Why I'm about to become more urbanized

After living in a conservative, English, market town in Wiltshire for the past 16 years, I am about to follow the trend and become completely urbanised, by moving to the liberal city of Edinburgh.  Let me explain why:

Wiltshire’s attractive market towns grew up to serve the surrounding farmers who once produced food for the local community.  Nowadays farmers market their produce directly to food processors and big supermarkets.  The narrow roads running through the town centres that were built for horses and carts, are now clogged with diesel cars and heavy goods vehicles heading for the nearest motorway, causing illegally high levels of air pollution.  

Public transport is abysmal, with the few buses that are available, arriving too late to link commuters with neighbouring towns or the nearest railway stations (more than 7 miles away) in time for work.  As a result young people are leaving the area as soon as they finish school, leading to a top heavy population pyramid, with a mushrooming ageing population.  This is putting pressure on the health care system.  

Some of those who are left behind can be found in hidden pockets of deprivation, because they depend on benefits or the minimum wages that are paid by local shops and care homes.  If you cannot afford a car or are unable to drive, you face being separated from family and friends. It is no wonder that there is a loneliness problem in Britain. 

Rural development policies are urgently needed to reduce the rate of urbanisation and re-balance the demography in the UK.  However, it is extremely difficult for political parties, who are offering change, to canvas voters in extensive, rural constituencies at election times.  So elderly people tend to go with the status quo and vote for conservative candidates in both local and national elections. Many of them also voted to leave the European Union.  This means that the austerity that brought the swingeing cuts that disproportionately impact on public services in rural areas, are likely to continue for many years to come. 

In 2015, the UK government signed up to all 17 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  Although many of these goals are relevant to rural development, the UK government seems to think that they only apply to developing countries!   Goal 11 has three targets that are particularly relevant to English market towns:

• By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services...

• By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons.

• By 2030, reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality and municipal and other waste management. 

Unfortunately the UK Office for National Statistics has not yet developed the indicators that are needed to measure whether or not these targets are being achieved. 

UK Office for National Statistics Sustainable Development Goals website

I have a decent pension and a house to sell so I am able to relocate to a city that has all the essential services that I will need as I grow older. Many people are not so lucky.

Rural Women and the Post 2015 Agenda: the Need for Strong Rural Economies

Rural Women form, by far, the biggest group that have been left behind by those who have been funding and implementing the Millennium Development Agenda, since 2000: According to UN Women globally, and with only a few exceptions, rural women have fared worse than rural men and urban women and men for every Millennium Development Goal (MDG) indicator for which data are available. Read the UN Women Fact Sheet: Rural Women and the Millennium Goals

Despite their important role as food producers and guardians of the environment, rural women are unlikely to be paid for their work or have land rights, while being highly vulnerable to gender-based violence, including female genital mutilation. Such women are more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, than rural men and more likely to die during child-birth, than their urban counterparts, due to poor diet, early marriage and lack of antenatal care. Girls in rural areas are often forced to drop out of school due to sexual abuse and unplanned pregnancies and less likely to attend secondary school, than their urban sisters. This means that rural women are the least literate and thus the most vulnerable to exploitation.

Over the past 15 years, some of the big donors, including DFID and USAID, have sought to reach all eight MDGs by focusing on the needs of the urban, rather than the rural poor, see my previous post...

This has had the advantage of not only reducing development costs, but also of creating thousands of low-paid workers in over-crowded cities - potential consumers of western goods and services. Prioritising urban development has also supported their policy to increase urbanisation, throughout the developing world, which is seen as vital for the expansion of a globalised, free market economy.

The Post 2015 agenda has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These new development goals again depend on increased urbanization and have already been criticised for embedding the private sector along with neoliberalism, as the 'normal' financial model (see paper by Khan, et al.)

The 'sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth' that is to be promoted in accordance with SDG 8 and the 'sustainable industrialisation' described by SDG 9 will depend on the availability of urbanised, cheap labour; while SDG 11 calls for 'inclusive and sustainable urbanization' 

'Sustainable cities and urbanization are now in the heart of the post 2015 development agenda.'

Crucially, there is no mention of the obvious need to develop 'sustainable, strong rural economies' in any of the new development goals.

Sustainable, strong rural economies that ensure fair access to markets and lead to improved livelihoods are essential for the empowerment of rural women and men. Strong rural economies are the key to reducing inequality and will depend on the devolution of economic and political power to rural institutions, such as producer groups and savings clubs that are headed by rural women.

