The New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman addresses an interesting ‘disconnect’ in America in his column this week (Want the good news first?, 27 July 2010).
”The [US] Senate’s failure to act [on climate change] is a result of many factors, but one is that the climate-energy policy debate got disconnected from average people. We need less talk about “climate” and more about how conservation saves money, renewable energy creates jobs, restoring the gulf’s marshes sustains fishermen and preserving the rainforest helps poor people. Said Glenn Prickett, vice president at the Nature Conservancy: “We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth and show how it matters in people’s everyday lives.”
Some of those working to help farmers and herders in poor countries build sustainable agricultural systems and adapt to climate change have a similar message.
Funding for climate change research in developing countries, which are expected to be hit hardest by global warming, has increased dramatically in recent years, while funding for much traditional agricultural research for development has remained stagnant. Even so, scientists working at the cross-section of agricultural development and climate change say that there is not a lot in their research portfolios that is new because of the injection of new climate change funding. Rather, much of the new funding is allowing them to expand and refine decades of research on sustainable development of smallholder agriculture.
The two billion small-scale farmers and herders these agricultural scientists serve are, after all, already among the world’s foremost experts in climate change. They and their farming ancestors have managed to wrest food and livelihoods from changing tropical landscapes since the dawn of agriculture. No one has to tell them how climate change ‘matters in people’s everyday lives’.
Conserving rainforests, wetlands and other natural resources; restoring rangelands and farmlands into productive use; exploiting renewable energy, saving money and creating jobs; helping people build livelihoods that are sustainable over the long term–these are not new ideas. People have been working in these areas for decades. The hope of many agricultural research-for-development scientists is that the intellectual as well as financial spillovers from the current world focus interest on climate change will allow them to pursue these topics more vigorously; to connect to more, and more diverse, experts; to get more refined data on developing-countries; to make faster advances in their disciplines; and to help more people escape poverty, hunger and environmental degradation.
‘Neglected diseases are diseases of neglected peoples’—Eric Fèvre
Animals and people live close together throughout the developing world. Chickens, goats, pigs, cows and other farmed animals range freely in and out of rural homesteads as families go about their daily lives. This space-sharing by people and their livestock makes good use of the small plots of land managed by the world’s many smallholder farmers; food that might otherwise go to waste can be fed to the animals, for example, while animal manure feeds the cropland by fertilizing it. Most of the world’s smallholder farmers depend on their animals for milk, meat and eggs to feed their families, with the surplus generating much-needed regular household income.
However, such close proximity to their animals puts many people at risk of ‘zoonotic’ diseases, which are those transmitted between people and animals. Remarkably, more than 60% of all human diseases are infections they can get from animals and more than 70% of today’s emerging diseases, such as bird flu, are zoonotic.
Because human and animal health are particularly intertwined in poor countries where people and livestock live in such close proximity, efforts to improve human health in the developing world need to focus on improving animal as well as human health. This makes it necessary for medical and veterinary experts to collaborate and for livestock farmers and herders to be made aware of the disease risks their animals pose to the health of their households.
A project begun in 2009 and funded by the Wellcome Trust, with other support from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), is studying neglected zoonotic diseases and their epidemiology to raise levels of health in poor rural communities. The project, People, Animals and Their Zoonoses, is based in Kenya’s Busia District, which sits on the country’s western border, with Uganda.
Eric Fèvre, who is working jointly for the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the University of Edinburgh, is the project’s principal investigator and leader. Fèvre says this study is important.
‘Zoonotic diseases are a great burden on poor communities’, Fèvre says. ‘In a poor household where animals and people are in regular close contact, there is a significant chance of zoonotic diseases spreading. Typically in such areas, animals have access to human waste, there is little preventative health services for livestock and there is poor-quality food and forage for people and animals.’
With insufficient and/or unreliable health infrastructure and with many poor people not readily seeking professional medical attention, these diseases often go underreported or misdiagnosed. Complicating and aggravating this already serious health situation, he says, is that ‘in some cases, other non-zoonotic infections may already be present.’
Furthermore, as reported in the May 2010 issue of Veterinary Record, Fèvre says:
‘While malaria is undoubtedly a very serious health issue, its overdiagnosis hides many other problems. To compound this, people in marginalised communities can easily fall off the policy radar – many may be born, live and die without official record being made of them and, as such, they have a weak, or nonexistent, political voice. Thus, while the diseases are grouped as “neglected zoonotic diseases,” it would be equally correct to identify them as “diseases of neglected populations”.’
