Jim Brumm: Long-Term Thinking for a Short-Sighted World

Millions of cassava farmers in eastern and central Africa are in distress from viral cassava diseases that are sweeping across the region and ravaging their crops. But their counterparts on the popular tourist island of Zanzibar are undergoing a quiet revolution using new disease-resistant and high-yielding varieties that were introduced three years ago.

The four varieties, Kizimbani, Mahonda, Kama, and Machui, have given cassava a new lease on life after the crop was devastated by the two main diseases afflicting the region: brown streak disease and mosaic disease. The diseases, which are spread by white flies, cost Africa's cassava sector more than US$1 billion in damages every year. Small-scale farmers - among the poorest in the region - bear most of the economic effects.

Cassava mosaic disease first appeared in Uganda in the mid-1980s and spread rapidly in cassava-growing areas of eastern and central Africa through the sharing of infected planting materials and via the white fly vector. Following the development and deployment of resistant and tolerant varieties and widespread awareness-raising on ways to curb the mosaic's spread, scientists, governments, non-governmental organizations, and farmers were able to bring the disease nearly under control. Then the cassava brown streak struck. This disease had been around for much longer but was confined to the coastal low-altitude areas of Eastern Africa and around Lake Malawi. From 2004, it started spreading rapidly to mid-altitude areas that were recovering from the mosaic, sending scientists back to the drawing board.

Haji Saleh, the head of Zanzibar's roots and tuber program under the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Environment, says the first survey of cassava brown streak on the island was conducted in 1994 and indicated that 20 percent of the crop had disease symptoms. In a follow-up survey in 2002, the disease was found everywhere. "All the local varieties grown by the farmers were susceptible. The farmer and authorities were crying out for help," Saleh said.

Heeding the call for help, Zanzibar crop scientists in collaboration with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) started a breeding program to develop cassava varieties that were resistant to the two diseases. Their efforts paid off, and after only four years, four new varieties were released in 2007.

"You have to understand, cassava is a very important staple in Zanzibar, where it comes in second after rice," Saleh said. "However, it is first in terms of acreage and production with over 90 percent of farmers growing the crop. It is our food security crop as it grows in most of the agro-ecological zones including in the dry parts of the island where other crops do not perform well. So when the diseases hit, they were very devastating to the island's food security. We had to act fast."

The research team then started a rapid multiplication program, working with the farmers to spread the improved varieties on the island and beyond. "We selected pilot farmers in each district to help with the multiplication," Saleh said. "We trained them on how to grow cassava to get good yields and maintain soil fertility, and on business skills, as they were to sell the planting material as a business."

One farmer, 59-year-old Ramadhani Abdala Ame of Kianga village - a father of 10 - participated in the on-farm trials using the improved varieties. During the trials, the farmers helped the researchers select not only the best performing varieties, but also those that met farmer preferences and requirements for various uses of the crops. Ramadhani said he had given up on cassava, which was suffering from "kensa ya mhogo," or "cancer of the cassava." Infected by the brown streak disease, the crop develops a dry rot in its roots - the most economically important part of the plant - which makes it useless for consumption.

"The cassava looked good in the field, but when you harvested, the roots were rotten and useless, with all your labor and efforts going down the drain," Ramadhani said. He explained that he was given 40 cuttings of the four new varieties to test on his farm. "At that time, they did not have names, only numbers. I was amazed at their performance: the  tubers were huge, and had no disease. I selected the two I liked best that were later renamed Kizimbani and Machui."

Ramadhani said the sale of cassava roots and planting materials has made a big difference in his life. He has bought two cows to add to his stock, constructed a cowshed, and is now building a better brick and iron-sheet house for his family.

Another pilot farmer, Suleiman John Ndebe of Machui village, had also given up on cassava after 10 years of bad harvests due to the "cancer" and other pests and diseases such as mealy bug and cassava green mite. But the varieties given to him at Kizimbazi research station for testing excited him and motivated him to resume growing the crop. It's a decision he says he has not regretted.

Suleiman says his involvement in the project has turned his life around. Farming for him is now a serious business. He estimates that he makes profits of between 50 and 100 percent from his cassava, depending on the season, and his income increased more than four times. "Before the training, I did not know agriculture was a business. I did not know whether I made a profit or a loss. Now, I know how much cassava I have planted, the cost of labor and manure, how much I expect to harvest, and how much profit I will make," he said. "I am now able to save some money in the bank and my life is less stressful. I even bought a color TV to be able to follow the World Cup!"

Yet there is still a big gap to fill before all the farmers on Zanzibar can enjoy the new cassava varieties. According to Salma Omar Mohamed, a research officer with Kizimbani Research station, only some 10,000 farmers are currently growing these new varieties, out of a potential of more than 1 million. She says the business model of distributing the planting materials has excluded poor farmers who are not able to afford the materials. However, she was thankful for the strides made with funding from donors such as Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which supported the free distribution of planting materials to poor farmers under a voucher program.

Mohamed hopes they can get more such support to spread the improved varieties to all the farmers on Zanzibar and on neighboring Pemba Island, where the disease is also prevalent and penetration of the new varieties is even lower.

IITA cassava breeders report that hope is also on the way for farmers in Kenya, mainland Tanzania, and Uganda, as 15 promising cassava varieties that are suitable for the climatic conditions of these areas are in the last testing stages.

Catherine Njuguna is a communication officer with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about food security developments through innovations such as crop breeding.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.   

 

The following op-ed appeared in The Seattle Times.

For most Seattle residents, global hunger seems like an impossible problem to solve. Reports of famine in Niger or the thousands at risk for starvation and malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, seem not only far away but impossible to change. A local organization, however, begs to differ.

The Seattle-based Bridges to Understanding uses digital technology to empower and connect children around the world. Students participating in the Bridges curriculum are taught to use cameras and editing software to develop stories about their community and culture. These videos, comprised of a photo slide show with a running narration, are then shared with the Bridges online community, which is made up of schools in seven countries around the world.

For many students, it's the first time they have ever even held a camera.

"At first, the prospect of designing, shooting and editing a movie seems insurmountable but then they produce these beautiful films," says Elizabeth Sewell, Bridges Program Manager at the Rural Development Foundation's (RDF) primary school in Kalleda, a small village in the Warangal district of Andhra Pradesh, India. "And then you knock down that barrier, you show them what they are capable of doing. And then they can start to approach other, larger and more institutional, problems the same way. Suddenly, in their own eyes, there are no limits to what they can achieve."

Since the 1980s, international investment in agriculture has decreased significantly. These cuts have impacted women and children the most. But in addition to making sure we reverse these trends, we need to ensure that funding is used effectively - reaching the farmers who need it most.

Who better to consult - and to equip with the tools to help out - in the global effort to combat hunger than the youth, women and farmers who will most benefit from it?

In South Africa, the organization Food and Natural Resource Policy Analysis Network is using theater to engage leaders, service providers and policymakers; encourage community participation; and research the needs of women farmers through a project called Theatre for Policy Advocacy. Popular theater personalities travel to communities in Mozambique and Malawi and stage performances using scripts based on the network's research, to engage members of the community.

After each performance, community members, women, men, youth, local leaders are engaged in facilitated dialogues. The dialogues give all community members - especially women - a chance to openly talk about the challenges they are facing without upsetting the status quo, empowering them to speak about what they need from aid groups and their community.

In Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Mali, and other countries around the world, the Africa Rice Centre is using farmer-made instructional videos to help rice farmers share various new methods of improving rice production with each other. The strong presence of women in the videos also helps local NGOs and extension offices - which tend to be made up mostly of male agents - engage women's groups.

Projects like Bridges, Theatre for Policy Advocacy and Farmer to Farmer Training Videos - that provide a forum for those who might not otherwise have a voice - allow for the spread of important information, empowering the very people who will most benefit from, and can play the largest role in, the alleviation of global hunger and poverty.

They are ready. All they need are the tools.

Danielle Nierenberg is co-project director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Project. Molly Theobald is a research fellow at the Worldwatch Institute.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.

No longer a mere suggestion of what might be, renewable energy is hitting a tipping point, with far-reaching implications. For the first time, understanding the scale and patterns of renewable energy development has become essential to any full analysis of trends that will shape the global energy economy and the health of the planet.

That is the story told by a new report that the Worldwatch Institute helped research and write: the Renewables Global Status Report 2010. Produced by the REN21 network of governments, NGOs, and industry associations, the report paints a remarkable picture of a booming new economic sector that has powered its way through a deep global recession, emerging stronger than ever. 

Buoyed by hundreds of new government energy policies, accelerating private investment, and myriad technology advances over the past five years, renewable energy is breaking into the mainstream of energy markets. Over the past two years, the United States and Europe have both added more power capacity from renewables than from coal, gas, and nuclear combined, according to the report. Worldwide, renewables accounted for one-third of the new generating capacity added.

Renewable energy, including hydropower, now provides 18 percent of total net electricity generation worldwide. Meanwhile, biofuels such as ethanol and biodiesel are making inroads in the transportation fuels market and are now equal to about 5 percent of world gasoline production. And in China, more than 150 million people heat at least some of their water using solar hot water systems.

The economic weight of the renewable energy sector is now large enough to attract many of the world's largest and most powerful companies, from GE and Siemens to unlikely players such as Samsung and Google. Renewable energy investment of $150 billion worldwide in 2009 was the equivalent of nearly 40 percent of annual investment in the upstream oil and gas industry, which topped $380 billion.

