Nourishing the Planet

Drip irrigation system in Nepal. (Photo credit: IDE)

After Elizabeth Samhembere’s husband passed away in 2004, she struggled to feed her family. A small-scale farmer in Zimbabwe, Elizabeth had trouble getting water to her crops, and her children were too young to help with the labor-intensive task of irrigating the vegetables and strawberries she grew.

“I was making a paltry Z$80,000 (US$0.81) per week from selling small and miserable-looking strawberries, and that did not improve my livelihood,” Elizabeth explained in an interview for International Development Enterprises (IDE). “I continued living from hand to mouth.”

But Elizabeth’s crop—and income—improved significantly in 2005, when she received a donated drip kit, seed, and fertilizer through the Micro Irrigation Partnerships for Vulnerable Households project (MIPVH) of IDE, an organization working to alleviate poverty and hunger in Asia and Africa through technology and market access for small farmers.

Drip irrigation delivers water and fertilizer directly to the roots of plants through systems of plastic tubing with small holes and other restrictive outlets. By distributing these inputs slowly and regularly, drip irrigation conserves up to 50 percent more water than traditional methods, IDE estimates.  The water and fertilizer are also more easily absorbed by the soil and plants, reducing the risks of erosion and nutrient depletion. Usually operated by gravity, drip irrigation saves both the time and labor that would otherwise be needed to water crops, leading to larger harvest yields.

Since installing her own drip kit, Elizabeth has seen her income rise to between Z$1 million (US$10) and Z$4 million (US$40) per week. Both the quality and quantity of her strawberry harvest have improved, and she was able to expand her crop diversity by adding peas, carrots, and tomatoes to her garden. With training from the Zimbabwe Women’s Bureau, Elizabeth is also generating income by selling jam she makes from her strawberries.

Elizabeth’s family is eating better, both from the garden and because of the profit she makes from selling her produce. And she no longer worries about going into debt or needing to borrow money to make ends meet. “I am able to send my children to school with the income I now generate from the garden,” she said.

To learn about other ways that irrigation technologies are helping small-scale farmers improve their incomes and livelihoods, see Getting Water to Crops and Access to Water Improves Quality of Life for Women and Children.

Danielle Nierenberg (second from right) meeting with representatives from Care in Zambia. (Photo credit: Bernard Pollack)

Care International’s work in Zambia has two main goals: increase the production of staple crops and improve farmers’ access to agricultural inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers.

But instead of giving away bags of seed and fertilizers to farmers, Care is “creating input access through a business approach,” not a subsidy approach, according to Steve Power, Assistant Country Director for Zambia.

One way they’re doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, “we are mindful” of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM). Care and C-FAARM are working with farmers to combine high- and low-technology practices.

Care thinks that this “business approach” will help farmers get the right inputs at the right time, unlike subsidy approaches that give farmers fertilizer for free, but often at the wrong time of year, making the nutrients unavailable to crops. And Care’s focus on training agro-dealers and giving them start-up grants allows the organization to remain invisible to farmers. Power says that Care wants to be a “catalyst to the market” and help transfer resources, without distorting the basic pricing structure.

Another component of Care’s work is improving the production of sorghum and cassava. “Zambia is as addicted to maize as we are to Starbucks coffee,” says Power. But by encouraging the growth of other crops, including sorghum, which is indigenous to Africa, Care can help farms diversify local diets as well as build resilience to price fluctuations and drought.

Care is promoting conservation farming in Zambia as well. The organization has been working in six districts since 2007, reaching 24,000 households. In addition to promoting minimum tillage practices and the use of manure and compost, Care is helping to train government extension officers about conservation farming so that eventually they’ll be responsible—instead of Care—for training farmers.

According to Power, the key to Care’s work is promoting business-like approaches to agriculture alongside more traditional ones, so farmers don’t become dependent on the organization for gifts of fertilizer or seed. These sorts of programs, according to Care, will be more effective at feeding people and increasing incomes than traditional food-aid projects that rely on long-term donor support. This is a big challenge in a country—and a region—facing the impacts of both climate change and the global economic crisis.

Stay tuned for more blogs about how farmers are linking to the private sector.

To learn more about Care’s work in Zambia, visit www.care.org/zambia.

“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.

Multiple Use Water System in Nepal. (Photo: IDE)

In sub-Saharan Africa, improved access to water means more than simply basic survival for families dependent on agriculture for both food and income. It means the difference between barely scraping by and eating balanced meals, affording education, and owning a home.

