Supporting a true agricultural revolution

It is heartening that the international community is finally paying attention to small farmers – the people who produce the majority of the world’s food and safeguard our ecosystems, and yet are the majority of the world’s poor. Everybody agrees that if we want to address the food crisis, we need to invest in small-holder agriculture. Yet what kind of help do these farmers need?

Most of the buzz these days is around a 'Green Revolution' for Africa, using essentially the same thinking we saw for Asia three decades ago. The Green Revolution in Asia was premised on a single dimension: increasing agricultural yields through modern technology to boost food production and feed people. And it was indeed successful.

Yet we now know that this partial success came at a great cost: badly depleted soils and water supplies, lost crop diversity, poisoned ecosystems, farmers becoming indebted from the high costs of inputs, increased inequity and accelerated rural-to-urban migration. In addition, we weren’t calculating the carbon footprint of high-input agriculture, but today we know that this industrial form of agriculture is responsible for up to 14 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions –not counting the deforestation that adds another 18 per cent.

Despite a series of high-level food summits since 2008, the hunger/poverty nexus remains more serious than ever. The question we keep hearing today is how will the world increase food production by 70 per cent to meet rising food demands and feed more than a billion hungry people?

But a growing consensus is asking whether this is the right question. From 2004 to 2008, 400 of the world’s top agricultural scientists, through the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), asked a different question: How do we rethink our global food system so that it can feed people, create healthy communities and economies, and sustain the planet?

The IAASTD, which I co-chaired, asked a complex question because we don’t live in a one-dimensional world. Food, climate and economic problems are all related. And, if we looked simply at food production, that would be business as usual. The global experience with food, finance and economics tells us that business as usual is not an option.

So what should we learn from the IAASTD? We reached the conclusion that to achieve food security we must take into account the multi-functionality of agriculture. In other words, the link between farming and a wide range of other development sectors.

Beyond food production, we need to invest in technologies that blend farmer knowledge and innovation with formal science. We need to support an agriculture that fosters rural economies; that restores, not erodes, biological diversity and soil fertility; and that builds resilient food systems that can withstand shocks like climate change.

Of course, no discussion on ending hunger is complete without asking bigger questions about how our food system is organised. We could significantly reduce hunger by enacting policies and practices that ensure equitable access to food, reduce food waste and post-harvest losses, build vibrant local markets, and redirect the land and resources increasingly being used to feed cars, animals and industrial processes, to nourish humans. All this while supporting smallholder farmers so they can maintain ownership of their own productive resources and be the stewards of the land that will sustain the generations to come.

The evidence in support of low input, ecological or 'conservation' agriculture is undeniable, from the IAASTD to the Union of Concerned Scientists to a recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report that states: 'Organic agriculture can be more conducive to food security in Africa than most conventional production systems, and is more likely to be sustainable in the long term.' And evidence that sustainable, ecologically based agriculture can provide the nutrition and income to the billion-plus poor and hungry of today, and the two billion newcomers by 2050, is now well-proven.

Here lies a great opportunity for Canada to effect a different kind of revolution. Canada’s recently released Food Security Strategy contains some heartening elements. It states that the current agricultural paradigm is not sustainable, and that we need to look beyond food production in order to effect real transformation in the food system. So the best thing Canada could do is to focus its modest aid resources in the areas that we know will have the greatest long-term impact: ecological, organic and conservation agriculture, an agriculture that is in harmony with its environment, the people that practice it and those who enjoy its multiple benefits.

What we need more than another Green Revolution is an agro-ecological evolution.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article was originally published by Embassy.
* Hans R. Herren is co-chair of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 1995 World Food Prize laureate and currently president of the Millennium Institute (MI).
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