Food retailers and manufacturers are increasingly committing to address agricultural sustainability issues in their supply chains. In place of using established eco-certifications, many companies define their own supply chain sustainability standards. Scholars remain divided on whether we should expect such company-led programs to affect change. We use a major food retailer as a critical case to evaluate the effectiveness of a company-led supply chain standard in improving environmental farm management practices. We find that the company-led standard increases the adoption of most environmental best management practices among the company's fruit, vegetable and flower growers in South Africa. This result is robust across two identification strategies: a panel analysis of over 950 farm audits and a cross-sectional matching analysis using original survey data. In-depth interviews suggest that the program's unique focus on capacity building through audit visits by highly trained staff, coupled with a close business relationship between the retailer and their growers help to explain the increased effectiveness of the program as compared to other private environmental standards. Contrary to the argument that company-led initiatives are mere window dressing, this study provides a critical example of the positive role private governance mechanisms can play in improving environmental farm management practices globally.
Food security experts identify government support, policy implementation, private sector engagement and investment in smallholder farmers as keys to Africa’s agricultural future.
Food security experts from the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) gathered to discuss transforming food production in Africa at Stanford on Nov. 29. The symposium, hosted by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) examined the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa.
Moderator Ertharin Cousin, FSE visiting fellow and previous World Food Programme director with more than 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, launched the panel by outlining Africa’s plight. “Today some 100 million of the farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa farm less than 2 hectares of land. Some 80 percent of those living in rural areas are poor. More than 30 percent of the rural population is chronically hungry and 35 percent of the under-five-year-olds are stunted. By 2050, the bulk of the world's population growth will take place on the continent. In fact, some project that 1.3 billion will be added to the continent, and Nigeria’s [population] will grow larger than the size of the United States between now and 2050,” Cousin said
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While Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity worldwide, the continent also contains over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. Panelists included Agnes Kalibata, AGRA President and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda; Kanayo F. Nwanze, AGRA board member and immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development; Usha Barwale Zehr, AGRA board member and Director and Chief Technology Officer of Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Private Limited; and Rajiv Shah, AGRA board member, Rockefeller Foundation President and former Administer of USAID.
Kanayo F. Nwanze stressed the importance of agricultural transformation for Africa’s future. “No country in the world ever transformed itself without going through an agrarian change. No country. Europe, 17th; Japan, 18th century; 19th century was the US, your country; China, 20th century. Why should they be different from Africa? So, first and foremost, we have to have total agricultural transformation,” Nwanze said.
AGRA president, Agnes Kalibata, also spoke to the need for policy implementation and government support in helping drive change. “AGRA as an institution can only do so much. But these governments have the potential and the capacity to reach every corner of their countries. The problem is they are challenged by capacity to do that, by capacity to design proper programs, and by capacity to implement these programs,” Kalibata said.
Expanding on governments' ability to impact and drive change, Usha Barwale Zehr highlighted Asia’s success, specifically with strategic partnerships. “…we've done a lot of talking about public/private partnership. Not so much on the ground on implementing it in a manner, which happened in Asia, for instance, where there was policy, and, most importantly, government will. The government was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that agriculture was transformed at the end of it,” Zehr said.
Beyond government and policy support the panelists also addressed the need for innovation and access to seed technologies. “Why is it that the African farmer and the Indian farmer should not have access to what the American farmer has access to today and reaps benefit from it? …So it's the hybrids, the varieties, the GM technology. Tomorrow it'll be the gene-edited products. And after that we will talk about the satellite-based imaging data that we will use for developing drought-tolerant crops for that very, very small micro environment that existed in the one district in Nigeria,” Zehr said.
"By 2050, who is going to feed Africa? … It's the youth of today. But they're not going to be using the same technologies that exist today. Just think of what IT can do, aggregation, organization of farmer's groups. So, the elements are there. I see the agriculture of tomorrow meeting the challenge – for Africa meeting that challenge is Africa being at the forefront of feeding the world. Africa has to be able to feed itself first. And we have all the opportunities there,” Nwanze said.
This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
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Panel members at the Global Food Security Symposium, Nov. 29 2017.
Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment launches new symposium series focused on global food security with panel exploring Africa’s agricultural potential.
Organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), the Nov. 29 symposium is the first in the center’s new Global Food Security Symposium series. Panel members include visiting AGRA board members, who will examine the challenges, strategies, and possible solutions for catalyzing and sustaining an inclusive agriculture transformation in Africa. This symposium marks the third series established by FSE convening thought leaders addressing global food security issues.
Afflicted by conflict, political upheaval, and extreme weather patterns Africa continues to experience the highest occurrence of food insecurity. However, with over 60 percent of the worlds uncultivated but fertile land, there is significant room for improvement. AGRA formed in 2006 to fulfill the vision that Africa can feed itself and the world. As an alliance led by Africans with roots in farming communities across the continent, they work to understand the unique needs of farmers and offer sustainable solutions designed to boost production.
