Cross posted from Border Jumpers, Danielle Nierenberg and Bernard Pollack.

Nearly 40 years after Francis Moore Lappé wrote Diet for a Small Planet-one of the first books to take a hard look at the environmental and health problems caused by the meat industry-her daughter Anna Lappé has written a book exposing how the industrial food system is contributing to climate change. In Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna describes how are diets can be a crucial tool in the fight against global warming-and she gives a recipe for what an environmentally sustainable diet should look like, including more locally grown foods and eating less meat.

For more information, check out Anna's "Taking a Bite Out of Climate Change" website.

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Check out this interview featured in Eco-Chick about the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet's on-the-ground research in Africa by Stephanie Rogers:

If it’s true that there are sayers and there are doers, Danielle Nierenberg falls firmly into the latter camp. Danielle is currently traveling through sub-saharan Africa to highlight stories of hope and success in sustainable agriculture and blogging about it at WorldWatch.org.

A Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute and co-Project Director of State of World 2011: Nourishing the Planet, Danielle is a widely cited expert in sustainable agriculture issues and the spread of factory farming. She knows better than most of us how our eating habits affect the world, and the experiences she shares on her blog will blow you away.

So of course, Danielle fits right in as an Eco Chick Heroine for the Planet! I talked to her about women in agriculture, global food issues and what we can all do to help.

SR: We were surprised to learn through your blog, Nourishing the Planet, that 80% of sub-Saharan farmers in Africa are women and that women make up the majority of farmers worldwide. What are some of the unique problems that female farmers face?

DN: Although women produce most of the food and raise most of the livestock in Africa, they rarely have access to land tenure, credit, agricultural extension services, and are under-represented in farmers groups, associations, unions. But by increasing women’s participation and representation in these groups, women and men farmers alike can work together to improve gender awareness, as well as improve their access to loans and agricultural inputs and land tenure. As a result, women are able to earn a greater income, which translates into better nutrition for their families. But womens voices often go unheard, or even ignored, and that has to change.

SR: How has your focus on sustainable agriculture influenced your own eating habits?

DN: I’ve been a vegetarian since I was a teenager, but the more I learn about the global food system, the more interested I become in knowing where my food comes from and how it was produced. I think it’s important to put a face to your food and know not only how the animals you eat were treated, but if the farmers who raised the vegetables and other foods you eat were given a fair price for their crops and if the workers who processed and packaged the food you eat had safe working conditions and were paid a fair wage.

SR: As much as we all care about global food issues and how they affect human health and the environment, sometimes we’re not sure how to help – and sometimes, the problems of people in third-world countries can seem so far away. What can we do to contribute, even if it’s just in a small way?

DN: This is a question we’re asking as part of our Nourishing the Planet project: Why should wealthy foodies in the United States and Europe care about hunger in Africa?

The foodie community in the United States and Europe are a powerful force in pushing for organically grown and local foods in hospitals and schools, more farmers markets, and better welfare of livestock and I think that some of that energy can be harnessed to promote more diversity and resilience in the food system. Right now, the world depends on just a few crops–maize, wheat, and rice–which are vulnerable not only to price fluctuations, but the impacts of climate change. Many indigenous crops–including millet, sorghum, sweet potato, and many others–however, are not only more nutritious than monoculture crops, but also more resilient to adverse weather events and disease.

By supporting–and funding–NGOs and research institutions, such as Slow Food International, Heifer International, and the World Vegetable Center, wealthy foodies can help ensure that farmers in sub-Saharan Africa help maintain agricultural biodiversity.

SR: Did you have any moments of extreme culture shock when you first got to Africa?

DN: We started this trip in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a place most Americans associate with war and hunger because of the famines of the mid 1980s and 1990s. Even today, more than 6 million people in Ethiopia are at risk for starvation so I think I had mentally prepared myself for seeing very desperate people. Instead, though, I found farmers and NGO workers full of hope for agriculture in their country. I think that’s been my greatest surprise about the continent in general — how vibrant, entrepreneurial, friendly, positive, and alive people are here. Six months and thirteen countries later, I’m now in Antananarivo, Madagascar, feeling more hopeful than ever that things are really changing.

The trip is surprising in a lot of different ways. While we’ve seen extreme poverty and environmental degradation during our trip, we’ve also been impressed by the level of knowledge about things like hunger, climate change, HIV/AIDS and other issues from the farmers we meet. The people in many of these countries know better than anyone how to solve the problems their facing, they just need attention–and support–from the international community. In Africa, maybe more than anywhere else we’ve traveled, a little funding can go a long way (if used the right way).

SR: What’s your biggest goal for the Nourishing the Planet trip?

DN: We’ve made a point during this trip to focus on stories of hope and success in agriculture. Most of what Americans hear about Africa is famine, conflict and HIV/AIDS, and we wanted to highlight the things that are going well on the continent. There’s a lot of hope out here – a lot of individuals and organizations doing terrific work – but that doesn’t necessarily translate into them receiving resources or funding.

We hope to create a roadmap for funders and the donor community and shine a big spotlight on the projects and innovations that seem to be working, so that they can be scaled up or replicated in other places. Please check out our site and sign up for our weekly newsletter — and if you know anyone or project we should visit on the continent, please email me at dnierenberg@worldwatch.org.

Thanks Danielle, and many thanks as well to Bernard Pollack for the beautiful photos!

Special thanks to the Mail & Gaurdian (UK and Africa) for publishing this Op-Ed written by Danielle Nierenberg and Biran Halweil.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the devastating famine that hit Ethiopia in the 1980s. At that time, Bob Geldof brought together a group of well-meaning musicians to raise money to feed millions of people. Band Aid raised millions of dollars and immeasurable awareness with the compelling chorus of “feed the world”, but global interest in those hungry people has plummeted in the last two decades, if the barometer is international investment in agriculture. Agriculture’s share of global development aid has dropped from 7% to 4% since the song debuted, even though most of the world’s poor and hungry people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

The famine-stricken Ethiopia that inspired Band Aid remains hobbled by food shortages. Some 23 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk for starvation, according to the World Food Programme, which delivers food aid around the world. The global recession and recent spike in food prices isn’t helping, either. The United Nations reported recently that the number of hungry people worldwide has crested 1 billion. The sheer number of hungry people isn’t the only reason we must raise our standards for success.

Because agriculture makes up such a large percentage of the planet’s surface, and intimately touches our rivers, air and other natural resources, the world can’t tolerate some of the unintended — and counterproductive — consequences of how we farm and produce food. And farmers everywhere, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, need crop varieties and whole new approaches to farming that help them deal with drought, extreme heat and increasingly erratic weather.

Our collective understanding of how to “cure” hunger has matured enough to recognise that solutions lie not only in shipping food aid, but also in a new approach to agriculture that nourishes people and the planet.

There is no shortage of innovative ideas on the African continent.

We have four recommendations for farmers, agribusiness, politicians and other agricultural decision-makers:

Move beyond seeds

The vast majority of global investment in agriculture is aimed at seeds. But we’ve neglected the environment in which the seeds grow: the soil, trees, livestock, the farm and the food processors, roads and other pieces of the food system that gets the crop to market and onto tables.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the region of the world where the greatest percentage of people are hungry, just 4% of the farmland is irrigated (in Asia, 70% of farmland is irrigated). In parts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mali, the hundreds of thousands of farmers using inexpensive, locally made water pumps have seen incomes double and triple because they can grow a greater range of crops over a greater share of the year and are protected from losing entire crops to drought.

Cut the slack in the system

Instead of focusing on increasing production, make better use of what we already produce. It turns out that a shocking 30% to 50% of the harvest in poorer nations spoils or is contaminated by pests or mould before it reaches the dinner table.

Simple fixes can go a long way. In Nairobi, Margaret Njeri Ndimu has started selling goat milk in plastic bags sealed with candle wax. She learned this simple process through a training programme provided by the Mazingira Institute; the bags make it easier to manage and sell her milk, allowing her customers to purchase small quantities of the perishable milk in portable containers. Similar practices can be used by other urban milk producers in cities all over the world.

Go local (and regional)

Just as important as the techniques that farmers use is to what extent the farmers and farm communities control the techniques. Locavores in the US and Europe argue the benefits of a decentralised food system. Solutions for hunger are rooted in harnessing local crop diversity, building up locally owned infrastructure and developing regional markets.

In Kampala, Uganda, Project Disc is working with Slow Food chapters to catalogue and revive neglected indigenous foods and foodways that can help inject diversity into diets and farmers’ fields. At the World Vegetable Centre in Tanzania, researchers are working with farmers to breed vegetable varieties that don’t need fertilisers and pesticides, use less water, are locally appropriate and raise farmer income. Babel Isack, a Tanzanian tomato farmer, advises staff at the centre about tomato varieties that best suit his needs, including those that depend less on chemical sprays and have a longer shelf life.

Position farms on the front line of climate change

Agriculture is the human endeavour that will be most affected by climate change. But agriculture, livestock grazing and forestry — responsible for nearly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions — is the only near-term option for large-scale greenhouse sequestration. A combination of farming with perennial crops and grasses, cutting nitrogen fertiliser use and managing manure better, reducing erosion and enriching soils with organic matter could offset one-quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Dr Frank Place of the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya, several million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are using leguminous trees and shrubs that are grown along with or before or after crops. This technique can improve soil, double or triple the yields of the subsequent crop and eliminate the need for artificial fertilisers.

All of these measures hold untapped potential for boosting global food production, strengthening rural communities, rebuilding ecosystems and reducing poverty and hunger. And in contrast to “band-aid” shipments of food, the lasting solutions will involve farmers and food communities working together to feed themselves.

Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil are senior researchers at the Worldwatch Institute. Danielle has been travelling in sub-Saharan Africa for the last two months researching innovations in African agriculture.

 By Danielle Nierenberg and Abdou Tenkouano, special thanks to the Kansas City Star

As hunger and drought spread across Africa, a huge effort is underway to increase yields of staple crops, such as maize, wheat, cassava, and rice.

While these crops are important for food security, providing much-needed calories, they don’t provide much protein, vitamin A, thiamin, niacin, and other important vitamins and micronutrients—or taste. Yet, none of the staple crops would be palatable without vegetables.

Vegetables are less risk-prone to drought than staple crops that stay in the field for longer periods. Because vegetables typically have a shorter growing time, they can maximize scarce water supplies and soil nutrients better than crops such as maize, which need a lot of water and fertilizer.

Unfortunately, no country in Africa has a big focus on vegetable production. But that’s where AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center steps in. Since the 1990s, the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (based in Taiwan) has been working in Africa, with offices in Tanzania, Mali, Cameroon, and Madagascar, to breed cultivars that best suit farmers’ needs.

By listening to farmers and including them in breeding research, AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center is building a sustainable seed system in sub-Saharan Africa. The Center does this by breeding a variety of vegetables with different traits—including resistance to disease and longer shelf life—and by bringing the farmers to the Regional Center in Arusha and to other offices across Africa to find out what exactly those farmers need in the field and at market.

Babel Isack, a tomato farmer from Tanzania, is just one of many farmers who visits the Center, advising staff about which vegetable varieties would be best suited for his particular needs—including varieties that depend on fewer chemical sprays and have a longer shelf life.

The Center works with farmers to not only grow vegetables, but also to process and cook them. Often, vegetables are cooked for so long that they lose most of their nutrients. To solve that problem, Mel Oluoch, a Liaison Officer with the Center’s Vegetable Breeding and Seed System Program (vBSS), works with women to improve the nutritional value of cooked foods by helping them develop shorter cooking times.

“Eating is believing,” says Oluoch, who adds that when people find out how much better the food tastes—and how much less fuel and time it takes to cook—they don’t need much convincing about the alternative methods.

Oluoch also trains both urban and rural farmers on seed production. “The sustainability of seed,” says Oluoch, “is not yet there in Africa.” In other words, farmers don’t have access to a reliable source of seed for indigenous vegetables, such as amaranth, spider plant, cowpea, okra, moringa, and other crops.

Although many of these vegetables are typically thought of as weeds, not food, they are a vital source of nutrients for millions of people and can help alleviate hunger. Despite their value, these “weeds" are typically neglected on the international agricultural research agenda. As food prices continue to rise in Africa—in some countries food is 50-80 percent higher than in 2007—indigenous vegetables are becoming an integral part of home gardens.

The hardiness and drought-tolerance of traditional vegetables become increasingly important as climate change becomes more evident.

Many indigenous vegetables use less water than hybrid varieties and some are resistant to pests and disease, advantages that will command greater attention from farmers and policymakers, and make the work of AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center more urgent and necessary than ever before.

Abdou Tenkouano is director of the Regional Center for Africa of AVRDC – The World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania. Danielle Nierenberg is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute blogging daily from Africa at http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/

Beyond Band-Aids for Hunger

Cross-post (op-ed) from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet
By Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil

It's been twenty-five years since a well-meaning music producer threw together a bunch of megastars to record the now ubiquitous humanitarian torch song, Do They Know it's Christmas. Bob Geldof's Band-Aid raised millions of dollars and immeasurable awareness with the compelling chorus of "Feed the World," but global interest in those hungry people has plummeted in the last two decades, if the barometer is international investment in agriculture: agriculture's share of global development aid has dropped from 7 percent to 4 percent since the song debuted, even though most of the world's poor and hungry people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

The famine-stricken Ethiopia that inspired the song in the 1980s remains hobbled by food shortages today: some 23 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk for starvation, according to the World Food Program, which delivers food aid around the world. The global recession and a recent spike in food prices aren't helping, either; the United Nations reported recently that the number of hungry worldwide has crested 1 billion.

The sheer number of hungry people isn't the only reason we must raise our standards for success. Because agriculture makes up such a large percentage of the planet's surface, and touches our rivers, air, and other natural resources so intimately, the world can't tolerate some of the unintended-and counterproductive-consequences of how we farm and produce food. And farmers everywhere, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, will need crop varieties and whole new approaches to farming that help them deal with drought, extreme heat and increasingly erratic weather.

Hopefully, our collective understanding of how to "cure" hunger has matured enough over the last twenty-five years to recognize that solutions lie not only in shipping food aid, but a new approach to agriculture that nourishes people and the planet. One of us has been traveling in Africa for the last two months, visiting farmers, agricultural research centers and other sources of innovation. There is no shortage of innovative and winning ideas on the continent.

There's more...