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STATE OF TH E WOR LD2 0 1 1

TH E WOR LDWATCH I N STITUTE

Innovations thatNourish the Planet

WWW.NOURISHINGTHEPLANET.ORG 3

Member of a women’s group waters their cabbage, Zimbabwe

C H A P T E R 1

Charting a New Path toEliminating Hunger

Brian Halweil and Danielle Nierenberg

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their families as a protein-filled treat, have sofar been willing to pay a little bit more. Mean-while, the harvesters—many of them immi-grants from surrounding nations and thepoorest of the poor in The Gambia—are alsoputting on plays about mangrove restorationand building hatcheries to further boost thewild stocks, as well as eyeing upscale marketsin hotels and restaurants that cater to tourists.2

Oysters are not necessarily what come tomind when confronting the task of eliminat-ing hunger and poverty around the globe.After all, according to the latest U.N. Food andAgriculture Organization (FAO) report, 925million people are undernourished. (See Box1–1.) That is 98 million fewer than in 2009.

long the shoreline of the Gambia River,a group of women has achieved raresuccess in reducing hunger in their

communities. It revolves around a certain brinymollusk. To boost their incomes and safe-guard a source of nourishment, the 15 com-munities in the Women’s Oyster HarvestingAssociation—a total of nearly 6,000 people—agreed to close one tributary in their oyster ter-ritories for an entire year and to lengthen the“closed” season in other areas.1

These steps were difficult in the short term.But by the following season the oysters werebigger, and so was the price they commanded.Customers, primarily other local merchantsor women who want to make fried oysters for

A

But a child still dies every six seconds fromundernourishment. Oysters alone cannotaddress this tragedy.3

What can? Typically the solutions citedare higher-yielding seed varieties, dams toirrigate vast areas, and mountains of fertilizerto rejuvenate depleted soils. Yet seafood pro-vides about 15 percent of the calories and athird of the protein that people worldwideconsume—and more than that in poorernations, including much of West Africa. Sofisheries will in many regions be lastingsources of food and income for poor com-munities. But seafood is just one neglectedpart of the food chain that might provide

answers where fertilizer or irrigation or afocus on boosting grain production alonehas not.4

It was on a journey to find such neglectedsolutions that we came upon this group of oys-ter harvesters. The context, and the basis ofWorldwatch’s Nourishing the Planet project,was this: Agriculture has come to a cross-roads. Nearly a half-century after the GreenRevolution, a major share of the human fam-ily is still chronically hungry. In addition,much of that revolution’s gains have beenachieved through highly intensive agriculturethat depends heavily on fossil fuels for inputsand energy—and the question of whether the

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Charting a New Path to Eliminating Hunger STATE OF THE WORLD 2011

In September 2010, FAO released its latestreport on hunger, finding that 925 million peo-ple are undernourished—98 million fewer thanin 2009. (See Figure.) While the lower numberis encouraging, it is still unacceptably high—and nowhere near the Millennium Develop-ment Goal of halving hunger by 2015. Ghanais the only sub-Saharan African country oncourse to cut its prevalence of hunger by then.

Globally, the 2010 hunger figure marked adecline of 7.5 percent from the 2009 level. Thereduction was mostly concentrated in Asia.FAO estimates that 80 million fewer peoplewere hungry there in 2010. Gains were muchsmaller in sub-Saharan Africa, where one thirdof the population was hungry. Furthermore,the overall number of hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa has increased over the lastdecade. In Burundi, Comoros, the DemocraticRepublic of the Congo, and Eritrea, chronichunger affects at least half the population.

Overall, women and children account forthe highest proportion of the chronically hun-gry. High food prices and lower incomes putpoor households at an additional risk of notproviding expectant mothers, infants, andchildren with adequate nutrition. Indeed,

more than one third of child deaths worldwideare related to inadequate nutrition.

Most of the men and women, usually farm-ers, who live on less than $1.25 a day arefound in rural areas, lacking land tenure, infra-structure, and access to health services orelectricity. Increasingly, however, cities are notimmune to hunger. In the 1980s and 1990surbanization increased by 4 percent each year,while poverty levels continued to increase aswell. The population of slum dwellers is alsogrowing worldwide—at almost 1 percent eachyear. Rising food prices during the 2007/08world food price crisis were especially hard onthe urban poor. In Kenya, for example, FAOestimated that 4.1 million urban poor in 2009were “highly food-insecure” and as many as7.6 million were unable to meet their dailyfood needs.

