" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 26, 2011

 

 

·       Gates’ next target: Revolutionize farming

·       Monsanto shareholders reject risk study

·       Fed planting map reflects warming trend

·       Low-till ag gets its day in California

·       Progress towards a food-secure Africa

 

 

Gates’ next target: Revolutionize farming

 

(Forbes) – While still focusing on eradicating polio as his eponymous foundation’s “top priority,” Bill Gates says in his annual letter that he is increasingly troubled by the lack of investment into new research in agriculture.

 

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already been Gates says his foundation has devoted $2 billion to help poor farmers boost their productivity. But the annual letter is a public way to set the priorities for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest charitable foundation with a $36 billion endowment. Most of the $25 billion the foundation has given away so far has been devoted to public health, with $6 billion focused on vaccines, including the polio effort.

 

America’s richest man says that it is a terrible irony that most of the billion people, 15% of the world population, who live in extreme poverty and must worry about where they will get their next meal are suffering on farms. He says that the world needs to repeat the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, when new farming technologies, including new seed varieties of rice, wheat, and corn, increased the amount of food available and decreased its price.

 

“The world faces a clear choice,” he writes. “If we invest relatively modest amounts, many more poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don’t, one in seven people will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation.”

 

That’s staggering considering that only $3 billion is spent on agricultural research on the seven most important crops, Gates says, including $1.5 billion from countries, $1.2 billion from private companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, and $300 million by an agency called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

 

Gates writes:

 

“We do all these things with one goal in mind—helping people like Christina Mwinjipe, a farmer I met last year in Tanzania. Christina supports her family by farming cassava, a staple crop that provides a basic diet for more than 500 million people worldwide. (When dried to a powder, cassava is known as tapioca.) In the past two years, Christina’s crop has been invaded by two cassava diseases. The leaves of some of her plants are curled and withered, and covered in the white flies that carry mosaic disease. The roots of other plants are rotted by brown streak disease. Because of these diseases, she is depleting her savings to buy cassava to feed her three children. Her oldest son just passed his examinations to enter secondary school, but she doesn’t know where she’ll find the money to pay his fees. She is not sure what she will do about food when her savings run out.

 

For Christina and other small farmers—and for hundreds of millions of extremely poor people living in slums in big cities—getting food is the most pressing daily concern. And food is strongly connected to another constant worry: basic health. The lack of adequate nutrition is a key reason why poor children so often die of diseases like diarrhea that richer and better-fed children are able to fight off. Poor nutrition in childhood also prevents the development of both the brain and the body, severely and irreversibly limiting children’s ability to grow, learn, and become healthy, productive adults. Ultimately, there is very little in Christina’s life—or her children’s lives—that doesn’t depend on her cassava crop.

 

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Monsanto shareholders reject risk study

 

ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Shareholders of Monsanto Co. on Tuesday voted down a proposed study of how the company's genetically engineered crops, or GMOs, may pose financial and legal risks to the seed giant. They also reelected four of the company's directors and approved compensation packages during the annual meeting.

 

Napa, Calif.-based Harrington Investments had put up for shareholder vote a request to study "material financial risks or operational impacts" of the chemicals and genetically modified crops that Monsanto sells.

 

Monsanto's seeds are engineered to withstand the weed killer Roundup, allowing farmers to reduce the use of other chemicals and limit the practice of tilling fields to kill weeds. The company's seeds dominate corn, soybean and sugar beet production in the U.S.

 

Harrington Investments CEO John Harrington said in a statement that he is concerned about the possible environmental and economic impacts of Monsanto's engineered crops. The plants have patented genes inside them, and some countries, particularly in Europe, block U.S. crop exports if traces of those genes are present.

 

Harrington said he is concerned that "genetic drift" from engineered crops could contaminate farmers' organic crops and prohibit those crops from being sold to markets in Europe, China and Japan.

 

"The potential legal implications for Monsanto are staggering," Harrington said.