This means that the following targets should be included in the Post 2015 Agenda:

• Strong, sustainable rural economies that empower rural women and reduce the need for mass urbanization/forced migration.
• Economically and politically powerful rural institutions, headed by rural women.

Unless these two targets can be fully integrated into the new SDGs, it is highly likely that in future, rural women will either be forced to migrate to the closest urban slum or risk being left even further behind by the Post 2015 Agenda.

Launch of the Phiri Award for Farm and Food Innovators and prize-giving for the inaugural winners.

On the 24th October invited guests from Government, civil society, farmers’ organisations, the private sector and international agencies will gather for a double celebration. They will be celebrating the launch of the Phiri Award for Farm and Food Innovators and they will celebrate the first winners of the Award.

Life is tough in the rural areas of Zimbabwe, often very tough. It’s the same across Africa. But sometimes we fall into the trap of stereotyped images of people waiting to be ‘developed’. It’s a much more complex picture than these simplified images. Rural areas are very dynamic. All sorts of things are going on. People are getting on with their lives and there are those experimenting and trying out practices, responding to what life throws at them, be it a cyclone, a drought, a piece of land covered in rocks or even mole rats eating their crops.

There is a tendency in today’s world to think that solutions will always come from experts and new technologies and we often underestimate the degree of innovation that is going on. In order to start giving recognition to this innovation, a group of Zimbabweans have set up the Phiri Award for Farm and Food Innovators.

The initiators of the Phiri Award Trust, would like to see innovators in the farming and food world being given much more prominence. They draw inspiration from Zephaniah Phiri, after whom the Award is named. He is a fine example of someone who responded to his difficult situation in a creative and meaningful way. And he has gone on to have enormous impact on the thousands who have visited his small farm in Zvishavane or who have met him elsewhere. See previous blog...

Inspiration is also drawn from an approach to farming and food that puts emphasis on food in a much broader way than the narrow perspective of food security. This is an approach that stresses productivity while also paying attention to ecosystem processes, soil health, nutrition, sustainability, local knowledge development amongst farmers and others in the food chain, and the rights of farmers and consumers.  Many call this food sovereignty. It’s an approach that recognizes and works with the complexity of ecological, social and economic systems.  The more conventional approaches today over-emphasize technological solutions and don’t take into account all the true costs.

As well as celebrating the launch of the Phiri Award for Farm and Food Innovators on October 24th, prizes will be given to the inaugural winners of the award from a shortlist of five. Below is a taste of those who have been shortlisted, in no particular order.

Cyclone Eline devastated William Gezana’s farm in Chimanimani in 2000. Instead of feeling sorry for himself he immediately set about reclaiming his land. With various techniques he has rehabilitated his farm and the perennial stream destroyed by Cyclone Eline. He now works with others around him on watershed management.

Wilson Sithole’s father allocated him 2 hectares of land in the Rusitu valley in the 1980s. The only problem was that it was an unproductive piece of land covered in rock boulders. Undaunted and with a clear plan in mind he has over the last 20 years turned this land into a productive banana, citrus and pineapple farm in which all water is harvested by ditches combined with rock bunds on contour. He is a fine example of turning a problem into the solution.

Faiseni Pedzi learned a little about water-harvesting and water management during a short stint working on a lowveld sugar estate from 1968 to 1976. He used and added to this knowledge through trial and error and has developed an intricate system to distribute water on his small farm in the dry district of Chivi, using ‘valves’ and canals. It is a system that enables him to direct water to any desired point on his farm. This allows him to grow fish and crops throughout the year.

Bouwas Mawara, inspired by the liberation struggle to think in new ways, put in a system of one to three metre deep dead level contours, which also incorporate mini-dams. As a result he harvests huge amounts of water in Mazvihwa, a very dry part of the country. His extensive irrigation system, involving clay pipes, can draw excessive water from the fields in the rainy season to use for irrigation in the dry season. He also uses the water to grow crops throughout the year and to grow fish. Furthermore, he has set up an ‘innovators’ platform’ to sharpen, share and disseminate innovations amongst farmers in the area.

Finally, Paguel Takura lost most of the sweet potatoes and bananas that he planted on his newly allocated farm in 2008 to the African mole rat. Through experimentation with both bait and trap, he has developed a highly effective way of catching mole rats on his farm in Chikukwa, near the border with Mozambique. In 2011, for example, he captured 39 mole rats.

