Yeah. Okay, okay. Yeah, this is
the New Horizons speaker series that we have here,
bringing experts from around the country and internationally now come
and talk to other venues around Virginia Tech to kind
of share in the knowledge break things here, but
also wants you and especially the students challenge, ask
the questions asked why why not? How come,
What if get them to do a good report back
and forth. So this is what this is for
. And let's have some fun. Please ensure your
cell phones are turned off. We are being recorded
so afterwards we can come after you and say,
hey, you should turn yourself up, just kidding
on that, it is being recorded so others who
couldn't make it, we'll be able to see this
. So you're, would you please introduce our speaker
? Thank you. Thank you very much. I'd
like to expand uh introductory remarks saying that uh you
ask questions, you will be on tv. Uh
it's my pleasure to introduce the speaker. My name
is uh Novak, I'm uh retired professor of 40
Culture, but I'm also coordinated international programs at the
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Um I've known
Paul Struk for many, many years with advice,
uh some of our students and a brief history of
his career is that in 1993 he finished his PhD
in Mechanical University and in 1986 became a professor.
Uh Sir uh ever since his career was flourishing in
so many areas uh expertise as well and uh he
is a truly global research. Uh Paula is uh
head of the Center for Crop systems Analysis in the
sense global crop systems analysis. And he steamed explore
the institutional determinants of innovation Towards sustainable intensification in West
Africa as a case study. Uh Paula currently advises
30 graduate students, many of them in Africa and
Bangladesh both. Thank you very much. Yeah.
Mhm. Thank you very much for a very kind
introduction and let me start by saying that it's a
great honor for me to be here. It's also
a great honor to see such a huge turnout.
Thank you very much for coming. We just had
a tour through the engineering building and I must say
I'm really very, very impressed what's happening here at
Virginia Tech. It makes me feel very humble and
say normal agronomist, but well I also want to
share something with you and I'm not going to bombard
you with all kinds of numbers and figures. I
want to give you a little bit of our philosophy
, thinking how we can upgrades crop production in Africa
. I also brought some material with me, which
I don't intend to bring back to europe, so
please have a look and if you feel like it
and you can also keep it. Uh First of
all, it's a journal copy, it was a
sort of overview of what we have been doing lately
in Africa and a brochure about our way of thinking
and a few copies of a special issue which still
has to come out on sustainability uh and especially on
ecological sustainability and there is much wider than just africa
. But the title, my presentation is Institutional Change
towards Sustainable intensification of African agriculture. And this is
the structure of my talk. So I will start
with a brief introduction indicating what currently are the main
pillars of agricultural policies. Give you a few numbers
just to give you an idea. I will talk
about under nutrition and then we'll focus on what is
most needed in Africa and what have we learned so
far from our programs in Western Africa mainly, which
we call the convergence of Sciences program and what we
have not learned yet. So what we still need
to learn and then I will focus on sustainable intensification
for food security and finally come up with a few
conclusions and a summary. Well, the three pillars
of international policies for food security and protection of natural
resources are following. First of all, it's the
right to food. That means the right to have
enough food to feed yourself of high quality but also
also culturally specific. So you're not going to be
forced to eat hamburgers when you live in Africa.
Okay. The other issue is intensification of agriculture because
we can't feed the world with the current production levels
, we need to to go up much much higher
and we need new technology for that and therefore we
need to intensify agriculture. But we need to do
that in a sustainable way because we are already overloading
the system and in order to produce twice as much
, was about the same amount of land we really
need to improve the efficiency of our resources. However
, all these three pillars actually have triggered enormous amount
of debates and actually those debates are quite often very
, very hefty. For example, they can be
about technology. Are we going to use GMOs or
not in europe were very much against us, but
our scientists say we can help to feed the world
if we accept that. What is that true about
ethics, for example, in terms of animal welfare
, but also in terms of resource use, are
we going to use the resources that actually harvest it
elsewhere in the world ecology? Environmental impact. I
put the term here derogation, That's very important.
Term in europe. Every time that we get new
laws how we should practice agriculture from brussels, there's
always a few politicians that's say, well, let's
ask for a derogation so that we don't have to
follow up those rules. And then we get a
derogation for about five years with the promise that we'll
do better next time next time you ask for another
derogation, and in this way you really keep the
system not very sustainable. And I wrote quite a
few letters to the newspapers about that, and it
got a lot of uh, well manure over my
head from the farmers, but also the economics of
food production and especially how are we going to externalize
the costs? We don't do that, and we
need to do that in order to pay a real
price, an honest price for for the products.
Some numbers, at the moment, more than 800
million people are actually undernourished. That's that's fewer than
than some years ago. But still it is astonishingly
high number. It even gets worse. More than
two billion people actually suffer from micro efficiencies, deficiencies
such as zinc and iron etcetera. But also more
than a billion people are obvious. And that means
that there are more people obese and hungry at the
moment and that's a fact to think about. They're
also more than twice as many people suffering from hidden
hunger. So the micronutrient deficiencies then people actually suffering
from real hunger. But the most important lines actually
here at the bottom, more than half of the
deaths in the human population are actually related to poor
nutrition. Either too much or too little or not
the right diet. Well, what is a under
nutrition and how is it caused when, When we
talk about under nutrition, we should actually start from
the bottom here, the basic causes and this is
a slight from globalization cluster and well based on the
UNICEF conceptual framework. The biggest issue is uh the
formal and informal infrastructures, so the institutions, but
also the general physical infrastructure that we have, but
also the political ideology uh and the lack of resources
and these basic courses actually trigger three main effects.
