By way of transforming food systems

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This blog post is written by Master’s student; Anudini Wijayarathna, Rural Development & Natural Resource Management, SLU and Camilla Lindberg, MSc Environmental Science, SLU. The content is based on their experience in participating in the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021,‘The People’s Plenary – Accelerating Action for the Future We Want’.

Women working within agriculture in Asia.

In a phase where the COVID-19 pandemic has destructively affected global food systems and food security, the much-needed global discourse on transformation of food systems was conducted by the UN Food Systems Summit 2021.

The aim of the summit was to create a platform in bringing all-inclusive, diverse and effective strategies to transform today’s food systems, through which the world can achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 – and we have listened to some of it and are happy to share some of our thoughts.

The session, ‘The People’s Plenary – Accelerating Action for the Future We Want’ brought attention to various efforts that the global community have initiated for this transformation through worldwide pre-summit dialogues. We were excited to listen in on this particular part of the summit to see what the national dialogues, that we also had taken part in, had generated in terms of collective action. During this session one thing that stood out to us was the multitude of coalitions that have been created around different food system issues. The coalitions are a way of collaborating and sharing knowledge to enable and accelerate the commitment of transforming the food systems to be sustainable and in line with Agenda 2030. We thought this was a great way of generating action around a specific topic as well as inspiring to see so many people wanting to share and work together.

We have described some of the coalitions below and what action areas they are related to:

Coalitions across the world

One of the coalitions from action area one, Nourish All People, is The Coalition of Action for Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems for Children It is & All. The coalition is described as a broad coalition that focuses on aligning and strengthening actions across sectors to be able to achieve collective impact on healthy diets. The actions the coalition is mainly focusing on should address malnutrition, unsafe foods and environmental impacts of food production.

The Global Sustainable Livestock Coalition is a part of action area two to Boost nature based solutions of production and their overarching goal is to “support decision making at all levels for farmer- and value-chain-oriented national/bioregional development”. Livestock production affects development in the economic, social as well as the environmental system and the coalition is a way to optimise sharing of best practises between stakeholders across scales.

Vegetables at a market. Credit: Pixabay

The session has also shed light on the strategies across the world to reduce food loss and waste under the Coalition on Food is Never Waste under action track two. While one in ten people in the world suffer from hunger, a large amount of food is wasted, which also results in releasing greenhouse gases. Thus, the initiative urges the consumers to avoid buying excess food while utilising what we buy. It also depicted the need to invest more in facilities to preserve food, and technologies for food waste management such as the food losses measuring method developed in Sweden to reduce food loss within food production.

Indigenous Peoples Food Systems coalition is connected to action track three; Advance Equitable Livelihoods, Decent Work, & Empowered Communities. The main objective of the coalition is to strengthen and protect indigenous people’s food systems across the world as well as scale up and disseminate the traditional knowledge and good practices already there that have the potential to transform the global food system as a whole.

Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH), linked to action track four, is established around the main objective of improving soil health with the intention of changing diverse perspectives of food systems constructively.  Paying farmers not only for volume but also for the quality and soil health, scaling up science-based solutions and innovation, sharing knowledge with farmers through field schools to store carbon in soils, increasing plant-based meat and dietary products and many other initiatives were uncovered by this coalition.

For a sustainable future

In review of these efforts, we felt encouraged to see that the summit and its’ extended network is mobilising people to act and specifically to collaborate. To be able to transform such complex systems as the food systems, cross-scale and cross-sectoral collaborations are definitely needed. Perhaps these coalitions can be a perfect place for the sharing of knowledge and practices to take place.

Nevertheless, we also find these initiatives are not as simple as we see. Especially the pandemic has made some people’s vulnerability worse because of health issues, unemployment and poverty, lack of access to food and resources and many more. Under such circumstances, will these coalitions be able just to come out of the worse scenario or to overcome the detrimental effects of the pandemic and create long-term sustainability in food systems? Most importantly, continuation of these collaborations in the long run is essential to see a visible change in food systems.

Apart from that, some of these actions could contradict different sustainable development goals. The coalitions’ effort of promoting plant-based dietary products can be a constructive change in acquiring health benefits for people whereas it can be a livelihood and environmental threat. For example, almond milk can be a comparatively nutritious plant-based substitute yet, almond cultivation is highly water extracting and labour consuming. Thus, it is also vital to integrate the implementation processes of these initiatives with the other Sustainable Development Goals.  Moreover, to see a sustainable future, the implementation strategies of these initiatives might have to be shaped constructively according to the situation.