The Kenya zoonotic study is a four-year project that brings together ILRI scientists in Kenya with researchers from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh and from the Kenya Medical Research Institute, the latter of whom are already working in much of Kenya’s Western and Nyanza provinces. These epidemiologists, veterinarians, medical health professionals and laboratory technologists will visit over 500 homesteads in Busia to collect data and samples from people and livestock; those people found ill will be treated or referred to specialists.
The project data will be used to quantify the place of zoonoses in the context of other infectious diseases and to refine our understanding of factors that put people and livestock at risk. The study team also aims to come up with diagnostic tests that can be used in the field and to design cheap, easy-to-implement health interventions for both people and livestock. The project is focusing on bovine tuberculosis, cysticercosis, brucellosis, Q-fever, Rift Valley fever and trypanosomiasis (in cattle) /sleeping sickness (in people) and their impacts on both livestock and the people.
The results of this project are expected not only to improve the health aspects of the relationship between people and their livestock in western Kenya but also to provide important background for future research and policymaking on zoonotic issues.
Women in rural areas have a heavy workload that included delivery of food, water and fuel for household needs
New research findings on bioenergy access and delivery in Kenya are recommending greater collaboration between stakeholders to promote sustainable use of bioresources, biofuels and bioresidues.
In a socioeconomic baseline survey carried out by the eastern Africa office of Practical Action Consulting, in Kenya, between March and December 2008, researchers evaluated the bioenergy needs, gaps, status and opportunities for poor people in Kenya. The research focused on the socioeconomic links and patterns of bioenergy use, access and delivery for the poor in Kenya and generated baseline data that can guide national decision-making.
The report, ‘Bioenergy and Poverty in Kenya: Attitudes, Actors and Activities’, looks at bioenergy use and access by communities in Kenya, with information collected from Kisumu, Lodwar, Mandera, Nairobi and Nakuru.
The report says more awareness of alternative bioenergy technologies and resources is needed in Kenya’s rural and peri-urban areas. It recommends training communities in producing and using low-cost energy-saving stoves and in planting trees. The long-term impacts of firewood and charcoal use by households and institutions should be better known, the report says, and charcoal use should be matched by tree replanting.
The report also calls for a change in attitudes regarding female provision of household fuel; such provision must begin to be seen, say the researchers, as a joint responsibility of all family members. And development programs should begin to treat energy and gender as central, not peripheral, issues in development.
Two development experts recently debated the ‘public goods’ and ‘bads’ of global livestock production. They debated the question, ‘Should we eat less meat to increase food security’, in a ‘Spat’ column in the current (June 2010) issue of People and Science, published by the British Science Association.
Arguing ‘no’ (with reservations) is John McDermott, a Canadian veterinary epidemiologist who serves the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) as Deputy Director General for Research. Arguing ‘yes’ (also with reservations) is Vicki Hird, a Senior Food Campaigner at Friends of the Earth, a UK-based environmental non-governmental organization.
The missions of both ILRI and Friends of the Earth have much in common. Both organizations, for example, are investigating ways to reduce climate change. And both want to manage natural resources in ways that conserve as much land, water, biodiversity and air as possible, with everyone getting a ‘fair share’ of those resources.
But when it comes to their views on livestock — as to whether cows, sheep, goats, pigs and other farm animals do more good than bad, or more bad than good, for people and their environments — each of these development experts sees livestock from a different perspective.
For Hird, who lives in Europe — where environmental concerns are major issues, and where the public embraces environmental causes and activism — livestock are largely ‘polluters of the planet’.
For McDermott, who lives in East Africa — where people’s greatest concerns are getting a job, putting food on the table and paying school and medical fees, a region where development concerns take centre stage — livestock represent ‘pathways out of poverty’.
As one might expect, Hird takes a ‘global’ and ‘environmental’ view of the impacts of livestock production, focusing on the inhumane industrial ‘factory farms’ of industrialized countries, the over-consumption of fatty meat by the rich, and the rape of South American forests to make room for cattle, sheep and goat ranches or for growing soy to feed pigs in Europe. Additionally, there is a growing push for sustainable practices, such as installing solar panels for factory operations, to reduce the carbon footprint of such industries. McDermott, also as one might expect, takes the perspective of the world’s 450 million small farmers, who raise their animals on grass and crop wastes rather than grain, whose children don’t yet eat enough meat, milk and eggs, and whose livelihoods depend directly on the natural resources they have at hand.
Both of these development experts, perhaps surprisingly, also agree on quite a lot when it comes to livestock. They agree that factory farming practices are becoming more and more unsustainable as well as inhumane; they agree that most people in rich countries would profit from eating less fatty meats; they agree that South America’s forests should not be felled so that rich people can eat more pigmeat; and they agree that finding more sustainable as well as equitable ways of producing livestock is in the general public interest.
What the debate focuses on, then, is not so much what to do but how to do it. And, as we shall see, on how long that should take.
McDermott argues for giving small farmers ‘incentives’, for example, to redistribute livestock herds or to intensify their crop-plus-livestock farming systems in ways that make more efficient use of natural resources.
Hird argues for more regulation of the livestock industry in richer countries in areas such as farm subsidies and taxation, and for raising awareness of the major environmental, social and health problems that livestock systems can cause so as to change public (meat-eating) behaviour.
McDermott thinks our biggest job is ‘to close the selective-evidence divide on both sides of the debate’ by getting more evidence in key areas; some industrial practices, he points out, make ‘very efficient’ uses of environmental resources. To come up with equitable policies in the global livestock sector, McDermott argues, will require better assessments — and at much more local levels — of the differing socio-economic as well as environmental trade-offs of those policies. ‘Before taking broad action’, he says, ‘we should use the best available knowledge to design and test interventions in pilot studies’.
Hird is impatient ‘to wait for a perfect evidence base’ before acting and says they have ‘presented a Sustainable Livestock Bill in Parliament to kick start the dialogue on vital UK action’.
In brief, Hird appears most interested in quickly getting to ‘less’ livestock intensive production’ and McDermott in developing long-term ‘smarter’ livestock intensive production’.
In a new 2-minute filmed interview on the ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ of livestock by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), scientists Phil Thornton, of ILRI, and Andy Jarvis, of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), in Colombia, give their views on whether giving up eating meat altogether would help to save the environment. They describe the importance of livestock to the livelihoods of one billion of the world’s poor and caution that removing livestock from the environment would have its own effects. These scientists shared their views during the launch of a new initiative by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) called ‘Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.’
Not to be missed is an inspired, and inspiring, 20-minute TED Talk by one of America's most famous cooks, New York's Dan Barber.
How I Fell in Love with a Fish is a presentation not for the 'self-righteous goody-two-shoes foodie,' says Barber (although he immediately confesses that, as a passionate chef and environmentalist, he is one). Rather, this is an instructive tale of how he fell out of love with one fish and into love with another, and the reasons for that, plus much else about our food systems.
His second (fishy) love affair takes place in Veta La Palma, a 27,000-acre totally self-sustaining fish farm in southwestern Spain that had formerly been a beef ranch and before that a wetlands. The owners of this fish farm reflooded the land, restoring the wetlands ecosystem, and began operating in radically sustainable ways. This farm doesn't feed its animals (fish); it measures its success not by how much fish it produces but rather by the health of its predators (birds); and, as a spill-over benefit, it serves the region as a water purification plant.
This fish farm / love story is, says Barber, a recipe for the future of good food. 'What we need,' says Barber, 'is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good.'
And for those of you who may be wondering about where he stands on global food security, Barber does get to the question (which he admits he 'doesn't love'): 'But how we can feed the world'.
'Our current agro-business business plan is one in liquidation,' he cautions, because it is a business 'that is quickly eroding the ecological capital that makes that very production possible. . . . Our breadbaskets are threatened today not because of diminishing supply but because of diminishing resources.'
Barber answers the question 'How can we feed the world' with another, 'How can we create conditions for every community feeding itself?'
He answers, 'To do that, don't look at the agro-business model for the future. It's really old and its tired. It's high on capital, chemistry and machines. And it's never produced anything really good to eat. Look to farms that restore instead of deplete. Farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively. Farmers that are not just producers but are experts in relationships.'
To that end, we might look to many of the world's billion-plus small-scale farmers in developing countries who are ambitious to practice neither the unhealthy factory-farming of the rich nor the grinding subsistence farming of the poor.
This is what scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and its research, development and agricultural partners are calling a 'third way' for the future of animal agriculture and mixed crop-and-livestock farming. This is an agriculture that would manage to feed the world while helping the world's 'bottom billion' climb out of hunger and poverty. Such a 'third way' of agriculture would feed both human nutrition and ambition in ways that build their livestock and other assets while conserving, not merely extracting, the Earth's remaining, land, water, air and other natural resources.