One is household food insecurity, the other one is
poor social and care practices. And here we have
poor public health and with four public health you get
disease with poor social and care practices, you get
also disease, but you also get inadequate foot intake
which is of course also caused by household food insecurity
and they interact. So we have inadequate food intake
but also we have disease and together they cause a
lot of under nutrition and we need to deal with
that in a better way. But they're also positive
developments. This was mine, right? Yeah.
There are also positive developments, first of all,
since the millennium goals and the food crisis. Food
agriculture nutrition are now back on the international agenda.
And that's very important because that means that we now
have donors are interested in subsidizing research or other activities
, especially also extension related to this issue. L
. B. It was a very strong bias towards
major crops. So still the big five rice,
wheat, maize, potato are still very important crops
that actually collect all the research funding. And even
the CTR institutes are still focusing on those major crops
and that causes a bias which is not good for
a long term. We also need reading companies where
breeding minor crops, we also need researchers working on
orphan crops etcetera. Despite rapid population growth, we
can also say that the absolute number of people who
are hungry is actually going down. So the policies
have some success, although decline in the numbers is
still much lower than predicted or expected or wanted.
There is more attention for integrative approaches and we should
also say that the problems are actually nowadays concentrating on
africa and that's also why my talk is about institution
innovation in Africa. Why is africa difference? Well
, Africa will have to face tremendous population growth mainly
in mega cities in the next decades. The increase
in population in countries like Nigeria is tremendous. Unheard
of. The Green Revolution largely bypassed Africa and that's
another problem. So youth increases were not so high
in Africa as they were in other parts of the
world. Africa's agriculture is very, very diverse also
at a very small scale and one actually needs at
least 50 shades of green for an African green revolution
. That was meant as a joke but apparently didn't
work. Thank you. We could not say that
, that is because African farmers are doing a poor
job. African farmers are very innovative but simply lack
the windows of opportunities to upgrade their their operation.
And even if they do, If they will be
able to increase their used by 20%, there is
no market for it, so they will have more
work, more stuff, but not more, more
income. What is that most needed in Africa to
solve these issues? I've listed six, but there
might be even more than that, but let me
go through this in a little bit of detail.
First of all, we need farmers with political clout
to exit influence on decisions that affect their livelihoods so
that affect the smallholders being directly citizens have much more
political clouds than farmers. And actually in many countries
in Africa, food imports are extremely important and actually
competing with what the farmers are producing themselves. We
need inputs, we need credits, we need transparent
information exchanged inputs, such fertilizer, crop protections,
but also credit why can't farmers by good seats because
well they can't afford that and there is no credit
system that will allow them to do so. A
major one is also, that's the land tenure arrangements
that are common in Africa actually um do not stimulate
sustainable soil management. It should be that there should
be very clear view that this is one of the
major elements Africa needs land tenure systems that support sustainable
agriculture. There's a lot of mining of nutrients going
on right now and that will continue to go on
if the land tenure system is not supporting long term
soil management and putting in organic matter or putting in
nutrients that will stay there for a long time.
So this is really a major problem. We also
need in africa regulatory frameworks that help to protect farmers
against bad governance and bad practices. To give you
an example, we investigated the oil palm seed system
in Benin. Well, small farmers want to plant
oil palm, but it takes a couple of years
before you can have the first harvest. There are
government owned and directed nurseries for seedlings that farmers can
buy to plan their plantations. But there are also
a lot of informal nurseries, farmers think they buy
a hybrid, which will be very high yielding and
after four years they find out that they have been
cheated And that they have a type that will only
yield about 30%. So you have to wait four
years for the first half or even more than that
and you find out that your tree is worthless.
Those kind of things happen in Africa and we need
to protect farmers against those kinds of practices. We
also need markets and we need value change that can
actually add value in each link. For example,
there is a big pineapple production in Western Africa.
The european market is around the corner and there are
daily direct flights from Western africa to paris and Amsterdam
and what have you. But they can't get to
produce exported because of poor quality or they can't get
it exported because they don't have the boxes to put
them in those kind of things. We also need
, sorry, we also need improved infrastructure and support
. By the way, a little bit of corruption
would help here to make things better. And I
say a little bit and there's a very clear optimum
there. Well, what did we do as a
bargaining university in that part of Africa? Well,
we have been there for about 15 years and we
call that the convergence of science is because we wanted
to bring together the people from the social sciences and
the crop sciences and the soil sciences. So we
wanted to have a convergence of sciences, but we
also wanted to have a process in which we made
science more democratic. So listen to farmers, let
them say what is knowledge and let them create the
conditions in which they could use our knowledge. That
was also a way of converging and our objective was
to design approaches that are actually effective in creating knowledge
. Of course you are scientists or you create knowledge
but it should be usable by farmers based on participatory
approaches but also based on co creation of knowledge,
action research and disciplinary t well there is a lot
of harm back in that sentence. That's what you
do for donors. But these terms also have a
meaning. We really like to invent new things although
we work directly with farmers. And we want to
learn from the farmers what kind of knowledge they can
use. And we have a participatory approaches to make
sure that the knowledge is immediately applied and demonstrated so
that they know that it's useful. We want to
go through a joint learning curve with farmers by exchanging
information. We are not the experts. Uh they
are not the experts but together we know more than
each individually. So let's create structures institutions that can
help to co create that knowledge and quite often either
through a action research and through transition disciplinary T meaning
that there are also non scientists as stakeholders active in
the research process, from all stages from the design
of the program to the statistical analysis and the interpretation
of it. Well, like I said, these
approaches involving all the stakeholders in all phases. And
well, here you see one of my PhD students
communicating with farmers has to use all kinds of drawings
because they are illiterate, but they do are very
, very, very capable of interpreting very complicated things
including statistical variation. For example, What have we
learned from that? 50 years of program in Western
Africa. First of all, we have learned a
lot of new method, a logical approaches like the
approach of techno graffiti where we really let practice speak
first. Before we start to do science. We've
learned to have diagnostic studies first so that we really
know what the problem is instead of what we think
that the problem is. We went through joint learning
and we went through institutional context analysis. We went
through our performance, let's say. It's a that's
the word that one of my anthropologist colleagues is using
quite often, although I still don't know what it
means, but I've put it here in the list
. We are analyzing the real problem and we try
to create realistic solutions that farmers are willing to to
adopt, but also willing to maintain. So not
only did they make a change for a few years
, but it should be such that they are.