If you want to know more about or get in contact with any of the coalitions, visit the FSS website or email foodsystemssummit@un.org.

Ethiopia assesses Environmental Monitoring and Assessment for Agenda 2030

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The blog post is written by Kevin Bishop, Professor at the Department of Aquatic Sciences and Assessment, SLU, and Solomon Gebreyohannis Gebrehiwot, Assistant professor at the Ethiopian Institute of Water Resources (EIWR) and Water and Land Resources Center (WLRC), Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. 

A field excursion to considering the possibilities for environmental monitoring and assessment in Ethiopia. Photo: Kevin Bishop

There is a global consensus to work towards the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But to set a course to these goals, and then navigate through the trade-offs and synergies between these goals is a challenge. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (EMA) has been a central feature of how many industrialized societies, including Sweden, have tried to achieve environmental goals for half a century now. But Agenda 2030 involves the economic and social dimensions as well as the environmental dimensions of sustainable development.

A group of researchers from Ethiopia, Chile and Sweden, all with ties to SLU, looked at how EMA could be renewed for a more effective role in Agenda 2030 that encompasses socio-economic dimensions and respects the complexity of knowledge needed to understand nature’s contribution to socio-economic development (Bishop and Jönsson, 2020). The three national settings were chosen to focus on how EMA’s potential looked in societies with different income levels, with a focus on issues surrounding forests and waters.

One outcome of the project is a new article examining EMA in Ethiopia (Gebrehiwot et al., 2021). National experts and practitioners were gathered and interviewed by the country’s Academy of Science to look at what the country currently has in the way of EMA, but also opportunities for the future, since the possibilities for observing ecosystems have developed tremendously in recent years, including remote sensing, genomics, and citizen science.

The stakeholder discussions in Ethiopia revealed a strong and shared belief that evidence-based assessments can help manage the challenges posed by the simultaneous pursuit of multiple SDGs. The most remarkable finding for those involved in the expert meetings was discovering the existence of more environmental M&A than the expert group had anticipated. That highlighted a weakness that many of the participants already suspected, namely that the environmental data which does exist are not well-communicated. The information resources remain largely unknown to decision-makers and even relevant experts, to say nothing of secondary stakeholders and the public at large. Given how Europe and other industrialized societies struggle to achieve the goals of “open science”, the issue of data documentation and sharing is an even more acute challenge in low-income countries.

Solomon and other experts gathered at the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, Feb 2018. Photo: Kevin Bishop

Strengthening existing public institutions, encouraging local participation through citizen science and adoption of up to date technologies to create national platform for EMA would be an important step to fill in the gaps identified in this study. Furthermore, this would facilitate addressing the needs for more integrated monitoring and assessment of the interactions between the use and management of water, forests, and other resources as well as to better navigate synergies and conflicts between SDGs.

Common to all the countries in the study, the participants in the Ethiopian study found that the evidence base must be translated into socially accepted knowledge in order to navigate potential synergies and conflicts between different SDGs. A strength Ethiopia has for this is the presence of government financed extension agents in villages across the country. This meant that developments in the evidence-base could be rapidly communicated and worked with down to the level of individual land-owners. Potential was also recognized in Ethiopia for more participatory environmental analysis methods that could promote a more inclusive dialogue on natural resource management.

Together with the other two case studies in Sweden and Chile, a theoretical framework regarding legitimacy and governance has been developed that could help evolve EMA into a powerful new tool which builds on a long tradition of environmental monitoring and assessment, but with the strength of co-production of knowledge suited to the vision of Agenda 2030, and a focus on learning processes in governance, creating versatility for different contexts (Alarcon et al., 2021).

This blog post is based on a published report:
Gebrehiwot, S. G., Bewket, W., Mengistu, T., Nuredin, H., Ferrari, C. A., & Bishop, K. (2021). Monitoring and assessment of environmental resources in the changing landscape of Ethiopia: a focus on forests and water. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 193(10), 1-13.

Alarcon Ferrari, C., Jönsson, M., Gebreyohannis Gebrehiwot, S., Chiwona-Karltun, L., Mark-Herbert, C., Manuschevich, D., Powell, N., Do, T., Bishop, K. & Hilding-Rydevik, T. (2021). Citizen Science as Democratic Innovation That Renews Environmental Monitoring and Assessment for the Sustainable Development Goals in Rural Areas. Sustainability, 13(5), 2762.

