when there is little rainfall, like this year, irrigation becomes expensive. Thankfully, finger millets can be grown with less water.
“What I grow sustains my family, but in the future, I want to sell my surplus on the market”.
Recent trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting an intellectual property approach to transform food systems on the continent. Credit: Aimable Twahirwa/IPS
by Aimable Twahirwa (kigali)
Inter Press Service
KIGALI, Jun 29 (IPS) – Adeline Umukunzi, a 28-year-old woman mushroom farmer in Musanze, a district located about 100 km north of the capital Kigali, said women have often been the unseen faces of agribusiness in Rwanda.
“Women have always played a vital role in agriculture, but behind the scenes. We are starting to see more and more female faces in agribusiness,” she told IPS.
While she developed high potential and locally-adapted innovations in mushroom farming, the young cultivator was unaware of how much her produce was worth to the market. Little did she know that one local food company had purchased most of her produce to process mushroom-based biscuits and nuggets.
As part of Rwanda’s agriculture transformation efforts to enhance agribusiness competitiveness, a growing number of women are now engaged in agribusiness, where many have been able to generate business benefits throughout the value chain.
Official estimates show that in Rwanda, more women than men are primarily engaged in agriculture, yet female farmers face more challenges in starting successful agribusinesses than their male counterparts.
Despite these challenges, the latest official trends show that African women are abandoning traditional ways of engaging in agribusiness and adopting intellectual property (IP) approach to transform food systems on the continent.
According to experts, adopting IP in agribusiness aims to protect goods or services produced in the sector. It mainly deals with trade secrets, described as an essential component for businesses to protect confidential information that provides them a competitive edge.
According to Olivier Kamana, Permanent Secretary in Rwanda’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, adopting IP rights allows innovators to generate good profits.
Kamana told IPS that key women agripreneurs in Africa could develop commercially viable products, so there needs to be some IP protection to incentivize the innovator.
In many African countries like Rwanda, where agriculture is the backbone of their national economy, experts stress the need to embrace talent, problem-solving ability, and innovation for women.
Official estimates by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) indicate that around 62 percent of women in Africa are involved in farming and do the bulk of the work to produce, process, and market food.
According to agriculture experts, business competitiveness in the regional intra-African trading space offered by the African Continental Free Trade Agreement requires agribusiness actors to operate more efficiently, which requires investments in new technologies, new ways of fertilizing and watering crops, and new ways of connecting to the global market.
For Kamana, African women agripreneurs have access to the type of innovations they need to overcome the unique challenges they face.
During the first Africa Regional Intellectual Property (IP) Conference for Women in Agribusiness, which took place in Kigali in May 2023, delegates expressed the desire to promote innovations in women-led agribusinesses in Africa by helping them understand and use IP to bring their ideas to the world.
Bemanya Twebaze, Director General of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), is convinced that Intellectual property (IPR) can be a powerful tool in empowering women and guaranteeing that they benefit from their innovations and creations in the agricultural industry.
“Policymakers should encourage and facilitate IP rights for women in agriculture while providing legal and technical aid to maximize their prospects of prosperity,” he said.
Agriculture scientists have made breakthroughs in identifying the actors that can be considered innovators to bring agricultural development and increase food production in Africa by examining how intellectual property rights could be largely promoted on the continent.
Estimates show that small farmers, with the majority of women, constitute Africa’s most important and most capable innovators, yet this category of the workforce is still struggling to aggregate their produce to supply foreign markets.
Supporters of IPRs argue that though the exclusive monopoly on the invention could impact agriculture in Africa, farming communities across the continent still have difficulty innovating by incorporating new technologies or varieties coming from outside into their production systems.
After graduating from university a few years ago, Rosine Mwiseneza, a young woman agripreneur and manager of BeeGulf company based in Kigali, started beekeeping with only five hives in the Rwamagana district from Eastern Rwanda. Soon after, the number of hives increased to 15 and later to 25.
Mwiseneza told IPS that there had been plenty of opportunity for honey production in Rwanda with the possibility to generate various products across the value chain without intermediaries.
Currently, Mwiseneza’s company is producing soaps, candles, and glass containers made from raw beeswax with a target to make appropriate use of IP rights in the stage of this innovation process.
“We are looking to apply for a valid invention patent, and we are confident to get substantial profits from these innovations in the near future,” she told IPS.
Ayan (25) with her daughter Mushtaq (15 months) in the waiting area of the WFP funded Kabasa MAM Health Center. Credit: WFP/Samantha Reinders.
by Paul Virgo (rome)
Inter Press Service
ROME, Jun 28 (IPS) – Four months pregnant, Ayan was close to dying of starvation when she arrived at the Kabasa camp in Dolow, on the border between Somalia and Ethiopia.
Her 18-month-old daughter, Mushtaq, was so severely malnourished that she weighed just 6.7 kilos.
Drought had forced the family to flee their home in Somalia.
Ayan’s husband died shortly after their arrival.