While world food prices have fallen since2008, they remain well above pre-2007 levels,and the trend continued steadily upward in2009 and 2010. Many food aid programs havenot been able to purchase as much food, andthe recession has meant less money for foodaid. The U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment reported that it was only able to donate

Box 1–1. Global Hunger and Agricultural Trends

world’s croplands can yield more food is beingtrumped by the question of whether they cando so without compromise to the soils, freshwater, and crop diversity the world dependson. Food prices worldwide are under strongupward pressure (see Figure 1–1), driven byrapidly rising demand for meat in Asia, forwheat in Africa, for biofuels in Europe andNorth America, and other factors. Climatechange is not likely to ease that pressure ormake things easier for farmers.5

Perhaps most troubling is that investmentsin agricultural development by governments,international lenders, and foundations are nearhistoric lows. However, the same record food

prices that handicap food-aid organizationsand threaten hundreds of millions with hungerare also pushing governments, foundations,and other groups to consider dramaticallyshifting investments in agriculture. A recentWorld Bank analysis, for instance, suggestedthat the Bank has mistakenly neglected this sec-tor and needs to shift resources back to ruralareas—which is hands down the most cost-effective investment for reducing poverty andhunger around the world.6

Over the last two years we have traveled to25 sub-Saharan African nations—the placeswhere hunger is greatest and rural communi-ties have struggled most—to hear people’s


STATE OF THE WORLD 2011 Charting a New Path to Eliminating Hunger

$2.2 billion in 2009, a decreaseof 15 percent from 2008.

Funding for agriculturaldevelopment is down as well.The new multibillion-dollarU.S. food security and agricul-ture initiative (Feed the Future)proposes to invest $20 billionin African agriculture in thenext decade. This is a timelyrecognition of the urgent needto invest more in this sector—but much of the money stillneeds to be raised. Agricul-ture’s share of global develop-ment aid has dropped fromover 16 percent to a meager 4percent since 1980. Moreover,only nine African nations allo-cate even 10 percent of theirnational budgets to agriculture. Most of thecontinent’s poor and hungry people dependon agriculture for all of their livelihoods. Yetpublic spending on agriculture is often lowestin countries with economies based on agricul-ture—in other words, farmers are, ironically,the hungriest people of all.

Increasingly, over the past two decades,the least developed countries have dependedmore on food imports. In 11 sub-SaharanAfrican countries, half of the grain they usedwas imported in 2005–06. In seven othercountries, imports accounted for 30–50percent of their grain.

Source: See endnote 3.

1969–71 79–81 90–92 95–97 00–02 04–06 2008 2009 2010

Million

Source: FAO

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

878 853 845 825 857 873915

1020

925

Number of Undernourished People in the World, 1969–2010

Box 1–1 continued

stories of hope and success in agriculture.Africa has among the most persistent problemswith malnutrition—it is home to the mostnations where more than a third of the peopleare hungry. In spite of this, the continent isbecoming a rich and diverse breeding groundfor innovations in agriculture that supportfarmer income and nourishment for people atthe same time.7

This journey has paid off in a treasure troveof innovation. On dozens of farms in Malawiwe saw yield-boosting techniques used by morethan 120,000 farmers, such as planting nitro-gen-fixing trees that enrich the soil for the sub-sequent corn crop and that boost yields fourfoldwith no other added fertilizer. Across WestAfrica, we met farmers and shopkeepers usingsimple storage systems to prevent cowpeas, amajor crop in the region, from rotting. If halfof the area’s cowpea harvest were stored thisway, it would be worth $255 million annuallyto some of the poorest people in the world.8

Our aim was to shine a light on communi-ties, countries, and companies that are modelson the path to a sustainable future. And beyondthe goal of reducing poverty and hunger, we

were guided by some more-tra-ditional Worldwatch criteria. Inorder to keep feeding humanityfor generations to come, andto feed people better, farmingmust reinforce conservationgoals by adding diversity to thefood chain and by healingecosystems. What also becomesclear in visiting farms through-out Africa is that the food pro-duction base is in many placesbeing degraded by soil mining,water scarcity, and a loss of thecrop diversity that ultimatelyfeeds future farming.

We were also interested inuseful models for larger-scaleefforts and for applications

beyond Africa—even in wealthy nations thatstruggle with food waste, overeating, and otherforms of agricultural dysfunction. A rooftopgardening cooperative that is feeding people inDakar, Senegal, offers guidance for neighbor-hoods struggling with food shortages in inner-city New York. Individually, the hundreds ofmillions of small-scale farmers and their fam-ilies who are the majority of the world’s poorseem to have little power in the face of globalissues like hunger, climate change, and wateravailability. But if each of their individual inno-vations were scaled up to bring food to thetables of not one farmer but 100 million ormore, as well as to the consumers who dependon them, it could change the entire globalfood system.