Changes in government policy are responsible for most of these advances. In 2009 alone, 10 national and state governments enacted policies giving renewable power generation access to the grid at prices set by policymakers, bringing the number of governments with such policies to 70. Altogether, the number of countries with policies to encourage renewable energy has increased from 55 in 2005 to 100 in 2010. 

One of the forces motivating new renewable energy policies is the desire to create new industries and jobs. Employment in the renewables sector now numbers in the hundreds of thousands in several countries. In Germany, which has led renewable energy development for more than a decade, more than 300,000 people were employed in renewables industries in 2009. This figure almost equals the number of jobs in the country's largest manufacturing sector: automobiles.

The changing geography of renewable energy is another indicator that we are entering a new era, with the growing geographic diversity boosting confidence that renewables are no longer vulnerable to political shifts in just a few countries. It is also clear that leadership is shifting decisively from Europe to Asia, with China, India, and South Korea among the countries that have stepped up their commitments to renewable energy.

This transition reflects a growing recognition within Asia itself that these oil-short countries have much to gain from the development of renewable energy in economic, environmental, and security terms. For the world as a whole, this is a momentous development, since Asian nations now lead the growth in carbon emissions. Given East Asia's dominance of low-cost global manufacturing, the region's commitment to renewable energy will almost certainly drive down the price of many renewable energy devices in the coming years.

Renewable energy is also beginning to make a dent in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In Germany, renewables displaced 109 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2009 - equivalent to 12 percent of the country's total - helping to reduce domestic emissions 29 percent from the 1990 level.

At a time when the world's energy headlines are dominated by an oil-stained Gulf of Mexico and failure of the U.S. Senate to act on climate change, renewable energy is a rare good news story. The momentum that renewables have gained in a relatively short time indicates that with modest policy changes, a very different energy system could begin to emerge over the next decade.

Our congratulations to Worldwatch Senior Fellows Janet Sawin and Eric Martinot, who co-directed the Renewables Global Status Report 2010. They and their many contributors from around the globe have provided a surprisingly clear picture of an energy economy in motion. The optimistic picture they paint offers inspiration to those who despair of the energy headlines in recent months.

Christopher Flavin is President of the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley's Center for African Studies and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First), has worked for, and later rallied against, the World Bank and World Trade Organization. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and most recently, The Value of Nothing. In an interview with Worldwatch research intern Ronit Ridberg, the award-winning writer, activist, and academic shares his views on food sovereignty and global agricultural policies.

What is food sovereignty, and what policies and programs will help encourage it?

Food sovereignty is about communities', states', and unions' rights to shape their own food and agricultural policy. Now that may sound like a whole lot of nothing, because you're actually not making a policy demand, you're just saying that people need to be able to make their own decisions. But, actually, that's a huge thing. Because in general, particularly for smaller farmers in developing countries, and particularly for women, decisions about food and agricultural policy have never been made by them. They've always been imposed.

That's why La Via Campesina, the organization that really invented the term, says that one of the visions behind food sovereignty is that food sovereignty is about an end to all forms of violence against women. That may sound like something not at all to do with food, but of course, if we're serious about people being able to make choices about how their food comes to them and what the food system looks like, then the physical and structural violence to which women are exposed in the home, in the economy, and in society all need to be tackled. Otherwise we will continue with a situation in which 60 percent of the people going hungry today are women or girls. So food sovereignty, to boil it down, is really about power - who has it in the food system and how to redistribute it so that those who have concentrated it have it taken away from them.

In terms of specific policies, what Via Campesina is calling for is for agriculture to be removed from the World Trade Organization, which is a way again in which local countries' sovereignty is already been given away. They also call for large corporations to be booted out of agriculture. There's strong opposition to Monsanto, for example, and the way that they've been behaving in many developing countries, and many Via Campesina members are campaigning against Monsanto in their home countries.

Will another Green Revolution or more food subsidies help reduce hunger?

To answer the question, let's look at Malawi. It's the poster child for what a new Green Revolution in Africa might look like, with widespread subsidies of inorganic fertilizer for farmers. When I went there, late last year, what you found was long lines at the gasoline pump, because all Malawi's foreign exchange had been spent on importing this fossil fuel-based fertilizer. The country had bankrupted itself in order that it might be a showcase for the new Green Revolution in Africa. And of course, there are alternatives right there in Malawi, driven by farmers, invariably by women who are innovating around sustainable systems like polyculture - growing lots of crops simultaneously together, building soil fertility for the long run.

What this shows is that there are some basic incompatibilities between varieties of ways of addressing agrarian problems in Africa. Some organizations, Worldwatch included, adopt a "big tent" approach, in which solutions that keep the status quo but improve it marginally sit alongside far more radical approaches. Ultimately, you can't promote genetically modified monoculture or techniques that make large-scale commercial farming less destructive at the same time as wanting something like food sovereignty, which calls for much more of a deeper structural rethink of the way the food system operates. Food sovereignty is about democracy in our food system so that everyone gets to eat; industrial agriculture involves a food system run by technocrats for profit. At the end of the day, you can have one or the other - not both.

[Editor's Note: Worldwatch has a long history of writing about sustainable agriculture systems that encourage crop diversity and support the livelihoods of small-scale farmers. Those reports have documented evidence that genetically modified crops are not necessarily the best, most appropriate, or only available solution to agricultural challenges. Visit the Nourishing the Planet blog for a more detailed response from our team of agriculture researchers.]

How does global agricultural policy affect small-scale farmers across the world?

In general, the policies foisted on developing countries through organizations like the World Bank is that large-scale agriculture is the way to go: that small farmers are a relic of the past. They are of purely cultural significance but economically, socially, and agriculturally, they stand in the way of development. So the policies that are essentially designed to increase farm size and kick off rural populations to the cities are ones that you see in pretty much every country around the world. And yet of course, it is the poor in rural communities that are being forced to bear the brunt of these policies, and these are the communities that are least able to afford it. And again-you can never say it too often - it is on women's shoulders that the bulk of the pain of moving from agrarian society to a so-called modern industrial society, falls.

Why should American food consumers care about the fate of agricultural producers halfway across the world?

Not out of any sense of pity or charity, but because the struggles that farmers in developing countries face are very similar to the struggles that farmers in the United States face. Industrial agriculture wreaks havoc. We've seen the deaths from E. coli, we've seen industrial agriculture and the rise of BSE [mad cow disease], we've seen the massive dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico because of the runoff from animal feeding operations flowing down the Mississippi. If you're in America and you're concerned about the quality or safety of your food, or about the consequences of the way your food is produced, then you're not alone. Those are all things that farmers elsewhere in the world are worried about, and that consumers elsewhere in the world are worried about too.

There's a proven way in which those concerns can be addressed. It is to wrench power away from the corporations that profit from low standards, from the ability to create offshore pollution, and the ability to evade the costs of defective products. So I think in the U.S., if you're at all concerned about food safety, health, obesity-any of these things-then you would want to have more control over your food system. And wanting more control over your food system is exactly what food sovereignty is about. In a globalized world, you can't have control over your food system in this country while people elsewhere don't, and this is what makes it a common struggle.

Funding for agricultural research has declined in recent decades. Where should funding for agricultural innovation and research come from?

Funding for agriculture ought to come from the places where research used to come from: the government. I don't have any stars in my eyes when I think about governments in developing countries having a ton of cash in their coffers for research into this. But governments that are net food-importing developing countries found themselves after the last food crisis in very dark times. They're keen to develop new ways of doing things.

A lot of these countries haven't had the money to be able to invest in agricultural extension and research, and so what we need are two things: one is a cancellation of the illegitimate debt that these countries have racked up with organizations like the World Bank. There's a huge debt that rich countries owe poor ones-for colonialism, for the ecological damage we have caused and continue to cause by the way we consume. Yet through the World Bank, the debt has been flipped over, and has become an agent for controlling these economies.

So we definitely need a change in the way international development and finance work. But we also need to support change within developing countries so that agricultural extension becomes something that once again is funded and is geared toward the kinds of research that is about low-carbon, that is about democratic control over resources, rather than about pushing a particular kind of product and particular kind of vision of agriculture that is ultimately unsustainable for the majority of countries in Africa.

Ronit Ridberg is a research intern with the Worldwatch Institute. Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about food sovereignty and fair trade.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

  
The prospects of Congressional reauthorization of a multi-year surface transportation bill in the United States-already many months overdue-appear dim this year. Identifying funding sources is one of the major stumbling blocks, and legislators seem to lack a vision of what 21st-century mobility entails. They might gain inspiration from developments in France.

On July 9, the French government released a draft plan for transportation infrastructure investments (called "avant-projet au schéma national des infrastructures de transports") over the next two decades. If the priorities hold, it will represent nothing less than an "adieu" to decades of car-centered development.

Of €170 billion ($220 billion) in planned spending, €85 billion-50 percent-will be allocated to high-speed rail, and €53 billion-31 percent-to urban trams, subways, and bus lines. That's a whopping 81 percent of transportation spending for public transport! Roads and airports, by contrast, will receive only a combined 5 percent, with the remainder going to ports and waterways.

By 2020, a total of 2,300 kilometers of new high-speed rail (HSR) lines are to be built, with another 1,500 kilometers planned by 2030. (See map.) Urban mass-transit lines are to be expanded fivefold to a total of 1,800 kilometers. It is expected that the overall plan will reduce the annual carbon dioxide emissions of France's transportation sector, currently at 30 million tons, by 2 million tons.

But, as the newspaper Les Echos comments, the plan does not specify how the French government will finance the plan-through taxes, user fees, borrowing, or other measures, including the mobilization of private investments-which raises some questions about the overall viability of the plan.

