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State of the World
State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet
From the Worldwatch Institute, the premier environmental nonprofit, an incisive account of the global food crisis―and how it can be solved. Known for tackling the most pressing issues that face our world, the Worldwatch Institute has dedicated the 2011 edition of its flagship report to a compelling look at the global food crisis, with particular emphasis on what innovators globally can do to help solve a worldwide problem. State of the World 2011 not only introduces us to the latest agro-ecological innovations and their global applicability but also gives broader insights into issues including poverty, international politics, and even gender equity.
Written in clear, concise language, with easy-to-read charts and tables, State of the World 2011 , produced with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides a practical vision of the innovations that will allow billions of people to feed themselves, while restoring rural economies, creating livelihoods, and sustaining the natural resource base on which agriculture depends.
Written in clear, concise language, with easy-to-read charts and tables, State of the World 2011 , produced with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides a practical vision of the innovations that will allow billions of people to feed themselves, while restoring rural economies, creating livelihoods, and sustaining the natural resource base on which agriculture depends.
- GenresNonfiction
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
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October 31, 2018This is almost entirely a set of reports and essays by a range of authors about agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa , and largely they are quite upbeat which for some may come as a surprise.
Long ago and far away the old dog was still alive and I'd take her for a walk , up a footpath, along past some villas, then into a patch of pine wood, twisting roots divided by deep carpets of fallen needles, where I'd generally meet an old man and his little dog on the way out of the woods. As is customary we'd bid one another a good day, apart from the one occasion when he stopped, lent heavily on his walking stick, and said "I don't think Africa will ever be able to feed itself". Naturally, as is customary, I murmured polite nothings and scurried on my way past the entrances to flooded WWII bunkers and further into the woods. Africa, or so I understand, is a fairly big and quite varied place, yet for a good many of us our mental model of its agriculture is coloured by the infamous famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, or some news coverage with some unfarmable looking scrub land in the background, or some idea about donated food aid to the continent. This volume is a corrective to all that.
There are interventions by the slow food movement to promote bee keeping in Ethiopia, the roles of radio, mobile phones and theatre in spreading ideas and best practice among farming communities, urban farms, planting trees in arable land - a bit of shade nearer the equator increases crop yield by up to 15%, enhancing soil fertility and water retention through zero tillage techniques, mulching, nitrogen fixing crops and trees, the benefits of cover crops, community groups, a return to traditional crops (sorghum in particular was mentioned) and plant varieties which flourish rather than struggle in the soil. In short lots of good things.
There are two basic ways of reading all this. One is to celebrate all the above good things - an optimistic reading. The other is to take a realistic reading - if all these ideas are so simple, so cheap, and as effective as claimed then there must be some massive barriers which are preventing their wider uptake .
Among the downsides of the presentations - each individual one tends to be reporting on a relatively small area with at most a glance to the countrywide story for example Zambia's experience with subsidising commercial fertilisers - they boost production causing the price to drop while continuing to impoverish the soil - in short there is a lot of cost to the government in order to increase the medium risk of catastrophically reducing the inherent fertility of the soil. Secondly there is little historical perspective and no analysis of the effectiveness of government policies - possibly out of a desire of the contributors to be diplomatic.
Within the book criticisms emerge over the proposed answers to Africa's food insecurity, a recognition that 'good' and 'better' can be contentious terms. If high milk yielding, good for eating, fast growing varieties of cattle are introduced to an area but struggle with the distances they have to go to get water they are not suitable however 'good' or 'better' than the local cows they may be. The same goes for new plant varieties. One of the needs identified is to develop local expertise and more than that to sustain that expertise across generations - here the book runs foul by not making policy recommendations, the nearest that we read to the establishment of grassroots agricultural colleges is that churches may take on something of this role as part of seminary education preparing people for the ministry which gave me flashbacks to Independent People and the famed clergyman who bred a race of mighty sheep, hardy and thick of fleece .
