Nourishing the Planet

“Meet the Nourishing the Planet Advisory Group” is a regular series where we profile advisors of the Nourishing the Planet project. This week, we’re featuring Sue Edwards, who is the Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD).

Sue Edwards (right) with her husband, Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher.

Name: Sue Edwards

Affiliation: Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD)

Location: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Bio: Sue Edwards is Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD) and has lived in Ethiopia for more than 40 years (since 1968). Her husband is Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, and both are passionate about the importance of recognizing the role of smallholder farmers in “nourishing the planet” for a sustainable future for all living things, from the greatest to the smallest, from the most appealing to the most appalling (for us people).

On NTP: This is a vital project that brings together the rich variety of ways that people have developed to both sustain ourselves and respect the basic natural laws that underlie, or should underlie, the kind of agricultural development needed to acheive a healthy future for all.

What is the connection between agriculture and alleviating global hunger and poverty? Good agriculture combines the knowledge of how people can obtain the food and other natural products we need in a way that is ecologically and culturally appropriate for the setting where we live. This is the wonderful pattern of farming and foods that all local people have developed, and that fits with their local ecosystems. In urban settings, growing herbs on the windowsill and salad in window boxes, having school gardens, and linking directly with more serious full- and part-time growers of our food should bring healthy, nourishing, and interesting food within the reach of all. The industrial idea that everything has to be supplied from outside means that only those who can afford to buy these products are the ones that cannot be hungry, and those who cannot buy will automatically at a minimum have their choices and opportunities for healthy and affordable food reduced, or most likely eliminated.

Your organization’s mission is “to contribute towards an Ethiopia that is free of hunger and poverty, where communities are empowered with the knowledge and responsibilities to chart their own development, and where the best from traditional knowledge, practices and innovations is maintained and enhanced with modern knowledge, practices and innovations.” Why is it so important to integrate traditional knowledge, practices, and innovations with modern knowledge? The empirical knowledge, or folklore, that local people—farmers, fishers, foresters, and pastoralists—have acquired and built on over the last 10,000 years or more of agriculture is a vast pool of knowledge and wisdom that needs to be respected and understood with the benefits of modern science so that it becomes enhanced and enriched without destroying the base from which this knowledge came. It is all too easy to believe that change has to come by “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” Yes, there are traditional practices that need challenging, but there are many, many more that are sound and that can be used as the base to build better, but not greedy, lives for all.

Can you describe the relationship between global agriculture policies and small-scale farmers that you work with regularly? I feel that at last some of the key policymakers in important institutions, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are not only realizing but also speaking out for the critical role of small-scale farmers in meeting the challenge of overcoming poverty and hunger in both the developing and the developed world.

What kinds of policy changes would you like to see implemented immediately to address the needs of small-scale farmers? First is to have the importance of traditional knowledge, practices, and innovations (as stated in the Convention on Biological Diversity) properly recognized and budgeted so that they can take their place on the research agendas of all national and international agricultural research institutions. Second, to have it recognized that “quick fixes” and “one size fits all” will never bring genuine sustainable development in agriculture and to adopt policies that enable researchers and farmers to have the time, places, and support to work together as genuine partners. Then improvements and solutions can be location- and culture-specific and be genuinely sustainable. Probably the most difficult input for this set-up to work is time.

After Danielle's visit, Stacia and Kristof Nordin shared more information about their permaculture project in Malawi by filling out our survey. (Photo credit: Bernard Pollack)

For the past few months, we’ve been collecting information about agricultural innovations from all over the world (survey in English and French). We shared the initial responses in September and even more responses in November, but continue to receive interesting information and recommendations from farmers, NGOs, research groups, and policymakers in a multitude of countries. Below are a few tidbits we’d like to share.

The following projects, already featured on the Nourishing the Planet blog, have recently provided information for our survey, further describing their agricultural innovations and helping us as we seek to define innovations that best nourish people as well as the world in our upcoming report, State of the World 2011.

From our friends at the Developing Innovations in School Cultivation project in the Mukono District, Uganda: Describing the innovation as spreading a “passion for producing local foods to the next generation,” Edward Mukiibi helped flesh out the details of his project by filling out the survey after Danielle’s visit. You can read more here: Cultivating a Passion for Agriculture, Conversations with Farmers: Discussing the School Garden with a DISC Project Student, and How to Keep Kids “Down on the Farm.”

From Never Ending Food in Lilongwe, Malawi: The Nordins are educating others about permaculture and growing indigenous crops to increase income and improve food security. You can read about Danielle’s visit to their home and farm here: Malawi’s Real “Miracle” and Sweeping Change.

Please continue to share your agriculture innovations with us. We look forward to featuring your success stories on our blog and in Nourishing the Planet. Stay tuned for more updates from the survey—maybe next time it will be your innovation we highlight!

"Vertical gardens:" a version of a micro garden being used in Kibera, Kenya to grow vegetables.

For the past few months, we’ve been collecting information about agricultural innovations from all over the world (survey in English and French). We shared the initial responses in September but continue to receive interesting information and recommendations from farmers, NGOs, research groups, and policymakers in a multitude of countries. Below are a few tidbits we’d like to share:

From our friends at the World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania, which Danielle plans to visit later this month: “The world currently depends on a few exotic vegetable species such as tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, etc., and yet hundreds of other species of indigenous vegetables exist but are not properly exploited. In many cases they are much more nutrient-dense than the common exotics, which is of substantive importance in areas in which malnutrition — both under-nutrition and obesity — are serious problems. The difficulty at present resides in the fact that seed of such species are difficult to get, breeding programs are rare or absent, and the supporting agronomic research to maximize their quality and performance has not received sufficient investment.

This innovation needs both a change in policy environment by governments and other supporters of agricultural research to embrace a much greater investment in crop diversity rather than relying on funding only a few staple crops…. [T]he introduction of improved indigenous vegetables has a considerable chance of not only allowing farmers to grow and market themselves out of poverty but also to ensure that the poor, vulnerable, and disadvantaged and their families have a much better chance of attaining a sensible balanced diet than at present.”

From a member of our Advisory Group in Senegal: “The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) introduced the Micro Gardens in Senegal. Rodale International was contracted to train women and implement micro gardens in neighborhoods in Thies. The practice rapidly spread in Thies and other cities. A medical doctor from the Fann Hospital in Dakar established a micro garden and is now feeding his patients and monitoring its impact on their health and recovery.”

From the International Rural Poultry Centre and Kyeema Foundation in Mozambique: “Mortality due to Newcastle Disease (ND) is a major constraint to village chicken production and, consequently, impacts on household food security and livelihood…. With support from the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the European Union, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the FAO, the International Rural Poultry Centre is supporting veterinary laboratories to produce quality vaccine and veterinary services [and] local NGOs and communities to implement ND vaccination campaigns…. Impact studies have demonstrated a significant increase in village chicken flock size, and poultry consumption and sale in participating households. As women and children are frequently the owners and carers of village chickens, they benefit directly from the vaccination program. Increased village chicken production also contributes to wildlife conservation and HIV/AIDS mitigation.”

From Premier Organic Farms Corporation in the United States: “Premier’s Pod Unit is a Closed-Loop Food Tilapia Fish RAS (recirculation aquaculture system) that provides a nutrient source to grow a Vegetables & Food Production greenhouse system, which in turn filters water through root uptake; it then re-cycles purified water back into fish tanks for re-use. Rainfall is harvested to conserve water and reduce system water requirements. The Pod Unit is designed to grow organic vegetables and foodstuffs based on regional needs. The system uses approx. 70% less water than a conventional farming system, with subsequent water conservation accumulation each time the water is filtered and re-cycled through the system. The fish produce nitrogen-rich water used as the nutrient and water source for growing vegetables; the vegetable root system filters the nitrogen out of the water creating a symbiotic relationship between the two growing segments. Methane gas biofuels from excess fish effluent can be used to produce electricity to operate the system. The system is also designed for adaptation for use with solar and wind power, or can use downstream scrubbed/filtered waste energy from power plants in the form of steam and water.”

From Martindale Farm in Zambia: “Holistic Management (started by Allen Savory) came about to deal with environmental degradation but has potential to reverse global warming as well. It has been most applicable to grazing land but the principles can be applied to anything successfully.”

From Rainbow Sustainable Solutions in the Netherlands: “[One practice is] turning coconut waste into added-value products like cattle feed, fish feed, and fertilizers. Continuing R&D in the Netherlands includes the establishment of a certification system. Through a fermentation process, coconut waste is turned into cattle feed and fish feed, which makes it possible to set up cattle farms and aquaculture in coconut regions.”

Stay tuned for more updates from the survey, and please fill it out or pass it on to others who might be interested!

Senior Researcher, Brian Halweil, appeared on NPR’s Science Friday, “Sizing Up Sustainable Food ,” last week with Michael Pollan and James McWilliams

On a recent episode of Science Friday, when the host asked whether organic farming could feed the world, one of the guests suggested that the impracticality lay with compost.

“The concerns with fertilizer really have to do with compost,” said journalist James McWilliams. “Compost is extremely heavy. And this is, in some ways, going to be tremendously unwieldy and unachievable, especially in poor countries.”

Yes, it’s true that compost is best made and used locally. But compost isn’t the only form of fertilizer used by organic farmers. In addition to bulky sources like compost and manure, there are cover crops, green manures, and leguminous plants added to the crop rotation, some of which are more accessible and affordable for poor farmers than chemical fertilizers. And if weight is your main concern, organic farmers also have an array of concentrated fertilizers to choose from, from bone and fish meal to chicken litter teas and microbial soil inoculants. A University of Michigan team of agricultural scientists and ecologists found that there was, in fact, no shortage of “organic” sources of nitrogen if the world needed to depend on these for fertility. (I took a look at this study and others a few years ago.)

At a time when the number of hungry people on the planet has just topped one billion, this guest’s anti-compost statement was good evidence that journalists, agricultural scientists, politicians, and even farmers often dismiss agricultural approaches based on misinformation. This is part of the reason that Worldwatch has launched a project to evaluate and point the world towards agricultural innovations that can nourish people, as well as the planet.

Which isn’t to say that an all-organic approach is necessarily the solution. Or that an all-anything approach is the best solution. In fact, if there were any broad conclusions from the Science Friday discussion it was that the world’s agricultural discussion is moving away from extremism and towards nuance. In parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where soils are so depleted in nutrients, organic forms of fertilizer are most effective at raising yields only after farmers use some chemical fertilizer to build back essential nutrients. In other situations, where poor farmers are exporting vegetables or coffee or cashews to wealthy nations, the greatest benefits will come from combining these long-distance markets with investment in local processing and local marketing cooperatives that add as much value as possible before the crops leave the country.

Past attempts to eradicate hunger, in addition to common sense, show us that no one answer will save the world—or millions of people from hunger and malnutrition. The most enduring solutions will suit the setting—a pest-resistant crop variety will be indispensible in some cases, whereas in other regions farmers will benefit most from access to low-cost irrigation. A diversity of solutions will be the strongest solution, just as the world’s wealth of crop and livestock diversity is our ultimate insurance against the emergence of new diseases or more erratic weather from climate change.

As the show wound down, I found myself channeling some commonsense wisdom from my grandfather: “We shouldn’t let doing the perfect prevent us from doing the good.” I suppose this is as true for our own lives as it is for agricultural development.