Photo credit: Bernard Pollack
1. Antonio Requejo says:
“I would love to see more funds directed to those young farmers who believe in what they are doing, those who are just starting in a very competitive and difficult industry. Much support is needed to keep them up to date and to protect the fragile and weak environment. And to those who work the land without destroying it.”
2. Alexandra Spieldoch, WOCAN, USA says:
“As Coordinator of the Network of Women Ministers and Leaders in Agriculture, I would like to see more funding go directly to women farmers to safeguard their innovative practices and traditional knowledge, to make sure they can have more control and ownership over their production, and to facilitate their access to markets.
3. Daniele Giovannucci, Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA), USA says:
“For me, current agriculture funding reviving the 1960s “green revolution” in ways and in places where it was neither practical nor viable is sheer hubris and misses the mark in many African situations. Africa’s systemic challenges make most agricultural problems local problems first and foremost. Put aside the valuable discussions about markets for a moment because, while undoubtedly valuable, these cannot much help the poorest who have no access or money to participate. While for decades the big economists recommended (and many still do) tens of millions of dollars toward grandiose western-oriented agricultural interventions, rural poverty continues unabated at the local and most vulnerable levels. Stop trying to change Africa and learn to work with Africa’s rural people. Invest, with their input, in the practical knowledge that makes a real local difference and is less dependent on the macro structures where, frankly, we have yet to make a substantial dent. I refer to: soil care, agro-pastoral integration, drought varieties, mixed companion plantings for risk management and nutrition security, water husbandry, and more. So, therefore, invest in the practical packaging/translation/expression of the wealth of agriculture information and technology that we already have in numerous research centers and in the accompanying dissemination via the existing socio-political networks and ground-based organizations.”
4. Mary Njenga, Urban Harvest, Kenya says:
“More agriculture funding should be directed to working very closely with communities at the grassroots and listening to their voices for enhanced impact.”
6. Mabel Toribio says:
“I would like to see more funding for projects that create food sovereignty among people at the grassroots (producing food at home or in co-operative groups); also, projects that support recovering the knowledge and techniques of indigenous communities for their application in agriculture; and projects that look to secure native seeds, with no transgenics, with the support and involvement of the local communities.”
6. Makere Stewart-Harawira, Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta, Canada
“This is such an important question and I’m afraid I disagree with other answers you’ve received. The thing is that the substitution of subsistence crops for export crops – primarily for the industrialized or northern nations – has left peasant farmers in Third World countries in many cases destitute. It has also, in many cases, been responsible for loss of critically important ground cover with devastating consequences. I believe that its critically important that we look at alternatives to restore local economies – and let me add in here the right to water without water meters as is the case in some areas.
7. Dale Lewis, COMACO, Zambia says:
“Funding specific needs is very wide-open – seed replication, developing lead farmer efforts, improved value-added process of healthy, eco-friendly crops, etc. etc. In general, I would fund research to identify agriculture efforts that are helping drive real solutions for sustainable agriculture that harmonize conservation with livelihoods while contributing to national economies. We need to find those examples and give them funding help – hopefully they’ll expand as models for others to emulate”
8. Chris Ojiewo, World Vegetable Center, Tanzania says:
“I would say that I would like to see more agricultural funding directed to nutrition based research. I would qualify this by saying a well nourished people will be productive and will work hard to be food self sufficient. Food security has been an issue of emphasis from many donors and policy makers, but nutritional security has fallen to the cracks. The effect of having a malnourished or under-nourished society is a vicious cycle of poor child development, poor mental capacity, low physical and intellectual productivity, poor health of expectant mother, poor health of the unborn baby, poor health of nursing mother, poor health of young children, overall poor health of the society, and the list continues. To cut the chain and break the cycle, emphasis should be made not only on food security, but on food and nutritional security as inseparable dimensions. This compels me to mention that vegetables, especially indigenous ones, and in this case African indigenous vegetables, mostly consumed as companions of cereal-based meals, have a very high potential that is yet to be exploited fully through organized scientific research and development.”
9. Molly Mattessich, National Peace Corps Association, USA
“I think that funding should be given to help smallholder farmers, especially women, to help them with their business plans to improve their own agricultural initiatives. In fact, that’s what we do on Africa Rural Connect.”
What is your answer? Email me at Dnierenberg@Worldwatch.org or tweet your response to @WorldWatchAg
Danielle Nierenberg, an expert on livestock and sustainability, currently serves as Project Director of State of World 2011 for the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, DC-based environmental think tank. Her knowledge of factory farming and its global spread and sustainable agriculture has been cited widely in the New York Times Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post, and
other publications.
Danielle worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She is currently traveling across Africa looking at innovations that are working to alleviate hunger and poverty and blogging everyday at Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet. She has a regular column with the Mail & Guardian, the Kansas City Star, and the Huffington Post and her writing was been featured in newspapers across Africa including the Cape Town Argus, the Zambia Daily Mail, Coast Week (Kenya), and other African publications. She holds an M.S. in agriculture, food, and environment from Tufts University and a B.A. in environmental policy from Monmouth College.