In Zambia, the majority of children drop out of school by the seventh grade because their families can no longer afford it. But Peter Chakanyuka and his wife are able to pay “school fees every three months for our six children,” thanks to a treadle pump the family purchased with the help of International Development Enterprises (IDE), an organization working to improve the livelihoods of farmers in Asia and Africa through improved agricultural technology and market access. “Our life is much better and we eat more food variety than before,” says Mrs. Chakanyuka. (See also: Innovation of the Week: Getting Water to Crops)

In Nepal, IDE found that installing Multiple Use Water Systems (MUS) reduced the labor needed for water collection, improved sanitation, and empowered women. The systems collect water from springs and deliver it downhill using gravity to a domestic water tank and separate irrigation tank. The tanks provide a consistent source for water for drinking, cooking, and bathing, as well as a shared water source for irrigation.

As in many sub-Saharan Africa countries, in Nepal the task of gathering water usually falls to women, and the reduced labor needed for water gathering has allowed women to become more involved in the business side of a community’s agriculture effort. Increased crop production and diversity have also improved household diets, ensuring that women and children are eating more vegetables.

Veronica Sianchenga, a farmer living in Kabuyu Village in Zambia, saw similar improvements to her family’s quality of life when she began irrigating her farm with the “Mosi-o-Tunya” (Pump that Thunders), a pressure pump that she purchased through IDE. The pump is manufactured in Zambia, creating local jobs and keeping the technology affordable for small-scale farmers. The Mosi-o-Tunya is lightweight and easily operated by both men and women and transported by foot or bike.

Explaining that her children are eating healthier, with more vegetables in their diet, Mrs. Sianchenga adds that she is also enjoying increased independence. “Now we are not relying only on our husbands, because we are now able to do our own projects and to assist our husbands, to make our families look better, eat better, clothe better—even to have a house.”

“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 Sara J. Scherr, who is the President and CEO of Ecoagriculture Partners.

Affiliation: Ecoagriculture Partners

Location: Washington DC, United States

Bio: Sara J. Scherr is an agricultural and natural resource economist specializing in land management and policy in tropical developing countries. She’s the founder of Ecoagriculture Partners and currently serves as its President and CEO.

Recent work: Worldwatch Report: Mitigating Climate Change Through Food and Land Use; Farming with Nature: The Science and Practice of Ecoagriculture

On Nourishing the Planet: Nourishing the Planet will stimulate much-needed dialogue, among diverse groups, about the ways we can and should supply our food as population grows, climate patterns shift, and agricultural land use becomes more critical to healthy and resilient ecosystems.

What is the relationship between forest management and agriculture? Most rural landscapes are dynamic mosaics of forest and agricultural land uses. It is difficult to plan for the future of either farmlands or forests without thinking about their relationship. Agricultural development is the main driver of forest conversion, not just on the so-called ”agricultural frontier”, but within long-settled agricultural landscapes that are losing remaining habitat networks that are critical for biodiversity and watershed management. A key strategy for saving forest biodiversity and ecosystem services is to modify agricultural production systems to support those services. Meanwhile, well-managed forest in critical areas can benefit farming by protecting watersheds, providing farm inputs, moderating micro-climate, reducing flood risks, etc.

What role can agriculture play in climate change mitigation? Agriculture plays a pivotal role in climate change mitigation. To begin with, agriculture is responsible for a sizable share of total global emissions, so reducing emissions from farming is essential. Key ways of doing that are to reduce and improve efficiency of fertilizer use, to reduce use of fire as a practice, to minimize conversion of high-carbon vegetation to annual crops, to reduce tillage, and to improve livestock manure management. But at the same time, there is huge potential in the agriculture and land use sector to mitigate climate change through large-scale carbon sequestration, in ways that also improve production. Major mechanisms include increasing soil organic matter and soil vegetative cover; increasing the proportion of land planted to perennial crops and grasses that sequester and store carbon in roots and stems; improving pasture management; and restoring degraded watersheds through re-vegetation.

What immediate steps would you like to see taken to better integrate conscientious land use in agriculture? The single most important action—on the ground—would be to mobilize stakeholders from agriculture, environment and other key sectors in agricultural landscapes to establish platforms for dialogue and collaborative planning to find ways to meet agricultural production and income challenges while also sustaining ecosystems and biodiversity. The second most important action—in the policy arena—is to establish mechanisms for cross-sectoral policy and program planning across agriculture, water, environment, rural development, climate, etc. to identify areas where these need to be aligned, where they need to be coordinated and where they need to integrated to achieve multiple goals on the land.