 

St. Louis-based Monsanto had recommended shareholders defeat the proposal. The company said an additional report on that topic would "be redundant and provide no meaningful additional information" because Monsanto has already studied the issue extensively. Most shareholders present at the meeting voted against the proposal, with only a small percentage voting in favor, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday.

 

Lawsuits have been filed on the issue. In August, three environmental groups filed in West Virginia seeking to have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service halt the planting of genetically-modified crops on 44,000 acres of federal land in the South. The Center for Food Safety, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Beyond Pesticides pursued two similar lawsuits in Delaware, which resulted in the agency ending the practice in its 12-state northeast region.

 

The groups maintain that the use of genetically-engineered crops such as those modified to resist the herbicide glyphosate — marketed by Monsanto as RoundUp — promotes growth of different feeds that wildlife would not normally be eating. In 2010, a California judge ruled that GMO beet seeds developed by Monsanto would not be able to be planted until the U.S. Department of Agriculture reviewed the effect those crops could have on other food.

 

Separately, shareholders voted to keep Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant and directors Janice Fields, C. Steven McMillan and Robert J. Stevens on the board until 2015. Shareholders also approved executive pay and bonus plans.

 

The company earlier this month reported a surge in fiscal first-quarter earnings on strong seed sales and lifted its 2012 forecast to the high end of previous estimates. Monsanto has said it's seen a very strong start to the year, with real growth in Latin America and early orders in the United States.

 

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Fed planting map reflects warming trend

 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government’s colorful map of planting zones is being updated for a warmer 21st century.

 

The official guide for 80 million gardeners and a staple on seed packets reflects a new reality: The coldest day of the year isn’t as cold as it used to be. So some plants that once seemed too vulnerable to cold can now survive farther north.

 

It’s the first time since 1990 that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has updated the map and much has changed. Nearly entire states, such as Ohio, Nebraska and Texas, are in warmer zones.

 

The new guide, unveiled Wednesday at the National Arboretum, also uses better weather data and offers more interactive technology.

 

“It truly does reflect state of the art,” said USDA chief scientist Catherine Woteki.

 

Gardeners can register their zip code into the online map and their zone will pop up. It shows the exact average coldest temperature for each of the 26 zones, even though zones are based on five degree increments.

 

For example, Des Moines, Iowa, used to be in zone 5a, meaning the lowest temperature on average was between minus 15 and minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Now it’s 5b, which has a coldest temperature of 10 to 15 degrees below zero.

 

“People who grow plants are well aware of the fact that temperatures have gotten more mild throughout the year, particularly in the winter time,” said Boston University biology professor Richard Primack. “There’s a lot of things you can grow now that you couldn’t grow before.”

 

He uses the giant fig tree in his suburban Boston yard as an example.

 

“People don’t think of figs as a crop you can grow in the Boston area. You can do it now,” he said.

 

An earlier effort to update the planting map caused a bit of an uproar when the USDA in 2003 decided not to use a map it commissioned that reflected warmer weather. The Arbor Day Foundation later issued its own hardiness guide that had the toastier climate zones. The new federal map is very similar to the one the private plant group adopted six years ago, said Arbor Day Foundation Vice President Woodrow Nelson.

 

In Des Moines, Jerry Holub, a manager for the Earl May Nursery chain, doesn’t think the warmer zone will have much of an impact on gardeners. But he said this may mean residents can even try passion flowers.

 

“Now you can put them in safely, when you couldn’t before,” he said.

 

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Low-till ag gets its day in California

 

(Merced Sun-Star) – Central Valley farmers are slowly getting hip to the idea that tilling land before planting seeds may not always be necessary.

 

Conservation tillage has long been in vogue in places such as the Midwest and South America. Now in California, leaving land undisturbed between planting and harvesting cycles has started to catch on.

 

Advocates say conservation tillage is an array of practices aimed not only at saving farmers money, but also enriching the soil and improving air quality.

