This, week, the CGIAR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) held a one day, high level event in New York: Development Dialogues 2014. This organisation is little-known outside development policy circles, but plays an important role. Its members – governments and various international bodies and philanthropic foundations – jointly fund a network of 15 Agricultural Research Centres, mostly in developing countries. Here, they work to fulfil their vision to ‘reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership’.
The network includes research centres dealing with all major crops, livestock, fisheries, and forestry plus water management and tropical and dryland specialist institutes. This is a vital resource for a world that is expected to have about two billion more mouths to feed by mid-century, a problem made more difficult by a large increase in animal products in the diet.
In the second half of the 20th Century, projections for population growth became progressively lower as it became clear that fertility rates dropped as prosperity and educational attainment increased. But we also have to consider that the current consensus on population plateauing at about nine billion in mid-century may be wrong.
A recent study in Science certainly suggests this (Study: population won’t stabilize this century). The authors estimate an 80% chance that the world population will be between 9.6 billion and 12.3 billion by 2100. The driver of this would be Africa, most of which has remained stubbornly poor despite decades of well-intentioned international aid. If this study turns out to be anything like correct, the need to increase agricultural productivity becomes even more urgent.
Whatever the answer is, more food will be needed. As has been said many times before, this has to be grown on essentially the same land area as is used for farming now and, under present policies, also has to compete for land use with energy crops. There are commentators who say we should all be eating a vegetarian diet, but in the real world this is not going to happen unless it is forced on people by shortages and economics.
As is the norm these days, the main messages from Thursday’s meeting were trailed before the event, with the headline Farming and science ‘vital for sustained development’. There is a lot of talk of ‘climate-proofing’ farming, which chimes with what is currently one of the defining issues of the 21st Century and comes hot on the heels of this week’s UN climate change meeting, also in New York.
AGRA, which works to help African agriculture become much more productive, warned in its latest status report that many small-scale farmers risk ‘failed seasons’ and are threatened by the pace and severity of climate change. Whether or not you subscribe to the received wisdom on dangerous climate change, farmers – particularly in developing countries – are very vulnerable to the impact of drought, flooding and other extreme weather, and parts of Africa in particular suffer from recurrent periods of drought. Increasing resilience to erratic weather patterns right now is very important, no matter what the future might hold.
Frank Rijsberman, head of CGIAR, told the BBC "Not everyone working in other areas of development sees the role of agriculture or food systems as critical to the Sustainable Development Goals… By and large, I think that many of the other sectors have not come to grips with how central agriculture is and how food, food systems, nutrition, health and well-being are all interrelated."
This, to me at least, is a very surprising statement. We need food, water and energy to survive and thrive and little progress can be made in other key development areas such as health and education if the population is malnourished. Many early-years schooling programmes actually deliver a lot of their benefits by providing food or nutritional supplements at the same time.
It is also good to see the role of science being promoted so strongly in the development sector. Dr Risjsberman has written a series of blog posts for the Development Dialogues event, and Agricultural science is the backbone of sustainable development sums up one of the key messages. So let me quote from this:
“Like all roads led to Rome, many of the 17 goals being discussed as part of this ‘post-2015 agenda’ seem to lead back to one place: agricultural science.
"So why is agricultural science so important?
"Let’s begin with the obvious. The SDGs want to achieve access to adequate, nutritious food and enable a healthy life at all ages for all. In order to boost food production, we are going to need to equip farmers, particularly those in the developing world, with the resources to cope with increasingly erratic weather caused by climate change, and to grow more with less as natural resources grow ever more scarce. This can be achieved through science.”
In modern societies, with few people having any direct connection to agriculture, many people have a romantic view of what farming is all about. Farming changes the environment, but often in ways which we now take for granted and appreciate aesthetically. Farming has also never stood still. Today’s food chain, based on evolving technology, is a marvel which we tend to take for granted. We have the luxury of worrying about how our food is produced, in contrast to many rural Africans and Asians. For the sake of them, we should not stand in the way of using the best scientific knowledge to improve productivity.
Martin Livermore
The Scientific Alliance
St John’s Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge CB4 0WS
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