Farmer in Nicaragua sprays crops during the dry season
In our RIO+20 Call-to-action, CGIAR called for "adopting cross-sectoral approaches which facilitate broader partnerships, coordinated regulatory frameworks and appropriate economic incentives. We need the vision and courage to transcend conventional sectoral approaches and apply integrated thinking to the management of agriculture, aquaculture, livestock, forests and water."
We wanted to find out more, and talked to Stephen Hall (Director General,WorldFish Center), Papa Seck (Director General, Africa Rice Center), Tony Simons (Director General, World Agroforestry Centre), Alain Vidal (Director, Challenge Program on Water and Food – CPWF), Amy Duchelle (Research Fellow, Center for International Forestry Research - CIFOR) and from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture - IITA), we have Peter Neuenschwander (Scientist Emeritus) and Piet van Asten (Systems Agronomist)
Can you give me examples why ‘agriculture’ and ‘agricultural development’ can’t be approached as a single sector?
Papa Seck: Sound sustainable agriculture policies can help move agriculture toward a more environmentally, economically and socially sustainable future. International agricultural research has an important role to play in strengthening Africa’s overall policy development capacity.
Stephen Hall: A good example is Lake Chilwa in Malawi, where fisheries production is highly dependent on changes in the surrounding watershed. Because of this, work to improve livelihoods in fishing communities also requires addressing land use changes sparked by agriculture and forestry upstream, as well as urban wastewater management.
Tony Simons: Agriculture continues to clear land and plant huge swathes of food crops. About 140 million hectares of forest and woodland have been lost worldwide since 1990 alone. If you only look within the agricultural sector, you will not see that trees play a fundamental role in almost all the earth’s ecosystems and provide a range of benefits to rural and urban people. Landscapes without trees can quickly erode. As natural vegetation is cleared for agriculture and other types of development, trees need to be integrated into agriculturally productive landscapes.
Piet van Asten: Even within agriculture itself, we can have individual, isolated sectoral approaches. In Burundi, for instance, coffee trade, production, and research are all focused on single or mono-crop production units. “Coffee is all that matters”. Until recently, there was no research to develop robust and productive intercrop systems.
Peter Neuenschwander: Often agriculture, economy and ecology are interlinked. For example, reducing the pressure of exotic floating water weeds benefits the traffic of goods to markets, patients to hospitals and access to agricultural land, improves water flow, and helps biodiversity conservation. The level of control is influenced by eutrophization caused by run-off of nutrients from agricultural land and sewage from cities, which can both be reduced by the preservation of fringing forests, which also allow punctual access to water for cattle.
Alain Vidal: The Mekong basin is a good example illustrating the need for cross-sectoral approaches on a macro scale. In the Mekong, hydropower dams are also supposed to provide flood control and irrigation. Often, reservoirs levels are kept high to ensure electricity can be delivered at a moment's notice during peak periods. Flushing can occur quite quickly, often causing floods.
When this happened on the Mekong last year, more than half a million people in ten countries were affected. The floods damaged over 64,000 hectares of farmland. Much of this was caused by a lack of planning and taking into account the needs of different users other than electricity. So better inter-sectoral planning is needed. But water is not only used for hydropower, agriculture and fisheries, but also for drinking and sanitation. These sectors have different ministries, rarely linked or coordinated.
Stephen Hall: The Mekong is actually an excellent example to illustrate the need for cross-sectoral approaches: In Vietnam’s Mekong delta, coastal shrimp farms expanded rapidly in response to global market demand and policy incentives from national government aimed at increasing export revenue. But many operations proved environmentally destructive, removing mangroves that provided critical fish habitat and buffered against storm waters. Without adequate measures to protect water quality and control disease, these intensive operations are subject to a cycle of boom and bust.
Alain Vidal: And particularly in Vietnam, there is a fear that the Laotian dam building efforts would reduce the sediment flows in the river. In the Mekong Delta, this could bring more saltwater into farmlands, which would be devastating for the agriculture in that region.
How do you try to break the isolated sectoral approaches?
Stephen Hall: In the Mekong example: by providing tools for a more integrated, landscape-level approach that considers the multiple benefits of, interdependencies between and risks to fisheries, aquaculture and agriculture production systems. A partnership under the Challenge Program for Water and Food -involving IWMI, IRRI and WorldFish- is a good example of how such an approach can help decision makers to manage these issues more effectively.
Alain Vidal: We try to influence policies to manage water resources at the basin scale, rather than by country or by sector. Fragmentation can cause conflict and unfair policies, while at the basin scale, policies can be oriented to accommodate competing interests.
Peter Neuenschwander: In IITA, biological control needs close collaboration among the government ministries concerning agriculture, education, and the environment. For inter-ministerial links to work well, we often created country-wide committees responsible for biological control.