Can you give an example from your research of a situation where farmers and the environment were equally benefiting from environmentally sustainable land use practices? We have identified many dozens of landscapes around the world where collaborative efforts to promote farm production and livelihoods and conserve key environmental values have been documented to achieve goals. Take a look at the Ecoagriculture Partners website in the section called “snapshots” for more examples.

Treadle pumps are foot-powered pumps that sit on top of a well and irrigate small plots of land. (Photo: IDE)

In 1999, when he purchased his first treadle pump, Robert Mwanza, a farmer in Lusaka, Zambia, was struggling to make ends meet and without reliable access to water. As his country dealt with drought and economic weakness, Robert lacked the necessary resources to irrigate his farm and “couldn’t grow enough to eat, let alone sell.” 

Access to water is a luxury that many rural households, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, do not have. Farmers must often travel long distances to collect water from streams or public wells, making it impossible to irrigate crops or have enough water for cooking and bathing.

But affordable technologies such as the treadle pump (a foot-powered pump that sits on top of a well and irrigates small plots of land), the rope pump (a manually powered alternative to the treadle pump), and a variety of water storage systems (made of plastic and used as sources for sprinkler or drip irrigation systems) are changing all of that. The systems are developed and supported by International Development Enterprises (IDE), an organization working to improve the livelihoods of farmers in 13 countries in Asia and Africa through improved agriculture technology and market access. (See also: Harnessing Too Much of a Good Thing, Addressing Soil Erosion to Improve Production, Income, and Nutrition, and Persistently Innovative: One Farmer Teaches by Example.)

IDE is making irrigation more efficient by combining technology specially designed to address the needs of small-scale farmers with on-the-ground support staff to provide training and education. This allows farmers to expand their farms, feed their families, and earn a profit from selling surplus crops.

After just two years of improved irrigation provided by a treadle pump, Robert Mwanza grew more than enough vegetables to feed his wife and eight children. He also earned enough money to purchase an additional pump, doubling the amount of land he could irrigate. He recruited his brother, Andrew Mwanza, to work the additional pump, and in three years, with the help of IDE field staff, Robert began to sell his produce to Agriflora, a company that exports high-quality vegetables to Europe. Now the two brothers are growing enough vegetables to afford a motorized petrol pump for $750, further reducing the labor required to increase production.

To read more about the importance of getting water to crops, as well as other examples of innovations that help farmers do this, see: Innovation of the Week: Water Harvesting, Weathering the Famine, and Persistently Innovative: One Farmer Teaches by Example.

(Photo: Bernard Pollack)

By Abby Massey

Noting that “1 billion people now suffer from hunger, the highest number in human history,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon emphasized the urgent need to focus on the eradication of global hunger and poverty in a speech to the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) Governing Council in Rome on February 17, 2010. Although global agricultural funding increased last year, Mr. Ban called on even more resources to be directed toward innovations and technologies that will help improve food security (for examples of such innovations and technologies, see Farmers Learning From Farmers, Breeding Vegetables with Farmers in Mind, and Malawi’s Real Miracle). Ban also highlighted the importance of building partnerships with small-scale farmers and rural producers who will play an important role in the fight to alleviate poverty and hunger worldwide. For examples of ways that agriculture innovations can help mitigate hunger and poverty, see Investing in Urban Agriculture, How to Keep Kids ‘Down on the Farm,’ and Teacher Turned Farmer. . . Turned Teacher.

Abby Massey is a Food & Agriculture Intern with the Nourishing the Planet project.

IRRI researchers examine a wild rice variety in the Philippines. (Photo: IRRI)

By Sara Delaney

At the launch of the new book Science and Innovation for Development on 19 January, co-author Sir Gordon Conway said: “It doesn’t matter where the technology comes from, it matters that it is appropriate.”

Too often international development researchers, policymakers, and practitioners get caught up in the source of a technology, and use this as the metric for whether it will be successful. The way a technology is designed, the country it comes from, the type of institution that produced it—while all important considerations—are not as important as whether the product is appropriate.

An appropriate technology is accessible, affordable, easy-to-use and maintain, effective—j and most importantly, it serves a real need.

A rice seed, for example, that has been bred or engineered to mature faster can be appropriate anywhere the variety thrives. Local farmers have a need for such characteristics and will usually want to buy this seed, regardless of whether it comes from local seed breeding and seed saving efforts or from global centers like the International Rice Research Institute.

Many scientists and policymakers in developed countries also often hold on to the idea that you can’t apply different types of technology to the same problem. In fact, this is often exactly what is needed.

