Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

As Iceland's erupting volcano strands thousands of air travelers across Europe and worldwide, a less publicized but arguably more costly catastrophe is mounting 15,000 miles away: piles of gourmet produce and cut flowers, some of Kenya's chief exports, are rotting in limbo. Meant to be shipped to upscale grocery stores throughout Europe, lilies, roses, carnations, carrots, onions, baby sweet corn, and sugar snap peas are going bad in heaps, on the vine, and in the ground because airport warehouses are already full and there's no local market for the expensive produce in a country where half the population lives on less than a dollar a day.

As food prices continue to rise worldwide, reducing food waste will be a critical element in alleviating hunger and poverty worldwide. Already, Nourishing the Planet has highlighted the many ways that growing indigenous vegetables for local markets and improving storage techniques can help to both reduce food waste and improve access to food, in Kenya and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

To read more about food waste and ways it can be prevented, see:  Reducing Food Waste, Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera, Farming on the Urban Fringe, and Investing in Better Food Storage in Africa. Also, stay tuned for an entire chapter on the subject, written by Tristram Stuart, in State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

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 Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

The highways in southern Africa are filled with trucks carrying food aid across the continent. In the past, much of the maize, rice, soy, and other foods loaded onto these trucks came not from African farmers, but from the United States. And while these shipments provided much needed calories to people in need, they also disrupted national and local markets by lowering prices for locally grown food.

But today, more and more of the crops providing food aid come from African farmers who are selling directly to the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) through local procurement policies. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and several other nations in sub-Saharan Africa (as well as in Asia and Latin America), WFP is not only buying locally, but helping small farmers gain the skills necessary to be part of the global market.

The WFP’s Progress for Profit (P4P) program, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, and the Belgian government, is working with the private sector, governments, and NGOs to provide an incentive for farmers to improve their crop management skills and produce high-quality food, create a market for surplus crops from small and low-income farmers, and promote locally processing and packaging of products.

In Zambia, WFP buys food directly from the Zambia Agricultural Commodity Exchange while remaining “invisible,” says Felix Edwards of the Zambia P4P Program. This way, WFP Zambia doesn’t distort prices and helps create an alternative market for farmers. WFP also works through its partners, including USAID’s PROFIT program, to help farmers and farmer associations meet the quality standards required by the Exchange. As a result, they are preparing Zambian farmers to provide high-quality food aid not only to programs and consumers in their own country, but also potentially to growing regional and international markets.

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Cross posted from Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.

Richard Haigh doesn’t look like your typical African pastoralist. Unlike many Africans who grew up tending cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, Richard started his farm in 2007 at the age of 40. He quit his 9–5 job at a nongovernmental organization and bought 23 acres of land outside Durban, South Africa.

He wanted to totally change his life.

Today, he runs Enaleni Farm (enaleni means “abundance” in Zulu), raising endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a breed indigenous to South Africa that is very resistant to pests), and a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Richard is cultivating GMO-free soya, as well as traditional maize varieties. “All the maize tells a story,” he says. Like the sheep and cattle, many maize varieties are resistant to drought, climate change, and diseases, making them a smart choice for farmers all over Africa.

This sort of mixed-crop livestock system is becoming increasingly rare in South Africa, according to Richard, because of commercial farms that rely on monoculture crops rather than on diverse agricultural systems.

Richard likes to say that his farm isn’t organic, but rather an example of how agro-ecological methods can work. He practices push-pull agriculture, which uses alternating intercropping of plants that repel pests (pushing them away from the harvest) and ones that attract pests (pulling them away from the harvest) to increase yields. He also uses animal manure and compost for fertilizer.

But perhaps the most important thing Richard is doing at Enaleni doesn’t have to do with the various agricultural methods and practices he’s using. It’s about the “stories” he’s telling on the farm. By showing local people the tremendous benefits that indigenous cattle and sheep breeds, and sustainably grown crops, can have for the environment and livelihoods, he’s putting both an ecological and economic value on something that’s been neglected. “Local people don’t value what they have,” says Richard, because extension agents have tended to promote exotic livestock and expensive inputs.

In addition, Richard asks himself “what can we do that is specific to where we live?” In other words, how can we promote local sources of agricultural diversity that are good for the land and for people?

Richard is also helping document the diversity on his farm. He’s been sending blood samples to the South African National Research Foundation to help them build a DNA “hoof print” of what makes up a Zulu sheep. This sort of research is important not only for conserving the sheep, but for helping to increase local knowledge about the breeds that people have been raising for generations.

As a result of his conservation work, Richard and Enaleni Farm have been recognized by Slow Food International, which wants to work with the farm and local communities to find ways to ensure that the Zulu sheep don’t disappear.

Richard hopes to share his knowledge about agriculture with local farmers, teaching them how to spot and prevent disease in indigenous sheep, as well as explaining agro-ecological methods of raising food.

Cross posted from Nourishing the Planet.