Bishop, K. and Jönsson, M. (2020). Med miljöanalys som verktyg: Skogen och Agenda 2030. KSLA Nytt och Noterat, 2020(1): 4-5)

 

More connections: Sustainable livestock opportunities and new food system realities

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Shirley Tarawali, assistant director general of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and chair of the Global Agenda for Sustainable Livestock, made a keynote presentation at an Agri4D online conference, Food Systems for New Realities, held 28–30 Sep 2021. The conference was organized by SLU Global and the Swedish International Agriculture Network Initiative (SIANI), with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). This blog post was first published by ILRI 4 Oct 2021. 

Tarawali’s remarks, ‘More connections: Sustainable livestock opportunities and new food system realities’, pulled examples from the livestock sector to illustrate the importance of existing, new and diverse connections to deliver on the future sustainable, inclusive, resilient and inclusive food systems we all aspire to.

A transcript of her remarks follows.

As I considered the theme of this conference, Food systems for new realities, and the core question it addresses, as I brainstormed with colleagues—and I particularly want to acknowledge ILRI’s Susan MacMillan and David Aronson in this regard—I found myself circling back again and again to the new connections that have arisen recently, and more connections that are needed to address—and to influence—the new realities.

Of course, food connects us all! We all need to eat. We all have preferences. We all like to make choices—especially about food!

But when it comes to food—especially milk, meat and eggs—let’s be careful that the wealthier ones of us don’t allow our choices or the voices about our choices to impact on those who have little or no choice and for whom these foods would make an immense difference to their wellbeing.

There are some connections that relate to this overall theme and which are part of those new realities—new connections that influence and deliver.

Food system connections

  • With ‘more food’ needed to feed ‘more people’, we need to better connect how food is produced, transported, processed, marketed and consumed
  • We need to understand the connections among the many ways that foods are produced and their impacts on the environment
  • We need to understand and address the multiple trade-offs as well as connections involved in making our food systems truly sustainable

For small- and medium-sized livestock enterprises in low- and middle-income countries, where the people–livestock connections are still very close and where demand for milk, meat and eggs is growing fastest, the oft-cited connections now are between livestock and the environment and livestock and human health.

But let’s not forget other connections:

  • Livestock provide livelihoods, jobs and incomes for more than a billion people
  • Women, who in lower-income countries make up two-thirds of all mixed crop-and-livestock farmers, have a unique intersection with livestock
  • Household stock are often the only asset that women can own
  • Farm animals may be the only means for a girl to go to school
  • Cattle, buffaloes, camels, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry and their many products provide women with nutritious food, or, if they sell those foods, with the income needed to buy other foods, to feed their families
  • And germane to today’s topics is livestock’s role in ‘agroecology’ and the ‘circular bioeconomy’ (‘closing the loop’). Because small and medium production enterprises often take the form of integrated crop-livestock systems, they are already operating as a circular bioeconomy, albeit one that needs improved efficiency and productivity. Or these enterprises take the form of pastoral herding systems, which play essential roles in, and present new opportunities for, environmental stewardship of the world’s vast rangelands.

Globally, we have the UNFSS (United Nations Food Systems Summit), COP26 (United Nations Climate Change Conference), N4G (Nutrition for Growth global pledge drive) and CBD (United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) all being held in just in the last quarter of 2021. These meetings are connecting people, conversations, ideas, commitments and investments.

Pandemic lessons about connections

  • The pandemic has painfully but usefully reminded us just how globally connected we all are. Perhaps Dr Tedros’ pandemic mantra—‘No one is safe until we are all safe’—needs to be expanded to global food systems—‘No one is fed or nourished until we are all fed and nourished’
  • We’ve seen how ‘connected science’ delivered (spectacular) vaccine solutions
  • And we’ve seen how vaccines alone will not suffice; we need similarly focused connections within and among institutions, policymakers, government officials and socio-economists
  • And, of course, the pandemic has underscored the need to understand the connections between people, animals and environments within a ‘One Health’ paradigm

Let me now turn to three connections that still must be established, developed and strengthened—three connections that are themselves interconnected!

Three new food system connections needed

Connections to diversity

  • Reality for each of us depends very much on our local context, which very much differs depending on where and how we live. This is particularly true of livestock, which globally play multiple and very different roles, involve very different species, and are raised to produce a range of commodities in very different environments and under very different circumstances.
  • Because these different realities are often overlooked, debates about the roles of livestock, for example, can get polarized, with contrasting views about whether livestock are part of the solution, or part of the problem, in addressing the new food system realities.

