Derived from naturally occurring microorganisms, microbial inoculants offer the same benefits as chemical fertilizers while reducing agricultural systems environmental footprint, according to the author. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
Opinion by Esther Ngumbi (urbana, illinois, usa)
Inter Press Service
To avert the ongoing fertilizer crisis, farmers in developed and developing countries alike, could turn into other alternative products such as microbial inoculants. Derived from naturally occurring microorganisms, including the billions of beneficial bacteria that teem in the soil near plant roots, microbial inoculants offer the same benefits as chemical fertilizers while reducing agricultural systems environmental footprint.
Due to their popularity, microbial inoculants are currently valued at $12.9 billion. Complementing their popularity is the proliferation in the number of start-ups and companies developing and commercializing microbial products. These include AgBiome, Indigo, Novozymes, Corteva, BASF, and Bayer.
What’s more is that these microbes can provide other benefits to plants including helping them to tolerate drought and hot temperatures that have increasingly become common with climate change. Further, they can increase plant defenses against crop damaging insects. These products also offer environmentally sustainable integrated crop management.
Cost wise, in the US, for example, microbial inoculants are relatively priced, from $30 – $100 per gallon.
As fertilizer prices keep escalating, we must invest in understanding and harnessing these naturally occurring microbes to improve crop productivity.
Just like we are investing in producing fertilizers, there is need to invest in science that is aimed at understanding beneficial soil microbes and the mechanisms that underpin microbe facilitated crop growth improvement.
Microbial inoculants could be the next sustainable tools for breaking the dependence on fertilizers.
Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.
A variety of insect-based delicacies. It is estimated that 2.5 billion people around the world eat insects as part of their regular diet. Encouraging the eating of insects could have health and climate change benefits. Credit: icipe
by Joyce Chimbi (nairobi)
Inter Press Service
Nairobi, May 06 (IPS) – Growing up in Samoya Village of Bungoma County in the Western part of Kenya, Elvis Wanjala has fond childhood memories of the rainy season, chasing and catching black-bellied winged termites in the rain.
“The termites would also come inside the house, attracted by the light late in the evening. My mother would sun-dry the termites and pan-fry them. We would then eat the crunchy termites with ugali (posho) and a serving of traditional vegetables,” he recounts.
“I grew up believing that everybody ate termites. At 11 years, I visited my uncle in Nairobi and was shocked to find that termites were more of a nuisance than food. One morning after a heavy downpour, I watched in awe as women and girls swept termites from their doorsteps and threw them in the bin.”
Beatrice Karare from the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries tells IPS termites, and other insects such as grasshoppers, locusts, black and white ants, and crickets are part of traditional diets in Western Kenya, but not so in other parts of the country.
But with rising inflation, scientists at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) say edible insects are a low-cost alternative to more expensive foods. The Kenyan ‘food basket’ indicates that food inflation rose by 20 percent in January 2022 compared to the same period in 2021.
Pan-dried desert grasshoppers. Credit: icipe
Dr Saliou Niassy, a scientist from icipe, tells IPS edible insects contain high-quality protein, vitamins, fibre, calcium, iron, B vitamins, selenium, zinc, and amino acids and are also an excellent source of healthy fats.
Insect oil produced through an icipe research project from two edible insects – the desert locust and the African bush-cricket – was richer in omega-3 fatty acids, flavonoids, and Vitamin E than the plant oil.
Niassy says as this East African nation grapples with increasing threats to food security such as “climate change, landscape degradation and pest invasion, edible insects are a viable and affordable alternative.” It is projected that Africa’s annual food import bill of $35 billion could rise to $110 billion by 2025.
A survey conducted by icipe shows there are an estimated 500 species of edible insects in African communities. The Central African region is home to approximately 256 edible insect species. East Africa hosts about 100 species, and about eight species are available in North Africa. An estimated 17 primary species are used for feed and food in Kenya.
“We have had two main challenges as far as increasing consumption of insects is concerned, a lack of legislation around the production, packaging, and marketing of insects for food and strong perceptions that dictate what is culturally acceptable as food. There are also strong beliefs that you must be very poor to eat insects,” Karare explains.
Karare says some of these issues were resolved in December 2020 when Kenya became the first African country to develop national standards regulating the production, handling, and processing of insects for food and feed.
Included in the regulation are stipulations of the necessary minimum infrastructural and environmental requirements necessary for the ideal production of edible insects, including how they are packaged and presented.
Wanjala, now a teacher based in Nairobi, says communities that do not eat insects and children could be slowly introduced to insect products such as biscuits “so that the idea of eating insects can slowly sink in. When it comes to eating whole insects, I find that people are also more likely to try dry-fried, crunchy insects.”
Despite the challenges of creating a viable and attractive market for insects, Karare is convinced that insects can be part of the diet in many homes, drawing parallels with the journey of Kenyans embracing traditional vegetables.
“A few years ago, highly nutritious traditional vegetables were eaten by a few communities. In Central Kenya, for instance, Amaranthus was considered to be food for poor people. Today, Amaranthus is a popular delicacy and part of the menu in five-star hotels. The same with pumpkin leaves,” Karare observes.
“We need to educate the people that edible insects can add nutrients to a plant-based meal. More importantly, insects can even nutritionally replace meat.”
These are pan-dried nsenene. Researchers say edible insects provide low-cost alternative protein. Credit: icipe
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an estimated 2.5 billion people eat insects as part of their regular meals, whole or in processed food products such as snacks and pasta. Karare says the global edible insect market estimated at $112 million in 2019, could reach $1.5 billion by 2026.
There are approximately 1,900 edible species globally, including butterflies, cockroaches, crickets, grasshoppers, ants, bees, dragonflies, beetles, domestic silk moths, centipedes and locusts.
According to FAO, turning to insects is not only good for the body but highly environment friendly and could contribute to reducing the emission of harmful greenhouse gases. The livestock sector contributes significantly to climate change as total emissions from global livestock represent 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Cattle reared for beef and milk and inedible outputs such as manure and draft power account for 65 percent of the livestock sector’s emissions. Producing insects for food is yet another alternative to reducing the emission of harmful greenhouse gases, the FAO says.
Crickets need six times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and half as much as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein. Additionally, insect-based products are found to have a much smaller carbon footprint in comparison to conventional livestock.
With these revelations, Niassy says there is a lot more to learn and benefit from, “we have just scratched the surface in terms of sustainable access to biodiversity for resilience, livelihood, food and nutritional security in Africa.”
Francisca Piecho stands with her daughter-in-law Johana Cruz and her grandson outside her home that now has electricity from solar energy, in the village of Cacho de Oro, Teotepeque municipality, in the southern department of La Libertad. Hers and other rural Salvadoran families have seen their lives improve with the arrival not only of electricity but also of a reforestation program in the area. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
by Edgardo Ayala (teotepeque, el salvador)
Inter Press Service
TEOTEPEQUE, El Salvador, May 05 (IPS) – After working on the family farm, Carlos Salama comes home and plugs his cell phone into a socket via a solar-powered electrical system, a rarity in this rural village in southern El Salvador.
“Just being able to charge the phone with our own electricity, which comes from the sun, is a great thing for us,” the 29-year-old farmer who lives in Cacho de Oro, a rural settlement nestled in hills on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in Teotepeque municipality in the southern department of La Libertad, told IPS.
Salama’s mother, Rosa Aquino, was also enthusiastic about the electrical system installed in her home and 15 other houses in the village in late April.
“It feels good, we never had electricity… at night it makes you happy. When I was a child we used kerosene lanterns. And then battery lamps, and now we save what we used to spend on batteries,” Aquino, 45, told IPS.
Salvadoran farmer Carlos Salama recharges his cell phone by means of a solar energy system installed on the roof of the house where he lives in the village of Cacho de Oro, in the municipality of Teotepeque. Although the system does not support appliances that consume more than 500 watts, the families now have lightbulbs to use at night, can charge their cell phones and can use small appliances. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
Poverty in plain sight
Some 50 families live in Cacho de Oro, dedicated to subsistence agriculture. And although the village has had electricity from the national grid for some years now, nearly twenty families, the poorest, have not been able to afford the connection to the grid.
That was the case of the family of Francisca Piecho, a 43-year-old farmer who lives with her son and his wife and their little boy in a dirt-floor dwelling.
Piecho’s husband works in another area of the country cutting sugar cane, as he could not find work in Cacho de Oro.
The family could not afford to pay the 500 dollars it cost to connect to the national power line that had finally reached the village.
“Some families have relatives in other countries who send them remittances, but we don’t have any, and we couldn’t afford it,” Piecho told IPS, while stirring a stew on a wood stove.
Her son was not at home when IPS visited the village. But Piecho said he works in agriculture, mainly during the May to November rainy season, because in the dry season there is almost no work available.
The village of Cacho de Oro is perched on top of a hill along the Pacific Ocean in southern El Salvador, a remote impoverished area where unemployment is particularly acute during the November to May dry season, when no agricultural work is available. The privatized electricity system has not connected these villages to the national grid because it is not profitable. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
In El Salvador, electricity distribution has been privatized since 1998, and many rural villages do not have electric power because they are very small and the companies do not see investing there as good business.
According to official figures, 95.2 percent of households in rural areas have access to electricity, while 2.0 percent use candles, 0.8 percent use solar panels, 0.5 percent use kerosene, and 1.4 percent use other means.
Official data also shows that the average monthly household income in urban areas is 728 dollars compared to 435 dollars in rural areas.
But now the poorest families in Cacho de Oro also have electricity, and from a clean energy source, thanks to the solar power project brought to the village by the governmental Environmental Fund of El Salvador (Fonaes), at a cost of 16,000 dollars.
Staff from the municipal government in Jicalapa, in the southern Salvadoran department of La Libertad, explain to a group of residents from the village of Izcacuyo about the solar electrification project that began in December 2021, as well as the community reforestation effort. CREDIT: Municipality of Jicalapa
Solar energy to the rescue
Solar panels were installed on the rooftops of the houses of nearly twenty families. The panel provides just enough electric power to connect a couple of light bulbs, charge a cell phone and plug in small appliances that consume less than 500 watts.
“If the appliances consume more than that, it’s not enough to turn them on,” Arturo Solano, a technician with Tecnosolar, the company that supplied the panels, told IPS.
He added that there are approximately 100 community solar energy projects in rural El Salvador, a country of 6.7 million inhabitants. About 7,500 homes have been electrified with this clean energy source.
“You have to adapt to the system and buy appliances that are compatible with the power it supplies,” he said, adding that the amount of energy provided depends on the investment made, because if you want more power, you have to install more panels.
Even so, with this very basic electricity service, the residents of Cacho de Oro are happy to at least have electric light and an outlet to charge their cell phones and stay in communication.
Before the arrival of the solar energy project, some of the families were able to connect to the national grid indirectly through neighbors who were connected. But this meant that they had to pay part of the monthly bill.
“Now we no longer pay part of the bill, which cost us five dollars. We use that money to buy some food, eggs or oil,” Francisco de la Cruz Tulen, a 30-year-old farmer who lives with his wife Milagro Menjívar, 21, and their two small children, told IPS, pleased to have electricity at no monthly cost.
In the rainy season, Tulen, like the rest, rents a small plot of land to plant the staple crops of Central America – corn and beans – to feed the family. He also works on other farms as a day laborer, to earn a little money.
But in the dry season, he leaves the village to look for work in the sugar cane fields. This work, one of the most physically demanding in agriculture, pays between six and 24 dollars a day.
In addition to the solar electrification project in the village of Cacho de Oro in southern El Salvador, reservoirs have been built to capture rainwater and irrigate fruit and timber trees planted to reforest the area and provide food, such as avocados, and keep the aquifers healthy. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
Reservoirs for life
There is no potable water in Cacho de Oro. The families get their water from a spring that sometimes dries up in the dry season and at times they have to buy water in barrels brought in by truck. Each barrel costs 2.5 dollars.
“There are possibilities of getting piped water. A Japanese development cooperation project has dug a well, but we are still waiting to see,” German de la Cruz Tesorero, a resident of the village and the president of the local Communal Development Association (Adescos), an organizational system for small settlements in this Central American country, told IPS.
To maintain water sources and to provide food, the solar electrification project is also accompanied by a reforestation effort in the area. In addition, small reservoirs have been built to irrigate the trees and home gardens.
This has occurred not only in Cacho de Oro, but also in another village located downstream, called Izcacuyo, in the municipality of Jicalapa, also in the department of La Libertad.
Some families have planted vegetable gardens next to their homes in the southern Salvadoran village of Cacho de Oro, growing vegetables such as “pipián”, a highly prized local squash, to boost food production in this impoverished part of the country. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
The families of Izcacuyo have their own solar electrification project, inaugurated in December 2021, with the difference that they had never received energy from the national grid.
To charge a cell phone, villagers had to go to the canton of La Perla, a 30-minute bus ride away.
The total cost of the local electrification and reforestation project was 38,000 dollars, including 30,000 provided by Fonaes, 4,000 by the municipal government and the other 4,000 from work contributed by the community, which was counted as hours of labor.
Some 5,450 fruit trees have been planted in family plots, including avocado, lemon and mango trees, as well as timber species such as madrecacao (Gliricidia sepium), which offers advantages to the habitat and soils by fixing nitrogen.
The project also provided fertilizer to ensure that the trees grew well.
The municipal government’s idea is that in three or four years, families will be harvesting avocados, mangos and lemons, and part of the production can be marketed along the coastal strip of the department of La Libertad, catering to tourists and hotels and restaurants in the area.
“They will see the benefits in a couple of years,” said William Beltrán, a technician in the Jicalapa municipal government, during a meeting with IPS in San Salvador.
Opinion by Paul Teng, Genevieve Donnellon-May (singapore)
Inter Press Service
SINGAPORE, May 02 (IPS) – Amidst a backdrop of rising food insecurity worldwide and a global food supply chain crisis, many countries are attempting to increase the level of food self-production. One improved input for farming which is receiving renewed attention is improved seed. The two most populous countries in the world, China and India, have recently made ground-breaking moves to improve their competitive position by developing new seeds which will improve their food production and increase resilience to climate change. So far, in 2022, new regulations on using biotechnology (genetic modification and gene editing) have been put in place by both countries to ultimately allow smallholder farmers to benefit from these new seeds.
Paul Teng
The COVID pandemic and, more recently, the Ukraine-Russia war have significantly disrupted food production and supply chains for food and farm inputs. Fears are growing about reduced crop planting by farmers in developing countries and reduced yields due to the lesser use of high-priced fertilizers. Apart from fertilizers, supply chain disruptions affect all inputs needed for farming, including seeds. The seed is the first link in the food chain.
The availability and access to seeds are essential to farmers, particularly in developing countries or areas affected by droughts and other disasters, giving rise to the concept of “seed security, which the UN FAO defines as the “ready access by rural households, particularly farmers and farming communities, to adequate quantities of quality seed and planting materials of crop varieties, adapted to their agro-ecological conditions and socioeconomic needs, at planting time, under normal and abnormal weather conditions.” In many developing countries, quality seed is commonly produced by companies operating under public scrutiny.
The importance of having reliable supplies of improved seeds for farmers has been particularly highlighted in the world’s most populous country, China, where seeds are high on the policy agenda.
In early April 2022, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for working toward food self-sufficiency and developing the country’s seed industry during a visit to a seed laboratory in Hainan Province, southern China. He noted that China’s food security could only be safeguarded when seed resources are firmly held in its own hands. President Xi’s comments come at a time when many countries aim to increase their self-production of food in anticipation of disruptions in supply chains such as those caused by the Ukraine-Russia crisis and the COVID pandemic.
Genevieve Donnellon-May
President Xi’s comments fit in the broader context of seed and food, issues that will only continue to grow in importance. They come at a time when there is rising food insecurity worldwide and a looming global food crisis brought on by the Ukraine-Russia War, a worsening geopolitical environment and growing vulnerability of the global food supply chains due to accelerated climate change impacts and Covid-19-related disruptions.
All the above background factors have led China and India to make important moves to tap a proven tool for developing new crop varieties, namely biotechnology.
In April 2022, China’s agriculture ministry announced plans for the first time after many years of deliberations to approve two new genetically modified corn varieties developed by the Syngenta Group. Earlier, In January 2022, China published new guidelines for the approval of gene-edited plants, paving the way for faster improvements to important food security crops. And this came amid a raft of measures to overhaul China’s seed industry, seen as a weak link in efforts to ensure it can feed the world’s biggest population. China’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Tang Renjian, had likened seeds to the “computer chips” of agriculture.
In an unrelated parallel development, India approved a key change in rules at the end of March 2022 to allow genome-edited plants or organisms without any “foreign” genes to be subjected to a different regulatory process than the one applied to genetically engineered products. As in China, this is anticipated to lead to faster development of new crop varieties that can meet the challenges of climate change and higher yields.
However, not all interested parties support the use of biotechnology to develop new seeds or patenting new crop varieties. Although the evidence is strong that multinational and domestic seed companies have played a major role in lifting crop production through their improved seeds, this has also led to concerns about the control that the private sector may have over this important input for food production. And related to this issue of control of seeds is the patenting of new seeds.
There has been a rise in ‘seed activism‘ and interest in seed sovereignty as part of the pushback against the modern agricultural system that is supported by patented seeds such as hybrids. This pushback has been helmed by groups which exploit the fear (often speculative) that by having control over seeds, a handful of multinational companies, rather than farmers or countries, have control over the global food supply. This omits the reality that farmers have the right to choose whatever seeds to plant and even keep their own seeds if desired. These groups have also failed to recognize that investments to innovate and produce new seeds would not have been possible without adequate protection of seeds as intellectual property. Countries like China and India realise the importance of promoting innovations in the seed industry.
China, in particular, has announced that it aims to revitalize the seed sector, encourage germplasm collection, and strengthen intellectual property protection in the sector. In China, views on the importance of seeds in food security are reflected in various domestic policies such as in 2022’s “No 1 Central Policy Document”, the country’s agricultural blueprint. A top policy priority is the development of the seed industry in China.
The issues of seed sovereignty based on farmer-saved seed, when balanced against the track record of improved seeds from companies which give high yields, are complex. But in the final analysis, farmers will choose the seeds that give them the most assured yields under risky conditions, even if they have to pay for such seeds. This has been the case with almost all the developed and developing countries with food surpluses for export, such as the U.S.A., Canada, Brazil and Argentina. And consumers, as well as food importers are those who benefit by there being more food at affordable prices.
The first “Green Revolution” in Asia which took off in the 1970s was based on improved seeds of wheat and rice, bred using technologies which were novel at that time. However, towards the latter part of the last millennium, the need for more novel technologies to improve crops became obvious as yield gains were stagnating in many crops. The challenges facing all smallholder farmers arising from changes in climate, pests and natural resource depletion are becoming more intense and frequent. And unless new seeds are developed and made available to farmers in shorter timeframes, it is the consuming public that will suffer the consequences of reduced, unreliable food supply and higher prices.
The conundrum is how to balance local ownership of seed sources which are commonly unimproved and low-yielding with improved high-yielding seeds developed by seed companies (either domestic or multinational) using modern science. Ultimately, smallholder farmers worldwide deserve new “seeds of hope”.
Paul Teng is Adjunct Senior Fellow, Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. He has worked in the Asia Pacific region on agri-food issues for over thirty years, with international organizations, academia and the private sector.
Genevieve Donnellon-May is a master’s student in Water Science, Policy and Management at the University of Oxford. Genevieve’s research interests include China, Africa, transboundary governance, and the food-energy-water nexus.
If forest loss continues at the current rate, it will be impossible to keep warming below two degrees Celsius as pledged in the Paris Agreement.
Credit: José Garth Medina/IPS
by Baher Kamal (madrid)
Inter Press Service
MADRID, Apr 27 (IPS) – In case you were not aware, please know that humanity used to cultivate more than 6.000 plant species for food, but now instead fewer than 200 of these species make major contributions to food production. Out of these, only 9% account for 66% of total crop production.
Also that 33% of the world’s fish stocks are overfished.
And that 26% of the nearly 8.000 local breeds of livestock that are still in existence are now at risk of extinction.
And most coral reefs face too many pressures from pollution to overfishing and habitat destruction.
In addition, many species, including pollinators, soil organisms and the natural enemies of pests, that contribute to vital ecosystem services, are in decline as a consequence of the destruction and degradation of habitats, overexploitation, pollution and other threats.
There is also a rapid decline in key ecosystems that deliver numerous services essential to food and agriculture, including supply of freshwater, protection against storms, floods and other hazards, and habitats for species such as fish and pollinators.
All the above facts do not come out of the blue – they, among many others, are based on specific scientific findings provided by 91 countries and 27 international organisations, and contributions from over 175 authors and reviewers, who elaborated The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture.
What is biodiversity for food and agriculture?
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) explains that biodiversity is the variety of life at genetic, species and ecosystem levels. Biodiversity for food and agriculture is, in turn, the subset of biodiversity that contributes in one way or another to agriculture and food production, it says, adding the following:
Biodiversity includes the domesticated plants and animals that are part of crop, livestock, forest or aquaculture systems, harvested forest and aquatic species, the wild relatives of domesticated species, and other wild species harvested for food and other products.
It also encompasses what is known as “associated biodiversity”, the vast range of organisms that live in and around food and agricultural production systems, sustaining them and contributing to their output.
Biodiversity supplies many vital ecosystem services, such as creating and maintaining healthy soils, pollinating plants, controlling pests and providing habitat for wildlife, including for fish and other species that are vital to food production and agricultural livelihoods, adds FAO, while also explaining the following:
Biodiversity makes production systems and livelihoods more resilient to shocks and stresses, including those caused by climate change. It is a key resource in efforts to increase food production while limiting negative impacts on the environment.
It makes a variety of contributions to the livelihoods of many people, often reducing the need for food and agricultural producers to rely on costly or environmentally harmful external inputs.
Biodiversity at genetic, species and ecosystem levels helps address the challenges posed by diverse and changing environmental conditions and socio-economic circumstances.
Diversifying production systems, for example by using multiple species, breeds or varieties, integrating the use of crop, livestock, forest and aquatic biodiversity, or promoting habitat diversity in the local landscape or seascape, helps to promote resilience, improve livelihoods and support food security and nutrition.
“Many key components of biodiversity for food and agriculture at genetic, species and ecosystem levels are in decline. The proportion of livestock breeds at risk of extinction is increasing. Overall, the diversity of crops present in farmers’ fields has declined and threats to crop diversity are increasing.”
More than 6,000 plant species have been cultivated for food. Now, fewer than 200 make major contributions to food production globally, regionally or nationally. A sea of soy is seen near the city of Porto Nacional, on the right bank of the Tocantins River, Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS
Demolishing our own home
Should this not be enough, please also know that the world’s oceans are getting warmer because of increasing global carbon dioxide emissions.
Also that the world’s best-known coral reefs could be extinct by the end of the century unless more is done to make them resilient to our warming oceans.
In short, “We are wreaking havoc on our own home – the only home we have, the one home we all share,” UN General Assembly President Abdulla, Shahid said on 22 April 2022 on the occasion of the International Mother Earth Day.
But who is behind the destruction of biodiversity?
Obviously, those who have been making voracious profits by exploiting the essential infrastructure of all kinds of life on Earth, through their industrial intensive agriculture, the collection of genetic resources of flora and fauna to register them as their own “property”, the production of genetically modified food, and the over-use of chemicals.
They are also the big timber business destroying forests, inducing the waste of huge amounts of agriculture and livestock products to keep their prices the most profitable possible, and a long, very long etcetera.
And who profits from such destruction?
A specific, accurate answer to this question may be deduced from the numerous studies elaborated by Professor Vandana Shiva, the world-famous environmental activist from India, who is known for her opposition to big multinationals such as Monsanto for their “nefarious influence on agriculture.”
“These new products seek to imitate and replace animal products, food additives, and expensive, rare, or socially conflictive ingredients (such as palm oil), explains the world-known physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers.
“Biotech companies and agribusiness giants are seeing the opportunity to move into this promising market of “green” consumption and hence these products are marketed to a new generation of environmentally conscious consumers who are growing critical of the grim realities of industrial food production.
“As a result, meatless burgers and sausages, as well as imitations of cheese, dairy products, seafood, and others, have begun to flood the market, being found anywhere from fast food chains to local grocery stores.
Such products market themselves as ‘eco-friendly’, ‘healthy’, and ‘sustainable,’ says Vandana Shiva, who already three decades ago, founded Navdanya and the Navdanya movement to defend Seed and Food sovereignty and small farmers around the world, as well as the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology (New Delhi, India).
In short: big business has largely contributed to destroying the essential web of life… and big business now supplants Nature by producing synthetic food.
Every other Tuesday, a working group of Mayan women meets to review the organization and progress of their food saving and production project in Uayma, in the state of Yucatán in southeastern Mexico. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Ko’ox Tani Foundation
by Emilio Godoy (uayma, mexico)
Inter Press Service
UAYMA, Mexico, Apr 26 (IPS) – Every other Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. sharp, a group of 26 Mexican women meet for an hour to discuss the progress of their work and immediate tasks. Anyone who arrives late must pay a fine of about 25 cents on the dollar.
The collective has organized in the municipality of Uayma (which means “Not here” in the Mayan language) to learn agroecological practices, as well as how to save money and produce food for family consumption and the sale of surpluses.
“We have to be responsible. With savings we can do a little more,” María Petul, a married Mayan indigenous mother of two and a member of the group “Lool beh” (“Flower of the road” in Mayan), told IPS in this municipality of just over 4,000 inhabitants, 1,470 kilometers southeast of Mexico City in the state of Yucatán, on the Yucatán peninsula.
The home garden “gives me enough to eat and sell, it helps me out,” said Petul as she walked through her small garden where she grows habanero peppers (Capsicum chinense, traditional in the area), radishes and tomatoes, surrounded by a few trees, including a banana tree whose fruit will ripen in a few weeks and some chickens that roam around the earthen courtyard.
The face of Norma Tzuc, who is also married with two daughters, lights up with enthusiasm when she talks about the project. “I am very happy. We now have an income. It’s exciting to be able to help my family. Other groups already have experience and tell us about what they’ve been doing,” Tzuc told IPS.
The two women and the rest of their companions, whose mother tongue is Mayan, participate in the project “Women saving to address climate change”, run by the non-governmental Ko’ox Tani Foundation (“Let’s Go Ahead”, in Mayan), dedicated to community development and social inclusion, based in Merida, the state capital.
This phase of the project is endowed with some 100,000 dollars from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the non-binding environmental arm of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), formed in 1994 by Canada, the United States and Mexico and replaced in 2020 by another trilateral agreement.
The initiative got off the ground in February and will last two years, with the aim of training some 250 people living in extreme poverty, mostly women, in six locations in the state of Yucatán.
The maximum savings for each woman in the group is about 12 dollars every two weeks and the minimum is 2.50 dollars, and they can withdraw the accumulated savings to invest in inputs or animals, or for emergencies, with the agreement of the group. Through the project, the women will receive seeds, agricultural inputs and poultry, so that they can install vegetable gardens and chicken coops on their land.
The women write down the quotas in a white notebook and deposit the savings in a gray box, kept in the house of the group’s president.
José Torre, project director of the Ko’ox Tani Foundation, explained that the main areas of entrepreneurship are: community development, food security, livelihoods and human development.
“What we have seen over time is that the savings meetings become a space for human development, in which they find support and solidarity from their peers, make friends and build trust,” he told IPS during a tour of the homes of some of the savings group participants in Uayma.
The basis for the new initiative in this locality is a similar program implemented between 2018 and 2021 in other Yucatecan municipalities, in which the organization worked with 1400 families.
María Petul, a Mayan indigenous woman, plants chili peppers, tomatoes, radishes and medicinal herbs in the vegetable garden in the courtyard of her home in Uayma, in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS
Unequal oasis
Yucatan, a region home to 2.28 million people, suffers from a high degree of social backwardness, with 34 percent of the population living in moderate poverty, 33 percent suffering unmet needs, 5.5 percent experiencing income vulnerability and almost seven percent living in extreme poverty.
The COVID-19 pandemic that hit this Latin American country in February 2020 exacerbated these conditions in a state that depends on agriculture, tourism and services, similar to the other two states that make up the Yucatán Peninsula: Campeche and Quintana Roo.
Inequality is also a huge problem in the state, although the Gini Index dropped from 0.51 in 2014 to 0.45, according to a 2018 government report, based on data from 2016 (the latest year available). The Gini coefficient, where 1 indicates the maximum inequality and 0 the greatest equality, is used to calculate income inequality.
The situation of indigenous women is worse, as they face marginalization, discrimination, violence, land dispossession and lack of access to public services.
More than one million indigenous people live in the state.
Women participating in a project funded by the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation record their savings in a white notebook and deposit them in a gray box. Mayan indigenous woman Norma Tzuc belongs to a group taking part in the initiative in Uayma, in the southeastern Mexican state of Yucatán. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS
Climate crisis, yet another vulnerability
Itza Castañeda, director of equity at the non-governmental World Resources Institute (WRI), highlights the persistence of structural inequalities in the peninsula that exacerbate the effects of the climate crisis.
“In the three states there is greater inequality between men and women. This stands in the way of women’s participation and decision-making. Furthermore, the existing evidence shows that there are groups in conditions of greater vulnerability to climate impacts,” she told IPS from the city of Tepoztlán, near Mexico City.
She added that “climate change accentuates existing inequalities, but a differentiated impact assessment is lacking.”
Official data indicate that there are almost 17 million indigenous people in Mexico, representing 13 percent of the total population, of which six million are women.
Of indigenous households, almost a quarter are headed by women, while 65 percent of indigenous girls and women aged 12 and over perform unpaid work compared to 35 percent of indigenous men – a sign of the inequality in the system of domestic and care work.
To add to their hardships, the Yucatan region is highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis, such as droughts, devastating storms and rising sea levels. In June 2021, tropical storm Cristobal caused the flooding of Uayma, where three women’s groups are operating under the savings system.
For that reason, the project includes a risk management and hurricane early warning system.
The Mexican government is building a National Care System, but the involvement of indigenous women and the benefits for them are still unclear.
Petul looks excitedly at the crops planted on her land and dreams of a larger garden, with more plants and more chickens roaming around, and perhaps a pig to be fattened. She also thinks about the possibility of emulating women from previous groups who have set up small stores with their savings.
“They will lay eggs and we can eat them or sell them. With the savings we can also buy roosters, in the market chicks are expensive,” said Petul, brimming with hope, who in addition to taking care of her home and family sells vegetables.
Her neighbor Tzuc, who until now has been a homemaker, said that the women in her group have to take into account the effects of climate change. “It has been very hot, hotter than before, and there is drought. Fortunately, we have water, but we have to take care of it,” she said.
For his part, Torre underscored the results of the savings groups. The women “left extreme poverty behind. The pandemic hit hard, because there were families who had businesses and stopped selling. The organization gave them resilience,” he said.
In addition, a major achievement is that the households that have already completed the project continue to save, regularly attend meetings and have kept producing food.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