But the global connections go beyondAfrica. Everyone is in this together, in moreways than one. First, agriculture encompassessuch a large chunk of the planet that healthyrural economies are also fundamental to globalsustainability. To prevent disastrous climatechange, it will help if farmers all over theworld are rewarded for building up the carboncontent of their soils. Second, even deter-



1990 1993 1996 1999 1990 2002 2005 2008 2011

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250

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Meat

Dairy

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Oils

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Figure 1–1. Food Prices, 1990–2010

mined “locavores” who try to support localfarmers depend on distant regions for coffee,cocoa, fruits, and other daily essentials or out-of-season specialties. The same Americanswho are flocking to farmers’ markets andpushing agribusiness away from feedlots mayemerge as new lobbying allies in matters ofinternational hunger policy. Third, even ifpeople do not get their corn, rice, and beansfrom African farmers, they are sustained by thecrop diversity in those fields. Poorer nationsstill house most of the world’s dwindling foodbiodiversity, not to mention cultural wisdomthat may be a source of enjoyment or betterhealth. Finally, for most people there is also themoral dimension. It is hard to fully enjoy ahearty meal when nearly a billion people else-where in the world—perhaps including thosenearby—cannot do the same.9

There is no single solution. In fact, it is theone-size-fits-all approach that has been socrippling. Past attempts have failed becausethey squeezed out diversity or depended toomuch on chemicals and other inputs thatfarmers could not afford. They also stum-bled because they ignored women farmersor neglected to consider food culture as away to change how they farm. Although aslightly smaller share of humanity is hungry,what the world has been doing about hungerhas not really worked. And because atten-tion has been focused relatively narrowly—ona few types of crops, on a few technologies—entire regions and ecosystems, not to mentionmyriad varieties of crops and rural ways of life,have been ignored.

So, here are three major shifts that we invitefarmers, scientists, donors, agribusiness exec-utives, and the global community to consider.

Go Beyond Seeds

The first shift needed is to look beyond thehandful of crops that have absorbed most ofagriculture’s attention and also beyond devel-

oping new seeds as the default solution forhunger and poverty. The long-standing focuson seeds is no surprise: they are elegant ves-sels for delivering new technology to a farm.Whether it is an American corn farmer look-ing for more drought tolerance or a beanfarmer in the Kenyan highlands, buying a newtype of seed is a relatively inexpensive andimmediate way to try to boost a farm’s harvestand income. But this search for just the rightseed has tended to erode crop diversity inboth rich and poor nations. At the same time,building soils, growing crops other than grains,making better use of rainfed farms, and invest-ing in other elements of the farm landscapehave been profoundly neglected. Yet thesehold vast promise for raising incomes andreducing poverty.

The Consultative Group on InternationalAgricultural Research (CGIAR) spends 27percent of its funding on genetic improve-ment of seeds, and most CGIAR centers arestill organized around growing a particularcrop—rice, wheat, corn, or potatoes, forinstance. But in recent years this global researchnetwork has evolved by adding centers focusedon agroforestry, integrated pest management,and irrigation; these centers now get nearly 25percent of the CGIAR’s budget.10

Because of their relative neglect untilrecently, the returns on investments in suchtechnologies and strategies can be impressive.That does not necessarily mean they getinvested in, however. Developing new seedvarieties, for instance, can be a lucrative propo-sition for seed companies. But few companieshave figured out ways to profit from encour-aging the rebuilding of soils or aquifers. Andthe new reality of agricultural investment is thatit comes less from public institutions like gov-ernments and universities than from privateentities. In 1986, for example, of the $3.3 bil-lion that the United States invested in agri-cultural research, 54 percent came from thepublic sector and 46 percent from the private



sector. Today, in contrast, agribusiness firms—primarily seed and agrochemical companies—have emerged as the majority investors,responsible for 72 percent of the total.11

If seeds represent the short-term payoffoption, the truly long-term investment with bigreturns is investing in the soil and water thatnourish crops. In Mali and other parts of theAfrican Sahel, soils are severely damaged fromovergrazing and drought, but the use of greenmanure and cover crops can dramaticallyimprove soil fertility without the use of expen-sive fertilizers. In Chapter 6, Roland Bunchcites recent interviews with farmers from morethan 75 villages in six African countries that,like much of sub-Saharan Africa, suffer fromwell-documented soil exhaustion. “People nolonger had any way of maintaining soil fertil-ity,” he notes. “Harvests were crashing, drop-ping 15–25 percent a year.” Bunch notes thatsubsidizing chemical fertilizers, which someAfrican nations are doing heavily (by up to 75percent in Malawi, for example), has generallynot been a good long-term strategy and actu-ally reduces farmers’ incentive to invest inmore agroecological approaches to nourishingsoils. When the fertilizer subsidies end, pro-ductivity will drop to virtually nothing. Instead,Bunch maintains that green manure/covercrops are the only sustainable solution toAfrica’s soil fertility crisis.12

Or consider that across much of Africa,only 15–30 percent of the rain that falls onfields gets used productively by crops, and if theland is severely degraded this share can drop to5 percent. In these places, crop failures may becaused more by “poor on-farm rainwater man-agement than by a shortage of rainfall,” notesSandra Postel in Chapter 4. Only a very smallshare of African farms currently have access toirrigation—albeit a share that is surging withlow-cost, human-powered pumps like theMoneyMaker, the Mosi-O-Tunya (“the pumpthat thunders”), or the more ubiquitous trea-dle pump that is used by more than 2.3 mil-

lion poor farmers in Asia and Africa.13

But even without irrigation, farmers arefinding they can insulate themselves from theworst effects of drought and boost yields dra-matically in a rainy year by mulching, reduc-ing tillage, and planting cover crops. As Postelnotes, “working with farmers on six experi-mental farms in Kenya, Ethiopia, Zambia, andTanzania, researchers found yield gains of20–120 percent for maize and 35–100 percentfor tef (a staple grain of the Ethiopian diet) onfarms using such soil- and water-conservingpractices versus those using traditional meth-ods.” This broad strategy, used in parallel withinvesting in place-appropriate irrigation, is rel-evant across the continent’s 18 or more distinctgrowing regions, all of which are predicted tobe shocked by more severe rainfall patterns incoming years.14