“We came here as we heard we would get some help,” Ayan said at a health centre funded by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
“We left our home because there was no water and our livestock had died.”
Thanks to nutritional therapy and fortified cereals provided by the WFP, Ayan and Mushtaq are still alive.
Many others do not make it.
Three years of drought have left more than 23 million people across parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia facing severe hunger, the WFP says.
When the region’s long-awaited rains finally arrived in March, instead of bringing relief, the downpours were so extreme they caused flash floods that inundated homes and farmland and washed away livestock.
Consecutive failed harvests and high transport costs have pushed food prices far beyond the reach of millions in the region, the WFP says, with a food basket in Eastern Africa costing40% more in March 2023 than it did 12 months previously
The limited humanitarian resources are being further stretched by the conflict in Sudan, which has sent over 250,000 people fleeing into neighbouring countries such as Ethiopia and South Sudan, where food insecurity is already desperately high.
“Conflict and drought are devastating millions of Somalis. Children are paying the highest price of all,” said WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain during a visit to Somalia in May. “Nearly 500,000 children are at risk of dying”.
The Horn of Africa is on the front line of the climate crisis.
A study released in April by World Weather Attribution (WWA) said that the drought in the Horn of Africa would probably not have happened without human-caused climate change.
“Climate change has made events like the current drought much stronger and more likely,” WWA said.
“A conservative estimate is that such droughts have become about 100 times more likely”.
The tragedy is also a massive injustice as poor countries like these are responsible for only a tiny part of the global emissions that have caused the climate crisis.
But they are feeling its effects most severely.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said the region is facing an “unprecedented disaster”.
“Many farming households have experienced several consecutive poor harvests and up to 100% losses, especially in the arid and semi-arid areas,” said Cyril Ferrand, the FAO’s Resilience Team Leader for East Africa.
“Some agropastoral communities lost all sources of food and income.
“In addition, 2.3 million people have been displaced across the region in search of basic services, water and food.
“And we know very well that when people are on the move, it is also an issue of security, violence, and gender-based violence, in particular.
“In short, the drought triggered a livelihood crisis that has grown into a multifaceted humanitarian disaster including displacement, health issues, malnutrition and security crisis that has long-term effects on people’s lives and livelihoods”
Ferrand said that pastoralists across the region lost over 13 million livestock between late 2020 and the end of 2022 due to lack of water and feed.
This is important because livestock are not only the main source of income for pastoralist households, but they are also a source of milk, which is vital for healthy diets, especially for children under five.
The loss of animals and the related deficit in milk production, therefore, is a big factor in the region’s high rate of malnutrition.
The WFP, meanwhile, says that it urgently needs US 810 million dollars over the next six months to fill a funding shortfall in order to keep life-saving assistance going and invest in long-term resilience in the Horn of Africa.
The UN agency was distributing food assistance to a record 4.7 million people a month in Somalia at the end of 2022.
But it was forced to reduce this to three million people in April and may have to further reduce the emergency food assistance caseload in Somalia to just 1.8 million by July.
This means almost three million people in need will not receive support.
“WFP’s rapid expansion of life-saving assistance helped prevent famine in Somalia in 2022,” said Michael Dunford, the WFP Regional Director for Eastern Africa.
“But despite the emergency being far from over, funding shortfalls are already forcing us to reduce assistance to those who still desperately need it.
“Without sustainable funding for both emergency and climate adaptation solutions, the next climate crisis could bring the region back to the brink of famine.”
Lucineide Cordeiro loads manure from her two oxen and two calves into the “sertanejo” biodigester that produces biogas for cooking and biofertilizer for her varied crops on the one-hectare agroecological farm she manages on her own in the rural municipality of Afogados da Ingazeira, in the semiarid ecoregion of northeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
by Mario Osava (afogados da ingazeira, brazil)
Inter Press Service
AFOGADOS DA INGAZEIRA, Brazil, Jun 24 (IPS) – “The biodigester really gives a huge boost to those who have the courage to do things,” said Maria das Dores Alves da Silva, based on her own experience as a 63-year-old small farmer.
She did not hesitate to accept the offer of Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, to acquire the equipment to produce biogas on her farm in the rural area of Afogados da Ingazeira, a municipality of 38,000 people in the state of Pernambuco in the Northeast region of Brazil.
At first she did not have the cattle whose manure she needed to produce biogas, that enables her to save on liquefied petroleum gas, which costs 95 reais (20 dollars) for a 13-kg cylinder – a significant cost for poor families.
She brought manure from a neighboring farm that gave it to her for free, in an hour-long trip with her wheelbarrow, until she was able to buy her first cow and then another with loans from the state-owned Banco del Nordeste.
“Now I have more than enough manure,” she said happily as she welcomed IPS to her four-hectare farm where she and her husband have lived alone since their two children became independent.
Das Dores, as she is known, is an example among the 163 families who have benefited from the “sertanejos biodigesters” distributed by Diaconia in the sertão of Pajeú, a semiarid micro-region of 17 municipalities and 13,350 square kilometers in the center-north of Pernambuco.
