Food Security – Page 3

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Extension Service, Food Security, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

SMS Productivo: Paraguayan farmers Join the Mobile Frenzy (Video)

Paraguayan farmers, like their counterparts across the developing world, are joining the legion of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid who now have access to mobiles—individually or through social networks.

They are also reaping the benefits of burgeoning agricultural markets, training opportunities and best practices that mobile-based systems help to inform them about and connect them to. The most recent, SMS Productivo, is premised on an SMS platformed, which was introduced by USAID’s Paraguay Productivo, under the management of CARANA Corporation.

This system has also automated data collection and enable agricultural planning to be more up-to-date and efficient, as farmers may now submit observations via text messages.

La Norteña, a cooperative, worked with PyP last fall to introduce SMS Productivo to their members. There are now five participating cooperatives and another 20 are ebbing to join.

Learn more about SMS Productivo and the stories of those using the technology.

June 23, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental Compliance, Food Security, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

NOAA Pilots GIS Project in West Africa: A Boost for Sustainable Agriculture

Climate change is already posing challenges to agricultural productivity worldwide, and the sector is likely to encounter severe water woes as this intensifies. However, water management, which is crucial for sustainable agriculture, improved rural livelihoods and food security, has not yet been sufficiently harnessed and employed across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Consequently, immense opportunities for growth and economic

Picture showing an irrigation system- green plants being watered.

Credit: A Guide To Irrigation Methods — Irrigation Systems

advancement are being missed. Proper irrigation is vital for sustained agricultural growth, according to the FAO. The UN agency says efficient irrigation practices could result in increased crop yields of up to 400%. Yet, farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa, who are most dependent on rainfall, are hamstrung by a landscape with the fewest rainfall monitoring stations in the world, which are also complicated to read. This challenge is compounded by an unreliable climate information dissemination mechanism.

But, as with all challenges in the sector, new technologies are emerging that could provide better information for planning. Rainwatch, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) funded climate information system, seems set to help West African farmers, in particular, to overcome their water management challenges.

NOAA says Rainwatch uses GIS to “monitor monsoon rainfall and tracks season rainfall attributes”. It automatically streamlines rainfall data management, processing and visualization. The user-firendly tool has interactive faces, symbols and self-explanatory names. This simplicity eliminates the need for external assistance, including satellite information, to make use of the tool.

The successful 2009 piloting of the project, coupled with the abundant returns to farmers in Niger last year, a country with chronic water management issues, shows that there is great potential behind scaling-up this project. A key challenge will be getting farmers to use the technology, but the demonstrable benefits will prove to be a strong selling point.

The NOAA funded project received support from the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development and CIMMS.

June 16, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Food Security, Humanitarian Assistance, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

Aidmatrix: A Model for Safeguarding and Fostering Global Food Security Gains

Terri Hasdorff, Vice President of Aidmatrix (at the middle, wearing pink), at the AID & International Development Forum, Washington, DC

Terri Hasdorff, Vice President of Aidmatrix (Center), at the AID & International Development Forum, Washington, DC

Getting the right aid to people when and where they need it most, logistics, is still a major challenge for the global humanitarian sector. But, Aidmatrix, an Irving, Texas based non-profit that employs logistics technology to tackle systemic challenges in the highly complex aid sector, is making major gains.

According to Scott McCallum, President & CEO of Aidmatrix, “more than 35,000 corporate, nonprofit and government partners use our technology solutions to move more than $1.5 billion in aid annually, worldwide, which impacts the lives of more than 65 million people”.

The ‘humanitarian technologist’ reconfigures widely used applications in the private sector for humanitarian causes, including disaster, hunger, medical, and transportation relief. According to McCallum, Aidmatrix is akin to a wedding-registry, as it provides a one-stop shop for the “registry of needs and donations”. Last year, Aidmatrix Foundation was awarded a contract with USAID to provide $1.3 million worth of technology for efforts in Haiti, 90% of which was financed by the non-profit’s partners—Accenture, UPS, AT&T, among others.

Although more widely known for its expertise in disaster relief needs assessment and donations management, Aidmatrix’s aid sector-sensitive and technological approach could help foster and safeguard gains in global food security, if deployed contextually on a broader scale. Food insecurity is caused by a wide range of factors, including declining yields, inadequate investment in research and infrastructure, and increased water scarcity, but it is also brought about by immense waste.

Logistical woes is a key cause for much of this waste. For instance, a third of crops reaped in India, a food insecure country, never gets to market in edible fashion because of poor value chain management and practices. Aidmatrix’s technology could aid in efficiently warehousing and transporting these goods to places where they are needed most. The highly subsidized nature of Aidmatrix’s development of technologies tailored to contextual problems limits implementation costs because of it vast network of major backers in the food and technology industries.

Aidmatrix’s current hunger relief programs gives a glimmer of hope of how its efforts could transform global food security management. “Through partnerships with Feeding America, Global Foodbanking Network, United Nations World Food Programme, and other global food bank and hunger relief programs, Aidmatrix enables more food to be connected with the hungry through our hunger relief solutions.” This is done by improving communication between food banks, suppliers and agencies, as it did with the Feeding America initiative.

Deploying Aidmatrix’s technology more broadly in international development work is likely to reduce global hunger, by matching appropriate chunks of the billions of pounds of foods wasted annually with many of the 850 million people suffering from hunger every day. Nearly all charitable food in the US already goes through Aidmatrix, through its partnership with Feeding America. The non-profit has also gained a toehold in Europe, where its largest partner is the UK-based FareShare, and Asia, through vibrant partnerships with organizations such as Second Harvest in Japan. On a smaller, yet increasing scale, Aidmatrix is making inroads in South America and Africa.

The opportunities are immense. Aidmatrix is certainly a model for safeguarding and fostering global food security.

June 10, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Extension Service, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal

The mFarmer Initiative: 2 Million Small Farmers to Benefit by 2013

The GSMA, a global body that represents the interests of over 1000 mobile operators and suppliers, launched the mFarmer Initiative Fund today, in Cape Town South Africa. The Fund, which will run until 2013, is backed by financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

If successfully implemented, the mFarmer Fund will enable the provision of more efficient farm extension services to 2 million of the world’s poorest farmers. The Fund will target “mobile communications service providers, in partnership with other public and private sector agricultural organizations, to provide information and advisory services to smallholder farmers in developing countries living under US$2 per day”.

The initiative will target 12 countries: India, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. However, the technologies developed and lessons learned will be shared globally. The mobile sector advocate said the initiative will function through competitive and deadline-driven grants. For more on the criteria for grants from the mFarmer Fund, please click here.

The Fund is part of GSMA’s thrust to fully deploy and integrate mobile technology into agricultural management, to boost productivity and ensure food security, under its flagship Mobile Agriculture (mAgri) Programme.

The GSMA project will further promote demand-driven, use inspired mobile tools for farmers. The rapid rise in mobile phone subscriptions, in even the outskirts of the developing world, presents opportunities to improve the lives of those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

June 9, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Health, Irrigation and Water, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

Haiti’s Food Security

Haiti’s post-quake food security show signs of improvement, which may get even better with the right mix of policy priorities. Although the Caribbean nation remains more food insecure than it was prior to the January 2009 earthquake, it is 13 percent more food secure than it was in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

In order for Haiti to meet the needs of its 2.5 to 3.3 million people thought to be food insecure, there ought to be a raft of bold nationally-led agricultural policies and projects. Haiti is in a prime position to chart this course due to its central position in the U.S initiated Feed the Future investment plan. This country-led initiative aims to foster food security and agricultural development in a truly endogenous manner. In other words, Haitians, like other Feed the Future countries, will have ownership over the process.

Although Haiti’s agricultural productivity hinges on a myriad of bold policy initiative, in my view, two things top the agenda: 1) The establishment of a national ICT policy with key focus on agriculture; and 2) The decentralization of agricultural management and educational facilities.

Despite demonstrable economic gains worldwide from ICTs in agriculture, Haiti still lacks a national ICT policy. A clear ICT policy will provide a guide for action for multilateral agencies, national action and NGO involvement in the ICT for agriculture sector. Haitian farmers are subjected to ad hoc marketing systems, a wide range of anthropogenic shocks, natural disasters, and limited information to make sound cost-benefit analysis. A solid national ICT policy will provide a basis for Haiti and its transnational donors to tackle these challenges in a coordinated manner—eliminating the well-entrenched culture of duplication.

It is imperative that the state take a lead on this to build its credibility and bring order to a development landscape dominated by NGOs—there is one NGO for every 3, 000 Haitian. Since the 1970s , NGOs have steadily gained a toehold in the country. This is largely because of the perception of endemic corruption within the Haitian government.

While I believe that ICTs ought to be used at all three major stages in the agriculture sector –pre-cultivation, crop cultivation and harvesting, and post harvest— it is most critically needed at the first juncture, pre-cultivation, crop selection, land selection, accessing credit and itemizing when to plant. If given the information for the proper selection of the best crops to plant according to their land type, access to input and generous credit, Haitian farmers will be well positioned to make proper cost-benefit analysis and thrive.

To achieve this, the ICT policy must emphasize the use of GIS and remote sensing. GIS and remote sensing technologies may be used to gather information on soil quality and available water resources. This will aid irrigation strategies in Haiti where water management is poor. Further more, the ubiquitous nature of cellphones in Haiti means that this information may be easily disseminated. Farmers may also be alerted about where to get seeds/other inputs and access credit.

To this end, Haiti ought to decentralize its agricultural framework. Haiti has evaded decentralization proposals for decades, but as the post-quake scenario shows, new life ought to be bred into this initiative with urgency. One third of newborn babies are born underweight. Acute under nutrition among children under five years old is five percent and a third of them suffer from chronic under-nutrition.

The collaborative work being done by the Les Cayes campus of the University of Notre Dame d’Haiti (UNDH), an innovative agronomy school, attests to the importance of decentralization. “The University uses its 40 acre farm as a catalyst for outreach, to assist poor farmers in building sustainable livelihoods, to map and protect biodiversity, and to expand civic participation among the rural poor.” Through these interventions, UNDH seeks to contribute to sustainable development and governance, important factors in rebuilding Haiti after the earthquake.

June 6, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Extension Service, Farmer to Farmer, Food Security, Health, Mobile, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

The Spoken Web: Searching for Farming info by Voice (VIDEO)

The emergence of IBM’s Spoken Web, a mobile innovation that eliminates literacy as a precursor to access the internet, is a game-changer in the ICT for Agriculture sector.

Unlike other efforts to bridge the global information divide, even people with limited to no functional literacy skills will find Spoken Web user-friendly. With nearly 800 million functional illiterates around the world, the inability to read remains a major impediment to the use of ICT4D. This is most acute in the most remote parts of the developing world where livelihoods and agriculture are inextricably linked.

The mobile innovation is essentially a world wide network of VoiceSites joined to make the Spoken Web. Its most essential hardware is a telephone, which people use to browse VoiceSites by saying keywords, also known as VoiLinks.

This rapidly progressing network of voice recordings is predicated on a system called VoiGem, which simplifies the process of creating voice-based applications. VoiGem is unique compared to existing interactive voice response technology because it allows users to create their own VoiceSites that consists of voice pages (VoiceXML files) that may be linked. Each page is identified by the user’s phone number. This identification mode allows the user to easily edit VoiceSites and pages from their phone.

The mobile-centric nature of this development reflects a global trend and complements a development need, particularly for agriculture. Although small scale farmers, scattered across some of the most far-flung places around the globe, make up a large portion of the 5 billion people without access to the internet and computers, a growing number of these people own cellphones. In fact, farmers constitute a strong contingent among the 3 in 4 people worldwide who own mobiles. Although only a fifth of those with mobile subscriptions worldwide have access to mobile broadband services, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) “predicts that within the next five years, more people will hop onto the Web from laptops and mobile gadgets than from desktop computers”.

As more farmers join the growing legion of wired folks, they will have faster and more reliable opportunities to access and share information. This development will reduce information asymmetries, structure and strengthen agricultural markets by bringing the internet to parts of the world where small scale farmers, consumers, middlemen and traders have limited knowledge about where to access and trade food.

The technology is also culturally appropriate given the oral nature of many cultures in the developing world. Farmers will also have the opportunity to efficaciously share valuable indigenous farming retentions.

As with most things, the Spoken Web also comes with challenges. Chief among the challenges is that though v oice-recognition technology can match search terms against a previously processed index of recorded voice sites, it presents cumbersome results. However, the technology is being refined to be more precise. Precision is especially important because farmers and other end-users will not be able to retain all the information found on lengthy voice pages/sites, and they may not have the literacy skills to jot down points. Interestingly though, the Spoken Web comes with a fast-forward feature that enables the user to listen as if they were skim-reading.

Despite these challenges, the technology has been successfully piloted in eight Indian villages. It is now a central part of farming and health-care delivery in four Indian states, parts of Thailand and Brazil.

June 3, 2011/by actualize

Agriculture, Agriculture Markets, Food Security, Health, Irrigation and Water, Originally posted on the GBI Portal, Sustainable Agriculture

U.S Leadership on Global Food Security

U.S leadership on global food security will get a major boost for the fiscal year 2011. This follows strong bipartisan support from Congress for a $1.15 billion budget to tackle food security issues around the world. Last week, USAID Administrator Dr. Raj Shah announced that nearly $1 billion will go towards Feed the Future, a global initiative launched by President Obama in 2009 to tackle hunger through sustained and endogenous multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Dr. Raj said, “$90 million will be spent on strengthening our nutrition programming”. Since the world food crisis in 2008, which caused riots in several countries and toppled governments, food security and agriculture grew in prominence on the international agenda.

He says, pending congressional approval, the agency will contribute $100 million to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a joint multilateral trust fund established in partnership with the World Bank, to address food security and agriculture globally. Since its conception in 2009, the fund attracted nearly $1 billion from donors, and allocated over $330 million to eight countries.

Conflict, natural disasters and the slow integration of ICT into agricultural policy remains a major impediment to food security and the improvement of livelihoods. Nearly 2 billion people worldwide are unable to grow or get enough food to eat. Most of those affected by chronic food security problems live in rustic areas, where they have limited information about where to access and trade food, in the least developed countries.

The World Bank has warned that the problem is likely to become even more intractable in the next two decades. According to the Bank’s report, Reengaging in Agricultural Water Management: Challenges and Options, “by 2030 food demand will double as world population increases by an additional two billion people. The increase in food demand will come mostly from developing countries.” The publication says improved food security depends on increased agricultural productivity and improved water management across the developing world.

June 2, 2011/by actualize

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