Fruit stalls at a local market in Hanoi, Vietnam. Credit: Shutterstock.
Opinion by Tuyen Huynh (hanoi)
Inter Press Service
HANOI, Apr 20 (IPS) – This month Nature spotlighted three insightful new studies chronicling food-related challenges from a global perspective. One presented worrisome new data on the global rise in the prevalence of diabetes, high blood pressure and liver disease, all linked to obesity. Another presented a new assessment revealing that half of the greenhouse emissions generated by food systems globally are caused by food waste. Finally, the third study found that food consumption could add “nearly 1 degree Celsius to warming by 2100,” with most of that attributed to global methane emissions from meat, dairy and rice production.
Studies like these are valuable for focusing attention on the need for a fundamental reset from farm to fork in the way food is produced and consumed around the world. But we also must recognize their limits.
Chiefly, that solutions to the problems they skillfully document will fail unless adapted to specific social, political and economic contexts on the ground.
We recently spent two years studying food systems across Northern Vietnam. Our work reveals how much food-related challenges can change even over relatively narrow distances—and how solutions must be tailored accordingly.
The contrasts we documented can be instructive for other countries as well. As a fast-growing, rapidly urbanizing middle-income country that still has a large rural population, Vietnam is an ideal living laboratory for studying the essential role of local food environments in shaping solutions to global food challenges.
In our work, we roamed the colorful, richly stocked open-air markets and modern retail outlets of urban Hanoi. We traveled just outside the city to study the food landscape in the populous peri-urban area of Dong Anh.
We visited the rural highlands of the Moc Chau district in Son La Province, where people rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Along the way, we surveyed thousands of people to learn about where they purchased food and what they ate. Here are a few key lessons that emerged.
Food-related issues are linked to both what you eat and where you eat it. With their bounty of choices and relatively high incomes, people in urban Hanoi tend to eat very diverse diets, including more meat, dairy and fish, than people in other areas in Northern Vietnam. It’s the opposite in rural Moc Chau: a dearth of food outlets and a reliance on subsistence farming leads to a narrower menu of options—and diets that are heavy in starchy staples. This difference produces a sharp contrast in food-related health problems. In rural areas, the issue is stunting and wasting in poorly fed children, which is three to four times higher than in urban or peri-urban areas. In urban areas, an abundance of food choices contributes to childhood obesity rates that are 6 to 10 times higher than in the other regions we studied.
Problems are clear; solutions are complex—especially in local contexts: We know that addressing malnutrition requires improving food choices, but that also requires considering trade-offs that can be highly political. For example, there is evidence that consistent access to nutrient-dense meat, fish and dairy products can reduce malnutrition in low-income communities like those we studied in rural Vietnam. But a lack of these products in local diets is a key reason rural food systems in Vietnam produce much lower emissions than those in urban areas. The solution is two-fold. First, we must acknowledge the different realities of people in high-income regions globally who have an abundance of nutritious food choices and those in low-income regions who have few. Second, supporting efforts in low-income communities to adopt environmentally sustainable, climate-positive approaches to livestock production—while encouraging more modest consumption in wealthy regions–can capture their benefits in fighting malnutrition while mitigating risks.
Promoting healthy diets requires probing local factors behind consumer behavior. Compared to other regions in Vietnam, a significantly higher percentage of rural consumers are relying on cheap and highly processed instant noodles to meet their dietary needs. But encouraging a shift to healthier diets requires engaging the broader constellation of local issues driving this choice. For example, economic policies that drive inflation can negatively affect household food budgets. Also, we found the neglect local road systems in rural areas we studied was a factor in limiting access to food stores and food selection relative to urban and peri-urban areas.
They are committed to a transformation of a global food system many view as fundamentally broken. The latest scientific studies chronicling food-related impacts to human and planetary health—alongside the recent shocks to the global food system caused by Covid pandemic—certainly support this view.
Our work reveals that food system challenges vary considerably depending on where you live—and that developing effective solutions requires a focused effort to detect these differences. It means if we want to achieve a more sustainable food system transformation, we must think globally but act locally.
Tuyen Huynh is a leading food systems expert and senior researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT
The Maipo River on its way from the Andes mountain range to the valley of the same name is surrounded by numerous small towns that depend on tourism, receiving thousands of visitors every weekend. There are restaurants, campgrounds and high-altitude sports facilities. The water comes down from the top of the mountain range and is used by the company Aguas Andinas to supply the Chilean capital. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
by Orlando Milesi (santiago)
Inter Press Service
SANTIAGO, Apr 19 (IPS) – Good management of the 101 hydrographic basins which run from the Andes mountain range to the Pacific Ocean is key to solving the severe water crisis that threatens the people of Chile and their main productive activities.
This vulnerability extends to the economy. Since 1990 Chile has gradually become wealthier, but along with the growth in GDP, water consumption has also expanded.
Roberto Pizarro, a professor of hydrology at the universities of Chile and Talca, told IPS that this “is an unsustainable equation from the point of view of hydrological engineering because water is a finite resource.”
According to Pizarro, “there are threats hanging over this process. From a production point of view, Chile’s GDP depends to a large extent on water. According to figures from the presidential delegation of water resources of the second administration of Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), at least 60 percent of our GDP depends on water.”
This South American country, the longest and narrowest in the world, with a population of 19.6 million people, depends on the production and export of copper, wood, agricultural and sea products, as well as a growing tourism industry. All of which require large quantities of water.
And water is increasingly scarce due to overuse, excessive granting of water rights by the government, and climate change that has led to a decline in rainfall and snow.
To make matters worse, since 1981, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), water use rights have been privatized in perpetuity, separated from land tenure, and can even be traded or sold. This makes it difficult for the branches of government to control water and is a key point in the current debate on constitutional reform in Chile.
Ecologist Sara Larraín maintains that the water crisis “has its origin in the historical overexploitation of surface and groundwater by the productive sectors and in the generalized degradation of the basins by mining, agro-industry and hydroelectric generation. And the wood pulp industry further compounded the problem.”
Larraín, executive director of the Sustainable Chile organization, adds that the crisis was aggravated by a drought that has lasted for more than a decade.
“There is a drastic decline in rainfall (of 25 percent) as a result of climate change, reduction of the snow surface and increase in temperatures that leads to greater evaporation,” she told IPS.