In a region with 27.4 percent of the population currently experiencing food insecurity, creating a sustainable agricultural revolution remains a key solution to improving food security across the area. Moderated by Ertharin Cousin, previous World Food Programme director, with 25 years of experience on hunger, food, and resilience strategies, the panel will explore how an agricultural transformation in Africa can sustain a growing population, relieve hunger, generate jobs, improve social cohesion, and create global exports.
Panel members include: Ertharin Cousin (moderator), Payne Distinguished Lecturer at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, former US Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome.
Agnes Kalibata, the President of AGRA and former Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources of Rwanda.
Kanayo F. Nwanze, the immediate past president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), winner of the Africa Food Prize in 2016, AGRA board member.
Rajiv Shah, Rockefeller Foundation President, former Administer of USAID (2010-15) where he led bipartisan reform and expansion of US efforts combating global food insecurity. During his previous work at the Gates Foundation he helped launched AGRA.
Usha Barwale Zehr, Director and Chief Technology Officer at Maharashtra – one of India’s largest and most successful multinational seed companies – and AGRA board member.
This is the first installment of the Global Food Security Symposium series hosted by Stanford University's Center on Food Security and the Environment and generously supported by Zach Nelson and Elizabeth Horn. FSE is a joint initiative of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Oil palm production expanded 1.2 million hectares in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990, with expansion accelerating in several heavily forested countries since 2000. Despite a narrative of expansion driven by multinational corporations, we provide evidence of a dynamic non-industrial oil palm production sector linked to a burgeoning informal milling enterprise. Surveys were conducted with oil palm farmers in Cameroon (n = 546), the third largest palm oil producer on the continent with the greatest amount of deforestation due to recent expansion, to determine who is expanding into forest. Seventy-three percent of survey respondents reported clearing forest, the magnitude of which was explained by differences in milling strategies and supply chain integration. Large-scale, non-industrial producers played a disproportionate role in deforestation, many of which were engaged in informal supply chains through the use of non-industrial mills. Farms associated with more clearing tended to use high-yielding seedlings. Even the highest yielding farms, however, averaged only 7.7 tons fresh fruit bunches (FFBs) ha−1 yr−1, well below the potential 20 tons FFBs ha−1 yr−1 yield for Cameroon. We also found a strong relationship between deforestation and land claims. Most farms claimed ownership of their land, although only 5% had official land titles. Conservation challenges in the region arise from land tenure laws that incentivize forest clearing. This study sheds light on the role of informal supply chains in deforestation and highlights the need for strict implementation and enforcement of land use zoning policies.
Food security will be increasingly challenged by climate change, natural resource degradation, and population growth. Wheat yields, in particular, have already stagnated in many regions and will be further affected by warming temperatures. Despite these challenges, wheat yields can be increased by improving management practices in regions with existing yield gaps. To identify the magnitude and causes of current yield gaps in India, one of the largest wheat producers globally, we produced 30 meter resolution yield maps from 2001 to 2015 across the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP), the nation's main wheat belt. Yield maps were derived using a new method that translates satellite vegetation indices to yield estimates using crop model simulations, bypassing the need for ground calibration data. This is one of the first attempts to apply this method to a smallholder agriculture system, where ground calibration data are rarely available. We find that yields can be increased by 11% on average and up to 32% in the eastern IGP by improving management to current best practices within a given district. Additionally, if current best practices from the highest-yielding state of Punjab are implemented in the eastern IGP, yields could increase by almost 110%. Considering the factors that most influence yields, later sow dates and warmer temperatures are most associated with low yields across the IGP. This suggests that strategies to reduce the negative effects of heat stress, like earlier sowing and planting heat-tolerant wheat varieties, are critical to increasing wheat yields in this globally-important agricultural region.
Although development organizations agree that reliable access to energy and energy services—one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals—is likely to have profound and perhaps disproportionate impacts on women, few studies have directly empirically estimated the impact of energy access on women's empowerment. This is a result of both a relative dearth of energy access evaluations in general and a lack of clarity on how to quantify gender impacts of development projects. Here we present an evaluation of the impacts of the Solar Market Garden—a distributed photovoltaic irrigation project—on the level and structure of women's empowerment in Benin, West Africa. We use a quasi-experimental design (matched-pair villages) to estimate changes in empowerment for project beneficiaries after one year of Solar Market Garden production relative to non-beneficiaries in both treatment and comparison villages (n = 771). To create an empowerment metric, we constructed a set of general questions based on existing theories of empowerment, and then used latent variable analysis to understand the underlying structure of empowerment locally. We repeated this analysis at follow-up to understand whether the structure of empowerment had changed over time, and then measured changes in both the levels and likelihood of empowerment over time. We show that the Solar Market Garden significantly positively impacted women's empowerment, particularly through the domain of economic independence. In addition to providing rigorous evidence for the impact of a rural renewable energy project on women's empowerment, our work lays out a methodology that can be used in the future to benchmark the gender impacts of energy projects.