Chapter Six, by Roland Bunch, raises the first discordant note as it raises the threat of widespread endemic famine across the continent due to the collapse in soil fertility.. What this chapter highlights is how many issues come together to cause complex problems - climate change, deforestation, the cost of petro-chemicals required by the Haber-Bosch process to produce commercial nitrogen fertilisers, that these fertilisers work to reduce inherent soil fertility, increasing the area under cultivation to cope with a growing population - which reduces the amount of land available for traditional management techniques such as leaving areas fallow, land purchase or rental agreements by non-African states and companies from Saudi Arabia to South Korea (all of whom are seeking to escape their own local agricultural problems), desertification, reduction in the number of animals kept by each household meaning their is less manure for muck spreading, urbanisation - with largely men leaving the countryside leaving agriculture to be an increasingly female affair then this sharpens the difficulty that women can have in getting their voices and experiences heard. However Bunch feared that we'd be seeing widespread famine within five years, assuming at time of typing that this particular horseman of the apocalypse has not taken up permanent residence on the continent so far underlines the lack of data available to the authors.
This gives rise to further discussion in other chapters - some approaches to revitalising sub-Saharan African can work together while others such as organic farming techniques and the use of chemical fertilisers will not sit together. Furthermore those venturing to offer opinions on how to change the situation are not disinterested persons but invariably already have a dog in the fight as the saying goes . The increasing amount of research funding going to companies like Monsanto is highlighted in this regard. This isn't to say that new seed varieties developed by commercial companies are bad, but that claims made on their behalf or for that matter for any single one approach frequently reflect what benefits the speaker rather than what may work in and on the ground in any one particular field. Given the web of interconnected problems the longing for a single silver bullet solution is understandable but that itself is part of the problem. There are no silver bullets .
In this regard I was particularly impressed by Hans Herren's contribution towards Chapter 15 - "Innovations in Understanding Complex Systems" in which he points out that farming is intrinsically complicated, sustainable agriculture is even more complicated because it does not take place in an economic vacuum, and that food production is both embedded in the environment and changing it at the same time. Since are not considering a vacuum, tabula rasa, or terra nullius. We are obliged to appreciate there are quite considerable forces that have produced the current state of sub-Saharan African agriculture, equally if a Sri Lankan farmer is able to lose much of their fruit crop carrying it to market but still makes a reasonable living for themselves then plainly the incentives for them to get more of it to market to enable poorer citizens to be able to afford to buy some probably aren't there.
Reading this brought back to mind studying history at the age of fifteen. We had two history teachers at our school, one was the head of department, a slightly built Scotswoman who insisted on detail she was the head of the department, and a younger man who amazingly considering the low class of our educational establishment had a doctorate and told us that our exam syllabus was particularly boring. We, fortunate that we were, had to study the 18th century English Agricultural revolution which required remembering Jethro Tull and his seed drill, arguments for & against Enclosures, the Speenhamland system, Bakewell and animal husbandry and many, many more entrancing topics to pass our examination. I mention all this not merely because I enjoy rambling on but because of the contrast between 18th and 19th century England and contemporary sub-Saharan Africa where traditional forms of landholding mean that many lack title to the land that they work or have left fallow - a very Romantic state of affairs but one which puts those people at risk from deals made at Government level, transport links built by former colonial powers support extracting goods rather than supplying internal markets while the free trade ideologies of the world's current great powers leave local agriculture at risk of having cheap goods dumped on their markets when distant countries have surpluses which undercut local production. In Britain an agricultural revolution took place in a protectionist regime - first ongoing war with France, then the corn laws - in conjunction with the development of new modes of transport, first canals then railways, and served a British market. The contrasts with the sub-Saharan situation are total. Not all of the farmers mentioned in this book think of themselves as part of the nexus of a market economy and don't aim to produce surpluses to sell, transport links can mean that it is cheaper and more effective to freight food in from the USA than from within a country's borders, some large scale farms are growing produce for the international market rather than to meet local demand. All of these factors reduce local food security south of the Sahara, the structures behind all of them further complicate efforts to elevate hunger, which as this book reminds us is not about producing more - but equal and effective distribution .
This is a book then that offers grounds for optimism and grounds for pessimism in equal measure, it is well calculated, unlike the celebrity gossip served up as the contemporary equivalent bread and circuses, to raise the moral fibre of the reader and improve their digestive capabilities. It's probably the nearest book I've come across that I might recommend as a must read, not just to share hope and despair, those merry bedfellows, but simply because of how it enriches the picture of the world with it's black and white photos of handsome cattle and women dressed up in their finest geometrically printed fabrics hoeing and sowing
Long ago and far away the old dog was still alive and I'd take her for a walk , up a footpath, along past some villas, then into a patch of pine wood, twisting roots divided by deep carpets of fallen needles, where I'd generally meet an old man and his little dog on the way out of the woods. As is customary we'd bid one another a good day, apart from the one occasion when he stopped, lent heavily on his walking stick, and said "I don't think Africa will ever be able to feed itself". Naturally, as is customary, I murmured polite nothings and scurried on my way past the entrances to flooded WWII bunkers and further into the woods. Africa, or so I understand, is a fairly big and quite varied place, yet for a good many of us our mental model of its agriculture is coloured by the infamous famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, or some news coverage with some unfarmable looking scrub land in the background, or some idea about donated food aid to the continent. This volume is a corrective to all that.