More . . . ('No simple solutions to livestock and climate change', opinion piece by ILRI Director General Carlos Seré published in SciDevNet, 10 November 2009)
Zebra and wildebeest in Kenya’s Masai Mara Game Reserve (photo credit: ILRI/Elsworth).
The New York Times and other media are reporting this week that one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on earth—the annual migration of nearly 2 million wildebeest and zebra from the drying savannas of the Serengeti, in Tanzania, to the wetter, greener, pastures of Kenya’s adjacent Masai Mara, and back again—is threatened by a proposed new national transit road for northern Tanzania that would cut right across the migration route of these vast herds of ungulates, likely leading to the collapse of this migration and possibly the crash of this ecosystem as a whole.
Kenya’s Masai Mara is the only year-round water source in the Greater Serengeti, and thus serves as critical dry-season grazing grounds for these vast herds of big mammals.
Just one of the problems such a road would bring is a greater disease burden to people, livestock and wildlife alike. In her extensive and useful research notes to her recent article, ‘Road Kill in the Serengeti’, in the New York Times, Olivia Judson refers readers to a scientific paper written by Eric Fevre, of the Zoonotic and Emerging Diseases research group at the University of Edinburgh, now based at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) in Kenya while working on a 3-year human-animal disease research project in Busia District. Fevre describes the spread of animal diseases through animal transportation in his article, ‘Animal movements and the spread of infectious diseases’ (Trends in Microbiology, 2006).
Perhaps just in time, just this month former ILRI ecologist Robin Reid, now director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, USA, began a project in Kenya that is putting radio collars on wildebeest to learn more precisely what routes the animals take in their migration. This project’s members are involving Maasai schoolchildren, who are naming the wildebeest, which they will then be able to follow. The wildebeest collars send regular tracking signals to Safaricom, which are then sent to Colorado, where the routes are posted on a web map that the schoolchildren can follow.
This year’s annual wildebeest migration has already begun. Herds are reported to have crossed the common border of Kenya/Tanzania from Northern Serengeti into Masai Mara, about 4 days ago. ‘What has been unusual about this year’s migration,’ says Paul Kirui, in the Masai Mara, ‘is that the main migration from the south arrived in the Mara early ahead of the Loita herds—the Kenyan resident herds of wildebeest—which usually migrate into the Mara from the east of the park. Normally when we start seeing them move into the park, it is a sign that the main migration from the south is on the way.’
The first population of wildebeest that Reid’s team darted and then tagged with radio collars in the Mara is the Loita group that remains resident in Kenya all year round. Or so the researchers think. The radio collars, now fixed on the first 15 wildebeest, have already started to report back and will be letting scientists, and those schoolchildren, know just where they go, and when.
Reid’s return gave ILRI cause to revisit two remarkable films about her ILRI research in the Mara. Counting in a Disappearing Land (ILRI, 11 minutes, 2007) describes Reid’s project with a Maasai community that has traditionally herded their livestock in Kenya’s wildlife-rich Masai Mara region. This ILRI project was looking to find ways of balancing the needs of people, lands and wildlife. In The Great Migration (CBS ’60 Minutes’, 15 minutes, October 2009), Scott Pelley interviews Reid about the threats to this natural spectacle and the part local Masai are playing to address these threats.
Collaborative conservation may indeed be the answer to saving the Serengeti ecosystem. Protecting majestic wild places and the wildlife they support, places that instill wonder in us, matters, of course, but so does protecting millions of people from severe poverty, chronic hunger and the afflictions that come in their wake: disease and untimely death.
With a large percentage of its land area under protection, Tanzania is a world leader in biodiversity conservation. It is also very, very poor. How this tug at resources—whether the Serengeti Plains will be used for wildlife tourism or other kinds of commerce—will play out may depend on how much the local communities living in poverty near the wildlife benefit from saving this, the last of the great migrations of big mammals on Earth.
The Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) is holding a conference—Climate Change Adaptation Strategies, Capacity Building and Agricultural Innovations to Improve Livelihoods in Eastern and Central Africa: Post-Copenhagen—in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 7–9 June 2010.
Joining ASARECA for this 3-day sub-regional meeting are representatives from the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development; the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research; the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which has a principal campus in Addis Ababa; the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), based in Syria; and other regional and international partners.