Piet van Asten: And just like many CGIAR centers and research programs, IITA works with national research partners for local science activities, local and international development partners for scaling out to farmers, and local authorities to influence policies.
Amy Duchelle: Indeed, we saw the same in CIFOR's Global Comparative Study on REDD: our main partners are sub-national REDD+ project developers; including government agencies, NGOs, foundations, and private companies. NGOs may be more efficient in terms of project design and implementation, but they rely on collaborations with government agencies to be able to implement REDD+ intervention mechanisms that include land tenure regularization for instance.
Papa Seck: AfricaRice is rather unique in this: As an intergovernmental association of African States, we facilitate more effective policy dialogue in the continent through our Council of Ministers and the National Experts Committee. These are excellent mechanisms to influence agricultural policy and create a more conducive environment for the sustainable development of Africa’s rice sector.
Tony Simons: Picking up on what Amy said: there is a role as well for public-private partnerships. In the area of agroforestry, companies have seen that adding trees to agriculture can be highly profitable, producing valuable fruit, rubber, oil, medicinal and energy products, and even commodities such as coffee, rubber and cocoa. Mutually beneficial relationships provide increased yields and greater returns for both the farmers and corporate actors. Enlightened multinational, national and local companies have realized the new opportunities.
Where have you seen practical, measurable impact of cross-sectoral work?
Tony Simons: Continuing in the area of agroforestry? Let’s take Niger: Following reforms to the forest code in Niger, farmers have again been cultivating trees and the country has seen a tremendous increase in tree cover on over 5 million hectares in the past 20 years.
In Senegal, in the Niayes coastal stretch north of Dakar, planting strips of Casuarina stopped the movement of sand dunes and allowed market gardening to thrive. Fertilizer trees that capture nitrogen from the atmosphere and transfer it to the soil provide a low cost way for farmers to improve soil fertility and boosts crop yields.
In Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Niger, Burkina Faso and other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, fertilizer trees are doubling and tripling average maize yields.
Peter Neuenschwander: Biological control programs against cassava mealybug, mango mealybug, water hyacinth and water lettuce, water fern, several cowpea pests, maize stemborers all involved several sections in the administrational and educational structure of the concerned countries in collaboration with different international research centers.
These programs were generally seen as having been successful, providing a reduction in the overall infestation level and improving the capacity of the local collaborators for the benefit of future programs.
IITA’s biocontrol program against cassava mealybug, for instance, has greatly increased farmers’ productivity and generated savings valued at between US$15.6 and $27.8 billion in 2004. The institute’s biocontrol of another pest, green mite, that had destroyed 30 to 40% of the cassava crop, has saved the ECOWAS region an estimated $1.7 billion over the last 18 years.
Papa Seck: For the government policies recommended by AfricaRice, the domestic rice production responses were remarkable in several countries in Africa, particularly in West Africa where paddy production increased consecutively by 26.9% in 2008, 5.3% in 2009 and 9.7% in 2010.
Alain Vidal: In the area of integrated water resource management, an example of the Machángara river basin, one of Ecuador’s most important watersheds.
Before 1998, there were considerable problems with natural resource management. Each sector planned according to its own needs and not that of the basin overall. More than thirty-two conflicts were recorded. A Basin Council was established in 1998 to improve coordination. one key achievement is a significant increase the measured improved access to the water source in urban areas: from 82% in 1990 to 97% in 2004. In the same urban areas, access to sanitation went up from 77% in 1990 to 94% in 2004. In addition, upstream communities, among the poorest and most marginalized in the Andes, have been provided with incentives and support in managing the upper paramos or grasslands.
Tony, what would be your concluding recommendations?
Tony Simons: A new way of doing business that integrates agriculture, livestock, forests, trees and water, and the sectors connected to each, is essential if we are going to meet the demands for food and energy tomorrow. And in 2030 when urban populations become the majority in developing countries or by 2050 when we expect 10 billion mouths to feed...
Governments can play a key role in guaranteeing food security by making use of evidence-based knowledge that spans across individual sectors. Governments need to be aware of the scientific knowledge that exists and they also need to understand it. They need to know how the knowledge applies in terms of national and regional priorities.
CGIAR is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for a food secure future. CGIAR research is dedicated to reducing rural poverty, improving human health and nutrition, and ensuring more sustainable management of natural resources. It is carried out by the 15 centers who are members of the CGIAR Consortium in close collaboration with hundreds of partner organizations, academia and the private sector.
Read more about CGIAR’s participation at RIO+20
With thanks to Fiona Chandler, Katherine Lopez, Savitri Mohapatra, Michael Victor, Paul Stapleton and Dan Cooney.
Picture courtesy Neil Palmer (CIAT)
climate_food_commission-spm-nov2011.pdf