I’m as guilty as anyone of having this kind of polarized (unconnected) viewpoint. Working in the developing world, I have thought that the ‘livelihoods’ livestock provide are more important in poor than in rich countries. I was wrong of course. People in wealthier countries employed in livestock production, processing, trading, retailing, etc. are just as dependent on livestock as the millions raising farm animals in poorer countries. That to me just emphasizes the need for very different pathways to reach a united goal to improve our food systems.

Or think, for example, of the pathways needed in the developing world for a smallholder mixed farmer, or a medium‑sized dairy cooperative member, or a pastoral herder, or a female head of household, or a traditional village elder or a young urban entrepreneur, and think of the many traders and processors of livestock foods and the many people providing feed and veterinary and other inputs and services to livestock farmers. Think of the variety of animal husbandry practices: from massive dairies in China to medium‑sized enterprises raising a few hundred pigs in the emerging economies of Asia, to family farms raising one or two cows and a handful of goats and chickens in Africa. What this huge diversity tells me is that a sustainable development trajectory—and the actions and science needed to drive it—will differ greatly depending on where one starts from, and with what resources.

Connections to science

While global food trends right now are heading in the wrong direction—with increasing numbers of people descending into poverty and hunger—our globalized world has, paradoxically, more new knowledge, more science and innovation, more enabling technologies than ever before.

As the pandemic has shown us, ‘connected science’ can deliver miracles such as rapidly developed vaccines against a new pathogen. But to make a bigger, and more equitable, difference in a diverse world, that science must be connected to, and contextualized within, a broad and diverse set of institutional, policy and social environments.

Connections to investments

We heard last week at the UNFSS of several large financial commitments to realizing the better food systems we aspire to. We must make those financial connections also work for these ‘new realities’, even when those realities are challenging, conflicting, confusing or paradoxical. By connecting people from different worlds, donors from different countries, ideas from different disciplines, innovations from different communities with a wealth of new science and knowledge, we can make the difference that makes the difference.

Let’s connect!

Let’s deliver!

Watch a video of Tarawali’s short (7-minute) talk here: https://youtu.be/QOJlSeY0kxE

DevRes 2021: Takeaways that may help us in reaching SDGs in low-income countries

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This blog post is written by Adan Martinez Cruz, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Forest Economics and SLU Global coordinator.

From 14 June to 16 June 2021, DevRes 2021 allowed us to exchange insights on challenges and opportunities to accomplish the 2030 Agenda –with a focus on low-income countries. Originally scheduled for June 2020 to take place at UmeĂ„ University campus, DevRes went digital. The success of this adaptation strategy can be illustrated by the 500 registered participants from all over the world, the 125 speakers in 51 sessions, and the variety of topics covered.

I was fortunate to chair two sessions and I will tell you my takeaways from these sessions.

During the “Gender and inclusion in agriculture” session, we learnt about the relevance of empowering women to fight poverty among smallholder farmers in Nigeria, and about the role of ethnicity and gender in adopting agroforestry strategies in Vietnam. In particular, Mai Phuong Nguyen, who works at World Agroforestry, reported her findings from semi-structured interviews to 60 farmers (30 men and 30 females) across three provinces of northwestern Vietnam. These interviews explore preferences, constraints, and opportunities to adopt agroforestry practices among Thai and H’mong people. These two ethnic minorities rely on farming sloped land, which results on high levels of soil erosion –hence the need to explore the opportunities for adoption of agroforestry. The finding I wish to highlight here is the difference across gender in interest and perceptions about benefits from agroforestry –women are less certain about what agroforestry entails, and therefore are less interested in adopting agroforestry practices. This difference seems to be originated in the different channels of information that men and women have access to –while men have formal and informal learning channels, women rely mostly on informal channels. The implication is that formal agricultural extension services, which are not currently reaching out to women, must be tailored to inform women or otherwise agroforestry practices may spread at a slower pace than desired.

During the “Climate change –resilience, mitigation, and adaptation” session, we discussed how climate impacts efficiency of subsistence farming in Ethiopia, the effect of the Sloping Land Conversion Program on Chinese farmers’ vulnerability to climate change, and how capital assets enable resilience to water scarcity among small farmers in Indonesia. Francisco X. Aguilar, who is Professor at the Department of Forest Economics in SLU, and co-authors have explored the association between rural livelihood capitals (natural, human, social, financial, and physical) and the avoidance of, adaptation to, and inability to withstand water scarcity among 200 small farmers in South Sulawasi, Indonesia. Their findings illustrate not only heterogeneity in the association but also the relevance of social and human capitals as assets to enable resilience. In particular, physical and natural assets in the form of irrigation infrastructure and direct access to water sources were saliently associated with resilience to water scarcity; factors associated with capacity to adapt were more nuanced with social capital being closely linked. Years of farming experience as a form of human capital asset was strongly associated with resiliency.

