Worldwatch is an independent research organization based in Washington, D.C. that works on energy, resource, and environmental issues. For their annual State of the World report senior researcher Danielle Nierenberg traveled throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, home to 239 million of the world’s 925 million hungry, to investigate and documents programs that effectively address hunger and ecology. You can read about the report’s findings in her blog, Nourishing the Planet.

The meta finding of the report is that we need to move “beyond seeds, move beyond farms, move beyond Africa.” In other words, the Green Revolution’s heavy emphasis on seeds and fertilizers was too narrow and too input-intensive, and it focused on just a few key crops instead of a diverse array of nutrient-dense and climate-appropriate crops. Additionally, hunger organizations have put a disproportionate amount of resources towards food aid to urban areas. Nearly 80 percent of Africa’s population are farmers, yet African nations typically spend only 4 percent of their budgets on rural areas. Some 40 percent of the food currently produced worldwide is wasted before it’s consumed. What works more effectively are programs and incentives that support farming that is less resource-intensive and that is ecologically diverse. Aid needs to focus more on soil health, water conservation, and making better use of the food already being grown.

“The international community has been neglecting entire segments of the food system in its efforts to reduce hunger and poverty,” says Nierenberg. “The solutions won’t necessarily come from producing more food, but from changing what children eat in schools, how foods are processed and marketed, and what sorts of food businesses we are investing in.”

Most of all, the reports shows how valuable farmer collaboration can be. As Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network said, “A lot of the investments that we’re seeing is that researchers, policymakers want to be the ones that pass on information, that pass on knowledge to farmers or to the very people that want to develop and be in charge of their own destiny. But what we have not done is to invest in allowing them to share information with us and for us to be able to hear their voices and translate them.”

So what does this look like? Here are 15 exciting examples documented by Nierenberg:

1. Rice Breeding in Madagascar: Centre National de la Recherche Appliquee au Developpment Rual is introducing new varieties of rice in close collaboration with farmers. The organization is responding to what farmers say about which varieties they prefer growing and is also working with farmers to adapt different technologies to Madagascar’s specific ecosystem and farming practices.

2. School Gardens in Uganda: The school garden movement is gaining ground in Africa! The  Slow Food Mukono Convivium has helped establish 31 school and community gardens “to improve young people’s relationship with agriculture and to develop innovative methods for long-lasting food sovereignty.” Ugandan children are leaning to preserve their culinary traditions while the program brings nutrient-dense, local fruit to school meals.

3. One Acre Fund puts farmers first: This program in East Africa combines agriculture extension services, micro-loans, training, transportation, and access to markets to provide rural farmers with the tools they need to feed their families and increase their incomes.

4. Rainwater Harvesting: Much of Africa’s water struggles are not so much about physical water scarcity as about the need to collect rainwater during rainy seasons for use during dry spells and droughts. Most Sub-Saharan African countries use at most 5 percent of their rainwater potential. Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency has helped organize the Southern and Eastern Africa Rainwater Network, 12 national rainwater associations that work together to publicize rainwater harvesting information and innovations. On innovations, a system of rainwater collection pots, returns its $800 investment within 2-3 years and enables farmers to plant more diverse crops, which in turn improves the nutritional quality of food for the community.

5. Grain Trading in Zambia: Some food innovations happen through policy. Comon Market for Eastern and Southern Africa has established the Alliance for Commodity Trade in Eastern and Southern Africa to develop and implement programs that improve market access for farmers and traders. Now regional farmers’ interests are on the table in multinational trade meetings and policy talks — so trade barriers that hold farmers back from feeding their region can be changed.

6. New Cassava Varieties in Zanzibar: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture started breeding program with farmers to develop cassava varieties that can resist diseases specific to the region. IITA is working with funders on making it more affordable to grow these superior, but more expensive varieties.

7. Solar Cookers in Senegal: Solar Household Energy Inc. (SHE, best acroynm ever) promotes solar cooking enterprises to help reduce dependence on biomass for cooking. Aside from the environmental benefits, solar cooking frees women’s time normally spent on collecting fuel so they can now work more on their farms, which increases their family income.