For example, in drought-prone areas, where farmers deal with persistent and increasing water shortages, they need “traditional” water conservation techniques and planting methods such as the zai system in West Africa, where farmers use small holes filled with manure and the extensive underground termite tunnels that result, to both capture water and recycle soil nutrients.

But there are also “intermediate” technologies such as drip irrigation, where plastic tubing is used to apply small amounts of water to each individual plant, and existing and upcoming “new platform” technologies, such as cereal varieties that are genetically modified to survive, and even prosper, in drought conditions.

Farmers should have access to all types of solutions. In fact, farmers around the

world are constantly looking for ways to tweak, invest in, and improve their land and what it yields. And they are often positioned to pick and choose the best combination for their own field, and adapt and innovate as conditions change.

Women weeding a field in Mali. (Photo: Jessie Luna)

I came across a telling example of the strong bias that some hold for particular sources of technology at a recent plant biotechnology conference. A number of presenters at the event introduced the methods they had been working on to control weeds, in particular the parasitic weed Striga.

On one side was the biological systems approach: intercropping the maize crop with plants that suppress Striga. The other side advocated a technological solution: breeding resistance to the herbicide that kills the weed into the maize seeds themselves, so that the seeds can be dipped into the herbicide. The treated maize seeds kill the parasitic seeds in the ground, allowing the maize to grow and the environmental impact to be minimized.

Both systems have drawbacks—more labor and skilled management needed for biological control, and higher research costs and risk of resistance developing for the seed modification approach.

So why not use both? Why not work together?

Instead, I saw the two sides actively arguing. Then, when another presenter introduced the idea of increasing the use of conventional herbicides in Africa, it was met with immediate derision, due partly to the source of the herbicides (U.S. manufacturers). Most did not consider the fact that, if applied in an educated and selective manner, conventional herbicides may be a great tool for poor farmers.

But this may be changing. As Science and Innovation for Development’s other co-author Jeff Waage stated in the book: “Between the extremes of a technological ’silver bullet’ approach to development science, and the belief that local and intermediate technologies are the only legitimate approach, there is emerging today a new community of scientists dedicated to an inclusive view of appropriate science for development.”

Sara Delaney joined Imperial College in July 2009 to work on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded project “Africa and Europe: Partnerships in Food and Farming.” She is assisting Gordon Conway with the writing of a second edition of his 1999 book The Doubly Green Revolution. She recently completed work with the UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS) and the London International Development Centre (LIDC), supporting publication of the book Science and Innovation for Development. Sara studied biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University and Science, Society and Development at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). From 2005–07 she served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, working in the water and sanitation sector.

Check out this opinion-editorial about a project I visited in Lilongwe, Malawi, published today in Wisconsin.

For the Wausau Daily Herald
By Danielle Nierenberg

Stacia and Kristof Nordin have an unusual backyard, and it looks a lot different from the Edgar yard in which Kristof grew up.

Rather than the typical bare dirt patch of land that most Malawians sweep “clean” every day, the Nordins have more than 200 varieties of mostly indigenous vegetables growing organically around their house. They came to Malawi in 1997 as Peace Corps volunteers, but now call Malawi home. Stacia is a technical adviser to the Malawi Ministry of Education, working to sensitize both policymakers and citizens about the importance of using indigenous foods and permaculture to improve livelihoods and nutrition. Kristof is a community educator who works to train people at all levels of Malawian society in low-input and sustainable agricultural practices.

The Nordins use their home as a demonstration plot for permaculture methods that incorporate composting, water harvesting, intercropping and other methods that help build organic matter in soils, conserve water, and protect agricultural diversity. Most Malawians think of traditional foods, such as amaranth and African eggplant, as poor-people foods grown by “bad” farmers. But these crops might hold the key for solving hunger, malnutrition and poverty in Malawi — as well as in other African countries.

Nowhere needs the help more than Malawi, a nation of 14 million in southeast Africa that is among the least developed and most densely populated on Earth.

The country might be best known for the so-called “Malawi Miracle.” Five years ago, the government decided to do something controversial and provide fertilizer subsidies to farmers to grow maize. Since then, maize production has tripled and Malawi has been touted as an agricultural success story.

But the way they are refining that corn, says Kristof, makes it “kind of like Wonder Bread,” leaving it with just two or three nutrients. Traditional varieties of corn, which aren’t usually so highly processed, are more nutritious and don’t require as much artificial fertilizer as do hybrid varieties.

“Forty-eight percent of the country’s children are still nutritionally stunted, even with the so-called miracle,” Kristof says.
Rather than focusing on just planting maize — a crop that is not native to Africa — the Nordins advise farmers with whom they work that there is “no miracle plant — just plant them all.” Research has shown that Malawi has more than 600 indigenous and naturalized food plants to choose from. Maize, ironically, is one of the least suited to this region because it’s highly susceptible to pests, disease and erratic rainfall patterns.

Unfortunately, the “fixation on just one crop,” says Kristof, means that traditional varieties of foods are going extinct — crops that already are adapted to drought and heat, traits that become especially important as agriculture copes with climate change.

“Design,” says Kristof, “is key in permaculture,” meaning that everything from garden beds to the edible fish pond to the composting toilet have an important role on their property. And although their neighbors have been skeptical, they’re impressed by the quantity — and diversity — of food grown by the family. More than 200 indigenous fruits and vegetables are grown on their small plot of land, providing a year-round supply of food to the Nordins and their neighbors.

In addition, they’re creating a “model village” by training several families who rent houses on the property,) to practice and teach others about the permaculture techniques that they use around their homes. They also have built an “edible playground,” where children can play, eat and learn about various indigenous fruits.

More important, the Nordins are showing that by not sweeping, burning and removing all organic matter, people can get more out of the land than just maize and reduce their dependence on high-cost agricultural inputs in the process.

And indigenous crops can be an important source of income for farmers. Rather than import amaranth, sorghum, spices, tamarinds and other products from India, South Africa and other countries, the Nordins are helping farmers find ways to market seeds, as well as value-added products, from local resources. These efforts not only provide income and nutrition, but fight the “stigma that anything Malawian isn’t good enough,” says Kristof. “The solutions,” he says, “are literally staring us in the face.”

And as a visitor walked around seeing and tasting the various crops at the Nordins’ home, it became obvious that maize is not Malawi’s only miracle.

“Meet the Nourishing the Planet Advisory Group” is a new regular series where we profile advisors of the Nourishing the Planet project. This week, we’re featuring Dr. Samuel Myers, who is an Instructor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and a member of the Worldwatch Institute Board of Directors.

(Photo: Harvard University)

Name: Dr. Samuel Myers

Affiliation: Harvard Medical School; The Worldwatch Institute

Location: Boston, United States

Bio: Samuel Myers is an Instructor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School. His research interests include human health impacts of large-scale, anthropogenic environmental change including climate change, land use change, and deterioration of ecosystem services. Dr. Myers also studies the  consequences of large-scale environmental change to human nutrition and impact of food production systems on the environment. He is Board Certified in internal medicine and is a Staff Physician at the Mount Auburn Hospital where he continues to see patients. Dr. Myers is also a member of the Worldwatch Institute Board of Directors.

Recent Work: Global Environmental Change: The Threat to Human Health Emerging threats to human health from global environmental change (see citation below)(1).

On the Nourishing the Planet project: At the same time that billions of people are suffering from protein-calorie malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, we are encountering numerous environmental headwinds in nourishing the global population. These include land degradation, soil nutrient depletion, biodiversity loss and a host of factors associated with climate change including temperature rise, altered access to water, more natural disasters, increased ground level ozone concentrations, and altered exposure to pests and pathogens. These challenges will manifest differently in different locations, and overcoming them will require solutions that have been developed in a way that is sensitive to local context. I see this as the great value of the Nourishing the Planet project. We need to identify a suite of agricultural innovations appropriate for different locations and contexts that we can employ to improve nutritional security around the globe. Nourishing the Planet is a very valuable effort towards this goal.

In your report ‘Global Environmental Change: The Threat to Human Health’ you describe the health impacts of climate change as an opportunity as well as a challenge. Can you describe those challenges and the alternate opportunities they present? Why should countries like the United States, who are the primary source of climate change, care about the health impacts of climate change on people in developing countries? Let me just say that there is a clear moral imperative for people in the wealthy world to address the suffering of people in the poor world given that our consumption patterns have put them in harm’s way. Addressing the health impacts of climate change is an opportunity as well as a challenge, because if we recognize this moral imperative, and rise to the challenge of helping to address these health threats, we will be addressing some of the most entrenched scourges of human wellbeing: malnutrition, poverty, infectious disease, inadequate water and sanitation, etc.  I believe that Nourishing the Planet can play an important role in helping to identify and highlight approaches to meeting nutritional needs that increase resilience to climate change—as well as other types of ongoing environmental change. This need for the wealthy world to help the poor world increase its resilience to environmental threats is central to all the health-related challenges of climate change and an area where Nourishing the Planet has a lot to offer.

1.         Myers SS, Patz J. 2009. Emerging threats to human health from global environmental change. Annual Review of Environment & Resources 34: 223-52