47 Portraits of Sustainable Agriculture Projects and Initiatives

Interesting read here

Agricultural sustainability and intensive production practices

"The goal of sustainable agriculture is to maximize the net benefits that society receives from agricultural production of food and fibre and from ecosystem services. This will require increased crop yields, increased efficiency of nitrogen, phosphorus and water use, ecologically based management practices, judicious use of pesticides and antibiotics, and major changes in some livestock production practices. Advances in the fundamental understanding of agroecology, biogeochemistry and biotechnology that are linked directly to breeding programmes can contribute greatly to sustainability.

Agriculturalists are the de facto managers of the most productive lands on Earth. Sustainable agriculture will require that society appropriately rewards ranchers, farmers and other agriculturalists for the production of both food and ecosystem services. One major step would be achieved were agricultural subsidies in the United States, EU and Japan redirected to reward sustainable practices. Ultimately, sustainable agriculture must be a broadly based effort that helps assure equitable, secure, sufficient and stable flows of both food and ecosystem services for the 9,000 million or so people likely to inhabit the Earth.."

Read more here.

Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement

Not so long ago I read the book of Noble peace prize winner Wangari Maathai: The Challenge for Africa. It is a very interesting read for anyone curious in the problems (and possible solutions) facing Africa's development. What I especially like is that Mrs. Maathai places as much blame on the Western world as well as Africans themselves and their leaders. She gives the perspective of the two.
Mrs. Maathai has also founded the Green Belt Movement, a NGO with a mission "to mobilize community consciousness for self-determination, equity, improved livelihoods and security, and environmental conservation.". Definitely check it out.


Let's end with a good Q&A with Wangari Maathai:

"Question: Why did you decide to write about Africa?
Wangari Maathai: I had been working in Africa for thirty-five years, and at all levels of society--in the academy and at the grassroots, as an activist and in the government, as a human rights advocate and an environmentalist. My experience is that dealing with the issues requires a holistic approach and a broad understanding of the issues at play, so that one feels challenged to keep going rather than giving up. I wanted to share my experience with others who, like me, want to see a better Africa. I hope that reading of my experience will help them understand why things are the way they are.

Q: You place as much blame on Africa’s post-independence leaders as on the legacy of colonialism for the failure of Africa to progress, and strongly advocate for better leadership. How do you feel this will be accomplished?
WM: First and foremost, it is important for the African leadership to let go of the excuse of the legacy of colonialism, and to accept that it is many decades since the colonial powers left Africa and some of the expectations of the African people should have been realized. It is the people in charge of the countries that should have made that possible, expcially since many of them were educated, enlightened, well-traveled, and well-exposed. Their people, however, were largely just the reverse and so put a lot of their faith in their leaders. My experience is that it is the leaders who let their people down, and it is they who must make a decision to work for their people. That is more likely to happen than their people having the capacity to hold them accountable and therefore to change the status quo. That’s why I emphasize leadership.

Q: You emphasize the loss of culture as one reason why Africa is not progressing. Why is this important?
WM: Every people in the world has a code of wisdom they have developed out of their experiences over the course of time. That code of wisdom is reflected in their ways of life: their worship practices; their sense of justice and fairness; their agriculture and the food they eat; their biological heritage and environment; their songs, language, and dances; and the way they mourn their dead and celebrate life. All of these are what we mean when we talk about the culture of a people.
The reason why I think culture is important in Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is that peoples’ cultures were deliberately demonized, trivialized, and destroyed, and people were encouraged to embrace a culture that was largely Western. Now the problem is that, when you deny people their cultural heritage, you render them vulnerable and make them feel inadequate. They become people with no ground to stand on, and they are disempowered. That is what happened to Africa during the colonial period, and because the cultures of Africans were largely unwritten when they got their independence, it was very difficult to go back to the pre-colonial cultures, and to a large extent many of them died with their ancestors. Because the people who were given power by the colonial administrators were devoted convertees to Western culture, they imposed that culture even more on their peoples.
As a result, when we look back and try to deal with the challenges that confront us, we don’t have one of the very important platforms we need to stand on to start. When I compare the experience of sub-Saharan Africa with Africa to the north, the reason why the northern Africans seem to have been able to pull out of the colonial legacy better than the southerners is, in my opinion, probably because they have a culture that is written, that wasn’t completely destroyed, and even if the colonial power tried they were able to resist. India also seemed to deal better with their post-colonial period than Sub-Saharan Africa. Gandhi removed his three-piece suit (which represented Western success) and put on a dhoti; he ate Indian food and adopted the symbol of the spinning wheel--all to appeal to the Indian peoples’ sense of themselves and their rich, written culture. This gives me reason to question aloud, and encourage Africans to do the same, whether culture may be a missing link in Africa’s failure to progress.