8. Evergreen Revolution for Africa: While the authors of the report advocate moving away from a single-minded focus on increasing yields there is increasing evidence that a new emphasis on improving the health of soil actually brings about the added benefit of increasing yields. Farmers in Malawi who have been encouraged to plant nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs like Faidherbia albida (indigenous to Africa) in their fields have seen their maize yields nearly double. Other benefits include shade protection, soil erosion control, and increased biodiversity.

9. Sustainable oyster fisheries in Gambia: TRY Women’s Oyster Harvesting Association has joined with Ba Nafaa, a sustainable fisheries projected funded by USAID, to create a sustainable co-management plan for oyster fisheries. By extending the closed season and adopting practices that promote a healthy ecosystem participants have seen harvests increase. They are now working on raising the price of oysters for the tourist market and on creating a permanent market.

10. Safer wastewater irrigation in Ghana: International Water Management Institute is working with Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture, universities, and growers in three cities with large urban agriculture spaces on new methods for safer water fetching and irrigation. Meanwhile, a team of researchers has strategized on how to “sell” the idea that paying more for cleaner food would benefit consumers. This new connection between agriculture extension services and research brings academic research back into the real world by implementing workable solutions.

11. Composting toilets: All over the world people are working on composting toilets that keep farm fields clean and nutrient-rich and help people manage their human waste. One example is the composting toilets from Stacia and Kristof Nordin’s permaculture project in Malawi.

12. Theater that gives women farmers a voice: Three quarts of agricultural workers in Sub-Saharan Africa are women. Women do all the food processing and most of the storage, transportation, marketing. Yet because cultural barriers keep women’s interests from being represented in decision-making bodies women experience relatively low productivity and little access to markets. In recognition of the important role women play in ensuring household food security, Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network has launched Women Accessing Realized Markets in Mozambique and Malawi. There popular theater performers use scripts based on FANRPAN research followed by community discussions that allow women to tell development organizations what they need–but in a culturally-sanctioned way.

13. Food storage bags that cut waste: One of the biggest culprits of food waste is pests, so new food storage bags are being developed to keep out pests safely and inexpensively.  Community Markets for Conservation in Zambia is promoting grain bags from GrainPro, Inc. to protect maize from weevils and grain borers, and Purdue Improved Cowpea Storage bags (via Purdue University) protects cowpea crops in western Africa. Mazingira Institute is training communities in Kenya on how to preserve foods like grinding and bottling nuts.

14. Churches connecting with farms: Throughout Africa churches (often the largest NGO in the area) are going beyond addressing hunger by distributing food. Many are working with Educational Concerns for Hunger Organizations to collect and disseminate agricultural knowledge to help support food sovereignty.

15. Small-scale livestock production: In Rwanda Heifer International contributes to the country’s recovery by giving farmers South African dairy cows to raise along with livestock training. The goal of the One Cow Per Household Program is to provide 257,000 of the poorest households with cows, training, and access to cooperatives in what will eventually be a self-sustaining system.

Now that we know… what’s next? The main audience for Nourshing the Planet is governments, policymakers, NGOs, and donors. The report includes briefing documents, summaries, a database, videos, and podcasts all intended to make the case for a wide-spread, coordinated effort to support ecologically healthy food sovereignty world-wide.

As citizens we can read about effective programs and send our own financial support. Our individual contributions are small, but they add up and and signify a vote. We can also hold our government, policymakers, funders, and corporations accountable. Report contributor Anna Lappé suggests four things to keep our eyes on in the future:

• How are our Federal policies helping and promoting food systems that mitigate and adapt to climate challenges? (Hello, Food and Farm Bill 2012!)
• Are international policies offering “perverse” incentives to deforest the landscape or discourage food and seed storage? Or are they offering incentives that protect the climate and support stable markets for farmers?
• What international funding/finance are we seeing and where is the money going?
• How are agribusiness and food companies responding to civil society’s questioning? Are they accountable to their supply chain?