Farmer Maria das Dores Alves da Silva stands between the manure pit and the “sertanejo” biodigester designed by Diaconia, a social organization of Protestant churches in Brazil, which has already installed 713 biogas production plants in eight of Brazil’s 26 states. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Biofertilizer
In addition to using the biogas, she sells the manure after it has been subjected to anaerobic biodigestion that extracts the gases – the so-called digestate, a biofertilizer that she packages in one-kilo plastic bags, after drying and shredding it.
Every Saturday, she sells 30 bags at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the municipal seat. At two reais (40 cents) a bag, she earns an extra income of 60 reais (12.50 dollars), on top of her sales of the various sweet cakes she bakes at home, at a cost reduced by the biogas, and of the seedlings she also produces.
The seedlings provided her with a new business opportunity. “The customers asked me if I didn’t also have fertilizer,” she said. The biodigester produces enough fertilizer to sell at the market and to fertilize the farm’s crops of beans, corn, fruit trees, flowers and different vegetables.
This diversity is common in family farming in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, but even more so in the agroecological techniques that have expanded in this territory of one million square kilometers in the northeastern interior of the country, which has an arid biome highly vulnerable to climate change, subject to frequent droughts, and where there are areas in the process of desertification.
The Pajeú river basin is the micro-region chosen by Diaconia as a priority for its social and environmental actions.
On Lucineide Cordeiro’s small farm, cotton, corn, sesame, sunflower, cassava and fruit trees are alternated in the fields, as recommended by agroecology, which is on the rise on family farms in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast, which is threatened by longer and more severe droughts due to the climate crisis. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
Energy and food security
“We seek to promote energy, food and water autonomy to maintain more resilient agroecosystems, to coexist with climate change, strengthening community self-management with a special focus on the lives of women,” Ita Porto, Diaconia’s coordinator in the Pajeu ecoregion, told IPS.
“The production of biogas on a rural family scale fulfills the needs of energy for cooking, sanitary disposal and treatment of animal waste and reduction of deforestation, in addition to increasing food productivity, with organic fertilizer, while bolstering human health,” said the 48-year-old agronomist.
More than 713 units of the “sertanejo biodigester”, a model developed by Diaconia 15 years ago, have been installed in Brazil. In addition to the 163 in the sertão do Pajeú, there are 150 in the neighboring state of Rio Grande do Norte and another 400 distributed in six other Brazilian states, financed by the Caixa Econômica Federal, a government bank focused on social questions.
“Hopefully the government will make it a public policy, as it has already done with the rainwater harvesting tanks in the semarid Northeast,” said Porto.
More than 1.3 million rainwater harvesting tanks for drinking water have already been built, but some 350,000 are still needed to make them universal in rural areas, according to the Articulation of the Semi-Arid (Asa), a network of 3,000 social organizations that spearheaded the transformative program.
Maria Das Dores examines the biofertilizer that comes out of the biodigester, without the gases from the animal manure. She sells this by-product at the agroecological market in the town of Afogados da Ingazeira, the seat of the municipality where her four-hectare farm is located, which earns her an average extra income of 12.5 dollars a week. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
The value of manure
“One cow is enough to produce the biogas consumed in our stove,” said Lucineide Cordeiro, on her one-hectare farm where she grows cotton, corn, sesame seeds and fruit, in an interconnected agroecological system, along with chickens, pigs and fish in a pond.
She also has two oxen and two calves, which she proudly showed to IPS during the visit to her farm.
“Pig manure produces biogas more quickly, but I don’t like the stench,” the 37-year-old farmer who is the director of Women’s Policies at the Afogados da Ingazeira Rural Workers Union told IPS.
The difference in the crops before and after fertilization by the biodigester by-product is remarkable, according to her and other farmers in the municipality.
She tends to her many crops on her own, although she is sometimes helped by friends, and has several pieces of equipment such as a brushcutter and a micro-tractor.
“It’s the best invention,” says Lucineide Cordeiro, as she shows IPS the seeder created by the Japanese for small-scale farming, which allows her to sow in half a day the land that used to take her two days to plant, on her one-hectare farm in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“But the seeder is the best invention that changed my life, it was invented by the Japanese. Planting the seeds, which used to take me two days of work, I can now do in half a day,” Cordeiro said.
The seeder is a small machine pushed by the farmer, with a wheel filled with seeds that has 12 nozzles that can be opened or closed, according to the distance needed to sow each seed.
The emergence of appropriate equipment for family farming is recent, in a sector that has favored large farmers in Brazil.
Female protagonism clashes with male chauvinist violence
For the success of local family farming, the support of the Pajeú Agroecological Association (Asap), of which Cordeiro is a member and a “multiplier”, as the women farmers who are an example to others of good practices are called, is important.
In family farming the empowerment of women stands out, which in many cases was a response to sexist violence or oppression.
Blue flames emerge from the burners of Maria Das Dores’ biogas stove at her home in Afogados da Ingazeira, in Brazil’s semiarid Northeast region. A single ox or cow produces enough manure to generate more biogas than a family requires for its domestic needs. CREDIT: Mario Osava / IPS
“The first violence I suffered was from my father who did not let me study. I only studied up to fourth grade of primary school, in the rural school. To continue, I would have had to go to the city, which my father did not allow. I got married to escape my father’s oppression,” said Cordeiro, who also separated from her first husband because he was violent.
After living in a big city with the father of her two daughters, she separated and returned to the countryside in 2019. “I was reborn” by becoming a farmer, she said, faced with the challenge of taking on that activity against the idea, even from her family, that a woman on her own could not possibly manage the demands of agricultural production.
Organic cotton, promoted and acquired in the region by Vert, a French-Brazilian company that produces footwear and clothing with organic inputs, has once again expanded in the Brazilian Northeast, after the crop was almost extinct due to the boll weevil plague in the 1990s.
In the case of Das Dores, a small, energetic, active woman, she has a good relationship with her husband, but she runs her own business initiatives. Thanks to what she earns she was able to buy a small pickup truck, but it is driven by her husband, who has a job but helps her on the farm in his free time.
“He drives because he refuses to teach me how, so I can’t go out alone with the vehicle and drive around everywhere,” she joked.
With one-fifth of farming households dependent on palm oil production, policy considerations that look after the environment, lives, and livelihoods were essential.
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Jun 20 (IPS) – Oil palm has brought significant benefits and prosperity to Liberia. The export of crude palm oil is a major source of foreign exchange earnings for the government. The palm oil crop covers more than 1 million hectares, hundreds of thousands are employed in the palm oil sector, and at least 21 percent of the farming households produce palm oil.
Opportunities for the country’s palm oil and other palm products in the international markets are considerable—creating a temptation to prioritize development over environmental concerns.
In 2020, policymakers in the Inter-Ministerial Commission on Palm Oil Concessions in Liberia faced a significant challenge: developing a policy path that pursued quick short-term profits and faced long-term negative consequences to the environment, lives, and livelihoods—or a beneficial approach for people and planet.
Forests Belong to Humanity
“When decisions are too short-term, narrow, and short-sighted, we do not take into account the long-term impact of our action. We need to recognize that some goods are common goods or public goods, such as forests. They do not belong to one person or one company; they belong to humanity as a whole,” says Francisco Alpizar, Wageningen University and Research.
This was the case for Liberia’s palm oil sector, whose key stakeholders include government, the private sector, NGOs, business associations, smallholder associations, and households that directly or indirectly rely on it as their lifeline.
“From an economic perspective, the prices of goods and commodities should reflect the true cost to societies, not just the immediate cost of producing them but also the environmental impact the production of those goods and services carries for societies,” Alpizar says.
The Liberian National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) was facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership. Here policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.
Targeted Analysis Scenario Benefits All
As they developed the National Oil Palm Strategy and Action Plan (NOPSAP) facilitated by the Global Environment Facility-funded Good Growth Partnership, policymakers in Liberia decided to use the Targeted Analysis Scenario (TSA) to design a mutually beneficial policy path for communities, sectoral government agencies, and palm oil concessionaires.
UNDP developed the TSA to respond to the growing demand from decision-makers and stakeholders for more policy-relevant sustainable development analysis to support national SDG implementation facing diverse policy, management, and investment choices.
As an innovative analytical approach, the TSA captures and presents the value of ecosystem services within decision-making to help make the business case for sustainable policy and investment choices. By doing so, the TSA allows policymakers to calculate these costs and make decisions that harmonize with the environment.
In Liberia, policymakers needed economic data that compared the outcomes of continuing with conventional palm production with the results of taking a different route to make sound, informed decisions leading to sustainable palm concessions.
At the time, the situation in the West African country was characterized by contradictory forest management and concessions policies. The Commission had to balance the eagerness of communities and smallholder producers to engage in palm oil concessions because they brought employment and socioeconomic benefits and concerns in the global market about the environmental risks of palm oil production.
UNDP’s TSA provided an answer, enabling the Commission in Liberia to include all the relevant social, environmental, and economic impacts. TSA offered a systematic approach covering all aspects of the sector.
The TSA improves the decision-making process by capturing and presenting the value of ecosystem services and sectoral production to make policy decision-making more holistic. The tool applies to any sector, scenario, context, or country.
“TSA can, for instance, be applied for decision-making at the national level, when taking a national perspective, regional, company or even household level. For each and every one of those decisions, we need a careful analysis of what the current situation looks like and how it will look in the future and, what would be the alternative situation,” Alpizar explains.
Business-as-Usual Versus Sustainable Ecosystem Management
One is considered a business-as-usual scenario, and the other a sustainable ecosystem management scenario.
“When you compare one against the other, with a long-term perspective and focusing on the relevant indicators for the decision makers or the things that the decision maker cares for, then you can provide a better picture of the decision that is in front of us, and that is what targeted scenario analysis is.”
