Category: Okategoriserade

Written by Matthew Kessler, project coordinator at TABLE, a collaboration between University of Oxford, SLU, and Wageningen University that explores the evidence and values behind global food systems debates.

Food is at the center of many of the intersecting challenges we face today. Nearly one in 10 people in the world are undernourished, climate change throws more instability into the already difficult job of farming, and global biodiversity is rapidly declining – so much so that some are calling this period the sixth mass extinction. These challenges are especially acute in low- and middle-income countries, which was the focus of the Agri4D 2023 conference that was I fortunate enough to co-moderate in September.

The incredibly timely theme of this year’s conference was “building resilient food systems in uncertain times.” While I won’t be able to summarize all that I learned, in this blog I’ll share two key insights I gained from this year’s conference: elevating unheard voices in food systems, and the importance of seeing each solution in the appropriate context.

Complex food systems

How do you run a conference on such a complicated topic like food systems? You’d have to explore the complex and interconnected webs that connect seeds and inputs to farms, farms which produce food that is regionally or internationally distributed across global supply chains, food that is then sold, or processed and sold, and purchased in markets, retailers, restaurants, and ultimately end up on people’s plates.

This movement of food from seed to plate does not only present logistical challenges, but also political, cultural, social and economic dilemmas. In order to facilitate an inclusive conversation about the future of food, you’d have to take the approach that Agri4D did, and engage with farmers, businesses, economists, trade experts, politicians at regional and national levels, civil society and researchers.  I was impressed with the commitment and care that each brought to improving food systems and making them more resilient, although they didn’t always agree on a solution.

Context matters

It’s a rare opportunity to be presented with a myriad of solutions and efforts to enact food systems transformation across the world. In this short period of time, it’s easier to notice the striking differences across countries and contexts. Some regions face challenges of malnutrition, the impacts of climate change, gender inequality, political instability, or a combination of these factors.

As keynote speaker Professor Appolonaire Djikeng pointed out, resilient to what? What is the exact vulnerability that we need to confront and how can we be proactive in our approach to building resilience. How can scientists, policymakers and practitioners work together to get ahead of our challenges and not only react to them. While we are connected by global challenges, and can share what we learn with each other, we must also recognize that solutions aren’t always easily translatable to other contexts.

I want to highlight one more accomplishment of this conference that really stood out to me, which was its ability to elevate unheard or marginalized voices in the food system.

Screenshot of panel recording from “Panel 12 – Indigenous knowledge production and rights in food system”

Elevating unheard voices

One of the most profound outcomes of the conference was its commitment to giving a platform to voices that are seldom heard in discussions about food systems. Those who are most vulnerable are typically being “spoken to” rather than “discussed with.” We heard a compelling keynote by Seema Kulkarni that spoke to the lived realities of the wives of Indian farmers who had taken their own lives. We learned about the immense challenges they face in continuing to run these farms while navigating economic hardships and societal pressures, and the community they found in supporting each other. Their stories were a strong reminder that the human element should never be lost in our discussions about food systems.

In addition to these personal narratives, the conference organized a panel discussion on indigenous knowledge production across Asia and Africa. These panellists shared the importance of preserving food cultures – cultivating, preparing, and sharing communal meals – to provide diverse and healthy diets to malnourished populations. Incorporating indigenous knowledge into our strategies for building resilience is an important tool to tackle some of the specific challenges that these communities face.

Conclusion

Building resilience across food systems is not a task for a single stakeholder. Nor is it strictly an ecological principle, where a resilient ecosystem can be defined as one that is better able to withstand and absorb ongoing shocks to the system. Resilience is also a social principle, where a village of people from different backgrounds, trainings and worldviews, work together to increase the resilience of local and global food systems.

We need to follow in the footprints of this conference – to bridge the gaps between science, policy, and practice, and bring a diverse array of professionals to the table. To be open about what solutions work, which don’t, and what remains uncertain. To be clear-headed about what the vulnerabilities are that we are trying to address. To apply the right interventions, whether they are trainings to build knowledge and skills, the use of appropriate seeds and technologies, or smart policy interventions and business innovations. Ultimately, we need to work together if we wish to apply and build a resilient, sustainable, and just food system in the future.