Check out the most recent issue of the journal Science, which takes a look at ways to improve food security as the world’s population is expected to top 9 billion by 2050. To best nourish both people and the planet, the journal suggests a rounded approach to a worldwide agricultural revolution by encouraging diets and policies that emphasize local and sustainable food production, along with the implementation of agricultural techniques that utilize biotechnology and ecologically friendly farming solutions.

Originally posted as a two part series on the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet blog.

Part I:Vertical Farms: Finding Creative Ways to Grow Food in Kibera

Driving through the crowded streets of Kibera, it's nearly impossible to describe how many people live in this area of about 225 hectares, the equivalent of just over half the size of Central Park in Manhattan. Everywhere you look there are people. People walking, people working, people selling food or tennis shoes, people sorting trash, people herding goats--people everywhere. Anywhere from 700,000 to a million people live in what is likely the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa--it's hard to count the exact number here because people don't own the land where they live and work, making their existence a very tenuous one. Often people are evicted from their homes (most of them wooden shacks with tin roves) because the city government doesn't want to recognize that Kibera exists. But it does. And despite the challenges people here face--lack of water and sanitation services and lack of land ownership are the big ones--they are also thriving.

Our hosts for this visit were Mary Njenga and Nancy Karanja, researchers with the group Urban Harvest, an organization with offices in Kenya, Uganda, and Peru.

We met a "self help" group of women farmers in Kibera, who are growing food for their families and selling the surplus. These groups are present all over Kenya--giving youth, women, and other groups the opportunity to organize, share information and skills, and ultimately improve their well-being.

The women we met are raising vegetables on what they call "vertical farms." But instead of skyscrapers, these farms are in tall sacks, filled with dirt, and the women grow crops in them on different levels by poking holes in the bags and planting seeds. They received training, seeds, and sacks from the French NGO Soladarites to start their sack gardens.

The women told us that more than 1,000 of their neighbors are growing food in a similar way--something that Red Cross International recognized during 2007 and 2008 when there was conflict in the slums of Nairobi. No food could come into these areas, but most residents didn't go without food because so many of them were growing crops--in sacks, vacant land, or elsewhere.

Dr. Karanja asked the women if they were using waste water--the water used to bathe and wash dishes--to water their crops. They explained that they were concerned about the soap hurting the crops, but Dr. Karanja explained that there are ways to filter the water that make it safe to use for crops--something the women were very interested in because they now have to buy water for them.

These small gardens can yield big benefits in terms of nutrition, food security, and income. All the women told us that they saved money because they no longer had to buy vegetables at the store and they claimed they taste better because they were organically grown--but it also might come from the pride that comes from growing something themselves.

Part II: Farming on the Urban Fringe

We met Mary Matou—and a group of about 20 urban farmers—on a farm across from Kibera, a slum of nearly one million people that live on just ten hectares of land in Nairobi. Dressed in a skirt and rubber muck boot, Mrs. Matou has farmed the land here for nearly two decades. She and the other farmers—more women than men—don’t own the land where they grow spinach, kale, spider plant, squash, amaranth, and other vegetables. Instead the land is owned by the Kenyan Social Security Administration, which has allowed the farmers to farm the land through an informal arrangement; in other words, the farmers have no legal right to the land (see Urban Farming in Kibera: Land Tenure ). They’ve been forced to stop farming more than once over the years, and although they’re getting harassed less frequently, they still face challenges.

About a year ago, the city forced them to stop using wastewater (sewage from an underground pipe they tapped into) to both irrigate and fertilize their crops. Although wastewater can carry a number of risks, including pathogens and contamination from heavy metals, it also provides a rich--and free--source of fertilizer to farmers who don't have the money to buy expensive store-bought fertilizer and other inputs. And because of longer periods of drought (likely a result of climate change) in sub-Saharan Africa, the farmers didn't have to depend on rainfall to water their crops.

But even with the loss of their main water supply and nutrient sources, Mrs. Matou and the other farmers are continuing to come up with innovative ways of raising food--and incomes--on the farm.

With the help of Nancy Karanja and Mary Njenga from Urban Harvest, the farmers are not only growing food to eat and sell, but, perhaps surprisingly, becoming a source of seed for rural farmers. Kibera's farmers have always grown fodder for livestock feed for both urban and rural farmers, but by establishing a continual source of seed for traditional African vegetables, they're helping dispel the myth that urban agriculture only benefits poor people living in cities.

Using very small plots of land, just a quarter of an acre, and double dug beds, the farmers can raise seeds very quickly. Fast-growing varieties like amarynth and spider plant take only about three months to produce seeds, with about 3,000 Kenyan shillings in profit. And these seed plots--because they are small--take very little additional time to weed and manage.

The future for these farmers continues to be uncertain. Their land could be taken away, the drought could further jeopardize their crops, and the loss of wastewater for fertilizer could reduce production; but they continue to persevere despite these challenges thanks, in part, to the work of groups like Urban Harvest and the Mazingira Institute.

There's more...