He says targeted scenario construction of business-as-usual versus sustainable ecosystem management outcomes is presented to the decision maker. When this is done, in principle, the decision maker will have a powerful decision-making tool to make informed decisions based on evidence.
“If we put ourselves in the feet of a decision maker, that is, for example, deciding whether to implement a series of policies to make the agricultural sector more sustainable, the business-as-usual scenario means you continue with the current practices. A sustainable ecosystem management scenario would be one in which you change a series of practices or actions, and with that, in principle, you achieve a different outcome,” Alpizar explains.
He gives an example of producing pineapples under a business-as-usual scenario with an impact on surrounding lands, agrochemicals, deforestation, land use change, competing diseases, or diseases that spread to the surrounding area, which might be viable but over a short period of time. The alternative scenario is to create and implement a more long-term, sustainable approach.
“Through UNDP’s application of TSA methodology, you can carefully construct the two scenarios by first asking this question: As the decision maker, what do you really care about? Is it employment, taxes, production, or reducing social unrest? Based on the answer, the analyst can construct a targeted scenario,” Alpizar says.
Returning to Liberia, the TSA was able to show that Smallholder Production (SPO) scenario and environmental sustainability were in the best interests of the concessionaire and the Liberian economy – with substantially greater benefits compared with the business-as-usual scenario (USD 333 million versus USD 188 million over 20 years).
When these results were discussed with the multistakeholder National Oil Palm Platform of Liberia, it was accepted and paved the way toward sustainable palm oil development in Liberia.
Across the world, TSAs have been conducted to assess the economic value of ecosystem services for various strategic economic sectors such as hydropower, agriculture, and tourism under the business-as-usual and sustainable ecosystem management scenarios to create a sustainable development path where humanity is in harmony with the environment.
Martina Santa Cruz, a peasant farmer from the village of Sacllo in the southern Peruvian Andes highlands department of Cuzco, is pleased with her remodeled kitchen where a skylight was created to let in sunlight and a chimney has been installed to extract smoke from the stove where she cooks most of the family meals. She is disappointed because a wall was stained black when she recently left something on the fire for too long. But her husband is about to paint it, because they like to keep everything clean and tidy. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS
by Mariela Jara (cuzco, peru)
Inter Press Service
CUZCO, Peru, Jun 15 (IPS) – Adopting a “healthy housing” approach is improving the living conditions of rural Peruvian women like Martina Santa Cruz, a 34-year-old farmer who lives with her husband and two children in the village of Sacllo, 2,959 meters above sea level in the Andes highlands municipality of Calca.
“I used to have a wood-burning stove without a chimney, and the smoke filled the house. We coughed a lot and our eyes stung and it bothered us a lot,” she told IPS during a long telephone conversation from her village.
Santa Cruz, her husband, their 13-year-old daughter and their four-year-old son are among the 100 families who live in Sacllo, part of the Calca district and province, one of the 13 provinces that make up the southern Andes department of Cuzco, whose capital of the same name is known worldwide for the cultural and archaeological heritage of the Inca empire.
With an estimated population of more than 1,380,000 inhabitants, according to 2022 data from the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, four percent of the national population of 33 million, Cuzco faces numerous challenges to fostering human development, especially in rural areas where social inequality is at its height.
According to official figures from May, 41 percent of Peru’s rural population currently lives in poverty, and in Calca, where 55 percent of families are rural, there are high rates of childhood malnutrition and anemia.
One way Santa Cruz found to improve her family’s health and carve out new opportunities to boost their income was to get involved in the project for healthy housing.
In 2019, she took part in a contest organized by the municipality of Calca, which enabled her to start remodeling their house, making it healthier and more comfortable.
Her husband, Manuel Figueroa, is a civil construction worker in the city of Cuzco, about 50 kilometers away by road. She stays home all day in charge of the household, their children, the chores, and productive activities such as tending the crops in their garden and feeding the animals.
“When I only cooked on the woodstove, I also had to get an arroba (11.5 kg) of firewood a day to be able to keep the fire lit all day long to cook the corn and beans, and the meals in general,” she said.
In addition to cooking food, the stove provided them with heat, especially in the wintertime when temperatures usually drop to below zero and have become colder due to climate change.
In the small village of Sacllo, in the Peruvian municipality of Calca, Martina Santa Cruz (L) poses with her two children, proud of having a healthy home that has improved the family’s living conditions. The house has been plastered with clay and has two stoves and a wooden balcony on the second floor where the bedrooms are located. CREDIT: Janet Nina/IPS
Healthy rural homes and communities
Jhabel Guzmán, an agronomist with extensive experience in healthy housing projects in different areas of Calca province, told IPS that the sustainability of the initiative lies in the fact that it incorporates the aspect of generating income.
“It is not enough to propose changing or upgrading stoves, improving order in the home or providing hygiene services; rural families need means to combat poverty,” he said.