This blog post is written by Professor Emily Wade, Landscape architect Nupur Prothi and Associate Professor Maria Kylin, Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management in Alnarp.

Kenyan teachers visiting Alnarp. Photo: Emily Wade

An ongoing, unique collaboration between Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) Alnarp and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Nairobi started out as an exploration of student’s innovative ideas related to spatial design/solutions addressing global challenges with local site specific actions.

A collaborative model between the departments of Landscape architecture in Alnarp and Nairobi was created with an aim to contribute to the Student competition set up in affiliation with the World Congress of International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) to be held simultaneously in Stockholm and Nairobi in September 2023. The Swedish part of the course is now well on its way into the final stretch. In this Blog mini-series we want to share some of the insights and highlights of this unique collaboration, as faculty and students of SLU.

How do we understand the scales of “Global” and “Local”?

Our action within our local communities and context eventually impacts resilience at a global scale. For example, the resources we use, and our daily lifestyle ultimately have global consequences. These lifestyles are conditioned by, as well as impacted by landscape design and solutions, which in different ways can enable or constrain ways of living. At the same time, global and transnational political agendas such as Agenda 2030 or the UN Convention of Children’s Rights (CCR) affect the local practice of landscape planning and design. How we empower the young generation, will most likely effect their decisions in the future. The inter-dependencies between the local and global becomes tangible when we collaborate on a sites shrouded in similar challenges. To create a resilient and sustainable future for all life on earth, planning and design of landscapes requires to embed local site-specific knowledge within a larger understanding of their global effects.

How do we concretize this in a course?

To demonstrate this through the course we constructed a possibility for the students to work with and compare two sites, one in Kenya and one in Sweden. Both sites face challenges related to water management but in distinct social, political, and climatological contexts. How do we interact with local context, understand spatial processes and handle local politics? These are a few of the challenges that are addressed in this course preparing the students for working cross-equatorially in their future career.

The sites chosen are Nyhamnen in Malmö and Nairobi dam. Nyhamnen is a former harbour area claimed from the sea with vast areas of hardscape and quays. This has been a place of departure and arrival, still harbouring structures for connecting the land and the ocean. The city of Malmö is now planning to extend the city on to the site, embracing the diversity of Malmö and making space for social and biological processes that will colonize the area.  Nairobi dam, is an artificially constructed reservoir to capture water for the urban elite also offering this strata, recreational opportunities of sailing etc. A few decades later, the expansion of an urban marginalized settlement on one of its banks has transformed Kibera into the second largest slum in Africa. Devoid of water this space today is used for urban agriculture with peripheral areas collecting solid waste and sewage form the informal settlements as well as from other parts of the city conveyed by a network of three rivers.

Kenyan colleagues Caleb Toroitich, Hilda Omuhindi, Victor Odiwa and Caroline Ofafa during their visit to Nyhamnen. Photo: Alexia Moulin

How do we solve the logistics and cooperation in the courses?

Due to the different university terms, the JKUAT course started in January ending in April, where the students began with the Swedish site of Nyhamnen. The SLU course began in March and ends in June. During the courses, zoom lectures and reviews between the two universities has been held frequently. These digital meetings was complemented with IRL tutoring when two teachers from Sweden, Emily Wade and Nupur Prothi visited Kenya in March. They were able to meet the students at JKUAT and discuss their inspiring work on the Swedish site. This was also an opportunity to connect with JKUAT faculty and visit the site and meet Landscape Architects who were working within Kibera.

The Swedish part of the Master’s course started in the middle of March with a week’s visit from two Kenyan faculty members Caleb Toroitich and Caroline Ofafa, and two students Hilda Omuhindi and Victors Odiwa. In an extremely intense week we got to know the Kenyan site through lectures and movies from the site delivered by our Kenyan colleagues. We were able to take them to visit the Nyhamnen site in Malmö. Our Swedish students got to discuss and give feedback to the visiting Kenyan students on their proposals for Nyhamnen. Most importantly, the conversations and discussions strengthened mutual respect, laying the foundation for future collaborations.

