1. Can you tell us a little about your background, prior to your whirlwind trip around Africa?
I'm from a small town in Missouri named Defiance (which I tend to think is appropriate!), studied environmental policy at Monmouth College in Illinois, and then spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Dominican Republic where I split my time between working with farmers and urban school kids. That experience helped me realize the connections between agriculture and the environment in a way that I hadn't before and then I went to the Agriculture, Food, and Environment program at Tufts University, interned with the Science and Environmental Health Network, and then I began at Worldwatch in 2000. After which I made them hire me ;-).
2. What is the purpose of your travel in Africa, and which countries have you visited?
The purpose of our research with Nourishing the Planet was to evaluate environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating hunger and poverty. Over the last year, we've visited more than 200 projects in 25 countries in Eastern, Southern, and Western Africa talking to farmers, farmers groups, researchers, scientists, policy-makers, NGOs, journalists, aid agencies, and others getting their thoughts about what's really working on the ground-from urban farming projects in Kibera, Africa's largest slum to school garden projects in Cote d'Ivoire. We wanted to do a couple of things with this project: one, tell stories of hope and success in agriculture in Africa. Most Americans and Europeans hear "Africa" and they think conflict, famine, HIV/AIDS and while those issues are definite problems, there are also many African-led innovations that are conserving soil and water resources, mitigating climate change, raising incomes, improving gender equity, and working towards better nutrition. We want to help make sure that these stories are also being told and publicized. That's one reason we like to include so much on the Nourishing the Planet blog and on our diary for La Vida Locavore; second, we wanted to create at least a partial roadmap for the funding and donor communities, helping funnel their investments toward projects that are really working. More and more investment is coming to Africa, after a long drought, so to speak, and much of it, unfortunately, gets wasted or goes toward projects that don't work or that are destructive in the long-term. And while the IAASTD suggested many of the same conclusions we've made in the forthcoming State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet, we're not based solely on peer-reviewed literature, but what we saw working on the ground.
3. What are the main barriers to food sovereignty in Africa, and how does it vary from region to region?
That's a good question, but please remember that I don't claim to be an expert on Africa. I can tell you what I saw on the ground and from that experience the main barriers to food sovereignty are gender inequity and the lack of land tenure. Women make up at least 80 percent of the agricultural labor force in Africa, but they typically aren't allowed to own land. And they don't have access to extension services, which despite the number of women farmers, still target men. Allowing women to have more rights over land and better access to education about sustainable agriculture methods would have a huge impact on not only yields and nutrition, but also reduce deforestation, improve water quality, and increase the number of girls going to school. One woman I met, in Niger had recently begun working with other women at a community garden and her "own" piece of land there had allowed her to triple her income from $300 USD per year to more than $1000 USD and she told me that not only is she able to buy more food for her family, but also send her children to school.
4. Is there any country (or countries) you've visited where the government has taken a particularly effective action to reduce poverty or increase food sovereignty?
Most of the work, unfortunately, isn't being done by governments, but community by community and farmer by farmer. Again, I don't know everything about sub-Saharan Africa, but most countries haven't invested as much as they could or should in agriculture or food sovereignty. I was, however, impressed by representatives of the agriculture department in The Gambia. They were working on helping farmers conserve and protect indigenous livestock, instead of promoting the use of exotic breeds, supposedly high producing breeds, which are promoted by many agriculture agencies in other African countries. The Gambia is recognizing that indigenous breeds have the potential to be more resistant to disease and able to withstand hot temperature, drought, and other extreme weather conditions better than exotic breeds and that they'll be key in helping Gambian farmers and livestock keepers practice sustainable agriculture, while also adapting to climate change.
5. Have you noticed any impact of neo-liberal free trade policies on food sovereignty in the countries you've visited? If so, what?
There's definitely a bit of a perception issue caused by flooding of markets with international products. Grocery stores are filled with processed foods from around the world, from crackers made in Argentina and soy milk from China to popular U.S. breakfast cereals. Local rice breeds are considered 'inferior' in Senegal. But this is starting to change as educational programs come about to revitalize an interest and an appetite for local and indigenous plants and products processed by local dealers, such as the It's Wild brand, started by the Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO).