Of the projects he has been involved in, the ones that have proven to be sustainable in time are those in which, together with improvements in relation to health, the transformation of the homes contributed to generating income through activities such as gardens, coops and sheds for small livestock, and experiential tourism, expanding the impact to the broader community.
The case of Santa Cruz and her family is heading in that direction. Their original home was built by her husband in 2013 with the support of a master builder and some neighbors, a total of eight people, who finished it in a month. They used local materials such as stones, earth, adobe and wooden poles.
But the two-story home was not plastered, which made it colder. In addition, it was not well-designed: the small livestock were in cramped pens, the bedrooms were crowded together on the ground floor, the stove had no chimney and the house was very dark.
Their participation in the healthy homes initiative marked the start of many changes.
Peruvian peasant farmer Martina Santa Cruz (R) sits with her mother (2nd-L) and her two children in the brightly lit kitchen-dining room where she cooks with gas. CREDIT: Courtesy of Martina Santa Cruz
“We plastered the house with clay, it turned out smooth and nice, and we painted a sun and a hummingbird (on the wall outside). In the kitchen I installed a wooden cabinet, we made a skylight in the roof and covered it with transparent roofing sheets to let the sunlight in, and we made a chimney for the smoke from the stove and fireplace,” said Santa Cruz.
“It feels good. There is no smoke anymore, I can keep things tidier, there is more light, the clay makes the house warmer, and my small animals, who live next door, are growing in number,” she said..
She also created a space for a gas cylinder stove and a dining room that she uses when there are guests and she needs more cooking power than just the woodstove, to prepare the food in less time.
Due to traditional gender roles, Peruvian women are still responsible for caretaking and housework, which take more time in rural areas due to precarious housing conditions and less access to water, among other factors, reducing their chances for studying, recreation, or community organization activities, for example.
Building large coops with small covered sheds with divisions for her guinea pigs and chickens made it easier for Santa Cruz to clean and feed them, therefore saving her time, which she aims to use for future gastronomic activities: cooking food for a small restaurant that she plans to build on her property.
She explained that she has 150 guinea pigs, rodents that are highly prized in the Andes highlands diet, which provide her family with nutritious meat as well as a source of extra income that she uses to buy fruit and other food.
A typical, unhealthy house in rural Peru where cooking is done using firewood in a closed room without a chimney, which causes smoke to spread throughout the house and damages the health of the families. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
Improving quality of life
Agronomist Berta Tito, from the Cuzco-based non-governmental organization Center for the Development of the Ayllu Peoples (Cedep Ayllu, which means community in the Quechua language), highlighted the importance of healthy housing in rural areas, such as Sacllo and others in the province of Calca, in a conversation with IPS.
She said they prevent lung diseases among family members, particularly women who inhale carbon dioxide by being in direct contact with the woodstove, while reducing pollution and improving mental health, especially of children.
“Rural families have the right to decent housing that provides them with quality of life and guarantees their health, safety, recreation and the means to feed themselves,” Tito said.
Berta Tito (C) stands in a greenhouse garden during a work day with peasant farmers from highland areas of Cuzco in Peru’s southern Andes. The agronomist from Cuzco stressed the importance of rural families accessing healthy homes as part of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS
She said the project requires property planning, in which families commit to a vision of what they want to achieve in the future and in what timeframe. “And viewed holistically, this includes access to renewable energy,” she added.
In Santa Cruz’s house, the different areas are now well-organized: the ground floor is for cooking and other activities and the four bedrooms, one for each member of the family, are located on the second floor and are all lined with a beautiful wooden veranda.
At the moment she is frustrated that she left something on the woodstove too long, which stained the nearest wall black. But she and her husband have plans to paint it again soon, because the family enjoys having clean walls.
In addition to her two cooking areas, with the woodstove and the gas cylinder, she has a garden on the land next to her house, where she grows vegetables like onions, carrots, peas and zucchini, which she uses in their daily diet. And she is pleased because she can be certain of their quality, since the family fertilizes the land with the manure from their guinea pigs and chickens “which eat a completely natural diet.”
Future plans include fencing the yard and expanding an area to build a small restaurant. “That is my future project, to dedicate myself to gastronomy, cooking dishes based on the livestock I raise. I have the kitchen and the woodstove and oven and I can serve more people. But I will get there little by little,” she said confidently.
Thousands of dead fish in Dal Lake, Kashmir, are of concern to fishers, who make a living off the lake. Credit: Umar Manzoor Shah/IPS
by Umar Manzoor Shah (srinagar, indian kashmir)
Inter Press Service
SRINAGAR, Indian Kashmir, Jun 14 (IPS) – Abdul Lateef Dar, a 45-year-old man living on the outskirts of Kashmir’s renowned Dal Lake, relies on the lake’s fish for food and income.
On the morning of May 26, 2023, Dar followed his usual routine, preparing his fishing tools and heading toward the lake. Initially, he noticed a few lifeless fish floating on the lake’s surface, which he considered a common sight. However, as the morning haze lifted, Dar looked at the lake with horror. The lake was filled with thousands of dead fish, resembling dry and withered branches. Dar urgently called out to fellow fishers and showed them the distressing scene.
