1. 1 billion hungry: what role for agricultural development?
Liz Wilson, Agriculture for Impact @Ag4Impact

2. Agriculture for Impact

3. The Boss
Nature, 13 August 2009 (S.Torfinn/Panos)

4. The role for agricultural development in food security
Content
The context: global challenges
The role for agricultural development in food security
Agriculture for Impact

5. Energy Food Water The Perfect Storm? Increasing population
Increased demand
50% by 2030 (IEA)
Energy
Increasing population
Increasing levels of urbanisation
The rightful goal to alleviate poverty
Climate Change
Food
Increased demand
50% by 2030
(FAO)
Water
Increased demand
30% by 2030
(IFPRI)
Population
Over 9 billion by 2050 (UN Population Division)
6 million a month (John Beddington, DFID, 12th Nov 2009)
Urbanisation
the world’s urban population has exceeded the rural population
FAO launched urban agriculture campaign
Alleviating poverty
In Sub-Saharan Africa only Ghana is on track to meet the MDG to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger
Energy: increased demand of 50% by 2030 (IEA) – biofuels, rising oil and fertiliser prices
Food: increased demand of 50% by 2030 (FAO)
Water: increased demand of 30% by 2030 (IFPRI)
Climate change
Major key issue is uncertainties about climate change and how to manage them
John Beddington, Chief Scientist, Government Office for Science, speaking at DFID, 12th November 2009

6. Gordon Conway’s English cottage loaf
Behind the acute crisis lies chronic crises.
As well as the Perfect Storm issues you can also include:
Land scarcity / land acquisition
Rising incomes + changing consumption patterns

7. Food price volatility
Food prices ‘will remain high and volatile’ say IFPRI b/c of rising demand

8. Food price volatility
Arguably the food price spikes of 2007/08 and then in 2010, finally got political leaders to focus on a global food security agenda

9. 1.02 billion people are hungry 1 in 6 of the world’s population
A global food crisis
1.02 billion people are hungry
1 in 6 of the world’s population
(FAO, 2009)

10. Hunger is on the rise
FAO (2009) State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009, FAO, Rome.
Undernourishment exists when caloric intake is below the minimum dietary energy requirement
(MDER). The MDER is the amount of energy needed for light activity and a minimum acceptable weight for
attained height, and it varies by country and from year to year depending on the gender and age structure of
the population.

11. Increased impact on developing countries
FAO (2009) State of Food Insecurity in the World 2009, FAO, Rome.

12. World Food Programme hunger map
WFP
Dark red is most acute

13. Over 265 million people are undernourished (26% of global total)
Sub-Saharan Africa
Over 265 million people are undernourished (26% of global total)
Home to 15 of the 16 countries where the prevalence of hunger exceeds 35%
FAO
FAO is revising the was it measures these numbers and we should get new data in 2012 or 2013

14. Food security underpins global security Economic time bomb
Why does it matter?
Food security underpins global security
Economic time bomb
Humanitarian imperative
Pls, we need to make sure that agriculture working to full effect globally as we are going to need all options on the table to feed the world.

15. Food security underpins global security
Picture is of Haiti in 2008
Food prices were ‘one of the factors that caused the Arab Spring’
Informative VOA report here:
The Guardian, 9 April 2008: Kena Betancur/EPA

16. Economic time bomb
Long term effects on health, physical and cognitive development.
Long term economic time bomb for all

17. Humanitarian imperative
13 million people affected by Horn of Africa crisis, with famine declared in Somalia in 2011

18. Food Security (World Food Summit, 1996)
“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.
(World Food Summit, 1996)

19. Entitlements
Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the of there being not enough food to eat
Amartya Sen,1982
The entitlement approach to starvation and famines concentrates on
the ability of people to command food through the legal means available in the society, including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-à-vis the state, and other methods of acquiring food.
A person starves either because he does not have the ability to command enough food, or because he does not use this ability to avoid starvation. The entitlement approach concentrates on the former, ignoring the latter possibility.
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation
trade-based entitlement: one is entitled to own what one obtains by trading something one owns with a willing party (or, multilaterally, with a willing set of parties); 2. production-based entitlement: one is entitled to own what one gets by arranging production using one's owned resources, or resources hired from willing parties meeting the agreed conditions of trade; 3. own-labour entitlement: one is entitled to one's own labour power, and thus to the trade-based and production-based entitlements related to one's labour power; 4. inheritance and transfer entitlement: one is entitled to own what is willingly given to one by another who legitimately owns it, possibly to take affect after the latter's death (if so specified by him).