Go Beyond Farms

As Olivier De Schutter notes in the Forewordto this book, eliminating hunger does not justdepend on the world’s ability to produceenough food. For many communities, thesolutions lie in making better use of the foodalready produced. A new study from the U.K.-based Soil Association suggests that the bestway to ensure that everyone gets enough to eatis to change what kind of food is produced andimprove its distribution: less meat production,use of more environmentally sustainable agri-cultural methods that do not rely on petro-chemicals, and more local and regionalproduction of food. In fact, many of the farmsand organizations we visited seemed to behaving the most success reducing hunger andpoverty with work that had little to do withproducing more crops.15

As Tristram Stuart notes in Chapter 9, some25–50 percent of the harvest in poorer nationsspoils or is contaminated by pests or moldbefore it reaches the dinner table. This amountof loss—sometimes the harvest gets returned



to enrich soils, but increasingly it ends up inlandfills and trash dumps—is shocking, con-sidering that many experts estimate the worldwill need to double food production in the nexthalf-century as people eat more meat and gen-erally eat better. So it would make good senseto invest at least as aggressively in making bet-ter use of what is already produced as in boost-ing global production. Simple, low-cost fixescan go a long way in this respect, includinginexpensive plastic bags that keep cowpeas dryand pests out, better-built silos for preservinggrain, and preserving fruit (and vitamins)through solar drying techniques.16

Often food goes to waste because the linkfrom farmer to market is slow, inefficient, orbroken. In Zambia, Samuel Fromartz foundthat corn production was actually in oversup-ply in 2010 due to good rains and fertilizer sub-sidies. In theory, this could be profitable, sincethe excess could be sent to countries in shortsupply. But Zambia lacks infrastructure andmarketing networks to do this, and farmerswere simply dumping corn on the market atlow prices—thereby entrenching poverty andsending a market signal to all the farmers togrow less. But Fromartz found some exceptionsto this, such as Justine Chiyesu, as described inChapter 13. With the help of the Production,Finance, and Technology (PROFIT) programof the U.S. Agency for International Devel-opment, Chiyesu was able to mechanize hisfarm and increase yields. PROFIT helped himfind ways to bypass inefficient marketing net-works, allowing him to sell directly to millersand get a better price for himself and the vil-lage of growers he represented.17

“Add value” has long been the mantra forstruggling rural communities from the Amer-ican Midwest to the North China Plain. Thatis, process, preserve, or otherwise transformraw commodities into a more valuable prod-uct—peanuts into peanut butter, for instance.But Africa has lagged in this realm, partlybecause of neglect in the off-farm businesses

that help farmers add value. In the last half-cen-tury, the amount of value-added to agricultureper person has nearly doubled across the devel-oping world; over the same period, it hasdeclined slightly in Africa, where investment inagricultural infrastructure like food processingfacilities has lagged. This is partly why thepoorest countries in Africa are twice as depen-dent on food imports today as 20 years ago—a precarious shift because global food priceshave also become more erratic.18

And while most of the world’s poor andhungry remain in rural areas, hunger is oftenmigrating as the world becomes more urban.Where people in cities have jobs and can affordtheir next meal, the food may come from faraway. But for slum dwellers in Kenya and



A young boy retrieves the day’s ration of peanutsfrom inside a silo, Cameroon

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Ghana, the most reliable source of nourish-ment is often what they can grow themselvesin patio gardens, on vacant lots, or on parcelsof land near slums. At least 800 million peo-ple worldwide depend on urban agriculture formost of their food needs. Right now themajority of these urban farmers are in Asia, butwith 14 million Africans migrating from coun-try to city each year, the residents of Lagos,Dakar, and Nairobi will likely become asdependent on food raised in cities as peoplewho live in Hanoi, Shanghai, and PhnomPenh. Urban agriculture is already an impor-tant source of income for millions of Africans.In Chapter 10, Nancy Karanja and MaryNjenga note that the poor in cities are not onlysupplying food to their own communities butalso establishing seed multiplication projects,making their “farms” an important source oflocal seed for urban and rural farmers alike.19

Over the long term, the most important“off-farm” investment may well be making surethat the farmers of tomorrow have the oppor-tunity and the desire to actually become farm-ers. In Uganda, Project DISC (for DevelopingInnovations in School Cultivation) has foundthat teaching students how to grow, cook, andeat spiderwiki, amaranth, and other native veg-etables can help give young people a reason tostay in rural areas and become farmers.20

Working in schools can also help reducehunger. In the United States, where 16.7 mil-lion children are deemed “food-insecure,” themost effective government intervention hasbeen the meals that children get in school.The school feeding programs of the WorldFood Programme (WFP) now reach at least 10million girls worldwide, helping to combatgender inequities in education and nutrition.Take-home rations provide an incentive forparents to send girls to secondary school, andimproved nutrition helps children developproperly and stay focused during classes.21

One thing they can focus on is getting themost out of local foods. Serena Milano from

Slow Food International reports in Chapter 7that teachers and chefs all over Africa are help-ing families do more with their limited foodbudgets by documenting, reviving, and teach-ing traditional recipes and food preservationtechniques. In places where indigenous or wildplants are the only crops thriving, Milano sug-gests investing in preserving wild resources, likecoffee and honey, as well as encouraging farm-ers to “grow” biodiversity in their fields byplanting indigenous crops.22

Go Beyond Africa

No matter where food comes from—a farm-ers’ market, a discount superstore, a householdgarden, or even online vendors—people every-where are tied into a global food system. (SeeTable 1–1.) In this sense, international soli-darity in the realm of food—embodied byeverything from fair trade cashews to farmers’groups like Via Campesina and cross-conti-nental collaborations like the Global CropDiversity Trust—is one of the most hopefulinnovations for reducing poverty and hunger.23

Food aid in Africa and elsewhere has tradi-tionally come from the United States and otherrich nations. But food aid could be much morecost-effective if the United States, the world’smajor donor, purchased the food in or nearrecipient countries. The United States cur-rently donates only U.S.-grown crops. Theseshipments provide much-needed calories tohungry people, but they also disrupt the foodsupply system by lowering prices for locallygrown food and by crowding producers inneighboring areas out of nearby markets. “Weare changing how we view the ultimate goal ofdevelopment,” said President Barack Obamaon issues of global food security. “Our focuson assistance has saved lives in the short term,but it hasn’t always improved those societiesover the long term.” Europe, the other majorfood donor, has already modified its aid pol-icy. Today the highways in southern Africa are



filled with trucks carrying food aid across thecontinent, more and more of it from Africanfarmers selling directly to the World FoodProgramme. In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia,and several other nations in sub-Saharan Africa(as well as in Asia and Latin America), WFP isnot only buying locally, it is helping smallfarmers gain the skills necessary to be part ofthe global market. And there is good evidencethat the need for food aid will soar in comingyears, not only because of higher crop pricesbut also because of climate-related and geopo-litical chaos.24

The global impact of farming also extendsto agriculture’s impact on climate change.African farmers could remove 50 billion tonsof carbon dioxide from the atmosphere overthe next 50 years, primarily by planting treesamong crops and stewarding nearby forests.That is like eliminating an entire year of all theworld’s greenhouse gas emissions—and itwould be a generous contribution from aregion that emits a tiny share of these gases.Already roughly 75 projects in 22 countriesacross Africa are in the works in the hopes ofcompensating farmers and rural communities

for providing this climate-healing service,including a proposal to create an African Agri-cultural Carbon Facility that could incubateprojects and help connect them with buyers.25

Farmers and communities throughout thedeveloping world can thus play an importantrole in solving certain global problems—a rolethat could lead simultaneously to income, jobs,and self-reliance. Not all of these experimentswill work. But David Lobell argues in Chap-ter 8 that “we need to be adaptation agnostics,willing to be honest about what we do notknow and ready to expend the effort to figureout what actually works.…The key will bewhether public and private investors can quicklyrecognize what works and scale it up.”26

Farmers’ groups are already making changesthroughout Africa—sometimes through Pro-linnova-supported projects where farmers shareinformation via workshops, meetings, pho-tographs, and the Internet, as described inChapter 5. At the same time, farmer advocacyand activists groups, including GRAIN andThe Land Coalition, are mobilizing to preventcorporate and foreign acquisitions of agricul-tural land in Ethiopia, Madagascar, and other



Indicator World Sub-Saharan Africa

Population 6.8 billion 863 million

Total arable land 1,380,515,270 hectares 179,197,800 hectares

Share of food production that issmallholder 70 percent 90 percent

Urban population 3.49 billion 324 million

Share of population that is urban 51 percent 33 percent

Hungry 925 million (14 percent) 239 million (27 percent)

Children underweight 148 million (24 percent) 39 million (28 percent)

Average age 29.1 years 18.6 years

Per capita added value output ofagriculture between 1961 and 2006 Increased 35 percent Decreased 12 percent

Source: See endnote 23.

Table 1–1. Putting Sub-Saharan Africa in Perspective

countries. In Chapter 12, Andrew Rice reportsthat millions and perhaps tens of millions ofhectares have been acquired by internationalbuyers, like Saudi Arabia and China, in just thelast decade. Currently this land is mostly usedto grow crops for people back home or else-where in the world.

Even as countries and communities start toinvest in local agriculture, people remain tiedto a global food system. And even where fewerpeople are hungry, governments and com-munities struggle with problems that ulti-mately relate to what people eat. Considerthat the American diet, anchored in a majorway to food products made from corn and soy-beans, has been implicated in the massive deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico, which is causedpartly by fertilizer and manure from mid-western farmland, as well as in rampant pub-lic health problems related to meals bulked upby corn syrup, soy oil, and grain-fed meat. TheNew York–based Feed Foundation’s 30 Pro-ject is bringing international activists involvedin hunger issues together with domestic advo-cates who are addressing obesity, looking forlong-term solutions that will make the foodsystem better for everyone. “Kids in the SouthBronx need nutritious foods and so do kids inBotswana,” explains founder Ellen Gustafson.Among the organization’s goals for the next30 years are easy access to fresh fruits andvegetables for every person on the planet,global sustainability standards for meat pro-duction, and processed food priced to accountfor all the negative impacts from its produc-tion and distribution.27

Steps on the New Path

The innovations we uncovered on our Africanjourney represent the kind of radical newthinking that more and more people are call-

ing for. Most recently, the InternationalAssessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Sci-ence and Technology for Development sug-gested that farmers and researchers need toabandon the conventional reductionistapproach that separates agriculture from theenvironment and the environment from meet-ing human needs. The report noted that thereis no uniform approach to solving hungerand poverty, that re-integrating livestock andcrop production could dramatically improverural economies in the most degraded envi-ronments, and that “orphan crops” and tra-ditional seeds have more potential thanpreviously assumed. These are the types ofinnovations that will help nourish people andthe planet alike.28

Needless to say, we have great expectationsfor the world’s food producers in Africa andbeyond. Agriculture is emerging as a solutionto mitigating climate change, reducing pub-lic health problems and costs, making citiesmore livable, and creating jobs in a stagnantglobal economy. In the most hopeful future—one that is entirely achievable—countries thatare currently food-short could begin to feedthemselves and generate surpluses to helpother countries.

Our hope is that this book will serve as apartial road map for foundations and interna-tional donors interested in supporting themost effective and environmentally sustain-able agricultural development interventions—and that it will offer some inspiration andsupport for the rural communities that are thesource of these innovations.

Given the limited ability of scientists to findsolutions, the finite generosity of donors tosupport agricultural research, and the over-stretched patience of struggling farmers andhungry families, shifting funds and attention innew directions is long overdue.



September 2010. International Water Manage-ment Institute, “In a Changing Climate, ErraticRainfall Poses Growing Threat to Rural Poor, Jus-tifying Bigger Investment in Water Storage, NewReport Says,” press release (Stockholm: 6 Septem-ber 2010); Conservation International, “ShellShock: The Catastrophic Decline of the World’sFreshwater Turtles,” press release (Washington,DC: 10 September 2010); FAO, “925 Million inChronic Hunger Worldwide,” press release (Rome:14 September 2010); Allan Dowd, “World PaysHigh Price for Overfishing, Studies Say,” Reuters,14 September 2010; “Global Fisheries ResearchFinds Promise and Peril: While Industry Con-tributes $240B Annually, Overfishing Takes Toll onPeople and Revenue,” ScienceDaily.com, 14 Sep-tember 2010; Vattenfall, “Vattenfall InauguratesWorld’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm,” press release(London: 23 September 2010).

Chapter 1. Charting a New Path toEliminating Hunger

1. Christine Zaleski, e-mail to Danielle Nieren-berg, 27 August 2010; Christine Zaleski, “Turningthe Catch of the Day into Improved Livelihoods forthe Whole Community,” Nourishing the PlanetBlog, 12 July 2010.

2. Zaleski, “Turning the Catch of the Day,” op.cit. note 1.

3. U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), “925 Million in Chronic Hunger World-wide,” press release (Rome: 14 September 2010).Box 1–1 from the following: FAO, op. cit. thisnote; Ghana from Sara J. Scherr and CourtneyWallace, “Rural Landscapes and Livelihood in Africa:Sustainable Development in the Context of Cli-mate Change and Competing Demands on RuralLands and Ecosystems,” Issue Paper for Dialoguetowards a Shared Action Framework for Agriculture,Food Security and Climate Change in Africa, Eco-Agriculture Partners, and World Wildlife Fund,Washington, DC, 6–9 July 2010, p. 4; FAO,“Global Hunger Declining, But Still UnacceptablyHigh,” Policy Brief (Rome: 14 September 2010);FAO, “Food Security Statistics by Country,” atwww.fao.org/economic/ess/food-securitystatistics/food-security-statistics-by-country/en; WorldHealth Organization, Children: Reducing Mortal-

ity Fact Sheet (Geneva: November 2009); Interna-tional Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI),“2009 Global Hunger Index Calls Attention toGender Inequality,” press release (Washington DC:14 October 2009); Shaohua Chen and MartinRavallion, The Developing World Is Poorer Than WeThought, But No Less Successful in the Fight againstPoverty (Washington, DC: Development ResearchWorking Group, World Bank, 2008), p. 4; UNHABITAT, State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011:Bridging the Urban Divide (London: Earthscan,2010), p. 28; U.S. Agency for International Devel-opment, “USAID’s Office of Food for Peace 2009Statistics,” press release (Washington, DC: 10 Jan-uary 2010); trends in agricultural developmentfunding from U.N. Department of Economic andSocial Affairs, Trends in Sustainable Development2008–2009: Agriculture, Rural Development, Land,Desertification, and Drought (New York: UnitedNations, 2008); African national agricultural bud-gets from U.N. Department of Economic and SocialAffairs, Division for Sustainable Development,“Summary Report of Multi-Stakeholder Dialogueon Implementing Sustainable Development,” 1February 2010, New York; grain imports fromStacey Rosen et al., Food Security Assessment, 2007GFA- 19 (Washington, DC: Economic ResearchService, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),2007); Figure from FAO, “Hunger Statistics,” atwww.fao.org/hunger/en, and from FAO, “Hun-ger,” at www.fao.org/hunger/hunger-home/en.

4. FAO, Fisheries and Aquaculture Department,The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2008(Rome: 2009), p. 4.

5. International Assessment of AgriculturalKnowledge, Science and Technology for Develop-ment (IAASTD), Agriculture at a Crossroads, Syn-thesis Report (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009);Figure 1–1 from FAO, FAO Food Price Index(2010).

6. World Bank, World Development Report 2008:Agriculture for Development (Washington, DC:2007).

7. FAO, “Global Hunger Declining,” op. cit.note 3.

8. W. Makumba et al., “The Long-Term Effects


STATE OF THE WORLD 2011 Notes

of a Gliricidia-Maize Intercropping System inSouthern Malawi, on Gliricidia and Maize Yields,and Soil Properties,” Agriculture, Ecosystems &Environment, August 2006, pp. 85–92; D. Garrityand L. Verchot, Meeting the Challenges of ClimateChange and Poverty through Agroforestry (Nairobi:World Agroforestry Centre, 2008); storage of cow-peas from Purdue University, “Gates FoundationFunds Purdue Effort to Protect Food, EnhanceAfrican Economy,” press release (Seattle, WA: 6July 2007).

9. Chris Reij, Gray Tappan, and Melinda Smale,Agroenvironmental Transformation in the Sahel:Another Kind of “Green Revolution,” IFPRI Dis-cussion Paper (Washington, DC: IFPRI, 2009).

10. Consultative Group on International Agri-cultural Research, Financial Report 2008 (Wash-ington, DC: 2008).

11. Data on research expenditures from Board onAgriculture, Investing in Research: A Proposal toStrengthen the Agricultural, Food, and Environ-mental System (Washington, DC: National ResearchCouncil, 1989), “Appendix B: Private SectorResearch Activities and Prospects.” Totals excludeForest Service and Economic Research Serviceresearch and development and do not count researchby the food processing industry.

12. R. Bunch, “Adoption of Green Manure andCover Crops,” LEISA Magazine, vol. 19, no. 4(2003), pp. 16–18; see Chapter 6 for interviews withfarmers and information on soil exhaustion andfertilizer subsidies.

13. Johan Rockström et al., “Managing Water inRainfed Agriculture–The Need for a ParadigmShift,” Agricultural Water Management, April 2010,pp. 543–50; see Chapter 4 for MoneyMaker andother pumps.

14. See Chapter 4; Johan Rockström et al., “Con-servation Farming Strategies in East and SouthernAfrica: Yields and Rain Water Productivity fromOn-farm Action Research,” Soil & Tillage Research,April 2009, pp. 23–32.

15. Soil Association, Telling Porkies: The Big FatLie About Doubling Food Production (Bristol, U.K.:

2010), p. 3.

16. Stockholm International Water Institute, Sav-ing Water: From Field to Fork—Curbing Losses andWastage in the Food Chain (Stockholm: 2008); seeChapter 9 for low-cost fixes.

17. See Chapter 13 for information on JustineChiyesu.

18. Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa,Framework for African Agricultural Productivity(Accra: 2006); “Rural Landscapes and Livelihoodsin Africa: Sustainable Development in the Contextof Climate Change and Competing Demands onRural Lands and Ecosystems,” draft DiscussionPaper for Dialogue towards a Shared Action Frame-work for Agriculture, Food Security and ClimateChange in Africa, Bellagio, Italy, 6–9 July 2010.

19. People depending on urban agriculture fromAlice Hovorka, Henk de Zeeuw, and Mary Njenga,Women Feeding Cities: Mainstreaming Gender inUrban Agriculture and Food Security (Warwick-shire, U.K.: Practical Action Publishing Ltd, 2009);see also Chapter 10.