DevRes aims to explore the challenges that require societal transformation in order to accomplish the 2030 Agenda with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As illustrated by the couple of findings I have highlighted here, DevRes 2021 delivered insights that we have taken with us in our pursue to design policies that empower citizens of low-income countries to accomplish by their own means the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs.

Survival of indigenous communities and forests amidst the pandemic

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This blog post is written by Anudini Wijayarathna, Master’s student in Rural Development & Natural Resource Management at SLU.

Image by cultur668 from Pixabay

‘Impacts of the pandemic on forest communities and forest resource use – what do we know, what do we need to know and how to find out?’ have been one of the most enlightening discussions that I have participated in. It was a dialogue co-arranged by Focali (Forest, Climate and Livelihood research network) and SIANI (Swedish International Agricultural Network Initiative).

It’s been around a year since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged worldwide. Yet, the impacts of it will extend over many years. Currently, there are various entities that are deeply impacted by the pandemic globally as well as nationally.  Forest resources and forest communities can be considered as one of them. Most importantly, the world is still in the process of identifying the extent of these implications. This dialogue has been an instrumental platform in creating awareness on that. However, my attention was grabbed particularly by the discussion on the disruptions that occurred in the livelihoods of indigenous people.

Absence of state and regressive actions of the governments

Having forest-based livelihoods, indigenous communities are affected by the pandemic in different ways. To a certain extent, the pandemic has been a positive cause of livelihoods for some of the indigenous communities. They got the chance to depend more on the forest resources as there are fewer external activities functioning within the forests due to lockdowns. Nevertheless, for some indigenous communities, the pandemic has been a cause of destruction.

In this event, Ricardo Camilo Niño Izquierdo, Technical Secretary of the Indigenous Secretariat of the National Commission for Indigenous Territories, Colombia and Keyla Barrero, Anthropologist, National University of San Marcos, Peru, shared their views on how the pandemic has affected the indigenous communities. According to their experience, the indigenous people are subjected to negligence with insufficient health care and sanitation by the state during the nationwide lockdowns.

The absence of state governing authorities in the forest territories during the lockdowns allowed powerful actors to expand their illicit activities. Those are illegal logging, use of land for illegal plantations, presence of armed groups, drug trafficking etc. These activities aggravated deforestation in 2020 in comparison to the previous years. Moreover, there has been a significant increase in human rights violations of indigenous communities, which sometimes ends up in murdering them.

The situation becomes worse when the governments are trying to overcome the ongoing financial crisis through detrimental policies and actions towards the forest resources. Renewal of mining and excessive extraction of resources by the authorities is such an instance that threatens the sustainability of the livelihoods. In addition to that, indigenous people who are not yet given proper land titles or tenures, get further suppressed when the local governments endorse illegal invaders to occupy the forests. Lack of effective policies and excluding indigenous community representation in the government consultation procedures has also been a stimulating factor for this vulnerable situation.

Ultimately, all these activities cause not only the deterioration of indigenous people’s livelihoods but also many other destructive consequences such as degradation of natural resources and climate and increase of global hunger and poverty. Thus, reaching UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 has become an immense challenge to the whole world.

For a brighter future

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Under such circumstances, it is a dire need to put forward remedial measures to decrease these vulnerabilities. Yet, identifying the needful actions to overcome these issues is the toughest among all. I believe, primarily it is important at this stage to lay a legal framework to ensure indigenous communities’ land tenure and to include them in the government consultation in policy making.

As discussed in the dialogue, it is also crucial to strengthen the local capacity building on merging the voice of indigenous and local communities. I consider this kind of effort will be essential to involve indigenous people and their lay-knowledge in local sustainable development efforts such as smallholder farming and plantations. It will be beneficial to upgrade the livelihoods as well as to promote sustainable use of ecosystems. In order to make the procedure more effective, the researchers and practitioners also need to collaborate in building knowledge and applying it in implementation.

Apart from that, creating public awareness continuously through global partnerships on the challenges and opportunities for indigenous communities is also needful for the long-term survival of indigenous communities as well as the forests. Accordingly, strengthening indigenous communities will not be merely an effort of uplifting indigenous livelihoods but also a part of green recovery. However, in order to see a brighter future, the implementation strategies of these remedial measures might have to be shaped according to the situation while aiming towards sustainable development.