They understand that this is really a way forward.
And we've also learned that technology alone cannot expand the
smallholders opportunities we need changed in institutions and actually institutional
context is dominant and our technology, we've learned to
mobilise smallholders by setting up experimental groups where we created
that system of co creation of knowledge, but also
the interaction between farmers and scientists to go through that
joint learning exercise. And a great example of that
is the witch wheat problem a striker which is very
dominant in certain parts of Western africa. And farmers
actually saw the plant but only when it was already
flowering and they did not know that had come from
a very tiny seat that is almost invisible and that
it actually enters the plant through historian and then starts
to suck up all kinds of resources from the plant
. When we showed them that it was actually a
seat that was causing this problem, they immediately knew
the solution. We didn't have to train them in
finding a way of solving this. The only thing
that they needed to learn was this problem comes from
a very small seeds. Well we've learned to experiment
with institutional innovations and that was the last five years
. It was really exciting period where we not only
try to show technology or learned together with farmers,
but where we also try to change institutions, for
example, setting up new land tenure systems where the
the rent for land, for example, is based
on the amount of nutrients that you are mining instead
of the number of crops you're growing. Things like
like that. We we also learned how to analyze
the agrarian systems including their institutions and how we can
have interventions. I'm one good example was the problem
of the crocodiles in irrigation ponds. You don't want
a crocodile, your irrigation ponds, your dog gets
eaten or your child gets beaten bitten. But yeah
, they are there and they are sacred and they
are protected. So what do you do? You
can't change them away. So you need a sort
of institution to to make sure that you can control
those crocodiles without well making them angry or without disobeying
all kinds of local rules and regulations and laws.
Another thing was the ladies in Benin, we're producing
palm oil Bye to burning old car tires or truck
tires, which was extremely bad for their health,
which was extremely bad for the quality of the oil
. And we could get them to ban the use
of those tires simply by convincing the local kings that
are still there that this is something that should not
be done and they made sure that it was not
done anymore. So we used the authority, the
moral authority of those local kings to make sure that
this was banned. And we also learned a reorganization
on integration between natural and social sciences and marketing is
very proud of that. I think that's a little
bit wrong because we're already trying to do that For
20 years and we are still not very successful.
You still produce a thesis and when it's defended and
when the quality is judged then the natural science guy
will say, well the natural science part was poor
and I can't judge the social science part and the
social science scientists will say well the natural science part
was wonderful. But the social science part was bad
. But he said that the natural science part is
good because he can't understand it. So we're still
not evaluating seizes on the quality of the integration.
And that's probably because we still don't have theoretical frameworks
. Uh and we still need major breakthroughs uh in
the conceptual sense there my director says that we need
new methodologies. I think that we need new concept
first before we can develop those methodologies. It's a
challenge What is left to be learned? Well,
that was already left to be learned. We need
new concept, but that's more than that. I
think that we also need to find very practical answer
. Yes. So the following for complicated questions.
The first question is how can lasting change be catalyzed
in an allegorical article setting and an institutional environment that
are both highly complex? How can we do that
? How can we use the lessons learned about institutional
innovation to make local ecosystems resilient and suitable for sustainable
intensification? And the third? How can sustainable agriculture
intensification be orchestrated in such a way? It actually
improves the livelihoods of all the rural poor, not
just a few, but all the rural poor.
And how can we design and implement agriculture policies that
protect smallholder farmers against the threats and uncertainties associated was
the globalization of markets. They are being pushed out
at the moment and you don't want that because you
need them to feed the local Well some examples,
well here you see a the farmer plowing and they
love plowing in most parts of africa, they do
it 34 times before they plan to grow and that's
probably needed because of the weed control, but it
also burns up all the organic matter etcetera etcetera.
So if we can change that, we might do
a much better job. And here are some ladies
happily harvesting pineapple and like I said, this is
a good product but very perishable and they can't get
it exported to europe, although they would fetch much
higher price if they do. So. So what
I do is they sell it on the local market
and every now and then a truck comes from Nigeria
and and makes a load full of pineapple. Um
the best thing that they can still do is processes
into fruit juice or something like that, but definitely
it's not going to work to make it exportable to
europe and if you could, you could really and
get those farmers doing much much better job in terms
of economics, this is a picture of southern Ethiopia
. Um it's in the, in the console area
where they mainly grow sorghum on these relatively steeper hills
and well, they've had a number of very bad
years in a row there. Uh they can't plan
see it anymore because they have already eaten the seat
and this is really a situation where hunger is striking
all the time. You have to manage your crops
very well, you have to manage the rainfall and
you have to manage the organic matter because that's the
only resource of nutrients that you have, And you
can see that they actually put all the sorghum stocks
more or less in parallel lines with the elevation.
So there's a lot of work being put in simply
managing organic matter. I've seen farmers walking around for
hours with one bag of organic matter that they want
to use for one of their plots and it's really
amazing that they have to do that under such very
low resource environments and well, if you are a
farmer here, you have a harsh life and this
even makes it worse, you have these, these
health where the villages are actually on top of the
hills and you have very steep hills and while they
build terraces, but there's hardly any organic matter in
those terraces, so there's hardly any production there either
and they are very sensitive to, to erratic rainfall
etcetera. Now it becomes a little bit happier here
. We have a few latest and they are actually
working here in a Sorghum field where they try to
identify the best possible varieties. And I put the
slide in here is a slide from doctors generally to
to stress the fact that agriculture worldwide is actually becoming
a female driven economic activity. Uh The men moved
to the big cities, the women stayed behind to
take care of the Children plus the farm, they
have to change their farming operation because they don't have
enough labor so they shift their crop rotation and that's
an impact that will be tremendously large for the next
decades to come and not only in africa but also
elsewhere. We also need to make sure that we
have then gender sensitive technology development, for example,
gender sensitive participatory variety selection or seat selection. We
need to have a seat systems where women play a
major role. We have to maintain agra biodiversity in
a way that women feel happy with and that will
require a change of mind in many parts of africa
. Another example in Changsha, let's say we're at
a south somewhere in Ethiopia as well. We have
three PhD students working on the menu potato, but
potato within the farming system and also within the system
of global change. And this piece, the students
together analyze quite a number of farms in very great
detail and they use a model to to analyze those
farms in a very special way. And this is
Mr Walder and he has a very diverse farm um
with very diverse crop rotation with potato but also with
grassland and he has eucalyptus, he has apples,
he has and set the false banana etcetera etcetera.
But when we look at the bottle necks on Mr
Walters farm then the first bottle neck is that's he
doesn't have enough insight into the nutrient flows was in
his farm. So here we have the crop rotation
. We have and set. We have a follow
up of apple, plum beans to peace and kale
. We have potato body, we have other systems
and this is the soil quality that you find.
So this is the carbon percentage available potassium available,
magnesium nitrogen concentration or getting metal concentration available P.
And P. H. And it doesn't look too
good because if you see this he is concentrating his
phosphorus for example on on the answered crop which is
a perennial crop Can grow there for about seven or
even 10 years. It's a false banana but it
does not produce fruits although it does but you don't
want it to produce fruits. It accumulates starch in
its system and in its core mus. And it's
a staple food there. So they really want to
have a lot of an set. And moreover,
it's a sort of food bank that you can store
and harvest whenever you like. So they're concentrating all
the potassium there and the rest is much much much
lower at the same time. You have a much
better ph here than you have elsewhere and you also
have much more potassium available in that particular plot and
elsewhere. If he would do that in a different
way, he would have had much much higher yields
but it simply is not aware or he doesn't want
to be aware or he simply wants to keep his
and set growing. The 2nd Bottleneck is Labour.
Labor is a problem when you don't have a lot
of mechanization and here we have the same list of
rotations, but now we have different parameters. Here
we have labor per hectare per year. We have
the labor costs per hectare per year in Ethiopian birth
. And there are 19 Ethiopian birds in one U
. S. Dollar. The production per hectare per
year in the monetary value of that production. The
labor use efficiency in terms of output per per input
and also the labor use efficiency in monetary value.
So in the well what costs labor and what does
it yield? And there is a tremendous variation again
here and that answered crop where he concentrates all his
nutrients is not having a very uh hi uh labor
used efficiency in terms of money. But yeah he
eats the and said so it doesn't want to sell
it. There are other rotations are much much more
efficient in terms of labor use for example, the
apple seedlings. Also the potato is much more efficient
than the onset. So he has a labor management
problem. And the third problem is that there is
a lack of information. What are the good reputations
and what is a good nutrient and soil management.