There are interventions by the slow food movement to promote bee keeping in Ethiopia, the roles of radio, mobile phones and theatre in spreading ideas and best practice among farming communities, urban farms, planting trees in arable land - a bit of shade nearer the equator increases crop yield by up to 15%, enhancing soil fertility and water retention through zero tillage techniques, mulching, nitrogen fixing crops and trees, the benefits of cover crops, community groups, a return to traditional crops (sorghum in particular was mentioned) and plant varieties which flourish rather than struggle in the soil. In short lots of good things.
There are two basic ways of reading all this. One is to celebrate all the above good things - an optimistic reading. The other is to take a realistic reading - if all these ideas are so simple, so cheap, and as effective as claimed then there must be some massive barriers which are preventing their wider uptake .
Among the downsides of the presentations - each individual one tends to be reporting on a relatively small area with at most a glance to the countrywide story for example Zambia's experience with subsidising commercial fertilisers - they boost production causing the price to drop while continuing to impoverish the soil - in short there is a lot of cost to the government in order to increase the medium risk of catastrophically reducing the inherent fertility of the soil. Secondly there is little historical perspective and no analysis of the effectiveness of government policies - possibly out of a desire of the contributors to be diplomatic.
Within the book criticisms emerge over the proposed answers to Africa's food insecurity, a recognition that 'good' and 'better' can be contentious terms. If high milk yielding, good for eating, fast growing varieties of cattle are introduced to an area but struggle with the distances they have to go to get water they are not suitable however 'good' or 'better' than the local cows they may be. The same goes for new plant varieties. One of the needs identified is to develop local expertise and more than that to sustain that expertise across generations - here the book runs foul by not making policy recommendations, the nearest that we read to the establishment of grassroots agricultural colleges is that churches may take on something of this role as part of seminary education preparing people for the ministry which gave me flashbacks to Independent People and the famed clergyman who bred a race of mighty sheep, hardy and thick of fleece .
Chapter Six, by Roland Bunch, raises the first discordant note as it raises the threat of widespread endemic famine across the continent due to the collapse in soil fertility.. What this chapter highlights is how many issues come together to cause complex problems - climate change, deforestation, the cost of petro-chemicals required by the Haber-Bosch process to produce commercial nitrogen fertilisers, that these fertilisers work to reduce inherent soil fertility, increasing the area under cultivation to cope with a growing population - which reduces the amount of land available for traditional management techniques such as leaving areas fallow, land purchase or rental agreements by non-African states and companies from Saudi Arabia to South Korea (all of whom are seeking to escape their own local agricultural problems), desertification, reduction in the number of animals kept by each household meaning their is less manure for muck spreading, urbanisation - with largely men leaving the countryside leaving agriculture to be an increasingly female affair then this sharpens the difficulty that women can have in getting their voices and experiences heard. However Bunch feared that we'd be seeing widespread famine within five years, assuming at time of typing that this particular horseman of the apocalypse has not taken up permanent residence on the continent so far underlines the lack of data available to the authors.
This gives rise to further discussion in other chapters - some approaches to revitalising sub-Saharan African can work together while others such as organic farming techniques and the use of chemical fertilisers will not sit together. Furthermore those venturing to offer opinions on how to change the situation are not disinterested persons but invariably already have a dog in the fight as the saying goes . The increasing amount of research funding going to companies like Monsanto is highlighted in this regard. This isn't to say that new seed varieties developed by commercial companies are bad, but that claims made on their behalf or for that matter for any single one approach frequently reflect what benefits the speaker rather than what may work in and on the ground in any one particular field. Given the web of interconnected problems the longing for a single silver bullet solution is understandable but that itself is part of the problem. There are no silver bullets .