Accurate measurements of crop production in smallholder farming systems are critical to the understanding of yield constraints and, thus, setting the appropriate agronomic investments and policies for improving food security and reducing poverty. Nevertheless, mapping the yields of smallholder farms is challenging because of factors such as small field sizes and heterogeneous landscapes. Recent advances in fine-resolution satellite sensors offer promise for monitoring and characterizing the production of smallholder farms. In this study, we investigated the utility of different sensors, including the commercial Skysat and RapidEye satellites and the publicly accessible Sentinel-2, for tracking smallholder maize yield variation throughout a ~40,000 km2western Kenya region. We tested the potential of two types of multiple regression models for predicting yield: (i) a “calibrated model”, which required ground-measured yield and weather data for calibration, and (ii) an “uncalibrated model”, which used a process-based crop model to generate daily vegetation index and end-of-season biomass and/or yield as pseudo training samples. Model performance was evaluated at the field, division, and district scales using a combination of farmer surveys and crop cuts across thousands of smallholder plots in western Kenya. Results show that the “calibrated” approach captured a significant fraction (R2 between 0.3 and 0.6) of yield variations at aggregated administrative units (e.g., districts and divisions), while the “uncalibrated” approach performed only slightly worse. For both approaches, we found that predictions using the MERIS Terrestrial Chlorophyll Index (MTCI), which included the red edge band available in RapidEye and Sentinel-2, were superior to those made using other commonly used vegetation indices. We also found that multiple refinements to the crop simulation procedures led to improvements in the “uncalibrated” approach. We identified the prevalence of small field sizes, intercropping management, and cloudy satellite images as major challenges to improve the model performance. Overall, this study suggested that high-resolution satellite imagery can be used to map yields of smallholder farming systems, and the methodology presented in this study could serve as a good foundation for other smallholder farming systems in the world.
Stanford welcomes Cousin, a global hunger expert, to the Center on Food Security and the Environment.
The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University is pleased to announce that former U.S. Ambassador and World Food Programme (WFP) Director Ertharin Cousin will serve as this year’s Frank E. and Arthur W. Payne Distinguished Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE).
Cousin brings over 25 years of experience addressing hunger and food security strategies on both a national and international scale. As U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture, she focused on advocating for longer-term solutions to food insecurity and hunger, and at WFP she addressed the challenges of food insecurity in conflict situations.
“Dr. Cousin’s outstanding leadership at the WFP and extensive experience in public service exemplifies the attributes we seek for Payne Lecturers,” says FSI Director Michael McFaul. The Payne Distinguished Lectureship is awarded to scholars with international reputations as leaders, with an emphasis on visionary thinking, practical problem solving, and the capacity to clearly articulate an important perspective on the global political and social situation. Past Payne Lecturers include Bill Gates, Nobel Laureate Mohamed El Baradei, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot, and novelist Ian McEwan.
As a visiting fellow with FSE, Cousin will be working to further her research focus on global food security and humanitarian efforts. In November 2015, FSE welcomed Cousin as the featured speaker in their Food and Nutrition Symposium series, where she presented her paper “Achieving food security and nutrition for the furthest behind in an era of conflict and climate change.” FSE Director, Roz Naylor, sees Cousin’s appointment as a pivotal opportunity for FSE and FSI to advance a global agenda on food security and human rights. “Ertharin Cousin is one of the most inspirational leaders we could ever hope to attract to Stanford as a year-long visitor,” Naylor says.
“This is a truly humbling, yet exciting prospect,” says Cousin. “This position provides an opportunity for scholarly work and dialogue with distinguished academics across Stanford's schools and policy institutes. I also look forward to the opportunity to convene thought leaders from a broad variety of backgrounds, who can help us explore some of the intractable issues plaguing humanitarian and development practitioners today.”
Following the completion of her term with the WFP, Cousin accepted an appointment as a Distinguished Fellow with The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, which conducts research on food and agriculture, global cities, economics, energy, immigration, security, public opinion, and water. Cousin hopes her appointments can provide a unique collaborative opportunity to expand her work on food security and nutrition issues.
“In my career I have never before been given the opportunity of pursuing intellectual inspiration. Just thinking about the ‘what’s possible’ gives me genuine pleasure,” Cousin said.
About FSE
The Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE) is a research center at Stanford University, jointly funded by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
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WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin speaks to a little boy in the Central African Republic during her visit in late March 2014. Photo: WFP