 

In 2010, Valley farmers used conservation tillage practices on 14 percent of crops surveyed, according to a University of California study. That's up from about 10 percent in 2008.

 

Between 2008 and 2010, Central Valley farmers switched to conservation tillage on nearly 1 million acres used to grow row crops such as corn and wheat silage, according to Sustainable Conservation, a nonprofit located in the Central Valley. That's more than 1,500 square miles and represents nearly 15 percent of all row-crop acreage in California. From 2004 to 2010, conservation tillage practices rose 24 percent for all silage corn acreage in the San Joaquin Valley.

 

"There has been a definite trend towards greater use of these systems, especially for crops like corn that readily lends itself to these practices," said Jeff Mitchell, agricultural scientist with UC Davis.

 

For California farmers, the decision whether to adopt conservation tillage isn't always a clear one.

 

"The reason people did it back (East) is soil erosion," Mitchell said. "You can't tolerate soil loss where there are rolling hills."

 

Conservation tillage techniques that allow the previous year's stalks and roots to naturally decompose in the field, creating a hardy layer of topsoil that doesn't blow away in the wind.

 

But that's not as big of a concern in the relatively flat Central Valley. In California, traditional tillage practices that rip up and turn over land are a relatively inexpensive way to prepare soil for the planting season.

 

Michael Crowell, 69, said he was "skeptical" when a Bay Area company first offered its services to help him transition his corn and grain fields to conservation tillage. "But I said 'come in and do 20 acres and we'll just see what it looks like,' " he said.

 

Six years later, the 69-year-old dairy farmer in Turlock uses conservation tillage techniques on every acre of his farm. "It reduces the amount of equipment that you need to have to operate," he said. "It also reduces the amount of fuel required to plant a crop. And it requires less labor because you're not running as much equipment to get the job done."

 

Crowell said there are tradeoffs. For example, with conservation tillage, crops have to be dry when harvested -- otherwise the ground becomes too compacted and nutrient levels have to be measured closely.

 

However, he said conservation tillage not only saves him money, it also improves the health of his soil. He recently returned from a conservation tillage convention in St. Louis. He said many farmers he met there have been able to significantly reduce their use of nitrogen and other fertilizers because of the their soil quality.

 

"Once you start this, you don't want to destroy the ecology, the soil structure, the organization that's down there as far as bacteria and enzymes that are working in the soil," he said. "We look at this dirt and we just think we're standing on dirt. No. You go out in that field and that dirt is a living organism. It's just alive. There are earthworms everywhere. And on tilled fields show me that. You just don't see it."

 

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Progress towards a food-secure Africa

 

NAIROBI, Jan 20 (IPS) - A growing number of African countries are making significant progress towards eradicating extreme hunger and poverty. Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and South Africa are some of the countries that have made tremendous achievements towards achieving these goals.

 

This has been reflected in a hunger-free score card geared towards measuring food security in Africa by ActionAid International, a non-governmental organisation that works towards a world without poverty and also in research by ACORD, the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development, which is an authority on food security in Africa.

 

In Ghana over the last 15 years the number of food insecure people has significantly decreased from 34 percent to eight percent. The country’s school feeding programme reaches one million children, according to data from this West African nation’s Ministry of Agriculture.

 

Since the decade-long civil war ended in 2002, Sierra Leone has dramatically increased its arable land to nearly 1.8 million hectares, consequently reducing the number of people going hungry by nearly 10 percent, also according to data by the country’s Ministry of Agriculture.

 

Agriculture, as in many African countries, is the bedrock of Rwanda’s economy. According to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, the sector generates 45 percent of export revenue and accounts for an estimated 90 percent of all food consumed.

 

George Nderi, a market analyst in Nairobi, explained: "In the last five years, Rwanda’s agricultural sector has been growing at an average of 4.5 percent, contributing an estimated 36 percent to the overall GDP, the highest in East Africa."

 

He said that both Kenya and Uganda’s agricultural sectors contributed an estimated 24 percent to the country’s GDP, with Tanzania contributing 25 percent.