In this regard I was particularly impressed by Hans Herren's contribution towards Chapter 15 - "Innovations in Understanding Complex Systems" in which he points out that farming is intrinsically complicated, sustainable agriculture is even more complicated because it does not take place in an economic vacuum, and that food production is both embedded in the environment and changing it at the same time. Since are not considering a vacuum, tabula rasa, or terra nullius. We are obliged to appreciate there are quite considerable forces that have produced the current state of sub-Saharan African agriculture, equally if a Sri Lankan farmer is able to lose much of their fruit crop carrying it to market but still makes a reasonable living for themselves then plainly the incentives for them to get more of it to market to enable poorer citizens to be able to afford to buy some probably aren't there.
Reading this brought back to mind studying history at the age of fifteen. We had two history teachers at our school, one was the head of department, a slightly built Scotswoman who insisted on detail she was the head of the department, and a younger man who amazingly considering the low class of our educational establishment had a doctorate and told us that our exam syllabus was particularly boring. We, fortunate that we were, had to study the 18th century English Agricultural revolution which required remembering Jethro Tull and his seed drill, arguments for & against Enclosures, the Speenhamland system, Bakewell and animal husbandry and many, many more entrancing topics to pass our examination. I mention all this not merely because I enjoy rambling on but because of the contrast between 18th and 19th century England and contemporary sub-Saharan Africa where traditional forms of landholding mean that many lack title to the land that they work or have left fallow - a very Romantic state of affairs but one which puts those people at risk from deals made at Government level, transport links built by former colonial powers support extracting goods rather than supplying internal markets while the free trade ideologies of the world's current great powers leave local agriculture at risk of having cheap goods dumped on their markets when distant countries have surpluses which undercut local production. In Britain an agricultural revolution took place in a protectionist regime - first ongoing war with France, then the corn laws - in conjunction with the development of new modes of transport, first canals then railways, and served a British market. The contrasts with the sub-Saharan situation are total. Not all of the farmers mentioned in this book think of themselves as part of the nexus of a market economy and don't aim to produce surpluses to sell, transport links can mean that it is cheaper and more effective to freight food in from the USA than from within a country's borders, some large scale farms are growing produce for the international market rather than to meet local demand. All of these factors reduce local food security south of the Sahara, the structures behind all of them further complicate efforts to elevate hunger, which as this book reminds us is not about producing more - but equal and effective distribution .
This is a book then that offers grounds for optimism and grounds for pessimism in equal measure, it is well calculated, unlike the celebrity gossip served up as the contemporary equivalent bread and circuses, to raise the moral fibre of the reader and improve their digestive capabilities. It's probably the nearest book I've come across that I might recommend as a must read, not just to share hope and despair, those merry bedfellows, but simply because of how it enriches the picture of the world with it's black and white photos of handsome cattle and women dressed up in their finest geometrically printed fabrics hoeing and sowing
December 8, 2011
Perhaps you already know about the respected Worldwatch Institute
[ http://www.worldwatch.org/mission ] founded in 1974 as an independent research institute to analyze critical global environmental issues and to offer a vision of creating a more sustainable world.
The institute publishes an annual STATE of the WORLD book in addition to its various Worldwatch reports in categories such as Climate Change, Energy, and Materials; Ecological and Human Health; Economics, Institutions, and Security; and Food, Water, Population, and Urbanization.
The theme of this 2011 STATE OF THE WORLD publication called Nourishing the Planet is the food crisis. Leading global thinkers, journalists, scientists, farmers, advisors and others have contributed articles for a volume that attempts to "understand not only the connections between hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation but also sustainable solutions to these problems." (page vii)
Think agriculture, hunger, Africa, climate change, food biodiversity, soil fertility, women farmers, ecosystem health. Then, for this particular global problem, think Africa again, in particular sub-Saharan Africa, where the Worldwatch team traveled to 25 countries to uncover agricultural innovations that offer some possible solutions for the global challenges.
The volume has a textbook-y feel with its double columns,many photos, green-colored headings and inserted boxes, tables, figures, notes, and index.
Most articles can be read separately. In fact, I envision that to be the case for many readers since this is not a typical narrative non-fiction type read. The table of contents is particularly excellent for a reader interested in such selective reading. The article titles are informative and helpfully descriptive.
(Examples: Chapter 7 Safeguarding Local Food Biodiversity...
From the Field: Threats to Animal Genetic Resources in Kenya...
From the Field: The Benefits of Solar Cookers in Senegal...)
For additional resources about agricultural innovations, check out www.nourishingtheplanet.org
March 10, 2012
As always with their annual publications, the book is well researched, with multiple authors providing various view of the subject matter.
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