Financing could also prove somewhat of an Achilles heel of ambitious Spanish plans. Spain currently has the largest high-speed rail construction program in Europe and, at 1,614 kilometers, already has the second-longest HSR track in Europe after France. Plans call for a total of 10,000 kilometers built by 2020, meaning that Spain will add more than three times the additional capacity envisioned under the already ambitious French plan by the same date.

The 2004 Strategic Plan for Infrastructures and Transport (PEIT) calls for 44 percent of total transportation investment by 2020 to be directed toward rail, primarily for expansion of the high-speed network. Between 2005 and 2020, some $152 billion is to be invested in rail, with $115 billion going to high-speed routes.

By 2010, with the country deeply mired in the global recession, the Spanish government turned to infrastructure investments, especially in rail, as a way to stimulate the economy. Its two-year Extraordinary Infrastructure Plan, rolled out in April 2010, promised to invest some $22 billion in transportation, with 70 percent going to rail and 30 percent to highways. High-speed rail tracks will see about $8 billion in new investment in 2010 alone. This latter amount is about as much as the U.S. stimulus program (ARRA) makes available for high-speed rail. Per capita, however, it's almost 7 times as much.

Given high levels of public debt, initial investments in projects will be made by construction companies and financial institutions, rather than the government. The government will begin to pay companies for their work starting in 2014, after projects are completed. Government spending is to be financed by a new tax on users of the infrastructure.

While a warm bienvenue and bienvenido is being extended to rail in these two European countries, the United States still struggles to offer its own welcome mat. The existing U.S. intercity rail network is fragmented, plans for the future are far less sweeping, and funding remains uncertain.

Gary Gardner and Michael Renner are senior researchers with the Worldwatch Institute. They can be reached at mrenner@worldwatch.org .

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog Green Economy. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org

 
Extractive industry companies that operate in U.S. markets will have to disclose any payments they make to governments worldwide as part of the financial reform bill that U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law this week.

Advocates of greater industry transparency in resource-rich developing countries managed to tuck the disclosure rule into the package of market regulations, claiming that the added transparency will limit investment risks abroad. More significantly, the rules would provide citizens in developing countries with essential information to combat the "resource curse" - the tendency of profits from oil, gas, or mineral deposits to adversely affect local economies and sometimes lead to conflict over these lucrative resources.

Oil, gas, and mining companies registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will be required to disclose publicly any payments made to government entities on a country-by-country and project-by-project basis as part of the financial statements already required by the SEC.

"With this far-reaching new law, citizens now have a reliable tool to ensure that the wealth created by natural resource extraction is used for essential social services such as health and education, as well as economic development opportunities," said Radhika Sarin, coordinator of Publish What You Pay, a global coalition of 600 organizations lobbying for mandatory disclosure of extractive industry payments and related government revenues.

Nigeria, the world's eighth largest oil exporter, has long struggled with crippling corruption associated with extraction of its petroleum resource. The country's anti-corruption commission has accused successive military dictatorships of embezzling some $400 billion between 1960 and 1999. Meanwhile, the majority of the population earns less than US$2 per day.

Lawmakers said that the reporting requirements would be designed using the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) guidelines. The initiative, launched at the 2002 World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, and since supported by the Group of Eight (G8) world leaders, entails regular audits of company payments to governments and of the material revenues that companies receive from governments. Independent audits are arranged in cases where audits do not already exist, with steering groups comprising government, industry, and civil society representatives overseeing the validation process.

The new disclosure rules, to be issued by the SEC no later than nine months after the financial reform bill is enacted, would increase transparency in developing countries by expanding disclosure to countries not covered by the EITI (more than 25 countries are "candidates" for inclusion in the initiative but only three have been fully validated).

Advocates estimate that the rules would apply to hundreds of companies, including 90 percent of the world's largest international oil and gas companies and eight of the world's 10 largest mining companies. Firms based outside the United States that are still listed on U.S. stock exchanges, such as Shell and BP, would have to comply.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade group that represents some 400 energy companies, opposes the disclosure rules. In a letter to U.S. legislators, Chief Executive Jack Gerard wrote that the measure would create an unfair disadvantage to companies that compete with quasi-governmental and national oil companies such as Russia's Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Company. "Disclosing payments at this level of detail, including payments on a project level, means that foreign competitors would have access to very specific, proprietary information that can be used against U.S.-listed companies in contract negotiations and for other purposes," Gerard said.

 API also criticized the rules for its "unilateral approach." However, the Hong Kong stock exchange enacted similar rules earlier this year and now requires mineral companies to include in their listing requests any information about taxes, royalties, or other payments to host governments on a country-by-country basis. Companies listed on the Hong Kong exchange must also disclose information regarding environmental, social, and health and safety risks associated with their projects.

In addition, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), a private London-based group that sets standards used in more than 100 countries, is considering a rule change that would require disclosure of payments to governments.

U.S. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) urged other countries to follow the U.S. lead when he spoke on behalf of including the transparency amendment, named after its backers Senators Benjamin Cardin (D-MD) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), in the financial reform bill.

"It is part of a broader international effort to combat corruption, poverty, hunger, and disease throughout Africa, Asia, and Central America by providing a mechanism to ensure greater transparency for the many ways in which sometimes corrupt and authoritarian governments in those regions take in huge revenue flows from oil and gas producers or mining companies and then fail to adequately meet the needs of their own vulnerable populations with social spending funded by the income from these projects," Dodd said. "I would hope that other nations and those in charge of major exchanges in London, Hong Kong, and elsewhere would follow the Cardin-Lugar approach on this." 

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch blog Green Economy. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

 
A group of women stands alongside the roads leaving Gambia's capital city of Banjul, offering up oysters for 15 dalasis a cup, or about 55 cents for approximately 75 pieces of oyster meat. These women have been harvesting oysters from the extensive mangrove wetlands of Gambia for decades. Much of the harvesting is concentrated in Tanbi National Park, a wetland listed by the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (known as the Ramsar Convention). Surprisingly, the mangroves themselves have undergone little change during the last 30 years, even as the population of the country, increasingly concentrated around Tanbi in the Greater Banjul Area, has more than doubled.

Although the mangroves remain healthy, the harvesters have witnessed firsthand the effects of increased pressure on the oyster population. The women report that oysters today are smaller and harder to find than 30, or even 10, years ago. Yet even with the increased effort required, more women are harvesting today than in the past. These women rely on oysters for their livelihoods and contribute to food security in a country that is heavily dependent on seafood for protein.

In 2007, a group of oyster harvesters organized themselves into a producer association called TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting Association. The founding members decided to call the organization TRY because it was an effort to do just that-try to improve the situation for oyster harvesters without much certainty that their work would pay off. After some initial success raising funds to buy boats, membership in TRY grew rapidly from 14 women in just one village to 500 oyster harvesters from 15 communities across the Greater Banjul Area.

This growth was no small feat. Although the women are all Jola, a minority ethnic group in Gambia, they are divided into different sects with distinct languages and heritages. Through TRY, the harvesters have been able to put aside these differences and work as a cohesive community, making decisions by consensus and collectively prioritizing needs.

Two years after its founding, TRY became linked with the USAID-funded Sustainable Fisheries Project, Ba Nafaa. Ba Nafaa has helped TRY expand the scope of its mission and has worked to create a sustainable co-management plan for the oyster fishery that respects the needs of harvesters, consumers, and the environment.

In their short time together, TRY and Ba Nafaa have already made important strides in working toward improved livelihoods and fisheries practices. The women have collectively agreed to practices that may be difficult in the short run but that pay off over time. Traditionally, oysters are harvested during the dry season, with the wet months of July through December closed for harvesting. This past year, the communities agreed to extend the closed season until March. When harvesting resumed in the spring, the women saw the benefits of the extended closure immediately, noticing a marked increase in the size of oysters for harvest. Additionally, each community agreed to close one bolong, or tributary, in their territory for the entire year to encourage regeneration of the oyster population there.

The women are also adopting practices to ensure that Tanbi remains a healthy mangrove ecosystem. Harvesters are learning about the ecological importance of mangroves and how destructive practices like cutting roots with machetes damages the capacity of the ecosystem to support oyster populations and fish nurseries. They are sharing these lessons with one another and the Gambian public through short plays demonstrating proper harvesting techniques and sharing information about mangrove ecology. In a country stretched for resources, the oyster harvesters are also helping the Department of Parks and Wildlife Management police the wetlands by reporting observations of illegal fuelwood harvesting to local officials. The women are experimenting with shellfish aquaculture to help relieve pressure on wild stocks and limit the harm to mangroves.

One of the first accomplishments of TRY was to raise the price of oysters from 10 dalasis per cup to 15. Customers have been willing to pay the new price, a partial acknowledgment of the value of these harvesters' effort. One of the big goals for Ba Nafaa and TRY, however, is to see that number grow exponentially by opening up new markets in the high-end retail outlets serving tourists. This would be greatly aided by establishing a permanent market for harvesters who currently rely on customers stopping by the side of the road or at temporary markets in the major cities in the Greater Banjul Area. Eventually, the harvesters could develop an export market to the United States or European Union, which could yield prices high enough to create living wages for harvesters.

In the meantime, the oyster harvesters will continue to sell their catch along the road outside of Banjul, working together to try to improve their situation.

Christi Zaleski, an environmental studies undergraduate at Brown University, is spending the summer in Gambia working with the Gambia-Senegal Sustainable Fisheries Project Ba Nafaa.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about improving livelihoods through sustainable seafood.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.   