But it's a beautiful farm. It's very diverse and
this gentleman knows is his his work. Another issue
is one. Do you want to improve the system
? And one of the major problems in africa is
the seat system. Uh seed is actually a sort
of social construct. It is something that you don't
buy. It's something that you share and everyone has
rights to see. But if you have poor seat
like in the case of potato where there is a
very strong degeneration of the quality of the seat of
generations because of virus infection and bacterial build infection etcetera
. You want to have a good seat every now
and then and there is an NGO which brings in
good seat and those are the dots here. But
they have a very specific strategy. They don't give
seed away to poor farmers and why not? The
poor farmers cannot use it. They have, they
don't have the resources to use it. The poor
farmers will immediately eat it or sell it and they
will definitely not share it. But if you give
it to the better off farmers or even the rich
farmers, then it will be spread and then it
will finally trickle down to the poor farmers and that
is shown here. So we have medium rich farmers
here, rich farmers there that are receiving the seat
and they share it either with rich farmers or medium
rich farmers, but also with poor farmers and quite
often and the poor farmers are at the end of
the seed exchange chain. And that is shown in
different capitalists and those are administrative units, actually farm
communities and it's everywhere. It's the same. The
poor farmer is at the end of the season change
chain. But that's good because if we would give
it to the poor farmer, it would never be
disseminated. And those are the kinds of things that
you need to learn when you do work in africa
automatically. You would say let's help the poor,
but it's not always the most effective approach. Also
the lines means something it's either a relative or neighbor
or acquaintance or a friend or whatever. Um There
are all kinds of social relationship to play a role
, religion, uh well etcetera etcetera beyond the health
status of the farmer. But for an NGO who
wants to improve potato production in this area, well
, status is the most important part and the message
is, don't give it to the poor, It
will trickle down to them finally. Well, in
short, the current assignment for agricultural sciences, actually
, we need to deliver robust and sustainable intensification for
a diverse set of social, economic, environmental conditions
and especially in africa that is very diverse and what
is needed in africa is actually a moderate intensification that
will help a global food security tremendously moderate intensification of
smallholder farming and well, how do I define that
is moderate increases in inputs to crop and livestock systems
to obtain increases in yield per unit area is actually
a very attractive option to attain global food security.
But then we need to give them space, we
need to give them the economic space that is required
to make this happen. And that's something which apparently
is very difficult within the framework of our world trade
agreements. Intensification itself is not always good. We
need moderate intensification because there is a sort of Yanez
faced a problem with with intensification. Intensification is both
the the culprit and the victim where agriculture is both
the culprit and the victim because intensification of agriculture actually
enabled the human population to grow and to appropriate ever
more natural resources. But it undermines the resilience of
the global ecosystems worldwide but also its ability to sustain
the ecosystem services that are necessary necessary to feed growing
numbers of people. And actually there is a sort
of faustian bargain between sustainable agriculture and sustainable consumption.
And it will certainly be true for africa and hit
africa tremendously. I really recommended you read stages paper
about that sustainable intensification actually an oxymoron unless unless real
progress can be made in ecological intensification. That means
increasing agricultural output by capitalizing on ecological processes in an
ecosystem. So this very poor environment with a steep
hill and hardly any organic matter needs to become sustainable
. Uh and that will require a lot of effort
well and sustainable identification as increasing output while keeping the
ecological footprint as small as possible. Well, some
facts might actually support the notion that sustainable intensification is
an oxymoron. Well, we agriculture poses an enormous
pressure on available resources. The pressure needs to stay
within the carrying capacity of planet Earth and actually we
are already approaching the stage where it's no longer is
the case, especially if you assume that certain tipping
points are existing. My colleague Scheffer is very famous
because of those tipping points and the predictability of those
. There are very specific and also partly unknown sustainability
thresholds. And those thresholds are actually very diverse.
Moreover, there quite often normative and that makes it
rather difficult to discuss them in a scientific environment because
we need agreement on moral standards and actually we need
trade offs based on those normal standards, moral standards
and we need political choices to decide about those trade
offs. And that's the most critical thing I see
approaching. We're not very good in making moral decisions
. Well, the current trend of science is to
enhance intensification because it's good, it's good for productivity
, it's good for resource use, efficiency and it's
also good for sustainability at least that's the common thinking
. There is a very strong focus on win win
situations or even win win win situation, for example
, in the faroes, water, energy, land
food nexus, that's a very positive document. Everything
will become better as long as we can create women
situations and make use of them. The university is
also claiming that the university has a sort of moto
saying, let's produce two times as much With two
times less input. Well, I can tell you
that's not possible, it's not going to work And
it's based on what the famous crop Ecologist davits argues
in the early 90s. He says it may be
concluded, well, he was rather cautious. He
said it may be concluded that no production resources used
with any less efficiency and that most production resources are
used more efficiently with increasing yield levels due to further
optimizing of growing conditions. That means that if you
increase one resource, you make better use of the
other resource and if you do that in a coherent
way, you finally end up having a very high
resource use efficiency based on win win situations, et
cetera. However, there are very few win win
situations rather rare and I think that we need an
agronomy that focuses on the science of trade offs.
Well traders are partly moral, so we also need
to include moral aspects into our science, and these
trade offs should be based on quantitative assessments of objectives
, tools, resources, costs for systems that look
actually beyond today and even look beyond one's own plot
on his own farm, on one's own cropping system
. And that's rather difficult to do for most people
to be much more precise. Intensification is actually a
multifaceted process that requires the implicit trade offs to be
analysed explicitly and the argument to be weighed. So
the trade off to being weighed and intensification should be
based on an all inclusive cost benefit analysis, in
which all inputs, all outputs and all consequences,
both desirable ones and the desirable ones, as well
as the externalized costs are all taken into account in
an appropriate way. And many people are afraid of
that. Jackson already claimed that rapid changes in land
use in food systems and in livelihoods requires socio ecological
systems that keep multiple options open and prepare for future
unpredictability, meaning that our approach should not be fixed
. It should be very dynamic because the future will
change and therefore our solutions will have to change over
time. And therefore we need sustainability, meaning the
properties and assets of a system that sustained the ability
or the agility of agents to adapt and media needs
in new ways. We need to keep changing.
We need to keep upgrading our agronomy and we need
rethinking on the trade offs that are relevant. I'm
almost done jesse, sustainability sets three major challenges.
First of all, we need societal consensus on values
and norms to be taken into account and consensus on
how to make choices on the processes and criteria to
decide on unavoidable trade offs and on the relative weight
or hierarchy of sustainability goals. But how to do
that in africa, it's even much more complicated than
it is in europe or in the U. S
. We also need scientific consensus on the sustainability issues
that are at stake based on precise definitions and indicators
, detailed conceptualization, reliable quantification of sustainability thresholds and
on the hierarchy of issues causing the sustainability gap that
we still have. But again, how do we
do that in Africa? And we need creation of
conducive institutional environments to realize consensus and change how to
do this. In Africa, we try to do
that. We experimented with institutions, but our main
outcome was that we learned how important institutions are.
We still haven't learned how to change that. Therefore
society should understand that sustainable intensification is not only environmental
issue, but it also includes a broad range social
and ethical concerns. And also society should be aware
of trade offs and possibly purpose outcomes if we continue
like we are doing right now, traders are also
more prevalent when the level of external inputs becomes high
. And practicing sustainable certification requires a process of realizing
the proper mix of local, national and international policies
, institutions and governance structures based on shared insight into
how to deal with all those challenges. Well,
I was going to take the lead in such a
process so complicated and requires leadership and especially he was
going to take elite in relation to africa. Actually
, we do need a coalition of the willing must
be familiar term for for for you in order to
create new theoretical frameworks for true integration of natural and
social sciences, a conceptual framework for integral and quantitative
trade off analysis. Very important crossovers between methodologies,
analytical tools and scientific languages and training systems to create
graduates that are real Integrators instead of converted natural or
social scientists. Finally, we need leadership and governance
. Thank you very much for your attention. Mhm
. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah, mm hmm.
Uh huh. Thank you very much. Fall for
this insightful analysis. Its the complexity of that is
much more than than the technology which we I used
to believe uh you know, grabbing me. Yeah
. So we have time for questions now. Mhm
. You mentioned about the filing several times as a
weak control method. What what are advice would you
have to farmer? Obviously the no till is a
child. Yes, I would I would time the
plowing much better than quite often is currently done.
Yes. So the timing should be very important and
and I would accept a little bit of weed if
we have much more. No june. Yeah.
Yeah. When you said that you think we're already
kind of reaching the carrying capacity Earth? What do
you think the carrying capacity of the Earth is?
In terms of people I've heard as much as high
as 40-50 million people. Yes but then with a
different diet than we currently do uh so much more
based on plant material and much less on animal proteins
and etcetera etcetera. I was really shocked when I
learned that there are more people a beast and hungry
because it's very inefficient use of resources. Um And
our friends in Asia only start to eat uh meat
. If they will all have the same diet as
we do then we can't feed the world anymore.
Moreover this is associated with so much moving around of
nutrients or spilling of nutrients or splitting of water that
we can simply not avoid it with more people.
It's not only agriculture that needs to become more productive
, but other aspects of society as well. And
therefore there will be an increase in competition for water
for phosphorus uh for for energy et cetera. And
when I go through Germany and see these huge fields
of maybe just there for for for biomass production and
quite often heavily fertilized at the expense of enormous amounts
of energy. And I think that we can't continue
doing that like we are. Um So yes we
we need well it would be best if we change
our diet. It would help if we produce fewer
offspring. Uh and it would definitely help if we
are better in sharing resources. The Netherlands is producing
um Enough pork for about 300 million people. So
why do we want to be the butcher of the
entire area between London Berlin and paris um on such
a very tiny spot. Um why do we want
to produce a lot of cut flowers with our natural
gas? Whereas we could be producing other things that
are more helpful to the people. Although I love
flowers. So yes, we we are spilling and
we are using our resources in a very inefficient way
and there are not enough economic drivers to change it
on a very short term. But they are definitely
ecological and political drivers that you do that. I
mean there was so much for because a lot of
yeah, there's a lot of pollution. You're selling
me that the designing of the tax system based the
consumption of resources. Yeah. Through the the pigs
are fed with feed that's produced in south America or
in europe or in Asia. And so we always
say we import defeat, we keep the shit and
we sell the meat that's not very sustainable. And
so yeah, those kind of things happen all the
time. There was a yeah we we had an
african student who wrote a paper on assignment and he
figured it out that the the dutch were the biggest
producers of mango and the biggest exporters of mango and
the biggest consumers of mango of the world. Well
he simply looked at the data, uh economic data
that were available. Yes, we do import a
lot but immediately exported and we don't eat it themselves
and we certainly don't produce mongo because mango trees won't
grow in our country. So and that's not only
true for mongo, it's true for quite a few
other products as well. And yes, strawberries from
problem arises from Ethiopia, uh etcetera etcetera. Um
And economically it's very healthy personally, I profit a
lot from it and my salary is paid on that
basis and I earn a lot of money, but
it's not good, we can't maintain it. And
the question is what will drive the change? And
I'm a little bit worried about that right now,
we have this enormous influx of people from africa.
They are most welcome, I mean, but thousands
of them drown on a yearly basis in the mediterranean
sea. Um Apparently the pressure to go away from
Africa and to get into um europe where they will
have a lousy life because they will live on the
streets so high that they do that well, I
cannot live in a situation where europe is so wealthy
that it attracts people from poor areas and they risked
their own lives in moving into europe. There must
be better ways of of helping them, for example
by while helping to feed them or helping them to
set up an economic system that will increase their well
being and welfare and not just hours. There is
definitely an issue there. Yeah, I was curious
about your opinion of the Green Revolution, really skipped
over Africa and other curious whether you think that in
some ways was a good thing. Uh No,
I don't think so. Uh Africa is the only
continent where the number of hungry people still increasing in
absolute terms and that is because they were not able
to profit from the benefits and I think that they
have been mining the soils uh to humans extent they
still grow old fashioned varieties that will perform well under
those conditions. Um but I could do much better
. I mean, let me give you an example
. Um I was in Eastern africa once and I
was driving on the road and on the left side
of the potatoes and on the right side of potatoes
, the ones on the left side would decide when
you pulled up a plant and we're already dead.
And the potatoes on the other side of the road
were this size and we're still green. Uh one
came from an old variety that was completely degenerated in
the city. The other one was a new variety
from new seat. Why did that farmers still grow
that? That pours crop from poor seat? Well
, there was apparently also another crop available or are
the seats source available? Well, simply because the
other uh old variety still could give a little bit
of yield when you have peculiar wilt in your soil
and material. Well this indigenous there, so you
always have that problem so that farmers simply did not
take the risk of having nothing. He rather had
about eight tons of Potato brick tower instead of the
25 of his neighborhood because he didn't want to have
the risk of material World. So we were talking
about those kind of issues and we can solve them
. So I know that there are bad things about
the Green Revolution certainly. But. Uh huh.
Our process we're very strongly based on results that's cutting
the same approach more than all and as breathing programs
to start it. Right. That's right. Right
. Yeah. Yeah. But I still think that
the main problem why the Green Revolution bypassed africa is
institutional institutional problems. Yeah. Okay well I think
it's good. Yeah. So in your model of
sustainable intensification you talk about about decreased influence and increase
yields. But no I didn't really hear much about
decreased waist and enhance post artists practices. Can you
repeat the question? Yes. There was a question
about, well you talked about input and output but
you didn't talk about post harvest losses, correct question
. Yeah, about 30-40 of what we produce is
lost. So we can reduce that to let's say
only 10 last. Then we would have enormous increase
with without much um effort. And it's amazing that
for example, this is Marnie Universities, hardly anyone
working on first half of technology, hardly anyone.
We had institutes in the past. It all done
because they don't get any funding anymore. Apparently the
donors and our politicians think that problem so easily solved
that farmers candidates themselves they don't need support anymore.
Of course it's not true. And yeah, uh
this is an issue where I really would like to
see international consortium picking up the problem and solving it
because it can be solved relatively easily and it's it's
worthwhile to solve it. Yeah. Okay. I
see you guys first yeah, mentioned he framework success
in this. We said curious is say you were
worried about that. Sure. Inside the director,
thank you very much for an important and interesting question
. The question was asked, can you tell a
little bit more about the development of new frameworks for
the interaction between social sciences and natural sciences? Um
We have tried to train a number of PSD students
in uh those frameworks, we had an idea what
needed to be done. They needed to learn to
talk to farmers, they needed to learn to do
a real diagnostic analysis, they needed to work on
the real problems and make sure how the solution could
be implemented. So there needs to be able to
manage the whole chain of inventing new things, making
them applicable to the farmers and let the farmers discover
that it was useful and let the farmers then adopted
and maintain it. So the whole chain for that
you need institutions and we organised farmers groups. Uh
so we let the students work with farmers groups right
from the beginning. The first task was organised farmers
and then start your problem analysis. And quite often
they did rather well in getting these farmers organized,
especially in countries like Benin, where they still have
that that that french system of getting things organized with
the secretary and vice secretary and a and the president
and vice president. So everybody had a role and
it worked. Um Yet we did not create a
lot of change there because the farmers were still on
their own. They did not have the power to
influence their own environment, especially their own societal environment
. So in the next phase of the program,
we try to to work on that, to work
on the institutions to change institutions instead of change productivity
and changing institutions takes much longer than anything else.
So we had to have something on a long term
. They were out of the 10 phds in that
part of the program, about two who actually managed
to really create a change. The rest only monitored
the problem, made suggestions for change, but never
got it changed. And one example was that boiling
of the film oil, creating better quality palm oil
, and the other example was setting up a new
management system for irrigation canals in rice production in Benin
. Both examples were actually from Benin. It's much
better than elsewhere. So there were two out of
the 10 successful in doing that, they worked on
it for for for years. Our approach is to
try to investigate what are the mechanisms there that work
and what mechanisms do not work. And then you
need to to have a sort of well go learning
between the anthropologist and the technologist, etcetera, etcetera
. But you need to speak each other's languages or
at least understand each other languages. And there are
very few people in marketing and we can talk to
social scientists when they are from agronomy. And there
are very few social scientists who can talk to an
agronomist and understand what they're saying. I had a
wonderful colleague, Doctor paul Richards and he was an
anthropologist and he spoke the language of an agronomist.
So I learned a lot from him and well since
then I'm a little bit better in understanding of sociologists
, but it's still a long way to go.
And in order to investigate those mechanisms. We definitely
need new theories. We need new frameworks, we
need new methodologies to test those frameworks. Otherwise it
doesn't work in the past. We thought okay we
have here a piece the students we have here social
scientists and we have here and a natural scientist.
And those two scientists are going to to work with
that Pc students and then the amalgamation or the integration
will take place in a poor head of of the
piece de student. Well, after two years,
I call the meeting and said this is not going
to work. I mean we have to to practice
first before we manage that poor Pc student. So
we had a number of sessions where we actually challenged
each other to do that amalgamation and the integration before
we actually started to to train us for PhD students
and it took a lot of effort and still working
on it. Well thank you. Yes. So
some aspects of the Green Revolution, we need to
look shorter term increases in carrying capacity because they may
ask one return decreases center right. Mhm. For
example, implementation resistant, perhaps pathogens that resistance or
inputs of fertiliser time. Yeah. Can you address
the difference between practices that can increased carrying capacity only
short term. This is yeah. Are we going
to the system was how can you discriminate between measures
that will work on the short term? Um And
measures that were only that will work on the long
term. Right? That was more or less so
you want the discrimination between short term effects of long
term effects and you want to to solve the negative
impact of some of the short term effects that the
Green Revolution has shown to us. Yeah, Well
that's a very difficult one. Um I think that
some of the negative effects of the Green Revolution are
actually mismanagement and not negative effects by itself. I
think it could be managed in such a way that
we can still create uh as many win win situations
as possible. And the Green Revolution certainly did that
because it produced highly productive cult of us that yes
that required a lot of input but could also use
that input in a very efficient way As compared to
two a low productive uh got of us which did
very well under oh poorly and out conditions and that
difference we still we still have so we still have
the need for a certain type of varieties that do
well under stressful uh low low input conditions with not
much resources available versus the varieties that do very well
when we feed them a little bit better without a
mismanagement. Very good example of mismanagement is actually the
current situation in some parts of china where rice production
has not increased over the last decade. But nitrogen
input still shows a linear increase, meaning that the
resource use efficiency there has gone down tremendously and they
need to solve that right away because this is only
polluting the environment. Um so yeah, we need
to think harder and we also need not only to
try to maximize the women situation but also to work
on the trade off situations. And I think that
that is a little bit of a bias that we
had in the past. We always wanted to maximize
those women situations. Thank you for a very interesting
question. They have to be so lack of foundation
agricultural sector in ASia, apologize it, sorry.
Still in states that are confident agriculture said other policies
that, Yeah. Okay, thank you. The
question was asked, Did climate change also affect agriculture
in africa? And in which direction, correct?
Yeah. Yes, it had an effect, especially
in Eastern Africa. Eastern Africa is one of the
most sensitive areas in terms of global change. It
did not reduce the amount of rainfall for example,
but it made a range for much more erratic and
unpredictable and that means that farmers did not really.
Um No, no, when two went to Seoul
plant because they were used to plan with the first
range, but now when the first range comes it
stops raining and then the plants have emerged and then
they die because they are well they don't have enough
rain following the first rains and then when they died
and the second flux of rain comes in, those
kind of things happen, for example, in Ethiopia
. And I've even seen a case in Eritrea where
the farmers could not harvest their crop because of the
amount of rain that was there during harvesting, whereas
it never rained during harvesting and actually the the wheat
crop was lodged and and the seats in the,
in the ears started to germinate and they were able
to do the house and the next crop that that
came from those germinated seeds on the years, which
was never happened before. So rain has become very
erratic. Also in certain parts of Zimbabwe for example
, you see therefore change of cereal based diets to
also refer to a crop based diet. Zimbabwe has
decided that it's not only to grow marriage was also
potatoes because potatoes, winter crop mazes the summer crop
rain becomes more attic. So in order to become
uh well less stressed by that climate change. They
also started to grow potatoes during the winter time.
Yes, So there are changes and especially rally green
fall is a problem. Okay, we'll take a
couple more questions actually, when it started of water
resources available for irrigation and how they affect your african
farmers utilizing question, was is there also what are
available for african farmers? And are they trying to
realize that um yes, there are um innovative ways
of irrigating crops with much higher what use efficiency and
much more water saving systems. For example, Israelis
are very active in Eastern Africa in selling that type
of technology. Um, We already had big irrigation
system, for example, in mali and in***
. They are still functional and it's amazing because you
have a river running through the desert and then they
have these beautiful irrigation schemes very effective set up by
, by the french and still operational. So yes
there is there is irrigation and the total acreage or
acreage of irrigated agriculture could still increase in in africa
. And you must also imagine that certain parties in
Africa actually have quite high rainfalls. There are parts
of Ethiopia with 2500 of rain every year, so
they are not drought stress. Yeah, thank you
very much. I would suggest that we'll take a
break now and we think Speaker and if you have
questions and exception here can correct one more smaller groups
. So thank you very much. Okay thank you
for all your questions. Thank you. Yeah.
On behalf of the director route Mahajan of Task,
we greatly appreciate you coming across the pond to share
with us some of the ideas opens up a lot
of discussion items and again we are going to stay
for maybe a few more questions. Take one of
those. Believe here. But you said something about
you don't want to take these items back with you
, so, no problem. We've got for you
a couple of gifts from a task just for you
to take back to remember us by. But in
appreciation of you taking time here. So again,
thank you very much. Thank you. Mhm. 1087 01:15:18.739 --> A:middle L:90% Mhm.