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? 

The Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: a Golden Opportunity to Mainstream Agroecology

The eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – which range from halving extreme poverty, to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education, all by the target date of 2015 – form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and the world’s leading development institutions.  The Post-2015 Agenda will be determined through critical evaluation of how the MDGs have worked as a framework for development, identifying what has worked well and areas for improvement, especially in response to current development challenges. 

Recently I listened to an interesting talk by Jeffrey Sachs, who heads the UN Sustainable Solutions Network and has been tasked with shaping the Post-2015 Agenda.  He called for the new UN Development Goals, to be applicable to all nations and incorporate both the post MDG agenda and the Sustainable Development agenda that was agreed in Rio last year.  This convergence would drive the policy changes that are needed to reduce global warming, which threatens people in both the developing and the developed world.

Sachs envisages a single set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 4 pillars:

• Ending extreme poverty
• Reducing inequality
• Promoting good governance
• Protecting the environment and cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

The inclusion of environmental protection and GHG emission reduction in the post 2015 SDG’s, would place enormous pressure on industrial agriculture, particularly where production depends on the use of synthetic fertilisers, pesticides and manure slurry and where cattle are reared intensively. This is because high input agriculture emits two of the most potent GHGs - nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4). In terms of global warming, N2O is 310 times as powerful as CO2, while CH4 is 21 times as powerful as CO2.

N20 is emitted directly from cultivated soils when crop residues are ploughed in, synthetic fertiliser or farmyard manure is applied and when leeching and run-off occur; also during nitrogen fixation by leguminous plants. Excess nitrogen that runs off into streams and lakes causes toxic algal blooms and reduces bio-diversity.

CH4 is emitted from enteric fermentation, during ruminant digestion, especially in beef and dairy cattle and during anaerobic decomposition of manure, e.g. in slurry tanks and lagoons.

In addition, CO2 is emitted from fossil fuels used to power agricultural machinery and transport and during the manufacture of fertilisers and pesticides.
 
This means that the Post-2015 agenda presents us with a golden opportunity to promote smallholder agriculture and mainstream agroecology as an environmentally sustainable, low GHG emitting form of agriculture: Agroecology has been already been recommended by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food – as there is evidence that in Africa, organic farms, using agroecological methods, can produce 2, 641 – 4, 381 calories per person per day, without the use of synthetic fertilisers or pesticides.  Agroecological farming can also increase diversity through reduced tillage, mixing and rotating crops and planting live fences and trees within and around fields.

More, highly successful, agroecology projects are documented by Miguel Altieri, et al, here…. 

However, for agroecology to score highly as an environmentally sustainable, low GHG emitting form of agriculture post-2015, the UN Key Indicators of Sustainable Development will need to be extended to include the following:

• GHG emissions 
• Carbon sequestration methods
• Nitrate levels in rivers and lakes
• Number of species in surrounding aquatic and terrestrial environments
• Crop diversity
• Nutritive value of food crops
• Frequency of antibiotic use in animal production
• Number of farming households above the poverty line