 

According to the World Bank, Rwanda’s economy is growing at a healthy rate of 7.8 percent, at least two points ahead of the East African Community.

 

"It is imperative to note that some drought-prone countries have also reduced their number of food insecure people. In Ethiopia, for instance, in the last year the number of food insecure people has decreased from 5.2 to 3.2 million, reducing nationwide malnutrition by 32 percent," Nderi said.

 

According to the 2011 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey, deaths of children under the age of five stood at 20 percent in 1990 but have fallen to 8.8 percent. Malnutrition accounts for at least half of these deaths according to the World Health Organization.

 

Amos Kiptanui, a small-scale farmer in Kenya’s Rift Valley Province, which is also known as the country’s breadbasket, said that these positive steps have been as a result of financial and political commitment to eradicate hunger and malnutrition.

 

"Rwanda was the first country in Africa to sign on to the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP). The country has also doubled its expenditure on agriculture to the current 10 percent meeting the CAADP policy framework," he said.

 

CAADP requires that countries signatory to the agreement allocate at least 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture.

 

"African countries that have made progress to sufficiently feed their people have done so by mainly investing in small-scale farmers who account for more than 90 percent of Africa’s agricultural production," Nancy Mumbi, an agricultural researcher and extension officer in Kenya’s Central Province, said.

 

She added that in 2011, Rwanda’s government committed an extra five million dollars to the agricultural sector.

 

"With an agricultural budget of at least 112 million dollars, these resources continue to benefit Rwandan farmers through subsidising inputs such as fertilisers and providing training in modern technologies that can improve production. In fact, there has been a government programme to boost the use of agriculture," Numbi said.

 

Other countries that have improved their budgetary allocations to agriculture are Sierra Leone, Kenya and Malawi.

 

Since 2005, Malawi has strived to allocate at least 10 percent of its national budget to agriculture. Kenya’s budgetary allocation to agriculture has leaped from a paltry four percent in the previous financial year to the current nine percent. It remains one percentage point shy of meeting the CAADP policy framework.

 

Ghana’s food security success has been attributed to the country’s long-term commitment to agriculture.

 

"Just like in Rwanda, there’s a national fertiliser subsidy project in Ghana that enables farmers to restore exhausted soil resulting from poor management of arable lands making them incapable of supporting the growth of crops," Mumbi said.

 

"Countries that have improved food security levels are those that have protected land from degradation caused by various factors such as over-use of inorganic chemicals, bush fires, deforestation and over grazing."

 

In Kenya, the degradation of the Mau Forest caused severe climatic changes that resulted in reduced rainfall, which affected farming in the Rift Valley Province and consequently caused a food shortage.

 

The Mau Forest is the country’s largest carbon reservoir and largest water tower. The forest is also responsible for flood mitigation and water storage, and reduces soil erosion. The country has embarked on a massive campaign to restore the forest and to create a ripple effect that will improve food security in the region.

 

Senegal has been working on an ambitious plan to achieve food sufficiency by 2015. The country is providing farmers with subsidised seed and fertiliser inputs. It also supports a food security and child nutrition programme that aims to improve the nutrition of children under five years, and pregnant and nursing women.

 

Other countries that are making tangible steps to be food secure include Algeria Morocco, Egypt , Tunisia, Botswana and Gabon.

 

Although the increasing number of countries significantly fighting hunger is a step in the right direction, much more needs to be done as Ousainou Ngum, the executive director of ACORD.

 

"African countries must realign their investment policies to focus on agriculture and food production. The food crisis facing the continent is because of incoherent policies. If leaders do not coordinate their policies well, millions of Africans will continue to starve due to food shortages,

 

"Our leaders must create investments that are conducive to agricultural sector, with a bias towards small scale farmers, women and pastoralists. At least 270 million Africans out of the continent’s population of 800 million were suffering from hunger. To address this, strategies to increase food production on the continent must also address security to land tenure and better access to markets."

 

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