20. Developing Innovations in School Cultiva-tion, at projectdiscnews.blogspot.com, viewed 12May 2010.

21. Number of hungry children in the UnitedStates from Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, andSteven Carlson, Household Food Security in theUnited States, 2008, Economic Research ReportNo. 83 (Washington, DC: USDA, November2009), p. 15; USDA, Food and Nutrition Service,“National School Lunch Program,” program factsheet, at www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Lunch/AboutLunch/NSLPFactSheet.pdf, updated September2010; World Food Programme, Feed Minds, ChangeLives: School Feeding, the Millennium DevelopmentGoals and Girls’ Empowerment (Rome: 2010).

22. See Chapter 7.

23. Via Campesina, at viacampesina.org/en,viewed 27 September 2010; Global Crop DiversityTrust, at www.croptrust.org, viewed 27 September2010. Table 1–1 from the following: world popu-lation total and share that is urban from FAO,


Notes STATE OF THE WORLD 2011

“Global Issue: World Hunger and Poverty Facts andStatistics 2010,” www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm;population in sub-Saharan Africa, world urban pop-ulation, share of sub-Saharan Africa that is urban,and average ages from United Nations, World Pop-ulation Prospects: The 2008 Revision (New York:2008); arable land from FAO, FAOSTAT Statisti-cal Database, at faostat.fao.org; share of world foodproduction that is smallholder from DevelopmentFund/Utviklingsfondet, Norway, A Viable FoodFuture (Oslo: 2010), p. 7; share of sub-SaharanAfrican food production that is smallholder fromEric Holt-Giménez, “From Food Crisis to FoodSovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements,”Monthly Review, July-August 2009, p. 145; urbanpopulation in sub-Saharan Africa from UN HABI-TAT, “Urban Indicators,” at www.unhabitat.org/stats; hungry populations from FAO, “GlobalHunger Declining,” op. cit. note 3; underweightchildren from UNICEF, The State of the World’sChildren 2009 (New York: December 2008), p.23; percentage underweight from UNICEF, TheState of the World’s Children 2008 (New York:December 2007); per capita added value output ofagriculture from Forum for Agricultural Researchin Africa, Framework for African Agricultural Pro-ductivity (Accra, Ghana: June 2006), p. 8.

24. Restriction to U.S. grown crops from U.S.Government Accountability Office, InternationalFood Assistance: Local and Regional ProcurementCan Enhance the Efficiency of U.S. Food Aid, butChallenges May Constrain its Implementation (Wash-ington, DC: 2009); Barack Obama, Remarks atthe Millennium Development Goals Summit,United Nations, New York, 22 September 2010;World Food Programme, “P4P Overview,” atwww.wfp.org/node/18711, viewed 12 May 2010.

25. Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit, Mitigating Cli-mate Change Through Food and Land Use, World-watch Report 179 (Washington, DC: WorldwatchInstitute, 2009), pp. 5, 9; World Agroforestry Cen-tre, Creating an Evergreen Agriculture in Africa forFood Security and Environmental Resilience (Nairobi:2009), p. 23; Scherr and Wallace, op. cit. note 3,p. 33.

26. See Chapter 8.

27. Ellen Gustafson, “Obesity + Hunger = 1Global Food Issue,” TEDxEast Talk, May 2010.

28. IAASTD, Agriculture at a Crossroads: TheGlobal Report (Washington, DC: Island Press,2009).

Measuring Success in Agricultural Development

1. P. B. R. Hazell, “Transforming Agriculture:The Green Revolution in Asia,” in D. J. Spielmanand R. Pandya-Lorch, eds., Millions Fed: Proven Suc-cesses in Agricultural Development (Washington,DC: International Food Policy Research Institute,2009), pp. 25–32.

2. J. W. Bruce and Z. Li, “Crossing the Riverwhile Feeling the Rocks: Land-Tenure Reform inChina,” in Spielman and Pandya-Lorch, op. cit.note 1, pp. 131–38.

3. O. Erenstein, “Leaving the Plow Behind:Zero-Tillage Rice-Wheat Cultivation in the Indo-Gangetic Plains,” in Spielman and Pandya-Lorch,op. cit. note 1, pp. 65–70.

4. C. Reij, G. Tappan, and M. Smale, “Re-Green-ing the Sahel: Farmer-Led Innovation in BurkinaFaso and Niger,” in Spielman and Pandya-Lorch,op. cit. note 1, pp. 53–58.

5. P. Roeder and K. Rich, “Conquering the Cat-tle Plague: The Global Effort to Eradicate Rinder-pest,” in Spielman and Pandya-Lorch, op. cit. note1, pp. 109–16.

Chapter 2. Moving Ecoagricultureinto the Mainstream

1. Kijabe Environmental Volunteers 2008, attdesigns.free.fr/kenvo/index.html.

2. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Ecosystemsand Human Well-being: Synthesis (Washington, DC:Island Press, 2005); Z. G. Bai et al., Global Assess-ment of Land Degradation and Improvement. 1.Identification by Remote Sensing (Wageningen,Netherlands: ISRIC–World Soil Information, 2008);Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptationand Vulnerability (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge


STATE OF THE WORLD 2011 Notes

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