Farming News - Oxfam report calls for action and ‘sustainable intensification’ to combat poverty

Oxfam report calls for action and ‘sustainable intensification’ to combat poverty

2 June 2011

The charity Oxfam, which seeks to raise people out of poverty, yesterday released a report which paints a damning picture of the global food supply chain; a system that allows 1 billion people around the World to go hungry. The report, Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World, asks “Why, in a world that produces more than enough food to feed everybody, do so many – one in seven of us – go hungry?”

In the report, the charity explains that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are already above sustainable levels and many areas around the World are facing water scarcity; modern agriculture is an increasingly thirsty industry and the report reveals that 3 billion people live in areas where demand for water outweighs supply. The report’s author, Robert Bailey, says the damage wrought by humans means “We have pushed ourselves into the ‘Anthropocene Epoch’ – the geological era in which human activity is the main driver of planetary change.”

Yesterday’s report aims to propose solutions to the challenge of food security that will have a real impact; it claims that most proposed solutions for alleviating poverty and ensuring food security merely “defend the status quo and the special interests that profit from it.” In Growing a Better Future the charity explains that, “Power above all determines who eats and who does not.”

Food prices set to double within twenty years

According to Oxfam’s figures, food prices are forecast to increase by something in the range of 70 to 90 per cent by 2030, however, it says that when the effects of climate change are factored in, food prices are likely to double again. This will mean international price rises of key staples somewhere in the region of 120 to 180 per cent within 20 years, which would spell disaster for food importing countries.

Josef Schmidhuber, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistician, said he broadly agreed with the message of the Oxfam report. However, Schmidhuber questioned the charity’s food price forecast. He said, "I would not think that food prices would rise rapidly in real terms if there were no real increase in oil prices.”. Although the price of wheat has remained largely flat thus far in 2011, wheat prices remain in excess of 70 percent above last year’s trading levels after a drought in the Black Sea region caused prices to skyrocket in summer 2010.

Oxfam’s recommendations for feeding the world

Nevertheless, the charity is adamant that something can be done to halt the march towards destruction outlined in its report. It recommends revolutionary changes to agricultural and government policy, focused on providing better support for struggling small-scale farmers, drastically curtailing the powers of speculators on food commodities and making moves to curb climate change, as the World’s poorest will be the worst hit.

Though the picture painted of the current global agricultural system may be bleak, the Oxfam report presents optimistic food for thought, which has been welcomed by governmental and policy organisations since its release.

The Crop Protection Agency released a statement yesterday afternoon in which it welcomed Oxfam’s findings. However, the Agency’s chief executive, Dominic Dyer, speculated that the report dismissed the role of large-scale, ’industrialised’ agriculture in addressing climate change and the food security challenge. Dyer praised the UK Government’s Foresight report, released earlier this year, which promotes approaches to meeting food security targets that are distinctly friendlier to exponents of industrial agriculture.

However, he did concede that, "Oxfam is to be applauded in raising the profile of the food security challenge, and in calling for urgent action to avert a major crisis in the years ahead."

CAP: A gross misallocation of resources

The Oxfam paper especially condemns subsidies paid under the European Common Agricultural Policy, which it claims enables “the vast majority of public money for agriculture [to] flow to agro-industrial farms in the North.”

The report uses figures from 2009 to demonstrate that EU CAP “added €79.5bn to tax bills and another €36.2bn to food bills… with about 80 per cent of direct income support going into the pockets of the wealthiest 20 per cent – mainly big landowners and agribusiness companies.” Author Bailey lambasts EU policy makers saying, “never, in the field of farming, has so much, been taken from so many, by so few.”

The charity also appeals for increased regulation of commodity speculation, which causes the price of staple foods to rise artificially high. France, during its presidency of the G20, has made moves to curb speculation on commodities. President Nicolas Sarkozy has campaigned for tough measures to limit speculation and is expected to push for increased regulation again this month.

Polarised debate over direction of agriculture is irrelevant

The report also criticises the polarised nature of debate over the future direction of agriculture; whether large scale, industrialised agriculture à la Brazilian ranches or environmentally benign but labour intensive peasant smallholdings represent the best option. The organisation says factionalised stances and blinkered viewpoints “continue a long tradition of ‘expert opinion’ directed towards small-scale food producers.” Continuing that, “it is difficult to think of any constituency in international development that has been subjected to so much irrelevant, and in some cases, harmful advice.”

However, the Oxfam report concludes that, “If we are to meet [food security challenges], then sustainable models of smallholder production must be where the lion’s share of effort goes... The huge untapped potential to increase yields among smallholder farmers is where the real opportunity lies. And while less input-intensive, more climate-friendly agricultural practices are not exclusive to small farmers, they are often well suited to this scale of production, and easily adopted.”

The report hails a number of practices which it terms ‘sustainable intensification’ as the most credible answer to questions of food security. It lauds such techniques as the use of animal and green manure in place of expensive inorganic fertilizers, and the adoption of agro-forestry and intercropping with leguminous vegetables to improve soils and diversify income.

Furthermore, the report claims agroecological solutions, such as integrated pest management techniques may reduce the need for chemical pesticides, which are expensive and threaten biodiversity, while water harvesting could help deal with unpredictable rainfall and reduce the strain on water systems.

Growing a Better Future supports these claims by pointing to recent research, which it says has produced exciting results in these areas. Jules Pretty’s study ‘Resource-Conserving Agriculture Increases Yields in Developing Countries’ examined 286 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 countries and found an average yield increase of 79 per cent. Another study by Pretty, conducted this year, which reviewed 40 sustainable intensification projects in 20 African countries, found that average yields more than doubled over a 3–10 year period.

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