Q: You examine the negative perspective of Africa that is present in Western media. What do you believe the West doesn’t understand about Africa?
WM: I think there are people who understand Africa but like to present it in a distorted fashion. I also believe there are people who genuinely want to understand Africa, but don’t because they look at Africa through the eyes of the Western media. The African media are not able to penetrate the Western media to give their own story, and even if they did, sometimes that media are already very pro-West, because the journalists have been educated and acculturated in the West and are unable to present Africa as it really is.
Quite often in the case of Africa, people will just present one aspect--for example, poverty--without having the time or patience to explain that poverty is manmade and created both by the local leadership and the international community in the way it deals with Africa. A Western person looking at poverty makes a judgment, without understanding that that poverty is partly caused by the way their government is dealing with Africa. Another good example is the debt issue. Many of us who wanted to campaign for debt cancellation came to appreciate that Africa has already paid the principal on the debt many times over, but the way the debt was structured, Africa was going to pay it through several generations. This is unfair and exploitative. Yet most Westen people are only told that Africans have borrowed and are refusing to pay the money. They don’t get the whole truth.

Q: African leaders often use the phrase “African solutions to African problems.” Do you support this idea?
WM: I’ve yet to see it applied.

Q: You seem optimistic about Africa’s future, despite entrenched challenges. Why?
WM: I would have to accept defeat if, after so many years of committing myself to Africa, I arrived at the conclusion that Africa cannot be saved. My personality is that of an optimist, because I believe that almost every problem has a solution. There are very, very few problems in life that have no solution whatsoever. Where there is a will and a commitment we can always find a solution. I do believe Africa can change. I am an African, I am highly educated; I was educated in the West, I went back home. I worked at all levels of development--among the rich and poor.
If I was able to change and was willing to devote my life to trying to improve Africans’ quality of life and, in spite of all the obstacles, was able to accomplish some measure of success, which even the world came to recognize, why not another person? And not just two people, but four--and then a critical mass of Africans who think like me in every other African country? If that happened, we could change; indeed, it is how things change. There are countries who have been poor, colonized, and enslaved, and they have been able to get out of that situation--mostly due to the kind of leadership they enjoyed. I don’t believe that other people have a monopoly of good leaders. I know I’m not alone. We need to speak out. We need to hold our leaders accountable, so they can stop dividing us along ethnic and economic lines, and begin uniting us so we can have a respectable place at the table of the nations of the world."

Environment for Development

"The Environment for Development initiative is a capacity building program in environmental economics focusing on research, policy advice, and teaching in China, Central America, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania."

This is what EfD says on the theme of agricultural research:

"Land degradation threatens food security and the sustainability of agricultural production in many developing countries. In response, government and development agencies have invested substantial resources in promoting sustainable land management technologies (SLMTs). In spite of the great efforts to promote bunds, SLMTs have not been widely adopted by smallholders in many developing countries.

Not only are the technologies not widely adopted but there is even some evidence that conservation structures, once constructed, are partially or fully removed. In some cases, pilot demonstration projects remain unreplicated on smallholder farms. These findings raise the following questions:

• Why are promoted resource conserving measures not widely adopted by land users?
• Why is there limited success in promoting resource conserving measures?

The research activities on SLM in each EfD center, which depend on the agricultural policy of the specific  country, were developed to answer these critical policy questions."

Also other themes such as Forestry and Climate Change are important.
I recommend visiting the organization's project and research pages for further (scientific) information.

Here is an interesting short article found on the website:
Climate change financing - what is the role of development cooperation? 

"Together with his colleague Emelie César he (Olof Drakenberg) has written the report, Old, New and Future Funding for Environment and Climate Change - the Role of Development Cooperation, which is a background study commissioned by Sida that feeds into the ongoing work on Swedish government policy on environment and climate change.

Weak rule of law, lack of transparency and low administrative capacity risk hamper climate funding to poor countries. The experience of climate finance coming through the Clean Development Mechanisms is illustrative. The least developed countries have attracted about 5 per cent of climate finance with the large majority ending up in China and India.

”The most important role for development cooperation in relation to environment finance in general and climate change finance specifically is to reduce the bottlenecks that inhibit financial flows and effective delivery, so that even the poorest countries benefit from climate change funds. In practice, support for strengthening institutional capacity, increase transparency and combat corruption becomes even more important. In addition, Sida and other donors should prevent the proliferation of funds and conditions that increase transaction costs and reduces national ownership.""

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

So here we have an interesting project promoting a new Green Revolution in Africa. While it is debatable whether the first Green Revolution was succesful, AGRA looks promising and we can atleast give it a chance. Here are the programs that AGRA uses to "trigger comprehensive change" :

• The Seeds Program supports the breeding of improved seed and works to ensure that this good seed gets to farmers. Currently, less than one-quarter of African farmers use high yielding, locally adapted seed. Poor seeds and depleted soils have kept farmers’ yields at one-quarter the global average.
• The Soil Health Program improves farm productivity through increasing farmers’ access to locally appropriate soil nutrients and promoting integrated soil and water management. The Seeds and Soil Health Programs work together to raise farmers’ yields. Both are key to environmental sustainability and helping farmers adapt to and mitigate climate change.
• Once improved seeds and soils engender higher yields, farmers need access to markets for their surplus. AGRA’s Market Access Program pursues multiple routes to expanding market access for smallholders.
• For all of these efforts to have a widespread impact, agricultural policies must provide smallholder farmers with comprehensive support on national, regional and global levels. At the same time, partnerships are needed to marshal the resources and expertise that will catalyze change. AGRA’s Policy and Partnerships Program tackles these challenges.
• All of this takes resources, and one overlooked source is Africa’s own commercial banks. AGRA’s cross-cutting Initiative on Innovative Finance works with Africa’s financial institutions and other partners to increase access to low-interest loans for smallholder farmers and agricultural businesses. 

Agroforestry

If you have checked the previous blog I just posted, then you've certainly bumped up agroforestry. At first sight, this seems like the certain thing to do in any agricultural system anywhere in the world. But keep in mind that disadvantages also exist with this production system. There is not one golden solution that you can blindly promote. All factors have to be considered.

"On the detrimental side, trees can be or be seen to be competitive - either economically or biologically or both - with annual-crop production rather than complementary or supplementary. Consequently, when farm size falls below a certain level, farmers may forego tree products and services in favour of staple food-crop production. Or if land tenure is not secure, the time-lag in realizing benefits gained by planting trees may become a severe disadvantage, and trees will not be planted or protected. Sustainability is not common sense if there is no future return to the individual on today's investment in conservation or long-term production. Also, trees hinder mechanization, and their establishment or maintenance may require more manual labour than is easily available.

...

Policies promoting agroforestry may demand costs from those who will not receive the benefits. Planning for agroforestry becomes very complex if it takes into consideration the incongruencies that may exist between ecological and economic accounting or if it seeks to resolve the issues of equity that promotion of agroforestry may cause across time and between social sectors or between the individual and the community.

...

To maintain the landscape in good health, it is not necessary that every landholding, every stretch of land, contain trees, just as every farmer need not be an agroforester- but it is necessary that there be sufficient trees in the right places, at the least on sloping land and along streams."
(http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80824e/80824E0l.htm) 

Some more related articles:


Livelihoods, Forest, and Conservation in Developing Countries: an Overview 

Agroforestry and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals

Africa Project 2020

Here's a first a blog with different interesting articles concerning sustainable agriculture in Africa: Africa Project 2020

I discovered some interesting projects/links through this blog:

United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD)

Is economic behaviour both the cause and solution to global warming?

Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa