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Highlights

Three weeks to go (as at time of first publication) before the launch of the 6th Africa Agriculture Science Week, and the energy among the ranks of social reporters is palpable. A very active community will support the efforts of those communicating from the event and its overall importance to African agriculture – and many of the members of this community have yet not even met! They are the virtual supporters of the social media efforts for AASW6 supported by CTA, GFAR, YPARD and the CGIAR Consortium.

The energy is palpable and contagious, the numbers speak for themselves. Three weeks to go and an army of over 140 social reportersfrom all walks of life and all corners of the world are already researching, preparing, writing… Some of them will travel to Accra and participate in person, others will be behind the scenes hard at work to ensure those not be able to travel to Accra can still engage, have a voice, be able to listen to what is happening.

Urban food security should be recognized as a critical 21st century policy issue. This is the central recommendation put forward by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ 2013 Emerging Leaders Program in a newly published report, Feeding an Urban World: A Call to Action. The report highlights the critical importance of addressing urban food security and offers 10 recommendations on how cities can promote food and nutritional security.

The world is witnessing the largest growth of urban population in human history. Between now and 2050, the world urban population is projected to grow from 3.6 billion to more than 6 billion while the population in rural communities is expected to decline worldwide. This rapid increase in population, dietary consumption changes, and more frequent and extreme weather brought on by climate change create enormous challenges to cities and urban centers, many of which already face the overwhelming burden of providing basic services to millions of inhabitants living in poor conditions.

Researchers and development practitioners at the recently concluded Agricultural Innovation Systems in Africa (AISA) workshop held in Nairobi, Kenya discussed a number of interesting topics, such as including gender into agriculture, the role of games in promoting innovations, differences between African and European agricultural systems and more.

Discussions wanted to reach an answer so to understand whether the approach being used to reach policy makers was the right one. Participants agreed on the need to make use of existing structures such as farmer associations rather than establishing new ones.

Boosting African Agriculture Partnership, Investment and Technology with particular concern on narrowing the investment and access to technology gaps that present limitations for young people across the African Continent is of great interest to me. I am very much excited and do applaud some regional and country-level initiatives to support young people to gain employable skills and in addition provide leeway to access various business support initiatives especially in the agrifood sector.

The periodic engagement of enterprising young people and rural, peri-urban and urban youth-led organizations in technical workshops and fora have gone a long way to deepen knowledge and some understanding of youth employment issues by various agencies. We have a long way to go, however, in the process of youth engagement in policy formulation, project design and implementation for the benefit of the bulging youth population. Some organizations simply choose to incorporate youth agenda in their framework of activities but when it comes to providing the necessary resources (financial and support services) to pragmatically implement those activities, they seem to be unenthusiastic. We have come to a stage where simply organizing conferences, fora, online discussions are seen by most youth as rather superfluous. We seem to be digesting and re-digesting the same old issues on youth unemployment. I tend to agree with them.

Worldwide, there are 1.2 billion young women and men between the ages of 15 and 24, 85 per cent of whom live in developing countries, often in rural areas. IFAD’s project portfolio includes a number of activities that focus explicitly on supporting rural youth, such as the establishment of young farmer clubs in Cambodia, business training in Vietnam and on Fiji, a youth employment programme in India, and a young professional programme in Afghanistan, if we look at the Asia and Pacific Region. Large portions of the population in IFAD’s partner countries are in the youth demographic – in Bangladesh the median age is 23.9 years, and in India half of the population is below 24 - making young women and men an important target group in all IFAD-supported projects.

Creating employment by supporting entrepreneurship: Young people often are confronted with a jobless market but have ideas for their own businesses. To give them the funds and capacity needed to turn these ideas into reality, the Finance for Enterprise Development and Employment Creation (FEDEC) project that is working in all areas of Bangladesh provided women and men with access to micro-entrepreneur loans as well as training on business management and technology aspects. Loans averaging USD 1000 supported a broad variety of businesses, ranging from producing cooking tools made of recycled aluminum, to producing clothes, to food processing. Worth noting is that an average of 1.5 additional jobs were created for every entrepreneur supported with a loan. So supporting small entrepreneurs with financial resources and capacity creates new opportunities and perspectives for others as well.

Amartya Sen addressing FAO Conference "If the world wants to conquer hunger, it needs to tackle all the causes of hunger simultaneously particularly poverty, and not just concentrate on producing more food", Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate in Economics, told the opening session of the FAO Conference on 15 June.

Delivering the McDougall Memorial Lecture on food security, Sen said:  "The main factors behind the continuation of world hunger include the huge continuation of poverty, despite the increasing prosperity of the modern world in terms of averages and totals."

"But poverty can be exacerbated by problems in the production side partly because of food supply falling behind food demand tends to raise food prices, which can make many families much poorer, given their incomes," Sen said.  

He pointed out that hunger and undernourishment are not uniform in a country, community, family or even among individuals within the same family. In analyzing causes of hunger, Sen added, governments will need to take into account "social norms and established conventions of sharing" especially between men and women, boys and girls.

Sen won the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his groundbreaking theory that hunger and starvation result from some people not having access to enough food - what he called entitlement - not because there is not enough food available in the country or region.

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said in his introductory remarks that Amartya Sen's approach has shifted the debate on hunger from food production to access to food and from charity to a rights-based approach and it has transformed the way we fight hunger and poverty today.

African hunger

In his lecture, Sen said Africa was not experiencing steadily rising per capita food availability, as Asia is. In Africa, per capita food production was only 4 per cent higher in 2011 compared with the average of 2004-6, and was 2 per cent lower in 2010. 

"Hence it is right to attach importance to policy initiatives that raise food production in Africa rather more robustly than has been happening," he said.

Sen urged Africa countries to consider diversifying their economies, including through industrialization. 

"For the long-run economic stability and security of Africa, economic diversification is quite crucial," he said. "There is absolutely no reason to believe that unlike all other people across the world, Africans somehow cannot industrialize successfully. To hold that view as a canon of faith comes close to, I fear, an odd kind of racism." 

Overcoming military and civil strife, expanding democratic governance, and also developing market institutions, are further conditions that are needed to end hunger in Africa. 

The role of public policy must also cover the expansion of health care, family planning facilities, basic education, especially of women, and social security provisions," Sen said. "All these can contribute - directly and indirectly - to nutritional security, to good health care, and to a more successful overall economy, including a healthy agricultural sector." 
  
Health care, education and hunger

Sen targeted maternal undernourishment, which he said not only ruined the health of the mothers but caused serious health problems for low-birth-weight children. "To prevent persistent undernutrition attention has to be paid to health care, in general, and in particular to the prevention of endemic diseases that deter the absorption of nutrients," he said.  

"There is also plenty of evidence to indicate that lack of basic education too contributes to undernourishment, partly because knowledge and communication are important, but also because the ability to secure jobs and incomes are influenced by the level of education." 

Summing up his speech, Sen said that: "These different influences, which operate together, demand that we do not isolate just one of those factors, and simply concentrate on that. We have to do many different things - together."  

Frank Lidgett McDougall, an Australian citizen, was one of the founders of FAO. Every two years, before the FAO Conference, the McDougall Lecture is delivered by a prominent personality working in the field of agriculture and hunger alleviation.

Download a copy of Amartya Sen's lecture here  in PDF or listen to the audio version here and a copy of FAO DG's introductory remarks here.

The recent Chicago Council's Global Agricultural Development Initiative symposium, “Capitalizing on the Power of Science, Trade, and Business to End Hunger and Poverty: A New Agenda for Global Food Security” offered its participants a series of perspectives into the future of global agricultural development – both the promise and the challenge of feeding a global population expected to reach more than nine billion people in only two generations’ time.

Future solutions to feeding a growing world require addressing gaps and constraints across the entirety of the scientific value chain for agriculture.  The Chicago Council rightly calls this a “two-pronged problem”: firstly to secure sufficient funding and education to develop new innovation and secondly to ensure adequate access to all innovations (existing or new), especially by smallholder farmers around the world.

The 2013 edition of FAO's Statistical Yearbook released today sheds new light on agriculture's contribution to global warming, trends in hunger and malnutrition and the state of the natural resource base upon which world food production depends.

Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture grew 1.6 percent per year during the decade after the year 2000, new FAO data presented in the yearbook show, with the sector's total annual output in 2010 reaching 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2 eq, a measure used to compare and aggregate different greenhouse gases). This equals 10 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Agrilinks hosted a Twitter Chat on Youth Employment in Agriculture last week. The Twitter Chat threw up several important issues that need to be considered in ensuring Youth Employment in Agriculture. As discussed during the Agrilinks' #AskAg chat on Youth Employment in Agriculture, youth are more likely to try innovative approaches when it comes to agriculture. If we are asking youth to try new technology, then we as development practitioners should try it too! The #AskAg Twitter Chat put our panel of experts—all Twitter newbies—to the test, and they passed handily. Tweets were streaming in at a rapid pace from Zambia to Mexico, Uganda to Ithaca, NY. To discuss youth employment, we brought together Rachel Blum (@rrblum) of USAID, Karen Brooks (@IFPRI) of IFPRI, David Feige (@DavidFeigeAg) of Making Cents International, and Carol O'Laughlin (@cbmo46) of Winrock International.

During the chat, our experts and participants addressed the following topics: