Radical Change Needed for Global Agriculture
29th March 2010
A report to be released at a pivotal global meeting on agriculture finds that transforming the agriculture agenda to meet the challenges of a warmer, environmentally-degraded world of 9 billion people will require changes "as radical as those that occurred during industrial and agricultural revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries."
The comprehensive assessment, Transforming Agricultural Research for Development, suggests the need for massive reform of the architecture of what it terms a currently "fragmented global system of research and development," in order to better reach small-scale farmers on the ground, while making food production more sustainable and the systems in which they are produced more resilient to future climatic and energy shocks.
The report, funded by a range of international organizations and development agencies, including the World Bank, European Commission, and the UK Department for International Development, provides a stage-setter at the first Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD), which has been tasked by the G8 to turn priorities on future needs in agriculture into constructive actions to reshape its future. Nearly one thousand participants, including World Food Prize Laureates, heads of international organizations, agriculture ministers, farmers, civil society groups, community development organizations, leading scientists, and private sector innovators are expected to participate in the meeting, taking place 28-31 March in Montpellier, France. The report, prepared by a team of experts led by Uma Lele and including Eugene Terry, Eduardo Trigo and Jules Pretty, builds on extensive consultations across all continents in 2009 and their considerable experience in global food and agriculture, and is undergoing review by stakeholders around the world. It will be formally presented at GCARD on Monday, 29 March.
According to World Bank estimates, some 1.4 billion people were already living in poverty in 2005, well before the 2007 food price increases and the 2008 financial crisis. Since the financial crisis, an additional 100 million people are now believed to have joined the ranks of the poor and hungry, according to both FAO and World Bank estimates. "It is clear that the Millennium Development Goal of substantially reducing the world's hungry by 2015 will not be met. A major cause has been a steady decline in policy attention to agriculture and rural development," said Uma Lele, the lead author of the report and Former Senior Adviser at the World Bank. "Little has been done by developed and developing countries alike to deal with the daunting challenge of hunger with long term- development assistance to agriculture and rural development. Rather as a flip side of development, short term emergency food and other emergency aid have increased."
Over the 1981 to 2007 period, the share of net aid flows to developing countries has become negative for Latin America and for East Asia, and it has declined substantially for South Asia. Even for sub-Saharan Africa, net aid has declined and less of it has been going to agriculture. "Barring the three big countries of China, India, and Brazil, capacity of most developing countries in agricultural R&D has been winding down," said Lele. "We must make a quantum leap in building back up their capacity and translate government and donor pledges into concrete actions."
"There has been remarkable progress in food production over the past half-century, with historically unprecedented improvements when agricultural research and development were given primacy," said Jules Pretty, a global author and Professor of Environment & Society, Department of Biological Sciences, at the University of Essex, UK. "But some of those benefits were spread unevenly, and there are big problems around the corner: climate change, the energy crunch, economic uncertainty, population growth, environmental degradation, and a shift in consumption patterns in emerging economies that are following the same unsustainable models found in the West. Substantial changes are needed in the levels and types of aid and the way it is given."
Meanwhile the theme for the next Cambridge Energy Forum will be the multiplicity of interactions between agriculture and energy, both as a larger user of energy (and perhaps carbon emitter) and as a potentially large supply of energy sources (biomass, energy-saving alternative materials, wastes, energy crops, sites for renewables etc etc).
Cambridge Energy Forum feel this theme is not yet fully explored in the UK, yet is wholly relevant to the east of England in particular with a large agri-hinterland and real energy issues.
Speakers will include:
- Richard Stark, Head of Commercial Development at British Sugar
- John French / Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley from InCrops
- Bruce Tofield, Innovation and Change, Cred School of Environment and Science, University of East Anglia