The stories of all five of these farmer innovators, which the Phiri Award has documented, show how they have had to overcome struggles to get to where they are now. All of them have had to face the ridicule of their communities, with some being told they are mad and others that they smoke marijuana.

A final note:
A serious shortcoming in this the first year of the award is that the five shortlisted farmers come from only three provinces in Zimbabwe and all are men. The Phiri Award is determined that this award will extend its reach to all corners of the country and pay much more attention to finding women innovators across the food value chain. We look forward to assistance in identifying these innovators, who deserve greater recognition. This has to be a joint effort and we appeal to Zimbabweans to work with us in this task.


Contact email: phiriaward@gmail.com for more information.

How you can REALLY help the Super Typhoon Haiyan relief effort

The UK Government has just announced that it will be giving £10 million towards the current relief effort in the Philippines and we are also being invited to give generously. However, whatever we give will be a drop in the ocean compared to the massive economic benefits that we in the developed world have gained from exploiting fossil fuels over the past 50 years.

In 2009, Nick Stern said that poor countries – the least responsible for climate change – will be hit earliest and hardest by hurricanes and storms.

Although there is no consensus yet over the link between the current rate of global warming and this latest Super Typhoon, hurricane researchers have said that Haiyan is an example of the type of extreme storm that may become more frequent as the climate continues to warm... 

Last year, Naderev Saño, the Philippines delegate to the Doha climate change conference stated that each destructive typhoon season costs his country 2% of GDP, and the reconstruction costs a further 2%, which means a loss of almost 5% of the Philippine's economy every year to storms.

Up until now, the Philippine GDP expansion has been impressive. Based on the most recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) assessment, GDP growth was 6.6% last year, a rate the agency ranks as better than most of the region. The IMF had forecast Philippine GDP expansion at 6% in 2013 and 5.5% in 2014. It is highly likely now that GDP will contract late this year and into next, and that contraction could be horrible. 

If you want to really help the Haiyan relief effort and help prevent monster typhoons and hurricanes from becoming more common in future, in addition to making a donation, you could do the following:

• Drastically reduce your carbon emissions – if you are using gas-fired central heating, you are probably releasing at least 7 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, it will be at least twice this amount if you are using oil or LPG.
• Switch to a green energy supplier.
• Campaign against fracking - this technology will undermine the UK's greenhouse gas emissions reduction target (i.e. 80 per cent on 1990 levels by 2050) through the methane leaked or vented from shale gas operations and the proliferation of gas-fired power stations.
• Support the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign - fossil fuels received subsidies worth over $500 billion (£311 billion) in 2011, according to ODI.
• Sign Philippine's Climate Commissioner, Yeb Sano's petition here...

Sponsors needed to support a pioneering Zimbabwean agroecological award

How Zephaniah Phiri transformed his parched environment

Deep in Zimbabwe's rural areas, in one of the driest districts that receives low and unreliable rainfall, lives a wise, old man.  His name is Zephaniah Phiri - locally referred to as VaPhiri. His life story is both fascinating and inspiring, as reported by Mary Witoshynsky and Jane Sheperd, in 'The Water Harvester', published in 2000:

Granite outcrop in Zvishivane

In 1964, VaPhiri was imprisoned, then fired from his job by the Rhodesian authorities for being politically active and had to return to his rural home in order to survive. Living in the low-rainfall district of Zvishivane in south-east Zimbabwe he quickly discovered that water was key to successful farming. He also realised that rainfall which is not harvested is not only lost to farmers but also degrades the land.

VaPhiri  and his family live on 3.5  hectares that slope gently downwards from a massive granite outcrop to a wetland area. VaPhiri started his water-harvesting beneath this outcrop by catching the run-off in very large pits. He and his wife then worked their way downwards, sinking and spreading the water in various ingenious, simple and sophisticated ways. With all the water going into the ground they were assured of a productive wetland where ponds surrounded with lush, water-loving plants, were created. This also meant that there was sufficient water for their cropping areas, depending on the season.

You can read more about VaPhiri in the Ecologist, here... and watch him, here...

Recognising a lifetime's achievement 

Zephaniah Phiri

Two PhD students 'discovered' the work of VaPhiri in the 1980s and helped him share his 'water genius' with the wider world. Since then thousands of farmers and development workers have visited his farm and taken his practices back to their farms. Books have been written and films made. In many ways, Zephaniah Phiri is the Godfather of the modern ecological farming movement in Zimbabwe. And to honour him, a celebration was arranged in 2010 at the University of Zimbabwe, where he was given a lifetime achievement award.

At this event, the idea was put forward to establish an award that distinguishes other male and female farmers and food innovators in Zimbabwe. That idea is now becoming a reality. The purpose is to give prominence to the role of grassroots innovators who are either not recognised at all or not yet recognised enough. All across Africa there are women and men who are creating sustainable ways to improve their livelihoods in their own localities. While this fact is appreciated by small bands of interested agroecologists, there is need for a much wider celebration of these achievements.

Creating the Phiri Award

Eight experienced agroecologists have come together to form the Phiri Award for Food and Farm Innovators Trust. They recognise the role that grassroots innovators can play and would like to honour this through a well publicised award.

The Phiri Award Trust will receive nominations from October to December this year. This will result in a shortlist of seven smallholder farmers who will be assessed by a team of five experienced agroecologists during March, 2014. We urgently need people with experience in promoting agroecology or permaculture who can both sponsor and take part in these assessments. This will be a fantastic way of seeing Zimbabwe, you will be accompanied by local people when travelling in the rural areas, where you will learn from innovators about their environment and how it drives innovation to ensure food security.

Could you sponsor a visit?

Each farm visit will take a day plus the amount of travel time. Once the shortlist is known, the Phiri Award Coordinator will work out a schedule of visits. We estimate that the total cost of the visits will be around USD7,000. This will cover vehicle hire, fuel, food and accommodation for the five people doing the visiting. It's impossible to know the exact cost until we know where the shortlisted farmers live.

The Coordinator will also work closely with the sponsor to plan his/her overall trip to Zimbabwe. This could include any number of other activities such as trips to Victoria Falls, Matopos, a game park, the Eastern Highlands, Great Zimbabwe and so on. It will all depend on what the sponsor wants to do, how much time (s)he has and the costs.

If you want to find out more, please contact John Wilson via: phiriaward@gmail.com

List of Trustees of the Phiri Award for Farm and Food Innovators: 

• Mr. Andrew Mushita - Director of Community Technology Development Trust
• Professor Ntombizakhe Mlilo - Dean, Faculty of Life Sciences, Gwanda State University
• Dr. Ken Wilson - Director of the Christensen Foundation
• Professor Mandivamba Rukuni - Director of Barefoot Education Africa Trust 
• Ms. Lillian Machivenyika - Director of CADS
• Mr. Abraham Mawere - Research assistant, communal farmer and longtime colleague of Zephaniah Phiri

Opening the Gates to GMOs - is the Biofortification of Staple Food Crops a Trojan Horse?

Bill Gates has praised the British Government for ‘leading the way’ by giving £655 million to tackle child hunger. £43 million of this will be given to the CGIAR in order to biofortify the staple food crops that are said to predominate the diets of the rural poor.  HarvestPlus will receive the bulk of these funds, in order to use ‘the best traditional breeding practices and modern biotechnology’ to develop new varieties of common bean, cassava, maize, rice, sweet potato and wheat that are higher in essential nutrients, especially vitamin A (β-carotene), iron and zinc. It is estimated that costs associated with breeding each new variety will average about $400,000 per year over a 10-y period, globally.

Is our money being well spent?

Orange-flesh, sweet potato lines, that contain over 20, 000 μg of β-carotene per 100 g of edible portion, have already been identified by HarvestPlus scientists.  Their GM ‘Golden Rice’ contains 3, 100 μg of β-carotene per 100 g.  Either of these food crops can protect adults and children from night blindness if they form part of a regular diet.  ‘Ongoing transgenic research is exploring the use of an endosperm-specific promoter to deposit iron within the endosperm of rice so that it is not milled away’.  Pregnant women need to consume at least 28 mg of iron per day to prevent anaemia.

Although higher zinc-retaining crop cultivars are also being developed, such crops will be unable to take advantage of this trait if they are growing in zinc-deficient soils.  Fortunately, zinc is cheap and easy to apply as a seed dressing.

According to HarvestPlus scientists, ‘to work, the biofortification strategy requires widespread adoption by farmers’  So another essential part of their work is to promote ‘behaviour change’ on the part of subsistence farming families in order to create demand for these new, biofortified seeds and planting materials. This means developing additional seed multiplication and delivery systems, leading to ‘new market opportunities for seed processors and retailers’.  

