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Special Edition of the Global Food for Thought News Brief

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo of the Week

Diogene Habiyakare of Kavumu, Rwanda, hangs his maize harvest to dry in a storage space near his home. Photo by Evariste Bagambiki. Photo courtesy of the One Acre Fund blog.

Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released a report(PDF) urging the US government to take action to curb the risks climate change poses to global food security. It explains how higher temperatures, changes in rainfall and natural disasters caused by climate change could undermine food production and put food supplies at risk. In total, climate change could reduce food production growth by 2 percent each decade for the rest of this century. The report was released at The Chicago Council’s Global Food Security Symposium 2014.

The report, Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate, calls on the US government to integrate climate change adaptation into its global food security strategy. Recommendations include: 

• Passing legislation for a long-term global food and nutrition security strategy.  
• Increasing funding for agricultural research on climate change adaptation. Research priorities should include improving crop and livestock tolerance to higher temperatures and volatile weather, combating pests and disease and reducing food waste.
• Collecting better data and making information on weather more widely available to farmers. There are significant global data gaps right now on weather; water availability, quality, and future requirements; crop performance; land use; and consumer preferences.
• Increasing funding for partnerships between US universities and universities and research institutions in low-income countries, to train the next generation of agricultural leaders.
• Advancing international action through urging that food security be addressed through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.  

Expert Commentary – Eliminating the Scourge of Stunting

By Rae Galloway

Ms. Rae Galloway works for PATH and is the Lead for Nutrition at the USAID-funded, Jhpiego-led Maternal and Child Health Integrated Program (MCHIP). She has worked for 25 years to reduce maternal, infant, and young child malnutrition in developing countries, where more than one-fourth of children younger than five years of age are stunted in their growth and nearly half of pregnant women are anemic.

Much of the malnutrition in the world today is invisible to policy makers, politicians, and families.  The most overlooked form of malnutrition is stunting (short stature) or chronic malnutrition which affects one-fourth of the world’s children younger than five years of age.  Because it is a process, taking place in the child’s first 1,000 days (from conception through the second year of life), stunting is difficult to identify by just looking at a child.  Most parents are not aware of the problem.  Even if parents notice their child is not growing like their other children, they often are not aware of the infant and young child feeding, hygiene, and sanitation practices that would reverse the problem.  And yet, if a child does not attain her/his potential for growth and height, it has serious life-long implications for the child and her or his family. 

Stunting increases risk of illness and mortality (contributing to half of child deaths globally), delays school enrollment, reduces the ability to learn, and decreases grade completion.  Like the families they serve, national governments in developing countries are unaware that a stunted population impedes national development.  The stunted adult cannot work as hard, earns less, and is sick more often than taller adults, reducing gross domestic product. The time lost in productive activities, the cost of health care, and the risk of premature death increases for both stunted children and adults, particularly for women during child bearing. 

In most countries, there is a belief that the solution to malnutrition is giving food to poor families.  Efforts continue to find the perfect food product to prevent and reverse malnutrition, even though many families have food on hand that could reduce much of the stunting in the world—children are just not being fed what is available in the household.  This is good news, because giving food and commercial food products is too costly to prevent all stunting.  Instead, evidence suggests that community-based nutrition programs with strong behavior change communication components can effectively reduce stunting. 

Commentary - Climate Smart Agriculture: An Opportunity to Secure the Future

By Strive Masiyiwa, Founder and Chairman, Econet Wireless; Chairman, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA); Cochair, GROW Africa

This post is part of a series produced by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, marking the occasion of its fifth Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington, DC.

Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of Weather Volatility and Climate Change, The Chicago Council’s 2014 flagship agriculture publication, points to two large and interrelated challenges.  

I term them a ‘double whammy’: the prospects of increasing food insecurity in the wake of climate change and consequent volatile weather.

Let’s consider the first: growing food insecurity.

Live Blog Post - Every Farmer Wants What I Have

By Jennifer Lentfer, Senior Writer, Oxfam America’s Aid Effectiveness team; Editor, Politics of Poverty blog

This post is recap of the "Managing Risks Associated with Volatile Weather, Changing Climates, and Resource Scarcity" panel at our fifth Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington, DC.

Two of Patrick F. O’Toole’s children and six of his grandchildren still live on the “family farm” near the Colorado River headwaters. This, he told The Chicago Council Global Food Security Symposium today, is what farmers want—to enable next generations to be connected to the land.

O’Toole told the audience of policymakers in Washington, DC, that another important part of farmers’ identity is to be problem solvers in the long- and short-term. Even though farmers look at resources with an intergenerational lens, they have immediate concerns that require attention.

There is no greater concern for farmers these days than climate change and the resulting effects on their land and livelihoods. O’Toole described how his farm has already seen its wettest and driest seasons in its history in this decade. As a result of this volatility, he and most other farmers in the West of the US are already managing for increased risk.

Food Security From the Ground Up

By Judith D. Schwartz, Author, Chelsea Green Publishing

This post is part of a series produced by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, marking the occasion of its fifth Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington, DC.

Taking on food security amidst the threat of increased climate instability is a formidable task. In food-producing areas around the world the best-laid plans are haunted by the specter of weather abnormalities, notably floods and drought. But once we bring land function—the ability of land to sustain plant and animal life—into the picture, we open up new strategies for building security into the food supply. An emphasis on floods and droughts—whether there’s enough rain or too much all at once—leaves the impression that we’re at the mercy of the elements. By contrast, a focus on land function creates a sense of agency: specifically, it draws our attention to the many ways we can enhance soil’s ability to retain water, organic matter, and microbial life, thereby offering resilience in the face of flooding and dry skies.

Though largely invisible to the general U.S. public, land degradation due to human impact is a huge problem across the globe. According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), each year upwards of twelve million hectares (thirty million acres) of productive land is lost to desertification; this means an area the size of South Africa is slipping away every decade. Some 1.5 billion people, primarily in dryland regions, depend for their food and livelihoods on land categorized as degraded. What’s important to keep in mind about desertification, and, more generally, land degradation, is that it’s not something that simply “happens”; rather, it’s caused by such actions as overcultivation, deforestation, poor irrigation design, poor livestock management, and the use of technology ill-suited to the landscape.

Expert Commentary by Trey Hill

By Trey Hill, Harborview Farms

This post is part of a series produced by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, marking the occasion of its fifth Global Food Security Symposium 2014 in Washington, DC.

As a large grain producer, living in the mid Atlantic, I am able to see agriculture and food production from a unique perspective. There are three primary stakeholders that all hold very different views on the present and future of agriculture, and on a broader scale, global food production. One of the biggest issues facing the future is the lack of communication and openness to the perspectives of the others.  In order to feed the world a healthy diet, sustainably, I think that these groups will have to work together.

Grain producers around the world are the biggest producers of calories for our global population, yet are rarely heard from in many of the discussions that are held outside of the agricultural industry. That’s why I was pleased to participate in The Chicago Council’s Symposium yesterday in Washington, DC.  

Commentary - Models Agree: Climate Change Will Put Pressure on Crop Yields in Large Areas of the Developing World

By Cynthia Rosenzweig, Senior Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

This post is part of a series produced by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, marking the occasion of its fifth Global Food Security Symposium 2014 held in Washington, DC.

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP)’s global gridded crop model results, cited in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, show that crop yields without adaptation will decline in large areas of the developing world by the end of the century (see Figure 1). This crop model assessment characterized global crop model agreement for the first time, with more than 70% of the ensemble members (climate-crop model combinations) projecting yield declines in most of Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia (Rosenzweig et al., 2013a).

AgMIP is a global program linking the climate, crop, and economic modeling communities with cutting-edge information technology to produce improved crop and economic models and the next generation of climate-impact projections for the agricultural sector. It aims to identify world food security risks in the face of climate change and improve developed and developing countries’ adaptation capacity. AgMIP supports teams of experts in crop and economic modeling and holds topic-specific and regional conferences as well as an annual Global Workshop that bring together the agricultural modeling community to share interdisciplinary progress and advance ongoing initiatives (Rosenzweig et al., 2013b).

Learn more or join the AgMIP listserv.