Learn more via Nourshing the Planet’s blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. Purchase a copy of State of the World 2011 in print, PDF, or Kindle form and access additional materials via Worldwatch Institute.

Worldwatch Institute’s 15th Annual State of the World Symposium takes place in Washington, D.C. this Wednesday, January 19. Live streaming will be available at www.nourishingtheplanet.com.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

Politicians and philanthropists, who may mean well, jump on the high technology band wagon. Could the promise of financial support or investment return fuel their apparent compassion?

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation supposedly works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa. While these sentiments and goals may be philanthropy at its best, some of the coalition partners have a different agenda.

One of the key players in AGRA, Monsanto, hopes to spread its genetically engineered seed throughout Africa by promising better yields, drought resistance, an end to hunger, etc. Could a New Green Revolution succeed where the original Green Revolution had failed? Or was the whole concept of a Green Revolution a pig in a poke to begin with?

Monsanto giving free seed to poor small holder farmers sounds great, or are they just setting the hook? Remember, next year those farmers will have to buy their seed. Interesting to note that the Gates Foundation purchased $23.1 million worth of Monsanto stock in the second quarter of 2010. Do they also see the food crisis in Africa as a potential to turn a nice profit? Every corporation has one overriding interest–self-interest, but surely not charitable foundations?

Food shortages are seldom about a lack of food. There is plenty of food in the world, the shortages occur because of the inability to get food where it is needed and the inability of the hungry to afford it. These two problems are principally caused by, as Francis Moore Lappe’ put it, a lack of justice. There are also ethical considerations, a higher value should be placed on people than on corporate profit, this must be at the forefront, not an afterthought.

In 2008, there were shortages of food, in some places, for some people. There was never a shortage of food in 2008 on a global basis, nor is there currently. True, some countries, in Africa for example, do not have enough food where it is needed, yet people with money have their fill no matter where they live. Poverty and inequality cause hunger.

The current food riots in Mozambique were a result of increased wheat prices on the world market. The UN Food and Agriculture organization, (FAO) estimates the world is on course to the third largest wheat harvest in history, so increasing wheat prices were not caused by actual shortages, but rather by speculation on the price of wheat in the international market.

While millions of people go hungry in India, thousands of kilos of grain rot in storage. Unable to afford the grain, the hungry depend on the government to distribute food. Apparently that’s not going so well.

Not everyone living in a poor country goes hungry, those with money eat. Not everyone living in rich country is well fed, those without money go hungry. We in the US are said to have the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, yet even here, surrounded by an over abundance of food, there are plenty of hungry people and their numbers are growing. Do we too have a food crisis, concurrent with an obesity crisis?

Why is there widespread hunger? Is food a right? Is profit taking through speculation that drives food prices out of the reach of the poor a right? Is pushing high technology agriculture on an entire continent at that could feed itself a (corporate) right?

In developing countries, those with hunger and poor food distribution, the small farmers, most of whom are women, have little say in agricultural policy. The framework of international trade and the rules imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on developing countries, places emphasis on crops for export, not crops for feeding a hungry population.

Despite what we hope are the best intentions of the Gates Foundation, a New Green Revolution based on genetically engineered crops, imported fertilizer and government imposed agricultural policy will not feed the world. Women, not Monsanto, feed most of the worlds population, and the greatest portion of the worlds diet still relies on crops and farming systems developed and cultivated by the indigenous for centuries, systems that still work, systems that offer real promise.

The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.

The ultimate cause of hunger is not a lack of Western agricultural technology, rather hunger results when people are not allowed to participate in a food system of their choosing. Civil wars, structural adjustment policies, inadequate distribution systems, international commodity speculation and corporate control of food from seed to table— these are the causes of hunger, the stimulus for food crises.

If the Gates Foundation is serious about ending hunger in Africa, they need to read the IAASTD report, not Monsanto’s quarterly profit report. Then they can decide how their money might best be spent.