What are the insights so far?

One of the important insights is that the education system in both countries have many similarities with a similar manner of teaching, design and practice of the landscape architecture profession. Early in our digital interactions, where we as SLU tutors reviewed the JKUAT students’ work in progress, we discovered that their analysis, sketches and proposals follow similar methodology and focus as our students. Our educational systems are also structured similarly at bachelor’s level even though the Kenyan education is younger than the Swedish program, which recently celebrated 50 years.

We do talk about the same global challenges, but site specific tangible problems are mostly very different. Multiplicity of cultures, dense urban populations, economic divides and a vibrant equatorial culture contrast somewhat with a Nordic population in a temperate and arctic landscape with low population pressure, abundance of open public space and ample natural resources.

This blog post is the first one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.

This blog post is written by Alex Weisend, Alexia Moulin and Sara Saleh, students at the MSc course Act Local, Think Global. 

Nairobi Dam. Photo: Emily Wade

What new perspectives on water access, use and design can be explored when collaborating with students from a country with vastly different challenges?

If there is an antithesis to a post-industrial harbour in a northern European, medium-sized town, it could, at first glance, be that of an overgrown dam in Nairobi, Kenya. It is in this economic, social, environmental, and not the least spatial contradiction that our team has approached the question of water access, use and design.

Visit in Nyhamnen, Malmö. Photo: Alexia Moulin

Nyhamnen is a constructed landfill, developed in order to expand in a growing, global industry. Nairobi dam of today reminds of a landfill, but is a consequence of political and economic circumstances with adverse environmental and social effects. Nyhamnen is an area that has been used to a limited extent by the city’s inhabitants, whilst Nairobi dam borders to, and is to a large extent integrated in, Kibera, the second largest informal settlement in Kenya. Although both sites face challenges of pollution, Nairobi dam is subject to an accumulation of urban runoff, inadequate sewage systems and the outcomes of poor sanitation facilities carried by rivers and tributaries with a final outlet in the dam. Nyhamnen is subject to a preceding industrial pollution, and in periods of extensive rainfall, to urban runoff.

Working together with students from Nairobi has – this far – had several effects on our design thinking. Seeing the possibilities of “our” site through the eyes of the Nairobi students – and specifically through their design analyses and concepts, has challenged us in our interpretation of the site. Mitigating rising sea levels by sculpting the land into dramatic hills and valleys, as suggested by one Kenyan student, inspired us to explore unconventional design solutions. It also emphasized the urgency of the global climatic conditions and how these require critical measures. We are not only theoretically aware of this. Being prompted by students with a first-hand experience of the consequences of climate change as well as of political and economic conditions in interplay with these, reinforces our incentive to practicing it.

Nairobi dam has been subject to a range of programs and measures taken to improve the conditions of the reservoir. The obstacles that have hindered a long term and extensive development of the past waterscape are described in literature on the development of the Nairobi dam, that we have taken part of. Despite the difference in severity and scale between Nyhamnen and Nairobi dam, there are lessons to be learnt in implementing improvement measures in the case of the urban transformation of Nyhamnen too. In terms of water access, use and design, one of the obstacles of the Nairobi dam experience has been that the extent of the defined extent of the project and the site has been too small-scale. Without engaging the local community, taking into consideration climate change, pollutants along the watercourse and economic circumstances affecting the use and misuse of the water, programs for treating the water risk being carried out in vain. The fluid character of water imposes on us a global perspective, in Nairobi dam as well as in Nyhamnen.

Act local, think global is as much the name of this class and a subtheme in the IFLA of 2023 as it is a method for learning from dramatically contrasting circumstances and applying them to our local conditions. An antithesis can also be a design tool that reveals a global parallel.

This blog post is the second one in a series of four blog posts from the Master’s course Act Local, Think Global given by SLU and JKUAT Nairobi.