Washington, D.C.- Improved drilling techniques have unlocked vast new reserves of shale gas, a resource that could be large enough to displace significant amounts of coal, and an energy source that emits less than half the carbon dioxide. But growing shale gas development has raised both environmental questions and public controversy. A new independent assessment by the Worldwatch Institute concludes that improved adherence to drilling best practice and better regulatory oversight are essential to assure environmental and public protection as shale gas production continues to expand.

The report, Addressing Environmental Risks from Shale Gas Development, details what happens beneath the surface during horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in deep shale formations, evaluating the risks to local water quality and the environment, as well as the technologies and policies needed to overcome them.

"Microseismic data have shown us that a properly designed hydraulic fracture job stimulates gas production only within the shale formations, which are typically hundreds of feet thick and thousands of feet deeper than drinking water supplies," says Mark Zoback, a geophysicist at Stanford University and a report co-author. "For this reason, the risk of fractures propagating from deep shale formations to underground sources of drinking water, which has been the subject of much debate, appears to be extremely low."

The report concludes that faulty well construction, in particular poorly cemented steel casings needed to isolate the gas from shallow formations, as well as above-ground contamination due to leaks and spills of fracturing fluids and waste water, pose more significant risks to the environment. In addition, continued study and improved communication of the environmental risks associated with both individual wells and large scale shale gas development are essential for society to make well-informed decisions about its energy future.

"Although the technologies, best practices, and regulations that can help minimize these risks exist, they have not yet been universally adopted," says Worldwatch Fellow and co-author Saya Kitasei. "Experiences in Colorado, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and New York demonstrate that strong public pressure exists for stricter oversight."

The report, authored by Mark Zoback of Stanford University, Saya Kitasei of the Worldwatch Institute, and Bradford Copithorne of Environmental Defense Fund, is the second in a series of briefing papers from Worldwatch's Natural Gas and Sustainable Energy Initiative, which examines critical environmental and policy issues surrounding natural gas.

Download Addressing Environmental Risks from Shale Gas Development by Mark Zoback, Saya Kitasei, and Bradford Copithorne.

 

The following op-ed appeared in Addis Fortune, Ethiopia's largest English daily newspaper

Most of the news one hears from Ethiopia is about millions of people facing malnutrition and starvation. Although one wishes that the answer could be as simple as supplying food aid or high-tech quick fixes, like chemical inputs to increase production, the financial and environmental costs of these solutions are often more than one can afford.

What one does not often hear about are the local organisations that attempt to unite farmers to find long-term solutions to Ethiopia's food security problems together, solutions that will enable small-scale farmers to become self-sufficient and the country to wean itself off of international food aid altogether.

Sustainable solutions require more than just additional funding and technology.

Most often, there is no "one size fits all" solution, the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD) in Addis Abeba discovered. Instead it is the sharing of traditional knowledge, practices, and innovations that leads to sustainable solutions.

"We need policies that enable researchers and farmers to have the time, places, and support to work together as genuine partners," said Sue Edwards, an advisory group member and director of the ISD, in an interview for the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Project, on October 23, 2009.

Edwards established the ISD in 1996 with her husband, Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher (PhD), who is now the head of the Ethiopian Environmental Authority (EPA).

In one project of the ISD, farmers and local agriculture experts in four communities were trained to make compost in pits using traditional processes and apply it to their fields during crop planting.

Within two years farmers found that natural compost increased crop yields as much as chemical fertilisers. Over the following years soil fertility and crop yields improved so much that farmers were able to stop purchasing chemical inputs altogether. Some farmers equated the use of chemical fertilisers with a system of bribing the soil, which they recognised as unsustainable.

To share this knowledge across Tigray Regional State, the northernmost region of Ethiopia, the ISD utilised a training strategy whereby farmers were responsible for training 10 or more of their neighbours, while local agriculture experts recorded and reported the impacts of compost use. This shared approach rapidly multiplied the number of farmers making and using compost and increased overall crop production throughout the region.

Across the globe it is widely recognised that the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides produces high crop yields. However, these inputs can often bring problems for farmers because they are expensive, often pollute water supplies, retard plant growth, and destroy biodiversity by killing beneficial insects and wildlife.

One farmer, Teklu Beza of Mai Berazio, Tigray Regional State, experienced these negative side effects. Using a pesticide called 2-4-D to control weeds on half of his small field of teff, he found that the growth of the crops where 2-4-D was applied, was slowed by two weeks when compared to the other half.

This side effect, in addition to the death of honeybees from the pesticide, led other farmers to shy away from buying pesticides and shift to using and improving their own traditional pest and disease control methods.

By developing their own practices, farmers not only avoided monetary costs and environmental degradation but also improved their confidence, livelihoods and local ecosystems. Also, by sharing this knowledge with their local agriculture experts, most farming communities in the area have reduced the use of pesticides and are collaborating with local authorities to ban their use.

A series of workshops organised by Spanish NGO Centro de Iniciativas para la Cooperación/Batá, Prolinnova, and the National Farmers Union of Mozambique (UNAC) in Maputo, Mozambique, allowed farmers to share their experiences and innovations and learn what is working in their local communities.

At one session, Energindo Paulo from Nicassa Province explained how to make natural, nontoxic pesticides. His ingredients, including leaves from the neem tree, were displayed on the floor as he discussed methods of pest control. When Energindo finished his presentation, the group of 50 farmers asked questions about how to apply the pesticide and how long they should wait after application to eat the produce.

These workshops help farmers value and invest in their own local knowledge.

"Good agriculture requires knowledge of how people can cultivate food and other natural products we need in a way that is ecologically and culturally suitable for the places we live," said Edwards.

The idea that technology is always the answer means that only those who can afford to buy the quickfix products will avoid hunger. Those who cannot buy them will have their choices and opportunities for healthy and affordable food reduced or, more likely, eliminated.

Growing food based on the shared traditional knowledge of local people is one way to bring healthy and nourishing food within reach of everyone.

Danielle Nierenberg is co-project director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet Project. Amanda Stone is a communication intern at the Worldwatch Institute.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.

 
Whether a bowl of rice or a piece of bread, staple foods provide millions of poor people around the world with a source of basic sustenance day in and day out. Now, a new technology promises to make these foods-which provide calories but do not always contain enough of the micronutrients required for good health-more nutritious.

People who intake insufficient amounts of iron, zinc, and vitamin A can suffer from a hidden hunger," often with serious consequences. Without zinc, an eight-year-old girl may have the stature of a five-year-old. A young boy who doesn't receive enough vitamin A-an amount easily provided daily by a small orange sweet potato-could face permanent blindness. These precious nutrients, needed in only minute amounts, can make or break a young person's life and haunt them through adulthood.

The ideal solution - a more diverse diet - is beyond the reach of millions of poor people living in often-remote rural areas. This is where more nutritious staple foods can help. Through a process called biofortification, scientists are breeding new varieties of staple food crops that are richer in micronutrients. They scour seed banks to find seeds that contain the desired nutrients and then breed these into popular varieties using conventional methods.

The first crop out the door was sweet potato, a staple food in many parts of Africa,  traditionally eaten in its white or yellow forms. Working with partners, the global agricultural research program HarvestPlus successfully released an orange sweet potato in Uganda and Mozambique that is far richer in vitamin A than yellow or white varieties. Children and women, the populations most susceptible to vitamin-A deficiency, are eating substantially more of this locally grown root vegetable.

"Me and my family are experiencing better health with fewer visits to the local clinic since we incorporated the orange sweet potato into our diet," a farmer in Uganda recently attested to visiting HarvestPlus staff. The organization and its partners will soon release two other nutritious staple foods in Africa: beans containing more iron and a vitamin A-rich maize.

Jean D'Amour Manirere, HarvestPlus Country Manager for beans, is currently testing the iron-rich bean varieties through field trials, with the goal of ultimately offering them to farmers and consumers in Rwanda, a country of lush rolling hills that claims beans as its staple crop. "Beans are the bread of Rwanda," Manirere says.

HarvestPlus is conducting a feeding trial to demonstrate that the new iron-rich beans reduce iron deficiency, a condition that leaves at least half of Rwanda's preschoolers physically and mentally impaired. With this seal of approval, local partners will be able to get the beans out to smallholder farming communities throughout the country. Farmers will be able to save and share seed to grow, year after year.

HarvestPlus expects that millions of Rwandans will be eating the beans within the decade. Once the beans have taken root in Rwanda, neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and several other African countries where people regularly eat beans will also benefit.

In Zambia, a different crop that has become synonymous with African diets is about to become more nutritious: maize. The new maize varieties are a distinct orange color due to their vitamin-A content. HarvestPlus partners will begin releasing these varieties in provinces where rural households grow maize and where the incidence of vitamin-A deficiency among women and children is high.

"First, we want to confirm that these varieties perform well in the field," says Eliab Simpungwe, HarvestPlus Country Manager for maize. "We are already working with two seed companies to test this maize in the field."

How do people react to these new "orange" crops? HarvestPlus has found that when you explain the nutritional benefits, people are willing to include these foods in their diet. A HarvestPlus study in Zambia found that there is no stigma attached to orange maize, so the color should not be an issue. Coupled with its more nutritious profile and good field performance, the crop should easily carve out a niche in farmers' fields-and the Zambian diet. Once proven in Zambia, orange maize will be adapted to numerous other countries where maize is a popular food, in Africa and beyond.

Biofortification may ultimately prove to be most successful because it uses food crops that rural communities are already growing and eating to deliver better nutrition. It also has built-in sustainability. Once scientists have bred the high-nutrient into the crop, it stays there-nourishing many generations to come.