Enter Bill Gates and his Monsanto-supported Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) that is spearheading a multi-billion dollar effort to transform Africa into a GMO-friendly continent...

This approach to reducing malnutrition among the rural poor is seriously flawed:

• Subsistence farmers depend on their own saved seed, if they are obliged to buy new seed and the associated inputs, they will be forced to sell part or all of their harvest in order to cover costs.
• It assumes that poor people will eat a narrow diet, based on a single food staple.
• It encourages a ‘Green Revolution’ approach, i.e. monoculture + high input technologies, rather than promoting crop diversity, carbon sequestration and de-linking farming from fossil fuels.

There is a much cheaper alternative that only requires educating women in nutrition and facilitating local seed exchange!

Pigeon pea - drought-tolerant crop, high in iron and protein

Many subsistence farmers are already cultivating a wide range of nutritious food crops that can be harvested year-round, using a method known as ‘permaculture’.  This is an agroecological farming system (preferred by the  UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food) that emphasises the use of perennial crops. This includes fruit trees and vegetable gardens around homesteads and field-grown grain crops, intercropped with pumpkins and legumes.  Such diversity assists pest management and ensures a sustainable supply of nutritious food.  For example, mangos, amaranth leaves, pumpkin and papaya all contain high levels of β-carotene.  Similarly, amaranth leaves, bulrush millet, pigeon peas and sesame seeds contain high levels of iron - 200g of pigeon peas per day would provide sufficient iron to satisfy the needs of a pregnant woman, see Table below:

Nutrient content of unimproved, indigenous food crops

Essential nutrient	Recommended adult daily intake	Crop/source	Content per 100g of edible portion
β-carotene	750-1,000 µg	Amaranth leaves	5, 176 µg
		Mango	3, 200 µg
		Papaya	950 µg
		Pumpkin flesh	3, 100 µg
Iron	9-28 mg	Amaranth leaves	8.9 mg
		Bulrush millet	20.7 mg
		Pigeon pea	15 mg
		Pumpkin seeds	8.8 mg
		Sesame seeds	8.1 mg
Zinc	15-20 mg	Pumpkin seeds	10.3 mg

These indigenous food crops are also high in other essential nutrients, such as Vitamin C, B Vitamins (Thiamine, Riboflavin and Niacin) and protein. 

So why do we need to spend so much money on biofortification? 

Many Africans are already suspicious and think that biofortification is just another term for ‘genetically modified’. 

It seems that our taxes are being used to support the multi-billion dollar, biotech industry in its efforts to get the rural poor hooked on GM crops, under the guise of reducing child malnutrition.

Freeing women and children from the drudgery of weeding

This is just one of the many social and productivity benefits of adopting the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) according to workers in Kenya:

Extension Messages that have been merely extrapolated from high input systems have often resulted in subsistence farmers incurring huge debts because the costs of the associated technologies (hybrid/GM seed, fertilisers and pesticides) have often exceed the value any increased yields.

Piara Begum storing her rice seed

Evidence collected by international NGOs (2010) from almost one million smallholders who have been practising low-input Systems of Rice Intensification (SRI) in four countries (Cambodia, India, Mali and Vietnam) suggests that a paradigm shift is needed before research and extension can truly serve the world’s poorest farmers: Compared to conventional rice farmers, SRI farmers more than doubled their yields by significantly reducing seed rates and transplanting much earlier into wider spacings; household incomes are said to have risen by around 50%. Crucially the SRI cropping systems require less water, thereby emitting less methane; the crops are more resistant to both pests and lodging and have shorter growing seasons. SRI needs neither improved seed varieties nor chemical fertilisers.  The abundant weed growth is dealt with by using locally-adapted, weeding machines.

Recent work (2012) has confirmed this trend of increasing productivity among SRI rice farmers, during two seasons, in Mwea Irrigation Scheme, Kenya. This work also highlighted positive social effects such as women and children being freed from the drudgery of weeding by men eager to use mechanical weeding machines, farmers’ saved seed being valued by the SRI system and farmers being empowered to do household record-keeping and cost-benefit analysis.

These exciting results should spur on applied, pro-poor research into some of the unanswered questions that have been raised by SRI activities globally:  

• To what extent are SRI farmers reducing GHG emissions?
• Which other crops could benefit from this system?  
• What are the positive microbial interactions that occur in SRI, organically amended soils? 
• What accounts for the increased tolerance to pests in SRI?