Grains and Leaves: Weekly Ag-Related News, Events, and Others

• Check out Farming First's excellent guide to understand global Food Security Initiatives and tell me what you think about their Food Security Statement
• Gordon Conway argues about the importance of continued support for agriculture development in Africa and presents the latest  Montpelier Report Growth with Resilience: Opportunities in African Agriculture
• Read the The Guardian's coverage of the report, and while you are doing that say hi to their wonderful section on Global Development
• The republican party proposes severe cuts to foreign aid, including Obama's flagship Feed the Future Initiative. See Chicago Council's Roger Thurow thoughtful commentary  
• Tired of crude poverty pictures? Tried to figures at FAO's 2012 Statistical Yearbook. The report covers the key factors related to global food and agricultural production and how they interact with broader issues.
• Check out the work of Harvest Plus' innovative and promising work on bio-fortification. They are adding Vitamin A the the otherwise micro nutrient-deficient Cassava and rolling it out in Nigeria. 
• The Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for the Future will release on April 2 a game dubbed Catalyst for Change -  not sure exactly what this is about seems like a neat idea
• Obama Picks Dr. Kim and heads for a world tour to promote his candidacy. Would Ocampo and Okonjo-Iweala have a chance? Probably not
• IFPRI tell us why we should love them: Reducing Poverty and Hunger through Food Policy Research 
• Soon i'll be blogging about a recent conference i attended on “Debates in Development: The Search for Answers"  and Michael Clemens' views

Focus on Farmers to Feed the World by 2050

The Female Face of Farming

Check out this cool initiative started by FAO and Farming First about the role of women in food production.

Also, IFPRI just published a great book, Reshaping Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, about the linkages that exist between these sectors. 

Grains and Leaves: Weekly Ag-Related News, Events, and Others

• The Economist The Guardian and FT write about nutrition after Save the Children publishes A Life Free From Hunger: Tackling Child Malnutrition  
• “Just because we can produce more on less doesn’t mean people will stop expanding (land for crops)” Says Ruth Defries from The Earth Institute referring to a common misconception about increases in productivity lead to less deforestation.
• Gates criticizes outdated UN agencies Gates attacks 'outdated' UN food agencies
• New World Bank data reports a drop in extreme poverty in every continent: Many write about it: The Economist, Shanta Devarajan's Blog
• Foreign Policy report about the Last Famine
• USAID's Infant and Young Child Nutrition Project ends, leaving behind a website full of great resources
• The Guardian reports how Ethiopian farmers are testing new chickpea crops. This comes after PepsiCo announced last year to invest in country’s Chickpeas crops
• Gates Foundation continues to bankroll agricultural projects
• Forbes’ Bill Conerly writes about the money main in ag commodities
• NPR on Monsanto’s recent court victory over organic growers’ patent sue 
• Oliver De Schutter, UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

A História da Agricultura e a Economia Verde

Check out the English version HERE of this great video

Brazil's Most Valuable Export: Fome Zero and its Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos da Agricultura Familiar (PAA)

With funding from Brazilian Cooperation Agency (ABC), the country's foreign aid agency,  WFP and FAO are rolling out a new food security program modeled after the successful Programa de  Aquisição de Alimentos da Agricultura Familiar (PAA). PAA, Family Agriculture Food Procurement Program, connects smallholder farmers with school feeding programs by purchasing their products at a subsidized price. In addition, PAA gives farmers access to credit, training, and technical advice. 

The government committed 2.3 million dollars for pilot projects in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger and Senegal. According the WFP, these funds will strengthen their ongoing initiative on local procurement called P4P.

This is also the latest example of the growing south-to-south cooperation between Brazil and the rest of the developing world. In addition to private investments in soybean cultivation in Mozambique, this year the Brazilian government formed an alliance with WFP to open the Center of Excellence against Hunger. The goal of this initiative is the strengthen developing countries' capacity to design and carry out effective programs against food insecurity and malnutrition, with special emphasis on school feeding. Watch WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran describe the Center.

Mozambique's Soybean Potential

As some of you know, I'll be traveling to Mozambique over the summer to work on a new UN initiative named REACH - Renew Efforts Against Child Hunger. The overall goal of REACH is to facilitate better governance and management of nutrition programs and ensure that UN agencies (FAO, WFP, UNICEF, and WHO) are coordinating their nutrition interventions.

With more than 40% of children under five stunted, Mozambique's government has prioritized the fight against chronic malnutrition. However, the integrated nature of nutrition programming makes it difficult to  operationalize, specially in Mozambique where there are so many development agencies and initiatives working at the same time.

Agricultural projects that can have a positive impact in reducing stunting are gaining traction in the development discourse.  Mozambique has an incredible potential to increase its food production and use agricultural development as an powerful engine for economic growth. The country has plenty of unused arable land, growing urban markets inside and abroad, cheap labor, and a great geographic location, with deep-water ports and infrastructure projects needing relatively little investments.

Can soybean lead the way in agricultural development? As the video below shows, the Northern part of the country has soils similar to those in the Cerrado - the Brazilian soy basket. According to the video, the Mozambique government recently signed an agreement with Brazilian soy farmers, allowing them to farm these lands in exchange for increased labor demand and technological advice on soy farming.

The initiative is also been supported by EMBRAPA, Brazil's agricultural research agency along with JICA and USAID. They are all working with government officials to adapt seed varieties to the Northern region and identify the steps need to develop soy's the value chain.

Similar, a World Bank study recently noted the following:

Soybean is a fairly new crop in Mozambique, but agricultural and market scenarios suggest a high potential in the northern Zambezia/southern Niassa area of northern Mozambique, and in Manica and Tete provinces in central Mozambique. In both production areas, improved soybean production can strongly benefit from a local good demand of soybean sub-products and investments in new industrial units, and from  already existing roads and railways linking to the important consumer markets of Beira  in the center and Nampula and Nacala in the north

More recently, Rei do Agro, a local agricultural firm, announced the plantation of 500 hectares of soybeans in the Zambézia province. This follows similar private sector initiatives that are taking advantage of the increasing world demand for soybeans to invest in Mozambique's crop potential.

At first look this makes sense. Soybean are one of the country's top 5 imports in terms of volume and value. With an increasing trade deficit, it makes sense to promote the crop as an import substitute and, in the future, as an export to satisfy growing world demand for the commodity.

Another good reason to promote soy is that the soil type in the north renders it unsuitable for other cash crops. Like the Cerrados in the 70's, these soils are consider wasteland.

In terms of nutrition, the high caloric and protein content of soybeans is also attractive given the country's high incidence of stunting. In theory, soybeans could play an important role in meeting the caloric requirements of Mozambicans while generating cash to access other products.

However, little evidence exist about the positive linkages between agricultural growth and reduction in chronic malnutrition. Although it may seem intuitive to think that higher food availability and/or increase incomes will improve diets, the link between those hasn't quite been demonstrated by robust studies. Moreover, most soybean production is used for livestock feed and the processing for human consumption requires a more complex value chain that the country currently lacks.

So the question remains: Would soybean serve as an engine of economic growth, providing much needed cash, calories, and employment for thousands of Mozambicans or would the project be added to the long list of failed mono-culture promotion initiatives in the past few decades? For now the jury is still out. Stay tuned.