The small town of El Volcán has just over a hundred inhabitants, 80 kilometers from Santiago and 1,400 meters above sea level, in the Andes foothills. Local residents are witnessing a sharp decrease in snowfall that now rarely exceeds 30 centimeters in the area, a drastic reduction compared to a few years ago. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS
First-hand witnesses
The main hydrographic basin of the 101 that hold the surface and underground water in Chile’s 756,102 square kilometers of territory is the Maipo River basin, since it supplies the Greater Santiago region, home to 7.1 million people.
In this basin, in the town of El Volcán, part of the San José de Maipo municipality on the outskirts of Santiago, on the eastern border with Argentina, lives Francisco Rojo, 62, a wrangler of pack animals at heart, who farms and also works in a small mine.
“The (inactive) San José volcano has no snow on it anymore, no more glaciers. In the 1990s I worked near the sluices of the Volcán water intake and there was a surplus of over 40 meters of water. In 2003 the snow was 12 to 14 meters high. Today it’s barely two meters high,” Rojo told IPS.
“The climate has been changing. It does not rain or snow, but the temperatures drop. The mornings and evenings are freezing and in the daytime it’s hot,” he added.
Rojo gets his water supply from a nearby spring. And using hoses, he is responsible for distributing water to 22 families, only for consumption, not for irrigation.
“We cut off the water at night so there is enough in the tanks the next day. Eight years ago we had a surplus of water. Now we have had to reduce the size of the hoses from two inches to one inch,” he explained.
“We were used to a meter of snow. Now I’m glad when 40 centimeters fall. It rarely rains and the rains are always late,” he said, describing another clear effect of climate change.
Agronomist Rodrigo Riveros, manager of one of the water monitoring boards for the Aconcagua River in the Valparaíso region in central Chile, told IPS that the historical average at the Chacabuquito rainfall station, at the headwaters of the river, is 40 or 50 cubic meters, a level that has never been surpassed in 12 years.
“This decade we have half the water we had in the previous decade,” he said.
“Farmers are seeing their production decline and are losing arable land. Small farmers are hit harder because they have a more difficult time surviving the disaster. Large farmers can dig wells or apply for loans, but small farmers put everything on the line during the growing season,” he said.
Large, medium and small users participate in the Aconcagua water board, 80 percent of whom are small farmers with less than 10 hectares. But they coexist with large water users such as the Anglo American mining company, the state-owned copper company Codelco and Esval, the region’s sanitation and drinking water distribution company.
“The decrease in rainfall is the main problem,” said Riveros..”The level of snow dropped a lot because the snow line rose – the altitude where it starts to snow. And the heavy rains increased flooding. Warm rain also falls in October or November (in the southern hemisphere springtime), melting the snow, and the water flows violently, carrying a lot of sediment and damaging infrastructure.
“It used to snow a lot more. Now three meters fall and we celebrate. In that same place, 10 meters used to fall, and the snow would pile up as a kind of reserve, even until the following year,” he said.
In Chile, the water boards were created by the Water Code and bring together natural and legal persons together with user associations. Their purpose is the administration, distribution, use and conservation of riverbeds and the surrounding water basins.
Many residents of El Volcán, in the foothills of the Andes mountains, lack drinking water and have built tanks to collect water from a nearby spring. They have also reduced the diameter of their hoses to a minimum because the flow of water is steadily shrinking, only providing a supply for domestic use and not enough to irrigate their crops and trees. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
Enormous economic impact
Larraín cited figures from the National Emergency Office of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security and from regional governments that reveal that State spending on renting tanker trucks in the last decade (2010-2020) was equivalent to 277.5 million dollars in 196 of the total of 346 municipalities that depend on this method of providing drinking water.
“The population served in its essential needs is approximately half a million people, almost all of them from the rural sector and shantytowns and slums,” said Larraín.
According to the environmentalist, Chile has not taken actions to mitigate the drought.
“Although the challenge is structural and requires a substantial change in water management and the protection of sources, the official discourse insists on the construction of dams, canals and aqueducts, even though the reservoirs are not filled due to lack of rainfall and there is no availability in the regions from which water is to be extracted and diverted,” she said.
She added that the mining industry is advancing in desalination to reduce its dependence on the water basins, “although there is still no specific regulation for the industry, which would prevent the impacts of seawater suction and brine deposits.”
Larraín acknowledged that the last two governments established sectoral and inter-ministerial water boards, but said that coordination between users and State entities did not improve, nor did it improve among government agencies themselves.
“Each sector faces the shortage on its own terms and we lack a national plan for water security, even though this is the biggest problem Chile faces in the context of the impacts of climate change,” the environmental expert asserted.
Chile’s Colina hot springs, in the open air in the middle of the Andes mountains and just 17 kilometers from the border with Argentina, in the east of the country, can now be visited almost year-round. In the past, it was impossible to go up in the southern hemisphere winter because the route was cut off by constant rain and snow storms. CREDIT: Arturo Allende Peñaloza/IPS
Government action
The Ministry of the Environment admits that “there is still an important debt in terms of access to drinking water and sanitation for the rural population.”
“There is also a lack of governance that would make it possible to integrate the different stakeholders in each area for them to take part in water decisions and planning,” the ministry responded to questions from IPS.
In addition, it recognized that it is necessary to “continue to advance in integrated planning instruments that coordinate public and private initiatives.
“We coordinated the Inter-Ministerial Committee for a Just Water Transition which has the mandate to outline a short, medium and long-term roadmap in this matter, which is such a major priority for the country,” the ministry stated.
The committee, it explained, “assumed the challenge of the water crisis and worked on the coordination of immediate actions, which make it possible to face the risk of water and energy rationing, the need for rural drinking water, water for small-scale agriculture and productive activities, as well as ecosystem preservation.”
The ministry also reported that it is drafting regulatory frameworks to authorize and promote the efficiency of water use and reuse.
Furthermore, it stressed that the Framework Law on Climate Change, passed in June 2022, created Strategic Plans for Water Resources in Basins to “identify problems related to water resources and propose actions to address the effects of climate change.”
The government of Gabriel Boric, in office since March 2022, is also promoting a law on the use of gray water for agricultural irrigation, with a focus on small-scale agriculture and the installation of 16 Pilot Basin Councils to achieve, with the participation and coordination of the different stakeholders, “an integrated management of water resources.”
Pacific Community-led regional initiative aims to assist countries in the region with mitigating the impacts of climate change-induced tuna migration. Credit: Pacific Community/SPC
by Neena Bhandari (sydney)
Inter Press Service
SYDNEY, Apr 19 (IPS) – Climate change and warming ocean waters are causing tuna fisheries to migrate to international waters, away from a country’s jurisdiction, thereby putting the food and economic security of many Pacific Island countries and territories at risk.
Now a Pacific Community (SPC) led regional initiative will help ensure that these countries are equipped to cope with climate change-induced tuna migration.
“All the climate change projections indicate that there will be a redistribution of tuna from the western and central Pacific to the more eastern and towards the polar regions, that is not Antarctica or the Arctic, but to regions outside of the equatorial zones where they primarily occur at the moment,” says SPC’s Principal Fisheries Scientist, Dr Simon Nicol.
“This has really important implications for the Pacific Island countries. Our projections suggest that about one-fifth or about USD 100 million of the income derived from the tuna industry directly is likely to be lost by 2050 by these countries,” Nicol tells IPS.
The total annual catch of tuna in the western and central Pacific Ocean represents around 55 percent of global tuna production. Approximately half of this catch is from the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Pacific Island countries.
The recent USD15.5 million funding by New Zealand for SPC’s ‘Climate Science for Ensuring Pacific Tuna Access’ programme will enable Pacific Island countries to prepare and adapt the region’s tuna fisheries to meet the challenges posed by climate change.
Nicol says that the investment that New Zealand has provided for the programme will allow for more rigorous and timely monitoring of the types of changes that are occurring, both due to the impacts of fishing and climate change, at a very fine resolution. Secondly, it will also provide the additional resources that are needed to increase the ocean monitoring capacity to remove the anomalies and biases to particular local conditions, which often occur in global climate models.
“We have noted, for example, that the boundary of the warm pool in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Nauru can have an element of bias associated with it. It’s an important oceanographic feature in the western Pacific equatorial zone, which moves in association with the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Sometimes its eastern boundary is right next to Papua New Guinea, and at other times, it extends all the way past Nauru. It is a key driver of recruitment for skipjack tuna, so we need to be quite precise where that boundary is for any prediction of skipjack recruitment that occurs in any given year,” he tells IPS.
Several Pacific Island countries and territories find their food and economic security at risk due to the climate-change-induced migration of tuna into international waters. Credit: Pacific Community (SPC)
The analysis at the ocean basin scale does not provide EEZ scale information for particular countries, and it is often not precise in predicting when the impact of climate change is going to manifest itself.
Under the programme, a Pacific-owned advanced warning system will be developed by SPC to help countries forecast, monitor and manage tuna migration, which is set to become more pronounced in the coming decades.
“The advanced warning system will allow us to zoom in on what the likely changes are in each particular country’s EEZ and also zoom in more accurately and precisely on when those changes are likely to occur, which is particularly important from a Pacific Island country perspective,” Nicol tells IPS.
Whilst Pacific Island countries manage the tuna resource collectively to ensure its biological sustainability, the income that they derive is very much a national-level enterprise. A recent study in Nature Sustainability estimates that the movement of tuna stocks could cause a fall of up to 17 percent in the annual government revenue of some of these countries.
The study notes that more than 95 percent of all tuna caught from the jurisdictions of the 22 Pacific Island countries and territories comes from the combined EEZs of 10 Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) – Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tokelau and Tuvalu. On average, they derive 37 percent (ranging from 4 percent for Papua New Guinea to 84 percent for Tokelau) of all government revenue from tuna-fishing access fees paid by foreign industrial fishing fleets.
“The advanced warning system would allow for more refined predictions of the changes in tuna stock, abundance, distribution and the fisheries around them. This is very important to what each country gets as access fees, which relates to how much tuna is typically caught in their EEZ,” says Dr Meryl Williams, Vice Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation.
“Access fees usually form part of the general consolidated revenue that the government has to spend on hospitals, education and infrastructure, and hence it is a very important source of revenue for people’s economic development in many of the Pacific Island countries,” she adds.
Currently, the program is focused only on the four dominant tuna species – Skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis), Yellowfin (Thunnus albacares), Bigeye (Thunnus obesus) and the South Pacific Albacore (Thunnus alalunga) – caught in the Pacific Island countries.
SPC’s Director of Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability, Coral Pasisi says, “Without successful global action to mitigate climate change, the latest ecosystem modelling predicts a significant decrease in the availability of tropical tuna species (tuna biomass) in the Western Pacific due to a shifting of their biomass to the east and some declines in overall biomass. Negative impacts on coastal fish stocks important for local food security are also predicted”.
Curbing greenhouse gas emissions in line with The Paris Agreement could help limit tuna migration away from the region. “We have to ensure sustainable fishing levels for the Pacific Islands. To reach this goal, developed countries should act quickly and increase their ambition to stay below 1.5 degrees centigrade, and Pacific countries should maintain sustainable management of their fisheries resources,” Pasisi tells IPS.
She says the future of the Pacific region’s marine resources will be secured through nearshore fish aggregating devices, sustainable coastal fisheries management plans, and aquaculture.
“We must also complete the work on delineating all Exclusive Economic Zone boundaries to ensure sovereignty over the resources. We need and seek international recognition for the permanency of these. We also must work with all fishing nations in the Pacific to ensure that sustainable management of tuna fisheries continues, even if there is a shift into international waters,” Pasisi adds.
The programme will work with Pacific Island countries and territories to develop and implement new technologies and innovative approaches to enable the long-term sustainability of the region’s tuna fisheries.
There is a need to also recognise the more direct fisheries benefits that people, including women, receive from their contributions to the tuna industry, says Williams, who is also the founder and immediate past Chair of the Gender in Aquaculture and Fisheries section of the Asian Fisheries Society.
“Looking at the whole of employment in small-scale and industrial fisheries tuna value chains, not just fishing but also processing, trading, work in offices and in fisheries management etc., we estimate that women probably make up at least half, if not more than half, of the labour force in the tuna industry. Hence, their role is very important in sustainably managing the tuna stock in Pacific Island countries,” she tells IPS.
Only 55 percent of people across the Pacific Islands have access to basic drinking water and just 30 percent have sanitation services – the lowest rate in the world. Photo Credit: UN Samoa
Opinion by Simona Marinescu (apia, samoa)
Inter Press Service
APIA, Samoa, Apr 14 (IPS) – Water is life. No other definition captures quite so aptly what this essential element means for our lives, livelihoods and the natural environment.
Although it is considered both a renewable and a non-renewable resource, water is becoming scarce and is expected to reach a critical point by 2040.
Out of the total volume of water present on earth, 97.5% is saline- coming from the seas and oceans, while only 2.5% is freshwater, of which only 0.3% is present in liquid form on the surface, including in rivers, lakes, swamps, reservoirs, creeks, and streams.
Due to irresponsible usage, including pollution from agriculture and the construction of dams, liquid freshwater on the surface of the earth is rapidly diminishing. We are the only known planet to have consistent, stable bodies of liquid water on its surface, yet we are not doing enough to preserve and provide access to all people everywhere to this critical source of life.
According to the 2021 UN Water report, in 2020, around 2 billion people (26% of the global population) lacked safely managed drinking water services and around 3.6 billion people lacked safely managed sanitation.
Some 2.3 billion people live in countries facing water stress of whom 733 million are in high and critically water-scarce environments.
Credit: UN Samoa
Samoa’s connected crises
In Samoa and other Pacific Small Island Developing States, access to clean water represents a huge challenge. Although these islands enjoy abundant rainfall – 2 to 4 times the average global annual precipitation, poor waste management systems and lack of adequate infrastructure means that the availability of clean water is severely limited.
Only 55 percent of people across the Pacific Islands have access to basic drinking water, and just 30 percent have sanitation services—the lowest rate in the world.
According to a joint study by the National University of Samoa, the Ministry of Natural Resources and other partners, water sources tested contained a high concentration of minerals, toxic pesticides, microplastics and bacteria such as e-coli, which increases the rate of water-borne diseases and poses significant health risks.
For our UN country team in Samoa, improving water quality is a central, cross-cutting priority which not only protects communities and helps prevent disease, but also feeds into our broader efforts to address the Triple Planetary Crisis of climate disruption, nature loss and pollution.
The use of the Triple Planetary Crisis framework provides a valuable basis for the measurement of losses and damages which countries like Samoa experience due to climate change and pollution including deterioration of water ecosystem services.
With this in mind, we have engaged extensively with communities and partners across Samoa over the past six months to develop the Vai O Le Ola (Water of Life) Report.
Launched ahead of the UN Water Conference in New York (22-24 March), the report draws on insights from these consultations to set out a response to the Triple Planetary Crisis and propose integrated approaches of restoring the quality and resilience of Samoa’s water system.
An integrated path forward
From rivers, mangrove swamps, lakes, wetlands, territorial waters, and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) – water represents a major part of the environment system which supports the livelihoods for over 200,000 people in Samoa and also forms a significant part of Samoan cultural identity. Improving the quality of this critical source of life must begin with the integration of all relevant policies and strategies on climate change, ocean management, socio-economic development, waste management, and biodiversity conservation into one overarching framework.
Targeted interventions including the Vai O Le Ola Trust Fund and Knowledge Crowdsourcing Platform, and programmes on Innovative Climate and Nature Financing, Social Entrepreneurship for Climate Resilience, Community Access to Clean Energy, Zero Plastic Waste, are central to the Triple Planetary Crisis Response Plan in Samoa and across the Pacific.
Nature-based Watershed Management is another key initiative outlined in the Vai O Le Ola report which will support agro-forestry, reforestation and invasive species management, flood management and biodiversity conservation linked to water systems.
On the legislative side as well, new opportunities to strengthen environmental protection and conservation are emerging. Last year, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing for the first-time access to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment including water as a fundamental human right.
With the adoption of this resolution, global attention on the legal rights of ecosystems and natural resources has significantly increased.
In 2022, Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognize and implement the “rights of nature” followed by Colombia which established legal personality for the Atrato River in recognition of the biocultural rights of indigenous communities.
In Samoa, the National Human Rights Institution is already discussing how the right to a clean, safe and sustainable environment will be operationalized into law.
As an ‘ocean state’, water is a defining feature of Samoa’s national wealth and people’s way of living – known as ‘Fa’a Samoa.’ To find long lasting solutions to water scarcity and pollution across Samoa and other Pacific Islands, we must therefore look not only towards science, technology and innovation, but also to the centuries of wisdom and experience of the communities who live here.
We must recognize that for the people of Samoa, as Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa explains below, their waters are a source of life as well as a source of beauty.
Simona Marinescu, PhD, is UN Resident Coordinator in Samoa, Cook Island, Nieu, and Tokelau. Editorial support by UNDCO.
Source: UNDCO
The Development Coordination Office (DCO) manages and oversees the Resident Coordinator system and serves as secretariat of the UN Sustainable Development Group. Its objective is to support the capacity, effectiveness and efficiency of Resident Coordinators and the UN development system as a whole in support of national efforts for sustainable development.
DCO is based in New York, with regional teams in Addis Ababa, Amman, Bangkok, Istanbul and Panama, supporting 130 Resident Coordinators and 132 Resident Coordinator’s offices covering 162 countries and territories.
The main newspapers and news programmes do not treat the climate crisis as an emergency, says Greenpeace Italia Spokesperson Giancarlo Sturloni. Credit: Paul Virgo / IPS
by Paul Virgo (rome)
Inter Press Service
ROME, Apr 11 (IPS) – If an alien landed on Planet Earth today and started watching television and reading the newspapers, it would probably not realize that humanity and the natural world face an existential threat – one that has taken us into the Sixth Mass Extinction, is already devastating the lives of many, especially in the Global South, and is set to hit the rest of us soon.
“I don’t know what is scarier, the fact that atmospheric CO2 just hit the highest level in human history, or that it has gone close to completely unnoticed,” tweeted Greta Thunberg on April 9 regarding data from the Global Monitoring Laboratory (GML) of the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Aside from some notable exceptions, the climate crisis has not brought out the best in the mainstream media.
The scientists and activists who sound the alarm are often portrayed as dangerous extremists or loonies.
The treatment dished out last year by a popular television show, Good Morning Britain, to Miranda Whelehan, a young member of the UK’s Just Stop Oil civil-disobedience group, is a good example.
Instead of considering her valid points about the looming dangers outlined in the IPCC’s reports, she was ridiculed and bullied with bogus arguments, including criticism for ‘wearing clothes’ that may have been transported using oil. Was she supposed to turn up naked?
It was so bad that it seemed to have come straight from Adam McKay’s 2021 satirical film about the climate crisis, Don’t Look Up.
But butchering climate coverage is only a small part of the problem.
What is perhaps worse is the extent to which global heating and its effects are largely ignored, with celebrity gossip and sports among the subjects that seem to take precedence.
There are not enough stories about the climate emergency and those that do get published or screened are not given the prominence they deserve.
New research by the Italian section of Greenpeace gives an idea of the scale of the problem.
The ongoing monitoring study, conducted with the Osservatorio di Pavia research institute, showed that the main Italian dailies only publish around 2.5 articles a day explicitly dealing with the climate crisis.
The newspapers give plenty of space, on the other hand, to businesses whose activities generate big greenhouse-gas emissions, running an average of six adverts a week to firms involved in fossil fuels and in the automobile, cruise tourism and air-transport sectors.
The study revealed that less than 3% of the stories on Italy’s biggest TV newscasts deal with the climate crisis.
“The main newspapers and news programmes do not treat the climate crisis as an emergency,” Greenpeace Italia Spokesperson Giancarlo Sturloni told IPS.
“The news is scarce and sporadic; the climate crisis is hardly ever a front-page topic.
“Suffice it to say that in the main prime-time news, climate change is mentioned in less than 2% of the news and in some periods it falls below 1%.
“Moreover, in the Italian media there is little mention of the causes, starting with fossil fuels, and even less of the main culprits, the oil and gas companies”.
Naturally, this problem is not limited to Italy.
In 2019 the Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The Guardian and WNYC set up Covering Climate Now (CCNow), a consortium that seeks to work with journalists and news outlets to help the media give the climate crisis the treatment it deserves.
Since then over 500 partners with a combined reach of two billion people in 57 countries have signed up.
But co-founders Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope say that, although progress has been made, much of the media is still failing to convey that climate change is “an imminent, deadly threat” lamenting that less than a quarter of the United States public hear about the issue in the media at least once a month
There are several reasons why the climate crisis is under-reported.
The climate crisis is complicated and often depressing, so editors may be reluctant to run stories that require lots of explaining and risk turning the public off.
Furthermore, Hertsgaard, the environment correspondent of The Nation, and Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, report that many major outlets have privately said they will not sign CCNow’s Climate Emergency Statement because it sounds like activism and they do not want to look biased.
Sturloni believes that money is a factor too.
“Our analysis shows that the voice of companies is almost always the one that gets the most space in the media narrative of the climate crisis, even more than the voice of scientists and experts,” he said.
“The companies most responsible for the climate crisis also find ample space in the main Italian media, and often take advantage of this to greenwash or promote false solutions, such as gas, carbon offsetting, carbon capture and storage, nuclear fusion etc…
“This is due to the Italian media’s dependence on the funding of fossil fuel companies, which are able to influence the schedule of newspapers and TV and the very narrative of the climate crisis.
“This prevents people from being properly informed about the seriousness of the threat, and thus also about the solutions that should be urgently implemented to avoid the worst scenarios of global warming”.
We’re spewing a torrent of waste and pollution that is affecting our environment, our economies, and our health, warns UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Apr 04 (IPS) – Straight to the point: the current system of voracious money-making production and the induced over-consumption patterns have turned Planet Earth into a giant garbage dump.
Such an unimaginable waste of food in a world of one billion empty plates, is just to be added to the dumping of billions of tons of plastics, textiles, discarded electronics, and debris from mining and construction sites.
“We are trashing our only home,” he said. “We’re spewing a torrent of waste and pollution that is affecting our environment, our economies, and our health.”
Guterres said it was time for “a war on waste” on three fronts, calling on polluters themselves to take the lead.
“Those who produce waste must design products and services that are less resource and material intensive, smartly manage any waste created across all stages of their products’ lifecycle, and find creative ways to extend the lives of the products they sell,” he said.
“We need to find opportunities to reuse, recycle, repurpose, repair and recover the products we use. And we need to think twice before throwing these items in the garbage.”
The case of Türkiye
The Türkiye’s Zero Waste Project has so far managed to conserve some 650 million tonnes of raw material, and to eliminate four million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions through recycling.
“All life on earth is connected but industrialization has led to the over-consumption that is polluting the planet, said the Turkish First Lady, Emine Erdo?an, who spearheads the Project.
“Humans have created this frightening landscape.”
“We are obliged to establish a fair system and take on measures based on burden sharing where we look out for countries deeply impacted by the consequences of climate change which had no part to play in the first place,” she said.
Be ‘waste wise’
The head of the UN’s urban development agency, UN-Habitat, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, urged countries to be “waste wise”, including through finding value in reusing items before discarding them.
“Zero Waste is the first step towards creating waste-wise societies,” she said. “The first step is to take responsibility and make a conscious effort to reduce our consumption of single-use plastics. Remember that everything we use and discard must go somewhere.”
Food systems
The global population is on track to reach 10 billion by 2050, and demand for food and non-food agricultural products is also expected to rise by up to 56%, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
Meeting this demand will require healthier and more sustainable food production and consumption, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said.
“We need to urgently address the inefficiencies and inequalities in our agri-food systems to make them more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable.”
A zero-waste approach entails responsible production, consumption and disposal of products in a closed, circular system. This means that resources are reused or recovered as much as possible and that we minimise the pollution of air, land or water.
Products should be designed to be durable and require fewer and low-impact materials. By opting for less resource-intensive production and transport methods, manufacturers can further limit pollution and waste.
Consumers can also play a pivotal role in enabling zero waste by changing habits and reusing and repairing products as much as possible before properly disposing of them.
‘The world is bigger than five’
Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has suggested that “the world is bigger than five” – a reference to the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.”
Sounds good. But the fact is that those five are the world’s major producers and their corporations are dominating the global markets, making astonishing profits from destruction, being all of them the greater polluters.
For example, alongside oil and gas corporations, food companies more than doubled their profits in 2022 at a time when more than 800 million people were going hungry and 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages, as reported by Oxfam International.
Most vendor tables are empty in the large fresh produce market in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, due to the widespread devastation of food gardens and crops by Cyclones Judy and Kevin in early March. Photo credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS
by Catherine Wilson (port vila, vanuatu)
Inter Press Service
PORT VILA, Vanuatu, Apr 04 (IPS) – One month after the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu was hit by two Category 4 cyclones within three days, food scarcity and prices are rising in the country following widespread devastation of the agriculture sector.
In the worst affected provinces of Shefa and Tafea, the “scale of damage ranges from 90 percent to 100 percent of crops, such as root crops, fruit and forest trees, vegetables, coffee, coconut and small livestock,” Antoine Ravo, Director of Vanuatu’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development told IPS.
Vanuatu is an archipelago nation of more than 80 islands located east of Australia and southeast of Papua New Guinea. More than 80 percent of the population of more than 300,000 people were impacted by Cyclones Judy and Kevin, which unleashed gale-force winds, torrential rain and flooding across the nation on the 1 March and 3 March. Properties and homes were destroyed, power and water services cut, seawalls damaged and roads and bridges blocked.
In the aftermath, many households turned to their existing stores of food and any fresh produce that could be salvaged from their food gardens. But these have rapidly depleted.
In the large undercover fresh produce market in the centre of the capital, Port Vila, about 75-80 percent of market tables, which are usually heaving with abundant displays of root crops, vegetables and fruits, are now empty. Many of the regular vendors have seen their household harvests decimated by wind and flooding.
Susan, who lives in the rural community of Rentapao not far from Port Vila on Efate Island, commutes
Regular market vendor, Susan, lost much of her garden produce during the two cyclone disasters and is selling dry packaged food, such as banana chips, instead. Central Market, Port Vila, Vanuatu. Photo credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS
daily to the market. “The cyclones destroyed our crops and our homes. We lost a lot of root crops and bananas. Today, I only have half the amount of produce I usually sell,” Susan told IPS. But, faced with the crisis, she quickly diversified and, alongside a small pile of green vegetables, the greater part of her market table is laden with packets of dried food, such as banana and manioc or cassava chips.
Agriculture is the main source of people’s income and food in Vanuatu, with 78 percent and 86 percent of households in the country relying on their own growing of vegetables and root crops, respectively, for food security and livelihoods.
But, as families grapple with increasing food scarcity, they have also been hit by a steep rise in prices for basic staples that are the core of their daily consumption. A cucumber, which sold for about 30 vatu (US$0.25) prior to the disasters, is now priced from 200 vatu (US$1.69), while pineapples and green coconuts, which could be bought for 50 vatu (US$0.42) each, also sell for 200 vatu (US$1.69).
Leias Cullwick, Executive Director of the Vanuatu National Council of Women, said that, in the wake of the cyclones, children were experiencing deprivation and anxiety. “Water is the number one concern and, also, food. And children, when they want water and food, and their mother has none to give, become traumatised,” she told IPS.
Lack of clean water and contamination by the storms of water sources, such as rivers and streams, in peri-urban and rural areas is also causing illnesses in children, such as dehydration and diarrhoea. Meanwhile, the current wet season in Vanuatu is increasing the risks of mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria and dengue fever, Cullwick added.
It will take months for some households to regain their crop yields. “Root crops have been damaged, and these are not crops that you plant today and harvest tomorrow. It takes three months, it takes six months, it will take a while for communities to get their harvests going, so it’s a concern,” Soneel Ram, Communications Manager for the Pacific Country Cluster Delegation from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies told IPS in Port Vila. Although, he added that access to food at this time is easier in Pacific cities and towns.
“In urban areas, the main difference is access to supermarkets. People can readily access supermarkets and get food off the shelf. For rural communities, they rely on subsistence farming as a source of food. Now they have to look for extra funds to buy food,” Ram said. In response, the government is organising the distribution of dry food rations to affected communities, along with seeds, planting materials and farming tools.
The Pacific Island nation faces a very high risk of climate and other natural disasters. Every year islanders prepare for cyclones during the wet season from November to April. And being situated on the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’, it is also prone to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasts that Vanuatu will experience increasingly extreme climate events, such as hotter temperatures and more severe tropical storms, droughts and floods, in the future. And, on current trends, global temperatures could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming as early as 2030, reports the IPCC.
The impacts of Cyclones Judy and Kevin in the country follow damages wrought by other cyclones in recent years, including Cyclone Pam in 2015, which is estimated to have driven 4,000 more people into poverty, and Cyclone Harold in 2020. And the impacts of the pandemic on the country’s economy and local incomes, especially from agriculture and tourism, since early 2020. Agriculture and tourism are the main industries in Vanuatu, and agriculture, forestry and fisheries account for 15 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The most important cash crops are copra, cocoa and kava, with copra alone accounting for more than 35 percent of the Pacific nation’s exports. Now the environmental havoc and the sudden decline in international tourist arrivals following the cyclones threaten to hinder the building of recovery in the country.
The government reports that this month’s disasters will leave the country with a recovery bill of USD 50 million. And it predicts that the rescue of the agricultural sector will take years.
“It will take three months for immediate recovery of short-term food production, and six to nine months for mid-term crops, such as cassava, taro, yam and bananas. But it will take three to five years for coconut, coffee, pepper, vanilla and cocoa,” Ravo said.
With climate losses predicted to continue accumulating in the coming decades, the Vanuatu Government remains determined to pursue its ‘ICJ Initiative’, now supported by 133 other nations worldwide. The initiative aims to investigate through the International Court of Justice how international law can be used to protect vulnerable countries from climate change impacts to the environment and human rights.
Malawi’s Department of Disaster Management Affairs shows that 2.2 million people have been affected, with 676 killed and 538 missing after Cyclone Freddy hit Malawi earlier this month. Credit: Red Cross
by Charles Mpaka (sonjeke, malawi)
Inter Press Service
SONJEKE, MALAWI, Mar 30 (IPS) – In Sonjeka village in Mulanje district, which lies on the border with Mozambique in southern Malawi, destroyed crop fields stretch almost interminably after floods ripped through them when Tropical Cyclone Freddy pounded the country.
One of those fields lying in waste with its drying maize stalks flattened to the ground, if not ripped off altogether, belongs to Eliza Mponya.
A field close to a hectare in size, this has been the lifeline for the single mother and her four children.
Not that it gives her all the maize which the family needs for the whole year, but it still gets Mponya and her children enough to carry them close to the next harvesting season.
By her estimation, this year, she would have harvested maize that would have lasted the family until the end of November.
Crops destroyed by Cyclone Freddy, which left at least 676 dead and 650 000 displaced. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS
“We had good rains here, and we were lucky because my son found piece work in Mozambique, and we managed some fertiliser through what he earned.
“But now, after all the hard work and just when we were close to reaping the rewards, we have this damage. It’s heartbreaking,” she says.
Malawi is in a mourning period, courtesy of the worst natural disaster to have struck the country in recent memory.
Exactly a year after the battering by tropical storms Ana and Gombe, whose devastation the country is yet to recover from, Tropical Freddy hit rather more brutally.
After barreling through Madagascar and Mozambique, the cyclone stormed into Malawi on March 11, 2023. From the afternoon of March 12, rain poured over 10 of the 13 districts in the southern region of the country for the next 72 hours.
Rivers broke their banks; furious waters gorged through unlikely landscapes, and, beyond anyone’s expectation, several mud avalanches pushed down giant boulders from mountainous areas that, in some cases, swept away entire villages and crushed homes and people below at night.
President Lazarus Chakwera declared it a state of disaster, calling for help, a plea to which both local and the international community have responded generously.
The scale of the destruction is unprecedented in any natural disaster Malawi has experienced. A draft situation report which the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), a government agency, released on Wednesday, March 29, shows that up to 2.2 million people have been affected thus far; 676 have been killed, and 538 are missing – many of them feared to have been buried in the mudslides and rubble of collapsed buildings or washed away to unknown lands.
At the appropriate time, the police will declare the missing people dead, DoDMA says.
According to the report, up to 2,000 people are nursing various degrees of injuries, some while still in the over 760 evacuation camps that are hosting over 650,000 that have been displaced in the affected districts.
Up to 405 kilometres of road infrastructure have been damaged, and 63 health facilities and close to a million water and sanitation facilities have been affected.
The worst hit of all sectors, according to the report, is agriculture, the mainstay of Malawi’s economy. Over 2 million farmers have lost their crops and livestock, and over 179,000 hectares of crop fields have been destroyed.
Mponya’s field is among those counted.
Her maize crop would have been ready for harvest sometime towards the end of April. Now floods have harvested it, and Mponya is broken.
“I have never experienced anything like this in my life,” she tells IPS.
On March 23, 2023, the Ministry of Agriculture launched its own assessment of the damage the cyclone has caused to the agriculture sector in the region. It is yet to release its report on the assessment and the interventions that it will undertake to bail out the affected farmers.
However, in effect, the cyclone has worsened the food security situation for millions of people for the year. This comes against the backdrop of the government distributing food to 3.8 million food-insecure households, an exercise meant to see them through to the next harvest, which is now struck by the storm.
In an earlier forecast, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), a USAID-supported global food security monitoring activity, said the southern region could register a decrease ranging between 30 and 50 percent in the harvest of maize, Malawi’s staple crop and a key factor in the economy.
This, it said, would leave poor households running out of food stocks by end of August instead of October, as it usually happens with most such households in a good harvest year.
FEWSNET cited limited and delayed access to fertiliser for most subsistence farmers who rely on the government’s fertiliser subsidy programme that was rocked by logistical and procurement challenges in this growing season and due to high prices of the commodity on the normal market, which drove the farm input out of reach for most of them.
FEWSNET compiled the report before Cyclone Freddy lashed the country.
Christone Nyondo, a research fellow at MwAPATA Institute, a local independent agricultural policy think-tank, says the cyclone has effectively struck a blow on household food security in the region and the country.
According to Nyondo, families that have lost their food crops will struggle to cope without external help. He, therefore, suggests assistance for the affected farmers to replant short-duration maize varieties.
He further says crops that can still do well when planted under residual moisture should be promoted to provide a short-term coping mechanism for the households as they recover.
However, Nyondo argues that Malawi needs to invest in long-term and enduring disaster-proactive measures considering that these natural shocks will keep occurring in the face of climate change.
According to Nyondo, an agricultural economist, for a long time, Malawi has focused much of its efforts on post-disaster recovery. It is high time the country did a deep rethink of its policies and invest significantly in early warning systems and forward planning based on intelligence gathered from these early warning systems, he says.
“The specific interventions to safeguard food security will vary by season by the nature of the predicted disaster. If the predicted disaster is a widespread drought, then forward planning in terms of strategic investments in irrigation infrastructure will be key,” Nyondo tells IPS via email.
He adds: “But, in any case, we need to invest more in irrigation, storage and other critical infrastructure without waiting for disasters. That’s the surest way of safeguarding our food security. Yes, it will be expensive but it will also be necessary.”
Back in Mulanje district, Mponya has no idea how she will recover.
Unlike some people in her village, she has not suffered any damage to her house or the loss of any member of her family. But she says it is a tragedy of her life that for the first time as a farmer, the 51-year-old will harvest almost nothing from her field after months of toil, leaving her to face a year-long struggle for food.
Asked whether she has a way out, Mponya stares blankly and then says, “I don’t know what to do.”
Building renewables plants across the Global South is a preferable alternative to generate fewer emissions — but the international community has to date been unwilling to provide the substantial funding needed to construct this type of additional generation capacity at the level developing countries require. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS
Opinion by Philippe Benoit (washington dc)
Inter Press Service
Unfortunately, the UAE and other Gulf states can’t easily export their solar resources to developing countries. However, they can export their natural gas to support affordable low-emissions power production in poorer countries if combined with donor-financed carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS)-equipped gas-fired power plants.
The lead-up to COP 28 provides an opportunity to explore this mechanism to support low-emissions economic growth in poorer countries — a “gas for poverty and climate” power proposal.
As I noted in an earlier opinion piece, the decisions by the G-7, China and others to halt overseas financing for coal power plants serve important climate goals but do not eliminate developing countries’ need for more electricity at affordable prices. According to a February Reuters report, the Pakistan government has decided, in the face of high and volatile natural gas prices, to pivot from building gas-fired plants to more affordable coal-fired ones notwithstanding the higher emissions.
The decision to build more coal power plants reflects the difficult dilemma faced by many poorer countries: They are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and yet they do not feel they can afford to forestall investing in affordable power generation and the shorter-term economic benefits it provides, even if this means building high-emitting coal power plants.
The upcoming COP 28 context might provide a way out, one that leverages the hosting of the event in the gas-rich Gulf region, with the stated interest of wealthier countries and multilateral development banks to support poorer countries in the energy transition.
The proposal has two basic elements: an undertaking by a Gulf producer to provide natural gas at a preferential low price to new “low-emitting” gas-fired power plants built with concessional climate finance in partnering developing countries.
The subsidy embedded in this structure would be recognized as a financial contribution by the gas-supplying country to both international development and global climate efforts. This structure could potentially also be used by wealthy gas countries from other regions, such as possibly Norway, interested in simultaneously supporting development and tackling climate change.
The second element is the use of this natural gas in gas-fired power plants equipped with “carbon capture, utilization and storage” technologies to produce “low-emissions” electricity.
CCUS is one tool to substantially further reduce these emissions by 90 percent or more. The potential result is CO2 emissions per kWh that are so low they might even be termed “near-zero emissions.”
Although CCUS technologies have been developed and tested for many years on power plants, they have yet to be deployed at a large scale. One reason is that they are expensive per ton of reduced CO2 emissions. Consequently, their cost would undermine a developing country’s electricity affordability objective.
To overcome this hurdle, the CCUS-equipped gas-fired plant would need to be financed in large part through highly concessional climate funding, to be provided notably by the international donor community. There may also be an opportunity to tap into carbon markets to fund both capital and operating expenditures given the lower (i.e., avoided) emissions from the CCUS-equipped plant as compared to the alternative of a new coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired one without CCUS.
There are, of course, additional complexities to explore. For example, the plant would need to be able to access reasonably priced options for CO2 use or storage. In addition, the greenhouse gases (including methane) emitted in producing and delivering the natural gas to the plant would need to be limited to ensure the produced electricity remains “low emissions” when considering the full value chain.
Further analysis would also be needed on the pricing and other terms to make this structure attractive for the natural gas supplier, the donor community funding the CCUS-equipped plant and the developing country’s electricity consumers.
Building renewables plants across the Global South is a preferable alternative to generate fewer emissions — but the international community has to date been unwilling to provide the substantial funding needed to construct this type of additional generation capacity at the level developing countries require. And, as noted earlier, the technologies don’t yet exist for the Gulf states to export their abundant solar power resources, notwithstanding current discussions about green hydrogen.
The hosting of COP 28 in the Gulf provides an opportunity to think creatively about how to mobilize the gas resources of that region (and elsewhere) to better support both the development needs of poorer countries and the global climate effort. This COP 28 “gas for poverty and climate” power proposal might provide some elements.
Philippe Benoit has over 25 years of experience working in international energy and sustainability, including prior management positions at the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. He is currently adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and research director at Global Infrastructure Analytics and Sustainability 2050.
The potential for indigenous crops and plant species to address hunger remains largely untapped even as extreme weather changes threaten to cripple food systems. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
NAIROBI, Mar 27 (IPS) – Elizabeth Njoroge recounts her poverty-stricken upbringing in Ting’ang’a village in the Central part of Kenya, growing up on a diet heavy on Amaranth and pumpkin.
The 45-year-old speaks about the shame of neighbours finding out the frequency with which her family consumed foods associated with poor and extremely food-insecure households.
“Terere (Amaranth) grew just like weed. We often sneaked into other people’s farms to pick the vegetable because only poor people ate terere and only babies ate pumpkin. Eating pumpkin as a family was considered a sign of poverty,” she tells IPS.
That was then; today, Zachary Aduda, who is an independent researcher in food security, says people’s understanding and appreciation of indigenous foods has grown.
“Native foods that were previously considered only fit for the very poor and vulnerable have been commercialized because of their documented high nutritional value. They include amaranth, which is also a neutralizer for vegetables that are considered bitter such as the black nightshade, locally known as osuga,” he says.
But as Kenya struggles to be free from the grips of the most severe drought in the last 40 years, he says indigenous foods have not been sufficiently utilized to halt the pace and spread of food insecurity and, more so, in the arid and semi-arid parts of the country.
The drought has resulted in the East African nation being considered seriously food insecure, with severe nutrition vulnerabilities leading to high malnutrition levels and poverty.
A UN food security outlook for October 2022 to January 2023 indicated that the number of people in Kenya facing hunger could reach 4.4 million and that 1.2 million people were projected to have entered the emergency phase and are in urgent need of food support.
The potential, Aduda tells IPS, for indigenous crops and plant species to address hunger remains largely untapped. Kenya, alongside a vast majority of the world, relies heavily on three crops – maize, wheat and rice.
Research by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that the three crop species meet an estimated 50 percent of the global requirements for proteins and calories.
Hellen Wanjugu, an agriculturalist based in Nyeri County, one of Kenya’s food baskets, says native crops and plant species are not only heavy in nutrition but can withstand ongoing extreme changes in weather patterns.
Take, for instance, amaranth: “It is easy to grow, matures fast and when cooked, very rich in nutrients such as calcium, manganese, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, folate, iron, zinc and potassium.”
Maize, wheat and rice production is buckling under the pressure from extreme climate change and pest infestation. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the size of farm acreage planted with maize has declined by approximately a quarter in recent years, an alarming development since maize is a staple food crop.
Aduda speaks of inadequate efforts to support resilience interventions around the production of indigenous foods. He says there is too much focus on fertilizers and little to no focus on the difficulties farmers face accessing and multiplying indigenous seeds.
“Every ethnic group in Kenya boasts of its own traditional crops and vegetables in line with the climate of their region. But there is a problem because our smallholder farmers, who are the backbone of our food system, cannot easily access the indigenous seeds they so urgently need,” he says.
Kenya’s smallholder farmers account for at least 70 percent of the country’s production, and their combined output meets an estimated 75 percent of domestic food needs in the country, according to government data.
“But, a vast majority of these farmers rely on informal seeds system. Traditionally, seed saving and sharing among farmers was a very normal and common practice. This way, farmers largely controlled the seeds system, and they were able to grow native species and promote our agricultural biodiversity until a prohibitive law came into place in 2012,” Wanjugu tells IPS.
The Seed and Plant Varieties Act 326 of 2012 was originally established to protect farmers from being duped into buying unregistered or uncertified seeds. Uncertified seeds are often low yielding and easily succumb to changes in weather and pest infestation.
But the 2012 Act also strongly prohibits the sale, exchange and sharing of indigenous seeds in Kenya. A violation of this law could lead to up to two years in jail, a fine of up to $10,000 or both.
A group of farmers are currently in court with a public interest litigation towards the amendment of the seeds law to allow the saving and sharing of indigenous seeds to boost the production of indigenous foods.
As it is now, farmers are required to buy seeds every planting season, which has placed the cost of farm input beyond the reach of many peasant farmers.
Wanjugu says the seeds law has removed the control of seeds from the hands of farmers and into the hands of multinational corporations, who are slowly dictating what farmers can grow because of the high seed prices.
Exotic vegetables such as cabbages and kale now account for about three-quarters of the total vegetables consumed in Kenya, she added.
She says this aligns with UN research that shows while more than 7,000 wild plants have been documented wild worldwide, either grown or collected, less than 150 of these species have been commercialised. Out of these wild plant species, the world’s food needs are met by only 30 plant species.
“Today, food recipes for indigenous species are available from reputable institutions and organizations such as FAO. Native species taste much better than exotic plants and are more nutritious, but farmers lack the capacity to fully lean on indigenous plant species to meet our food needs,” she emphasizes.
Aduda speaks of Kenya’s recent entry into the era of GMOs after the lifting of a 10-year ban, which he says has created debates that are moving the country further and further away from the critical issues facing farmers today.
He stresses that using indigenous knowledge and seeds, supporting farmers to overcome water stresses, deploying sufficient agricultural extension officers as it were many years ago, and improving connectivity between farm and market will produce the silver bullet to build a food-secure nation.
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