Originally published on CommonDreams.org

Yesterday in speaking with Allafrica.com, President Obama discussed today’s trip to Ghana, and his ideas for alleviating hunger in Africa. In just a few words, he revealed a bit about his possible economic agenda there, too:

“Now, I also think on the ground in many of these countries, how we think about not high-tech stuff but low-tech technologies to, for example, improve food production is vitally important.”

Low-tech technologies could imply better education around sustainable farming practices and food storage. But “improving food production” sounds a lot like boosting yields, similar to what Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in June (“If we can help countries become more productive themselves then they will be in a better position to feed their own people”). Both messages imply that not enough food is currently being produced to feed the world population. But as I’ve argued before, hunger is not a yield problem. Feeding people is about access, which is lacking even in the United States, where around 36 million people are food insecure. Speculation on commodities, the same practice that bottomed out our financial sector, has resulted in higher food prices and by extension, a food crisis, because people could not afford to buy food.

And yet these overtures are all too familiar. The President is echoing the wording featured in advertisements by companies like Monsanto, in whose interest it is that we continue to pursue GM seeds abroad (Monsanto holds 90% of seed patents) even though in the last 20 years these seeds have failed to produce the higher yields and drought tolerance they have promised. In an economic crisis, perhaps there is discussion that we can stimulate our economy by getting Africans hooked on our seeds and the herbicides/pesticides they require. But it will surely not be Africans who benefit from this arrangement.

Obama continued:

“And I’m still frustrated over the fact that the green revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009.”

There are very good reasons why we have never introduced a Green Revolution into Africa, namely because there is broad consensus that the Green Revolution in India has been a failure, with Indian farmers in debt, bound to paying high costs for seed and pesticides, committing suicide at much higher rates, and resulting in a depleted water table and a poisoned environment, and by extension, higher rates of cancer. If President Obama is lacking this information, it is his cabinet that is to blame.

Agricultural development is a loaded phrase, vague in the way political phrases can be, because the way it is implemented depends on the viewpoints of those involved in decision making. President Obama is currently embedded in a bubble featuring some of the fervent promoters of the biotech industry and a Green Revolution in Africa, such as Nina Fedoroff, who is a biotechnology researcher currently serving as Hilary Clinton’s adviser on science and technology, and Rajiv Shah who left his post at The Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to serve as the Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics (REE) and Chief Scientist at the USDA. One can’t help but wonder, then, if by requesting this money from the G8 in the name of charity we are instead trying to promote our own economy.

Right now, with most studies being sponsored by industry, millions of dollars being spent on lobbying by agribusiness in Washington, and a revolving door that brings people from private sector agricultural companies to Capital Hill, the public is being given one side of the story on biotechnology. Six European countries have now banned the planting of GMOs in their fields based on this lack of information, following what is called the “Precautionary Principle:” that if there is no scientific consensus, there is a responsibility to intervene and protect the public from possible harm. Instead, the U.S. is conducting a scientific experiment on its people, and the results have been alarming.

Aside from the the impact GMOs have on our health, on which study has been lacking, these crops are responsible for massive pollution and depletion of our waterways, and require high oil inputs and a stable climate to produce. This is not sustainable. Isn’t it then a bit short-sighted to promote GMOs and commodity crops in Africa, where 80% of the population is rural, and 33 million farms each farming 2 hectares or less are producing 90% of the continent’s food?

If we really want to help the hungry, we should invest in tools, arable land for communities, and education about sustainable farming in Africa. We should teach seed-saving and intercropping, so that diets will be diverse and healthy. Most of all, we should avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to hunger, as there are no easy answers. Empowering locals to work within their own climate, governance and culture will ensure that real strides are made in alleviating hunger. Otherwise, instead of teaching Africans to fish, we will be giving Africans fish with the hook of dependence still attached.

Update: The full G8 summit statement on food security can be read here. It is wide-sweeping, and a lot more focused on localized efforts than this piece had predicted. We shall see what the outcome of this statement will be.

[If you feel strongly that GMOs should not be a part of international development policy, sign the CREDO Action petition and let your legislators know!]