Soon, hundreds of fishermen and their families gathered along the lake’s shore, witnessing the devastating scale of the fish mortality.
Dar recounted how he began fishing with his father at 14, relying on the lake for his livelihood. He expressed deep anguish at the devastation. Overnight, thousands of fish had perished, dealing a severe blow to his livelihood and that of countless others who depend on fishing and selling fish in the market.
“But I have never ever seen such devastation – it’s like a doomsday. Not hundreds but thousands of fish are dead overnight. This is the heaviest blow to my livelihood, and there are thousands like me whose livelihood is directly dependent upon catching fish and selling them in the market. What will we sell now, and what is there to catch?” Dar lamented.
The Hanjis community has lived around Dal Lake for centuries, and its main occupation is fishing. They are considered the poorest community in the valley – and they only own a few belongings and live a simple life. Because of their reliance on fishing since ancient times, the community, estimated at about 40 000 people, is more vulnerable than the others in Kashmir’s local populace.
In Srinagar, Jammu, and Kashmir, Dal Lake is a famous and iconic body of water with enormous cultural and ecological value. It is frequently referred to as Kashmir’s “jewel.”
The formation of Dal Lake is believed to have been caused as a result of tectonic action and glacial processes. It is surrounded by magnificent mountains and has a surface area of around 18 square kilometers.
The mass fish deaths widespread panic among the locals and particularly those families whose livelihood is directly dependent on the lake.
The region’s government said its scientific wing had made an initial examination to ascertain the cause of fish mortality and said the deaths were caused due to “thermal stratification”– a change in the temperature at different depths of the lake.
Bashir Ahmad Bhat, the most senior officer of Kashmir’s Lakes and Conservation Management Authority, told IPS that the samples had been collected more analysis is ongoing.
“Although we have collected samples for a thorough analysis, the fish (seemed to have) died as a result of heat stratification, a common occurrence. There is no need to be alarmed; fish as little as two to three inches have perished. We have collected samples of the dead fish in the research lab of our department to find out the precise reason why the fish in the lake died; we are awaiting the official results,” Bhat said.
However, for experts and research scholars, fish mortality in the water body could be a prelude to more troubled times ahead.
Zahid Ahmad Qazi, a research scholar, told IPS that the spike in pollution level is severely affecting the lake’s biodiversity and is causing huge stress to the lake’s fish fauna. He says the unchecked construction around the lake and liquid and solid wastes going into the lake’s water has begun to show drastic impacts.
“Over the years, the water quality of Dal Lake has deteriorated, causing adverse impacts on its fish fauna. The endemic Schizothorax fish populations have declined considerably owing to the pollution and introduction of exotics. At the same time, the total fish production of the lake has not increased much over the last few decades. The lack of proper governance, policy regulations, and coordination between government agencies and fishers adds more negative impact to this,” the research paper concluded.
The Department of Lakes and Waterways Development Authority, tasked with the protection of the lakes in Kashmir, indicated there were various plans underway to save the Dal Lake and its biodiversity. The department, according to its officials, is uprooting water lilies with traditional methods and weeding the lake using the latest machinery so that the surface is freed from weeds and its fish production increases.
However, in 2018 research done by Humaira Qadri and A. R. Yousuf from the Department of Environmental Science, University of Kashmir, the government, despite spending USD 3 million on the conservation of the lake so far, there has been no visible improvement in its condition. “A lack of proper management and restoration plan and the incidence of engineered but ecologically unsound management practices have led to a failure in the conservation efforts,” reveals the research.
It concluded that conservation efforts have proved to be a failure. It adds that the apathy of the managing authorities has resulted in the deterioration of the lake.
“There is a need to formulate a proper ecologically sound management plan for the lake encompassing all the environmental components of the lake ecosystem and thus help to conserve the lake in a real ecological sense,” the research stated.
Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change – reframing how people think about food to unlock food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth. Pictured here a farmer in Katfoura village on the Tristao Islands in Guinea benefits from opportunities to generate income and improve community life. Credit: UN Women/Joe Saade
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Jun 12 (IPS) – Deep in the Egyptian desert, the SEKEM community celebrates its first wheat crop – grown to alleviate shortages and price increases caused by the war in Ukraine, and the latest crop in a 46-year history of regenerative development, which has effectively made the desert bloom. On another continent, a consumer who buys acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá in Brazil helps protect 200,000 acres of land.
Food connects people, cultures, and planet Earth. But rather than nourishing global health and well-being, food systems remain at the heart of the global community’s social and environmental crises today.
Massive investment and efforts to transform food systems and existing policy and technical solutions are not delivering the desired impact. In the face of the global food systems crises manifested in food insecurity, unsustainable agricultural practices, and climate change, re-examining the origins of ongoing crises and barriers to transformation is critical.
Reframing How People Think About Food
Against this backdrop, the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) promotes consciousness as a key evidence-based practice to support systemic change. The alliance is built on the premise that reframing how people think about food is the key to unlocking food systems transformation, nourishing all people, and regenerating planet Earth.
“We know our food systems are in a critical state and sit at the core of the regeneration process this world greatly needs, and we believe this can only happen with a change of mindsets and heart-sets, with different values and worldviews,” says Thomas Legrand, CoFSA Lead Technical Advisor.
Convened by UNDP, CoFSA is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.
The alliance aims to leverage “the power of consciousness and inner transformation, including proven approaches such as mindfulness, compassion, systems leadership, indigenous and feminine wisdoms, to support systemic change towards sustainability and human flourishing in the food and agriculture sector.”
CoFSA Challenge Fund to Support Regenerative Food System Projects
The CoFSA Challenge Fund, which is about to be launched, intends to support the development of strategic, innovative ideas and solutions to scale up and accelerate progress toward the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development through the transformation of food systems, which is critical to achieving the UN’s SDGs.
The Challenge Fund focuses on cultivating inner capacities for regenerative food systems. This constitutes a new field of practice that requires testing and innovation to identify, develop and nurture potentially transformative solutions.
In this first round of calls for proposals, UNDP will support approximately four pilot projects of up to USD 20,000.
COFSA Manifesto Video
Conscious Food System Links Supply Chain
A conscious food system is a holistic approach to the well-being of people and ecosystems, and where there is a connection and awareness between stakeholders across the whole supply chain, says Helmy Abouleish, SEKEM’s CEO. He heads the holistic, sustainable development community established in 1977 by his father, Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, in the Egyptian desert.
According to UNDP, to transform the systems that harm people and the planet and how food is produced and consumed, “We need to look beyond the problems’ symptoms and even systems’ patterns and structures, at what fundamentally drives the systems.”
Consciousness and mental models, or regenerative mindsets and cultures, are increasingly recognized as the key to unlocking systems change in food and agriculture. To this end, CoFSA applies consciousness approaches to technical solutions to support the cultivation and consideration of inner capacities based on the premise that sustainable change comes from within.
Christine Wamsler, Professor of Sustainability Science at LUND University, emphasizes that there is “increasing scientific consensus that creating sustainable, regenerative systems do not only require a change in our external worlds. Instead, it has to go hand-in-hand with a fundamental shift in our relationships — in the way we think about ourselves, each other, and life as a whole.”
Graphic representation of the Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA) concept. Credit: UNDP/CoFSA
Similarly, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Otto Scharmer, stresses, “You cannot change a system unless you change the mindsets or the consciousness of the people who are enacting that system.”
At the heart of it, mindful eating and activating transformation from the inside is a recognition that changing behavior is, at times, more about identity, emotions, and connections than data and analyses in the same way elections are campaigned and won against a backdrop of long-held beliefs and opinions.
Question Impact of Consumer Choices
“I think today, whatever you eat, however you dress, you need to ask yourself where they come from, what kind of impact they are giving back to the Mother Earth, cultural, economic, and spiritual environment,” says Tashka Yawanawá, Chief of the Yawanawá that has survived for centuries in the Brazilian rainforests.
Awareness of the people and processes in food and agriculture systems aligns with indigenous wisdom and is at the heart of the approach taken by the Yawanawá people. For instance, Tashka Yawanawá says: “When somebody drinks the acai collected and produced by the Yawanawá, they’re helping protect 200,000 acres of land.”
“They are also supporting the preservation of our language, our culture, our cultural and spiritual manifestation. Making that link gives value to where you source these products from … when you buy acai made by Yawanawá, you have an awareness that you’re supporting conscious food.”
UNDP stresses that farmers’ lives depend on being seen as human beings, not just economic agents, and says it is “Time to build safe, reflective and connecting spaces to engage in the deep conversations we need for right relationships to replace market rules.”
In the world of conscious thinking and mindful eating, everyone has a role.
A marker trader at a vegetable stall in the village of El-Maadi near Cairo with heaps of fresh vegetables. CoFSA aims to renew lost ties between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers. Credit: Gavin Bell
Teresa Corção, founder of Instituto Maniva, a non-profit in Brazil that values ??traditional food knowledge and renews the ties lost between producers, the foods they grow, cooks, and consumers, says chefs have a critical role in listening more to the people who grow the food.
“I think we all see now more and more we need other ways of both changing ourselves and helping others change the way they think in order for us to have the right mindsets to make choices that are more sustainable,” says Andrew Bovarnick, UNDP’s Food, and Agricultural Commodity Systems, Global Head.
CoFSA is built on bringing consciousness to food systems to support the transition to a holistic, bio-regional approach and creating productive landscapes of regeneration.
That consciousness can help restore the balance in food systems between food production, conservation, and well-being, support the uptake of agroecological practices which regenerate the soil, and strengthen the capacity of food to distribute wealth and well-being in communities.