Yassir Islam is Senior Communications Specialist at HarvestPlus, a program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about efforts to improve nutrition across sub-Saharan Africa through agricultural innovations.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

 
The package of aid interventions that the world's eight wealthiest nations put in place last year to respond to the food-price crisis of 2007-08 was insufficient, according to a new report from the U.K. Hunger Alliance and the Oakland Institute. Instead, governments should be investing in sustainable agriculture in the fight against global hunger, the report concludes.

The World Food Programme expanded its budget by $755 million in 2008, and in 2009, the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized nations set aside $20 billion for food aid, although most of the money has not yet materialized. The funds that were spent went mainly to food subsidies, cash transfers, and other conventional agriculture investments, including chemical inputs-in what the report authors say was a "missed opportunity."

"Despite lofty aid commitments at international summits, only a marginal proportion of the G8's financial pledges to address hunger have actually been disbursed," said Frederic Mousseau, Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute and a report author.

To date, the most common form of agricultural investment has been support for short-term, chemical interventions, namely fertilizer, according to the analysis. In countries such as Benin, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Niger, and Rwanda, as much as 90-100 percent of World Bank agricultural funding went to such inputs. Yet a variety of other steps would be more effective in addressing the root causes of hunger, the report notes-including investing in irrigation, extension, local seed production, crop diversification, preservation of natural resources, and activities that favor smallholders and the rural poor.

The report also points to the inadequate G8 response on the issue of land distribution, a significant factor behind persistent hunger in much of the world. In many developing countries, rising food prices have encouraged the large-scale purchase and lease of land, making it harder for small-scale farmers to engage in agriculture and boost their production.

In addition to providing policy recommendations on trade and fiscal measures, management of food stocks, and price controls, the study focuses on ways to improve agricultural production in the long term, and to improve its sustainability. Among the positive case studies, the authors note that in 2008, Bangladesh used some $15 million of international investment to install four large-scale waste composting plants southeast of the capital city, Dhaka. And in 2009, the Philippines ended its fertilizer subsidy program to encourage more widespread use of organic fertilizer.

The number of hungry people in the world continues to grow, surpassing a record 1 billion in 2009. And despite historic increases in the World Food Programme budget, only 9 percent of the 19 million severely malnourished children in 2009 received the treatment they needed, according to the report. In response, groups like the Ecumenical Association for Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (ECASARD) in Ghana are tapping into farmer innovation and developing comprehensive approaches to end hunger, improve livelihoods, and protect natural resources.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about innovative ways to address hunger.

This article appeared in its original form on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

In a new blog entry, Worldwatch Research Fellows Saya Kitasei and Haibing Ma report on China's growing interest in North America's unconventional oil and gas reserves.

The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) last month announced a new joint venture with Encana, Canada's largest producer of natural gas, to develop some of Encana's holdings in the Montney and Horn River Shales. These are two of North America's "Magnificent Seven" shale plays, containing an estimated 240 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas-enough to supply China with natural gas for almost 90 years at 2008 levels of consumption.

Of course, with natural gas consumption increasing more than 20 percent a year prior to the economic downturn, no one expects China's gas needs to remain flat - least of all the Chinese themselves. That is why the CNPC-Encana agreement joins a growing list of Chinese investments in unconventional oil and gas reserves around the world.

The deal with Encana will give CNPC a chance to gain insight from an independent gas company that has some of the longest experience with applying hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to extract gas from shale formations. In this model, one hand washes the other: major oil and gas companies gain access to the technology and expertise they need to develop unconventional gas, and smaller independent gas companies get access to the sizeable amounts of capital that many have needed in recent years. Taking the time to do initial exploration in other countries and produce gas there sustainably will require deep pockets, so the entrance of state-owned and international oil companies could soon have important effects on the global gas market.

The Chinese energy market represents a major prize for potential future exporters of unconventional oil and gas. This week, Sinopec paid ConocoPhillips $4.65 billion for a 9.03 percent interest in Syncrude, an oil sand project in Alberta, Canada. In March, Petrochina, a CNPC subsidiary, and Shell bid on Arrow Energy, a coal bed methane producer in Australia. Shell also has a major interest in a proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal on Australia's coast, whose product will likely be liquefied coal bed methane almost certainly destined for Chinese markets. Although Shell's investments in LNG will be affected as the global unconventional gas supply increases, the company seems to be betting on an ever-more-voracious Chinese demand for diverse energy sources.

China itself is thought to have significant untapped unconventional gas potential. CNPC and Shell signed an agreement in March to explore jointly for gas in the country's Sichuan province, which contains a large shale gas play. The U.S.-China Shale Gas Resource Initiative, announced during President Obama's visit to China last November, will assess China's shale gas potential and promote international investment in the country's gas shales.

Anxiety surrounding China's access to energy resources has grown in tandem with its gross domestic product. Although the country's investment in wind and solar energy is rapidly overtaking international competitors, its economy will continue to rely heavily on fossil fuels due to its exploding energy demand. But China's appetite is quickly outstripping its domestic supply of coal, once considered a secure and inexhaustible, if dirty, source of energy.

As a result, the world has seen China making more and more deals with energy resource suppliers beyond its borders. Recent deals have indicated that the Chinese government's resource strategy is shifting to a two-way mode: instead of passively buying commodities from Australia, the United States, and other major suppliers, the government is encouraging its industries to leverage their capital either by investing directly in foreign markets or by establishing joint-ventures with local partners. Meanwhile, China has opened its domestic resource market to foreign investors. Through collaboration with foreign companies on oil and gas projects both in China and abroad, Chinese companies hope to acquire the technological expertise that is key to unlocking these resources themselves.

With this updated version of its "opening-up" initiative, China hopes to catch up with industrialized countries not just in terms of the scale of its overall economy but in core competitiveness as well. And with China now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the energy investments it makes today will have a profound influence on the Earth's future climate.

Visit Worldwatch's ReVolt blog for more analysis of global energy markets.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Re-Volt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

 
Worldwatch Research Intern Alex Tung reports on water management workshops that are teaching farmers and communities in West Africa how to incorporate micro-irrigation into their fields.

In the hot, dry regions of West Africa, small-scale farmers can spend up to five hours a day irrigating their crops-hauling water in plastic buckets or in hollowed, dried out squashes known as calabashes. But several initiatives are helping farmers make more money without breaking their backs.

One such initiative, Affordable Micro-Irrigation for Vegetable Production in West Africa, sponsors training workshops to encourage farmers from Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Ghana to adopt better crop management practices. Developed by AVRDC-The World Vegetable Center and supported by Taiwan's foreign ministry, the workshops began in December 2009 and teach participants about more efficient water management and irrigation systems, such as the MoneyMaker pump.

Known in Mali as nafasoro, the MoneyMaker pump, developed by KickStart, is one of the more widely adopted tools in the region. The pumps are available in two models: a pedal pump, the Super MoneyMaker, which costs 49,500 cfa (US$103), and a manual pump, the MoneyMaker Hip Pump, which costs 22,000 cfa.

"[Kickstart's pump] has very good prospects for riverbank vegetable gardening and irrigating vegetables even about 75-80 meters from river sources," said Dr. Madhu Bhattarai, an agricultural economist at AVRDC.

In Mali, where AVRDC worked with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) to demonstrate technologies, more than 6,000 pumps were sold and 5,000 enterprises were created. Farmers have become actively involved in testing and adapting equipment for their vegetable gardens. Currently, more than 150 women farmers are growing vegetables using affordable micro-irrigation methods, including drip irrigation kits, pedal pumps, and microsprinklers.

Investing in micro-irrigation technologies may seem daunting for small-scale farmers, but the venture has proved to bring a reliable return on investment. Mahmoud Guindo, a farmer in Mali, doubled his annual income selling fruits and vegetables after purchasing the MoneyMaker pump. In addition to being able to irrigate crops more easily, farmers like Mahmoud can now expand their planting area of high-value crops such as fruits and vegetables and cultivate several crops year-round, yielding a steadier, higher income.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about the role of agriculture in stimulating local economies and enriching the lives of individuals across the world.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Nourishing the Planet. For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

The following op-ed appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

By Stephanie Hanson, Danielle Nierenberg, and Molly Theobald

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the fact that 1 billion people worldwide are going to bed hungry every night. And, in the United States, it is easy to look at sub-Saharan Africa - where the majority of people depend on agriculture for their livelihood but still do not get enough to eat - and want to just throw money at the problem. Or worse, to give up hope.

But when one talks to farmers on the ground in Kenya, Ghana, Madagascar, and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, it becomes clear that throwing money at the problem isn't enough.

It's not that funding isn't needed. With increasing extreme weather events due to climate change, skyrocketing food prices, and the highest number of hungry people in human history, funding for agriculture to alleviate poverty and hunger is needed now more than ever. The new multibillion dollar U.S. food security and agriculture initiative, known as "Feed the Future," is a timely recognition of this need.

But this money needs to be directed at the right kind of agriculture projects. Instead of silver-bullet, high-technology fixes, agriculture funding should focus on the many low-tech, African-led innovations that are already helping to alleviate hunger and poverty in environmentally sustainable ways all over the continent. As the global community looks for solutions to the problem of global hunger, it's important to remember something that we've heard again and again: Farmers already know what they need.

One Acre Fund, an agriculture organization that serves rural smallholder farmers in Kenya and Rwanda, was built on this idea. From the beginning, we sought to provide farmers with tools to feed their families and to increase their incomes by asking them what they needed-and listening to what they said.

For example, we knew that farmers needed improved seed and fertilizer, but, after many conversations, we discovered that farmers also needed financing to purchase those inputs, as well as education on how to use them. And, they needed access to a market to sell their crop after harvest[SH1] . Our service model-credit, inputs, education, and market facilitation-addresses all of these needs.

Now, when a farmer enrolls with One Acre Fund, she joins as part of a group of six to twelve farmers and receives an in-kind loan of seed and fertilizer, which is guaranteed by her group members. One Acre Fund delivers this seed and fertilizer to a market point within one mile of where she lives, and a field officer provides in-field training on land preparation, planting, fertilizer application, and weeding. Critically, our farmers repay us, which keeps the organization focused on customer service, and means that One Acre Fund can grow to serve more farmers season after season.

One Rwandan couple benefiting from One Acre Fund's program, Edith and Gilbert, has seen an 80 percent increase in their bean harvest in the past two years. Now, not only do they have enough to feed themselves and their three children, they are also able to afford school fees. And they are making plans for the future. While just two years earlier they were frequently going without enough to eat, they now dream of purchasing more land and expanding their farm to include livestock.

Farmer-led innovation is happening all over the continent. In Mozambique, the organization Prolinnova, along with the Spanish NGO Centro de Iniciativas para la Cooperación/Batá, and the National Farmers Union of Mozambique, UNAC, organized a workshop for farmers from all over the country to get together, share their experiences, and learn about different agriculture innovations being practiced in other communities. Throughout the event, farmers presented other innovations and practices-including how to prevent diseases that affect their crops and fruit trees and how to raise farmed fish. This event was the culmination of a series of workshops that Batá/Prolinnova/UNAC held in 2009 to help farmers identify innovations in their communities. Workshops like these spread information about innovations that work, and, ultimately, help farmers value-and invest in-their own knowledge.

"We have enough innovations," says Xavier Rakotonjanahary, the Rice Breeding Coordinator at Madagascar's Centre National de la Recherche Apliquee au Developpement Rural/FOFIFA or the National Center for Rural Development. His organization works with farmers to adapt different technologies and innovations to fit their own needs through extension services and on-farm testing.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, millions of farmers are working hard to eke out a living with poor seed, no fertilizer, limited access to credit, and no insurance. Improved seed, fertilizer, credit, and insurance all exist today. Adapting these products to fit the needs and resources of smallholders will require many hours of trudging through fields and learning from farmers. For solutions to reduce hunger and improve agriculture livelihoods, don't look to Washington DC, or even to Nairobi. Look to the farmers living miles away from paved roads in rural Rwanda, Mozambique, and Madagascar. Farmers know what they need.

Stephanie Hanson is the Director of Policy and Research at the One Acre Fund; Danielle Nierenberg is Co-Project Director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project; and Molly Theobald is a Food and Agriculture Research Fellow at Worldwatch.

Visit Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet blog to learn more about agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa.

 
The Copenhagen climate summit ended six months ago in what was widely seen in the clean tech and environmentalist communities as a major disappointment. Now, six months later, at the conclusion of yet another climate negotiation in Bonn, Germany, optimism for a climate agreement this year is no brighter than in those dark days of December. Nonetheless, the outlines of a pragmatic new approach are beginning to emerge.

As the founder of an investment business focused on the opportunities that will arise from the transition to low-carbon energy, I was hoping that Copenhagen would mark a decisive response that would signal the transformation of  the world's carbon-reliant energy systems toward cleaner, more secure infrastructure. European delegations committed wholeheartedly to a single-track objective: a legally binding international treaty with legally binding reduction commitments for all industrial countries, which, let's face it, is a very compelling goal. But the Europeans just did not pick up the signs that were there long before the conference in Denmark. Neither the United States nor China - the world's largest emitters - were going to sign such an agreement.

The United Nations climate regime, heavily influenced by the European view of the capacity of international law to order and direct behavior worldwide, is now seriously challenged. We have no option but to commit to a multilateral process. It is the most intelligent way to respond to a global collective action problem. And yet we must critically analyze the model for international agreements that the world has been following during the past two decades. In Copenhagen, we had not one, not two - but three! - negotiating documents. Now we are managing all three, and the latest approach, known as the Copenhagen Accord, is gaining in political power.   

We do have a problem: we have to commit to multilateralism - to abandon it would be irrational-and yet in its current form it is not working effectively and therefore cannot fulfill its mission. That means that we need to reform  what we have and to seriously contemplate alternative institutions in order to achieve our agreed-upon objective. We must find a way to organize collective action in a manner that manifests mutual interests. We must look for new ways of acting that are more effective. We have to oblige ourselves to save ourselves.

Collective Action for Mutual Interests

A generation of diplomats has become well practiced in making arguments that do not even approach real-world fact. They have created an alternative reality for the international climate debate, and it is almost impossible to alter it from within. It has to be challenged from the outside. The fact of the matter is that there is no difference between the U.S. interest, Chinese interest, or Indian interest in solving this problem. You could not put a rice husk between them.  There is a difference in capacity and in means, but none that justifies inaction.

A low-carbon economy would reduce national security risks, lessen reliance on expensive foreign fuels, reduce local air and water pollution, and avoid investment risks for agricultural development and urban planning that will result from a warmer world. But we carry so much useless baggage in our heads about what our national interest is. We still want to run an "I win, you lose" negotiation process. We still think there are material economic trade-offs here. "After you" strategies benefit no one if climate risk goes unabated.

To deal with the clear mutual interest in avoiding the consequences of unabated climate change, we need only ask: where are the resources to solve the problem, and how do we as a society consciously direct ourselves to using these human, financial, and technological resources more widely. As of yet, we are not properly valuing the cooperation that is necessary to solve this problem in the interest of every nation and every human. Meanwhile, we still exaggerate the costs of the transition. There are costs, but they appear manageable and there are economic benefits associated with investments that move us away from fossil fuels.

The rapidly developing countries, led by China, are now dominating the growth in global emissions, but they have held fast to the notion that the already-industrialized countries must sharply reduce emissions before the developing countries commit legally to domestic reductions. The energy systems of these high-growth economies need to be as least carbon-intensive as is humanly possible, and this must be achieved in a relatively short period of time.

Fortunately, the emerging Asian countries have two advantages when it comes to thinking about who might solve this problem. They have a high-savings culture and they have the capacity to deploy those savings possibly for the first time ever in their own countries, at significant scale, to solve this collective action problem.

These same countries also have enormous brainpower and rapidly advancing educational systems that can fuel the tremendous innovation needed to address this vast and complicated problem. Where are GE's biggest research facilities? They are not in Schenectady, New York, but in Bangalore and Shanghai. Where are the engineers of tomorrow being produced in vast numbers? Where are the solar Ph.D's emerging in huge numbers? This idea that all of the answers lie with those who created the problem is absurd.

Embracing "Wealth Transfers"  

Historic polluters need to take action, as well, for their own self interests. I have always said that if there was one country best suited to implement the Kyoto Protocol targets without economic harm while encouraging economic development, it was the United States of America. No nation was in a better place to display credentials on the capacity to connect innovation with business development and investment than America.

The problem for North America, Europe, and Japan is that they are now deeply indebted nations - we have over-spent and over-borrowed - and we are in an economically vulnerable position today. The effect is clearly visible in the clean tech sector. While these economies recover, China is taking over the market, investing more than ever before - China deposited $6.5 billion in renewable energy during the first quarter of 2010.

We have an even-more troubling problem in our language. It is so difficult to talk about investment in China or India, in particular, without it becoming characterized as a "wealth transfer," with the idea of a wealth transfer as a bad thing. Yes, I say that a wealth transfer is a good thing. It's good for solidarity. It's good for solving the problem. And it's good for building a world with lower risk in pretty much every area of human activity.

If I try to have an investment conversation, I can only get so far in Washington, D.C. or Ottawa or Canberra because there is something in the psyche of my opponents' minds that cannot believe that a "wealth transfer" investment provides profitable return. To me, it's obvious: the investment creates wealth if done well, and it delivers an environmental benefit that we share. The moment we build a wind farm in China or capture methane from a coal mine in India or put a waste-heat recovery system in a cement factory in South Africa, there is an immediate environmental benefit to a European or American citizen whether they know it or not.

Whether we get a financial return depends on whether our government maintains a system that creates demand for reducing emissions and whether the UN, with all of its faults, can issue a new type of currency (a carbon credit) that only has value because it represents the public interest. Meanwhile, development in China, India, or South Africa does not suffer. These countries get money they would not otherwise have received, and their industry still produces - but in a more efficient process.

For high-carbon producers in Europe, such as a steel manufacturer, there is a cost to emission-reduction obligations, and that cost is later invested in competing steel-manufacturing industries in places such as China. The cost is manageable by most. Some producers in some sectors suffer - those who compete directly with the manufacturers who receive subsidies for improving efficiency. Some call this unfair. I call it a bargain: we build trade relationships with the high-growth sectors of emerging economies in order to help our economies prosper; we increase the chances that those countries will soon develop comparable policies (this is already happening); those countries see value in more efficient growth; we incentivize our key economic sectors to move toward cleaner, safer technologies; and we soften the blow of this economic transition. We lower costs and we reward co-operation.

A Plurilateral Climate Agreement

The Copenhagen summit did provide a few positive developments that could be the framework for a successful new climate agreement. Amid the confusion over whether delegates would maintain the Kyoto Protocol, craft a new treaty, or settle instead for a political declaration, President Obama intervened, and there would have been no agreement at all if he hadn't.

In my view, there are good elements to the resulting Copenhagen Accord that do point toward a better, future agreement. The Copenhagen Accord championed by the United States has begun a process focused exclusively on outcomes and what resources are available, anywhere in the world, to achieve those outcomes. There is no longer the absolute distinction between developed and developing countries that was enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol - a distinction that no longer reflects economic or political reality. The Accord also firmly endorses a 2-degree Celsius upper limit for the amount of global warming that will be permitted, a sensible way to add a concrete goal to the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) collective-action objective of avoiding "dangerous interference with the climate system."

It's also positive that the Accord includes a commitment to securing significant new financial resources to help poor countries cope with climate change - though believe me, we have no idea what that really means in practice. The $30 billion committed for international assistance for 2010-2012 looks very much like a collection of previous commitments, amalgamated, not coordinated, not streamlined, and probably overlapping. As for the $100 billion a year commitment from 2020 onward, it doesn't take long to realize how thin that offering is. At least 50 percent of the financing is supposed to come from the carbon market, and the carbon market only works if aggressive, binding reduction targets are set, which most countries are still resisting. 

The climate change problem forces us to recognize our humanity over our nationality. But we just have not learned to behave like that yet, which is why we cannot give up on our multilateral institutions. We cannot give up on the national process either, and we must work hard at every other level too, including provinces, cities, municipalities, and individuals.

The Copenhagen Accord is a new start. Sooner rather than later, however, we need a new, tougher structure than Copenhagen: a plurilateral agreement that would initially focus on a small group of countries that have genuine interest in solving the problem, but also have the resources that can be channeled to technologies that can flourish, given the right incentives.

Such an agreement would begin by calling for the stabilization of concentrations of greenhouse gases at levels safe for future generations not just to survive but to thrive and prosper. The UNFCCC already articulates a clear over-arching stabilization goal "at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened, and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner." It is a rational scientific response to a scientifically based problem. There's one atmosphere, a single system. It doesn't matter where a ton of carbon is produced; it doesn't matter where it's taken out.

Such an agreement would also state that we have a collective action problem that we can solve more quickly and more effectively at lower costs if we act together. The pragmatic way forward today is to allow differences to emerge via commitments that individual countries offer on their own. When combined within their territories, this approach can be made into a passable patchwork quilt of demand for carbon reduction. The UNFCCC can still convene, connect science and policy, and develop regulatory standards (a definition of one ton of carbon reduced, for instance). The bulk of obligations would be left for national and regional governments.  

The sum of all these efforts must be to reduce the risk to societies from climate change and increase opportunities to invest in the low-carbon economy of the future. To that end, there will need to be specific sectoral targets for the major fossil fuel, extraction, and manufacturing industries. The World Trade Organization has the power to oversee trade provisions that would liberalize the markets in green technology, remove subsidies for fossil fuels, and oversee the orderly use of broader tax adjustments.

It might take years to negotiate all that, but a plurilateral agreement could allow for a more specific plan directed to technology solutions. We know that we can create demand globally from national schemes - that is what the European Union has already done with its Emissions Trading Scheme. We know that we can have a hodgepodge of domestic schemes all driving the price of carbon, and that capital markets could cope with the diversity. Twenty years later these markets will converge because that is what markets like to do. We also have the G20 emerging as a potential permanent institution that offers opportunities to test plurilateral deal-making on climate change.

Our hopes were very high for Copenhagen. Now we will be very sensible with how we proceed in the years ahead. Now is the time to form a new conversation. Instead of becoming completely depressed and nihilistic, now is the time to think out of reflection. Now is the time for gloomy creativity. With laziness and inertia continuing to prevent humanity from acting in its best interests, we need some imagination and, most of all, we need to show some guts.

James Cameron is Climate Change Capital's founder and vice chairman and a Worldwatch Institute board member.

For permission to republish this op-ed, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org

 
In a new blog entry, Worldwatch Senior Researcher Gary Gardner reports on efforts worldwide to improve urban cycling rates for environmental, health, and fiscal benefits.

The District of Columbia last week opened its latest set of dedicated bike lanes, part of a citywide effort to encourage cycling. The lanes run down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue, the busy thoroughfare that connects the U.S. Capitol and the White House and a high-profile route meant to demonstrate the city's seriousness about cycling.

The lanes are part of a burgeoning regional network of cycling paths and programs. Washington, D.C. now has more than 50 miles of bike lanes, according to city officials, and plans to install 80 miles' worth in all. The city also has a small public bikes program, with 100 bicycles available at 10 locations to subscribers, and plans to expand this to 1,000 bikes in 100 locations.

The D.C. initiative is just one of a multitude of municipal efforts to give bikes a wider berth in cities around the world. As noted recently in the July/August issue of World Watch magazine, cities struggling with pollution, demands for carbon reduction, rising obesity rates, and squeezed municipal budgets are turning to the bicycle as a multi-pronged solution.

Already, bikes are claiming a large niche of transportation mix in some cities. In many European cities with vigorous bike-centered initiatives, cycling accounts for more than 20 percent of all trips, compared to fewer than 1 percent in the United States, Australia, and other countries with less-developed cycling cultures. The European success is the result of strong, clear, pro-biking policies, including construction of dedicated infrastructure, traffic calming measures, and provision of ample bicycle parking. Creative initiatives like the Velib bike-sharing program in Paris, which sprinkles more than 20,000 bikes for public use on a subscription basis around the city, also help, by enhancing the visibility, convenience, and popularity of bicycle use.

The contributions of bikes to a better quality of urban life are clear. A bicycle commuter who rides four miles to work five days a week in the United States avoids 2,000 miles of driving and about 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per year. This amounts to nearly a 5-percent reduction in the average American's carbon footprint. Moreover, cycling is good exercise. With an estimated 1.6 billion obese adults worldwide, the potential savings in healthcare costs alone are extraordinary.

Meanwhile, biking programs and infrastructure can be far cheaper than automobile infrastructure. A mile's worth of urban highway can cost US$20-80 million compared to a few thousand dollars or up to a million dollars for biking infrastructure. Similarly, bike parking is some 30 to 300 times cheaper than car parking.

These arguments are not new. Our colleague Marcia Lowe made many of them 21 years ago in the Worldwatch Paper "The Bicycle: Vehicle for a Small Planet". What is new is that many cities are waking up to the advantages of bike use. Washington is just one of dozens of cities worldwide with active cycling promotion policies. If the trend continues, bikes could remake the look and feel of cities this century.

Visit Worldwatch's Green Economy blog to learn about environmentally sustainable urban planning.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Green Economy. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

For the past five years, Worldwatch has explored the history, production method, and environmental and social impacts of everyday products - from chopsticks to pencils - in the Life-Cycle Studies section of its bi-monthly magazine, World Watch. This print-exclusive content is now available for free to Eye on Earth readers.

Overview

The jimmy hat, wrapper, rubber, wetsuit, willie warmer, or condom, as it’s more prosaically known, has aided many coital couples throughout history. In ancient China, men applied oiled silk paper. The Japanese turned to tortoiseshell sheaths. Europeans commonly used fish bladders or lamb intestines, washed, smoked, and steeped in lye. Although the oldest archaeological evidence of condom use dates to the seventeenth century — discarded remains discovered in a castle latrine outside Birmingham, England — Greek mythology contains the earliest condom reference. King Minos of Crete, cursed with semen containing poisonous snakes, scorpions, and woodlice, could not mate without causing injury. In order to eject the poisons, Minos fornicated with a lady of his kingdom who inserted a female condom made from a goat’s bladder.

Condoms are now available in a wide assortment of sizes, colors, and flavors. The United Nations expects 18 billion condoms will be needed in 2015 for low- and middle- income countries alone.

Production and Impact

Asian rubber tree plantations have supplied the vast majority of the world’s rubber since the 1870s, and Asian manufacturers now produce nearly 85 percent of the world’s con­doms. At the factory, the rubber is vulcanized to create a more durable product. Condom manufacturers generally use mechanical systems that dip glass molds into chemical mixtures often containing gasoline or benzene.

Manufacturers commonly source their rubber locally but from plantations that rely heavily on chemical pesticides and herbicides. Condoms typically include ingredients that allow added flexibility and tear resistance. As a result, decomposition requires several years, so cast-away condoms contribute to waste-control problems, filling landfills or clogging water­ways. During the Ocean Conservancy-organized International Coastal Cleanup program in September 2009, volunteers removed more than 10 million pieces of trash from shorelines worldwide, including 26,617 condoms.

On the other hand, condoms offer significant social and environmental benefits. If worn correctly, latex condoms are, on average, 90 percent effective in preventing the trans­mission of sexually transmitted infections such as HIV. In Thailand, after the “Condom King” began providing condoms to sex workers, the rate of HIV infections decreased by nearly 90 percent; in Uganda, the ABC approach (abstain, be faithful, use condoms) helped reduce HIV prevalence from 15 percent to 6 percent of adults.

Worn correctly, latex condoms are also about 98 percent effective in preventing unwanted pregnancies. When couples use contraception such as condoms, delaying child birth, or reducing the number of children they would otherwise have, population growth rates decline and women have greater opportunities for education and employment. Slower popu­lation growth can help communities manage the costs of providing health, clean water, sanitation, and social services. In industrialized and developing countries alike, slower population growth can mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and improve social resilience to climate change as well.

Closing the Loop

Some condom producers are beginning to target “green” markets. For condom users in search of a biodegradable option, traditional lambskin varieties are still widely available, though infections are more likely given bacteria’s ability to penetrate lambskin pores. For those looking for organic protection, Bra­zil’s first national condom factory, opened in 2008, sources latex directly from rubber trees of the Chico Mendes Extrac­tive Reserve in Acre.

Condoms are also being used to promote greater awareness about the connections between sex, population growth, and environmental degradation. The Tucson, Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity distributed 100,000 free condoms for Valentine’s Day this year. Called Endangered Species Condoms, the packaging explains that overpopulation threatens to kill off tens of thousands of plants and animals. Decor­ating the boxes is artwork depicting threatened wildlife and slogans such as “Wrap with care, save the polar bear” or “Cover your tweedle, save the burying beetle.”

Ben Block is the staff writer for World Watch. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

For permission to republish this article, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

In a new blog entry, Worldwatch Research Intern Kyle Gracey reports on the latest in international climate negotiations. Land use-related emissions dominated much of the discussion at Bonn earlier this month.

Logging loopholes, gigaton gaps, and other funny phrases await resolution from negotiators now that the United Nations climate talks have wrapped up in Bonn. From finance to forests, a lot of issues will be taken up by governments when they meet again in - surprise - Bonn, in August, and then again in China later this year. Waiting until the annual high-level climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, in November to address these issues would leave little chance of solving them by that summit's end.

Land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) issues dominated much of the discussion in Bonn. Many developed (Annex I) nations argued for historical "baseline" rules that would give them credit for more emissions reductions than they actually achieved. That baseline serves as a reference period for assessing how greenhouse gas emissions from forestry practices (mostly logging) and land use activities (creating or destroying wetlands, grasslands, etc.) have changed over time due to human activity. If developed countries get their way, the rules would allow carbon storage from forest growth to count toward their reductions, but ignore future emissions from fires and logging.

Many developing nations cried foul, calling the proposals a "logging loophole" that would let countries hide their true emissions levels. They blocked agreement on how to calculate countries' lifetime forest and land emissions, delaying the adoption of rules until at least the next Bonn meeting.

Simultaneously, some developing countries began to talk about using similar accounting rules to calculate their own emissions under the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) discussions. That would let them hide some of their deforestation emissions, particularly significant for emerging economies that may be subject to future carbon caps. While no rule changes were officially advanced in Bonn, proposals may surface at the next Bonn meeting if the LULUCF disagreements remain unresolved.

As John Mulrow and Marion Viewig reported earlier, countries also left final decisions on carbon offsets and verification and financing, respectively, for future sessions.

Nearly as wide as the logging loophole in some negotiators' minds is the gigaton gap - the difference between emissions reductions pledged and the amount believed necessary to keep global average temperature rise below 2°C. That's a threshold scientists believe might prevent the worst impacts of climate change. The gap is measured in billions of tons (gigatons) of greenhouse gases. Most countries agreed to the temperature limit in both the Copenhagen Accord and at last year's meeting of the G8.

One estimate suggests that countries' current pledges will not keep the temperature increase below even 3°C. Island nations asked for the United Nations climate change staff to produce a report on the impacts of 1.5ºC of warming (a change still expected to swamp many of their lands), but Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar blocked the proposal. Countries expect to discuss at the next Bonn meeting a suite of solutions that might close, or at least narrow, the gap between the emissions paths we are and should be on. Advocates have already suggested a buffet of options. Nations will likely also revisit a version of the 1.5ºC report suggestion.

The recent Bonn talks demonstrated that agreement on these fundamental issues will be difficult to reach. Meanwhile, we are losing time that we don't have.

Visit Worldwatch's ReVolt blog to learn about the latest news from the international climate talks.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Re-Volt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org. 

The following op-ed originally appeared in USA Today.

What does the U.S. have in common with countries in sub-Saharan Africa?

Both waste large, obscene amounts of food. Better knowledge and technology would reduce food waste, deter environmental damage and, especially in that region of the African continent, reduce the number of people who go hungry each day.

In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 265 million people are hungry, heightening the travesty of the food waste problem. More than a quarter of the food produced in Africa spoils before it is eaten. Farmers battle post-harvest losses caused by severe weather, disease and pests, or poor harvesting and storage techniques. Annual post-harvest losses for cereal grains, roots and tuber crops, fruits, vegetables, meat, milk and fish amount to some 100 million tons, or $48 million worth of food.

Preventive measures

To prevent these losses in Africa and elsewhere, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is trying to provide the information and technology to begin turning this tide:

• In Kenya, the FAO partnered with the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture to train farmers to take steps to reduce corn crop loss to mycotoxin, a devastating result of fungi growth.
• In Afghanistan, the FAO recently provided metallic silos to roughly 18,000 households to improve storage of cereal grains and legumes, protecting them from the weather and pests. Losses have dropped from 15%-20% to less than 1%-2%.

Americans, of course, are blessed by an abundance of food. But that fact makes our waste all the more inexcusable.

Every day, the average American throws away about one-and-a-half pounds of food. Slightly wilted lettuce, half-eaten cheeseburgers, bruised apples end up in the trash instead of our stomachs. Better to buy and cook less food, and compost the rest. Although it doesn't sound like much, those nearly one-and-a-half pounds add up -31 million tons end in landfills or incinerators each year. That's roughly equivalent to the weight of 74 Golden Gate bridges. These dumps are not only unsightly, they produce 34% of the methane in the U.S. - a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent as carbon dioxide.

U.S. household waste

The waste goes well beyond households. Four percent to 10% of food purchases become waste in restaurants before ever reaching the customer.

Although, unlike sub-Saharan Africa, the United States has the technology to preserve harvested crops, too much of a harvest is left by farm equipment on the field to rot. To feed the hungry in the U.S., organizations such as the Society of St. Andrews recruit volunteers to visit farms after a harvest to glean, or pick up, the perfectly good produce left behind. In 2009, they were able to save and distribute 15.7 million pounds of produce.

Groups such as Food Runners, a non-profit in San Francisco run entirely by volunteers, deliver an estimated 10 tons of food each week to hungry people; otherwise, it would have been wasted. Taken from coffee shops, restaurants and supermarkets, this salvaged sustenance is used in shelters, soup kitchens, senior centers and other locations.

The U.S. and sub-Saharan Africa, now that they are catching up with other countries in this regard, can serve as models for the rest of the world when it comes to food waste. We can show the world how to feed its people while protecting the earth, too.

Danielle Nierenberg is co-project director of the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet project.  

For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.

 
In a new blog entry, Worldwatch Research Intern Meera Bhaskar reports on new approaches to polling public opinion that reveal "huge majorities" of U.S. residents believe in human-caused global warming and desire greater regulation to address the problem.

Over the past year, national polling data has pointed toward a growing sense of public skepticism on the credibility of climate science and the truth of global warming. According to a 2009 poll by Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the share of Americans who believe that global temperatures are rising dropped from 47 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2009. Additionally, a survey conducted by Gallup in 2010 found that 48 percent of Americans consider the seriousness of global warming to be exaggerated-a 12 percent increase from 1997.

Any increase in the public's ambivalence toward global warming poses yet another obstacle in the push for climate progress. However, pessimistic outlooks may need to be reevaluated in light of a new public opinion study released at a Congressional briefing last week. The hot-off-the press results from Jon Krosnick, a professor at Stanford University, pointed out inherent structural flaws in national climate and energy polls such as those conducted by Pew and Gallup, and indicated that, in fact, "huge majorities" of Americans believe that the planet is indeed warming due to anthropogenic activities. An even larger majority strongly supports government regulation to fight this problem.

Krosnick's study randomly selected 1,000 American adults to participate in phone interviews during the week of June 1, and respondents were asked a series of brief questions pertaining to climate change and energy issues. Seventy-four percent of respondents believed that Earth's temperature has likely been increasing over the past century, and 75 percent agreed that human behavior has been significantly responsible for any increase that occurred during this time.

When asked about potential government regulations for climate and energy issues, many respondents proved to be fairly knowledgeable about particular solutions and had a strong opinion as to which regulations should be promoted. Eighty-six percent of respondents said they wanted the government to place a limit on the amount of air pollution that business are allowed to emit, and 76 percent favored specific limitations on business's greenhouse gas emissions.

These figures are indicative of a large majority and show a drastic improvement from the statistics put forth by Pew and Gallup. But what makes Krosnick's polling data any more accurate than these other polls? Krosnick believes that the differences are a matter of survey design: that the surveys of Pew, Gallup, and many other opinion polls suffer from sloppy question structure, which can promote an unconscious bias and disproportionately skew the polling results.

One example is the 2010 Gallup survey, which asks: "Thinking about what is said in the news, in your view, is the seriousness of global warming generally exaggerated, generally correct, or is it generally underestimated?" Krosnick pointed out that this question asks more about respondents' perception of the news than their views on global warming; thus, a person who does believe in warming might also still believe that news coverage is exaggerated.

Stressing the need for simplicity in polling questions, Krosnick said that for scientific issues like energy and climate change, topics should be addressed one at a time in a succinct manner. He noted that studies similar to his own, which asked simple and direct questions, showed results strikingly aligned with the findings of his research. One such poll, conducted by ABC News in November, found that 72 percent of respondents believed that Earth has been warming.

Krosnick's study indicates that a significantly large majority of the American public supports the common goal of regulatory climate policies. With the U.S. Congress' mid-term elections drawing near, congressmen and women alike are scrambling to appease the majority of their constituencies. According to Krosnick, the majority results should serve as a united signal to elected representatives-and policymakers would do well to take a stand on climate and energy regulation.

Visit Worldwatch's Re-Volt blog to learn about public opinion and climate change.

This article originally appeared on the Worldwatch Institute blog Re-Volt. For permission to republish this report, please contact Juli Diamond at jdiamond@worldwatch.org.