6. How does the traditional agriculture and cuisine vary from place to place? (You can just give a few examples)
One of the best parts of my job is that I get to try so many interesting and traditional foods-from groundnut soup in Uganda to spiderwiki (leafy greens) in Kibera in Nairobi to millet paste in Niger. One of the "traditional" agriculture practices that is consistent throughout sub-Saharan Africa is seed-saving. Nearly every subsistence farmer we met with shared with us how they collected, preserved, and stored seed from one season or year to next. In Uganda, Edie Mukiibi, a young farmer and educator, is teaching students at 30 schools the importance of collecting seed from indigenous grains, vegetables and fruits and saving them to plant in school gardens. In Mozambique, we talked to a researcher who is helping farmers find better ways of storing seeds so that they don't get eaten by rodents or destroyed by mold or fungus.
7. Have you seen any particularly successful examples of industrial agriculture used to promote food sovereignty in the places you've visited? If so, what?
Not really...what I have seen is interesting examples of farmers getting better access to markets. I think I had kind of a naïve view of African agriculture before this trip-the issue is not that farmers can't produce food. They can-they're some of the best farmers I've seen in the world. The problem is that they often either can't get to a viable market for their crops because of bad roads or long distances or when they do get their maize, or sorghum, or rice to a market the price is so low it wasn't worth the trip in the first place. But through projects like USAID's PROFIT program in Zambia (which I was really skeptical of, at first), farmers are engaging directly with buyers and getting better prices for their crops.
8. Have you seen any particularly successful examples of agroecology used to promote food sovereignty in the places you've visited? If so, what?
We visited with Richard Haigh, founder of Enaleni Farm in Durban, South Africa. he raises endangered Zulu sheep, Nguni cattle (a pest-tolerant breed indigenous to South Africa), and a variety of fruits and vegetables, putting emphasis on the biodiversity of the continent. Richard's farm is an example of how agroecological methods work. He practices "push-pull" agriculture, using alternating intercropping of plants that repel pests (pushing them away from the harvest) and ones that attract pests (pulling them towards the harvest) to increase yields. He also uses animal manure and compost for fertilizer. Also in Kibera, Kenya, 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. The women grow crops in them on different levels by poking holes in the bags and planting seeds. During the food crises of 2008 when no food was coming in or out of the slum these women were still able to feed their families and communities.
9. What are land rights like in Africa? Do families have land, and if so, how much? And is the land good for agriculture or does it present challenges like poor soil or steep slopes? (You can give a few examples...obviously it'd be impossible to answer about every place you've been)
This is a complicated question and obviously differed from country to country. In Nairobi, Kenya we visited a large slum where men and women are farming land that isn't theirs, but owned by the Kenyan Social Security Administration. They are allowed to farm the land through an informal arrangement but have n legal right to the land. While this isn't the case everywhere, there is also the matter of the increasing trend of large scale land acquisitions in Africa. The debate on this issue is still ongoing but there is a great fear that the 'land grabs' deny land for local communities and complicate land tenure, taking land claimed to be idle that really belongs to indigenous communities. And yes, farmers are fighting battles against increasingly degraded land, like those in the Uluguru Mountains of Tanzania, where repeated plantings have depleted the nutrients in the soil leaving it nearly barren and vulnerable to erosion.
10. Do you see a lot of pesticides used in the countries you've visited? And if so, are people educated about the risks involved and equipped with protective clothing? Have you heard of (or observed) any acute illnesses or deaths due to pesticides in the places you've visited?
There is definitely still use of pesticides, but they are often too expensive for farmers to afford. We did meet with many groups who don't use them purposely, such as Songtaab-Yalgré in Burkina Faso, a woman's cooperative that processes and exports organic shea butter using only agro-ecological practices. The World Vegetable Center in Arusha, Tanzania is working to breed vegetable varieties that do not need pesticides, which is better for both the environment and the farmer's wallet.
In Kenya we visited the Sher Karuturi flower factory, and the week before we arrived, four women were hospitalized for chemical exposure. Apparently they were sent into the 35 degree Celsius greenhouses too soon after chemicals, mainly pesticides, were applied to the flowers. But for the most part, we're told, the conditions are better at this farm than some of the other farms--workers are provided a stipend for housing, there's a school located on site, and the salaries are higher than what employees of other farms make, because of their union. Kenya's Solidarity Center is working with them to conduct trainings and strengthen their ranks despite intimidation and pressure to avoid unions. |