20. Four dimensions of food security

21. GDP growth from agriculture benefits the income of the poor 2-4 times more than GDP growth from non-agriculture
WDR, page 6 – 42 countries
Agricultural growth has special powers in reducing poverty across all country types. Cross-country estimates show that GDP growth originating in agriculture is twice as effective in reducing poverty as GDP growth originating outside agriculture.
Rapid ag growth …
In India – driven by technological innovations
In China – driven by institutional innovations such as household responsibility system and market liberalisation
… led to major declines in rural poverty
Decile: Noun. (statistics) any of nine points that divided a distribution of ranked scores into equal intervals where each interval contains one-tenth of the scores
Also: The potential poverty-reducing impact of agriculture-related growth is three times larger than growth originating from other sectors of the economy.
Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, World Bank Research Observer vol. 25, no.1 (2010), Agricultural Growth and Poverty Reduction: Additional Evidence, available at

22. Lack of investment in agriculture
17% of ODA
30% of World Bank lending
Mid 2000s:
4% of ODA
7% of World Bank lending

23. EU overseas development assistance to agriculture
5,000
10,000
15,000
20,000
25,000
1967
1969
1971
1973
1975
1977
1979
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
Years
2007 $ US, millions
DAC EU members to Africa
DAC EU members to agriculture
DAC EU to SSA agriculture
ODA from Europe (Thirtle, Piesse and Hearn, 2009 via OECD DAC data)
Donor review
Quality, not just quantity
More focused

24. African agriculture
80% (33 million farms) less than 2 hectares (smallholders)
50% of the agricultural labour force is female
Cereal yields, around one ton per hectare, ¼ of those in East Asia.
Fertilisers are applied at average rates of about 11kg/ ha of arable land (compared to 112kg/ha in Latin American and the Caribbean)
Only 4% of cultivated land is irrigated, of which 70% is Madagascar, Nigeria and Sudan. The potential exists to bring 20 million hectares of land under irrigation.
Many pests, diseases and weeds such as Striga, Black Sigatoka, Banana wilt, Cassava mosaic virus, Maize leaf streak and Maruca beetles can destroy crops. .

25. A continent of many different stories
Room for optimism – we need a more differentiated narrative
While recognising that overall there is a lot of room for improvement
‘Africa is not in crisis but some African countries are’ (Wiggins, 2011)

26. Delivering change Looking for win-wins: Increasing yields sustainably
Enabling access to markets
Political leadership

27. Sustainable intensification
NERICAS: tissue culture (African and Asia)
Yields increase from 1 to 6 ton/ha
- higher yield, shorter growth duration, resistance to local stresses and higher protein content than
traditional rice varieties
Faidherbia albida
In Malawi, maize yields 280% + under the tree canopy compared with the zone outside the tree canopy.
In Zambia, unfertilized maize yields near the trees averaged 4.1 tonnes per hectare, compared to 1.3 tonnes beyond the tree canopy.
STRIGAWAY: The product combines a low-dose Imazapyr seed coating applied to Imazapyrresistant (IR) maize seed. Small quantities of Imazapyr (as little as 30 g/ha) act
before or at the time of Striga attachment to the maize root and so prevent the
phytotoxic ef ect of Striga on the maize plant, thus enabling the plant to grow to
its full potential. Additionally, Imazapyr that is not absorbed by the maize seedling dif uses into the surrounding soil and kills ungerminated Striga seeds

28. Quality as well as quantity
Golden rice (GM) – includes betacarotene, precursor to vitamin A
Orange fleshed sweet potato for vit A: BMGF funded a project to deliver in Uganda and Mozambique, where vitamin A deficiency affects 38% and 68% of all children respectively
HGSF links ag to health and education

29. Access to markets
SSA has the lowest density of roads in the world, 204 km per 1000km2 of land area, on average. The world average is 944km/1000km2.
Finance
Intermediaries – support for that / extension etc.

30. Political leadership

31. Agriculture for Impact

32. The gap
High level rhetoric
Gap?
Grassroots activity

33. Opportunities to influence
CAADP
G8 : UK Presidency in 2013
G20 EU
GROW Africa / WEF initiative
CAADP:
27 countries have completed the CAADP Roundtable process and signed strategy documents, known as ‘compacts’.
17 of the countries have moved on to develop their agricultural investment plans and five have been awarded GAFSP funding totalling $223.5 million (Benin et al 2011)

34. Our focus

35. Our activities

36. How can we feed the world?
Highly productive
Stable
Resilient
Equitable
Sustainable
Highly productive: by 2050 we will need to have doubled food production and in an efficient manner;
Stable: less affected by the vagaries of the weather and the market;
Resilient: resistant to, or tolerant of, stress or shocks, especially those generated by climate change; and
Equitable: to provide accessible food and incomes, not just to the better off, but to the poor and hungry;
Moreover it has to be:
Sustainable : we must achieve a pattern of equitable growth that lasts from generation to generation and ensure we do not undermine the environmental and natural resource base on which agriculture depends.

37. What is ‘successful’ scaling up?
Link to private sector?
Our hypothesis?

38. Beyond islands of happiness?

39. What is scaling up?
Becoming large?

40. What is scaling up? Expanding impact?
Need to define how we will measure success at scale?
Some ideas:
Farmers’ income
Number of adopters (affected by length of adoption on which there is little consensus, first time adopters, those who have adopted through successive growing seasons etc., those that innovate during adoption and scale)
Percentage adopting with the relevant recommendation domain (agro-ecology, national, district, village, percentage per farm)
Cropped area
Numbers of livestock using improved practices
Type of Intervention
Total factor productivity (land, labour and area)

41. The Boss
Nature, 13 August 2009 (S.Torfinn/Panos)

42. www.ag4impact.org @Ag4Impact e.wilson@imperial.ac.uk
Liz Wilson, Agriculture for Impact
11th January 2012