Participants of the ten countries that are members of ASARECA are being presented with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and implications for African countries of the resolutions of last December's climate conference in Copenhagen. The participants will assess the relative vulnerability to climate change of its ten member countries, as well as the impacts expected from climate change and the national agricultural adaptation strategies developed in those countries.
The agricultural innovations and technologies already available for responding to climate change and variability will be assessed for their ability to improve livelihoods in the region's arid and semi-arid areas. The participants will recommend optimal ways to negotiate and facilitate implementation of international climate change agreements in the region as well as ways simultaneously to reduce the impacts of climate change and climate variability while improving livelihoods of dryland peoples, who are particularly vulnerable to a warming planet.
Philip Thornton, an agricultural systems analyst specializing in climate change and pro-poor livestock research for development issues, has worked for 14 years as a senior scientist and program leader at the Africa-based International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). For the last 8 years, he has served ILRI as a consultant from his home in Edinburgh.
This year, Thornton was appointed leader of a research theme of a new challenge program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) called 'Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security'. This CGIAR challenge program is likely this year to be transformed into one of the CGIAR's new 'mega programs'. His theme is titled 'Diagnosing vulnerability and analyzing opportunities'. Thornton will split his time equally between this new CGIAR climate change initiative and ILRI research on livestock pathways out of poverty.
As reported in the Winter 2009 issue of Agriculture for Development, the Tropical Agriculture Association last year bestowed on Thornton 'Development Agriculturist of the Year' Award 'in recognition of his contribution to international agricultural development through greater understanding of tropical agricultural systems'. The Association highlighted Thornton's prodigious work that has inform policies addressing climate change, land use and poverty alleviation.
In the current, Spring 2010, issue of Agriculture for Development, Thornton has published an article on 'Climate change and livestock keepers in developing countries: What are the prospects?'. The paper presents examples of possible impacts on livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa 'of long-term changes in climate, and then of possible impacts of short-term changes in climate variability.' For example, Thornton reports that research indicates that 'there are widespread parts of the continent that are currently classified as mixed crop-livestock rainfed arid-semiarid systems, in which cropping is possible but may well not be in 2050'.
'All in all', writes Thornton, 'the coming decades are likely to see substantial shifts in the patterns of African cropping and livestock keeping.' The paper concludes with a summary of options for dealing with these types of changes in future.
Examples: 'Helping livestock keepers understand and deal with current levels of climate variability can provide one entry point to the problems posed by increasing variability in the future and to the options that may be needed to deal with it. For example, weather information can be used to assist rural communities in managing the risks associated with rainfall variability, and can also feed into livestock insurance schemes that are weather-indexed: policyholders are paid in response to trigger events such as abnormal rainfall or high local animal mortality rates. An index insurance scheme based on satellite imagery is currently being piloted in several areas of drought-prone northern Kenya. It may also be possible for livestock keepers to change the mix of livestock species and/or breeds that they keep, a strategy that has been practised in the past by some pastoralists in East and West Africa, for example. Longer term approaches to adaptation are also needed.'
Thornton is also an Honourary Fellow in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Agricultural Systems.
The livelihoods of many of the world’s rural poor are increasingly threatened by climate change. Most of these livelihoods are dependent on farming, fishing and forests. Climate change will affect and worsen the living conditions of people who are already vulnerable and food insecure, especially in developing countries. In the face of what seems an inevitable change, scientists are looking for solutions that will help poor smallholder farmers adapt their agricultural practices to cope with, and mitigate, climate change.
Through a new Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) initiative, a consortium of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is seeking innovative approaches to address the emerging threats to global agriculture and food security. CCAFS is a 10-year initiative launched by the CGIAR and the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP). CCAFS works to diagnose and analyse threats to agriculture and food security, to provide evidence for development of climate change policies and to identify and develop pro-poor adaptation and mitigation practices that will benefit poor farmers and urbanites alike.
In a CCAFS workshop held at the World Agroforesty Centre (ICRAF), in Nairobi, Kenya, on 4 May 2010, scientists and researchers held discussions on ways of ‘building food security in the face of climate change’. Among the key challenges to food security identified by the participants were: lack of a platform by which developing countries could share their experiences in dealing with climate change; weaknesses in presenting lessons from climate change impacts on farming; and inability to implement policies to address climatic risks to developing-country agriculture because of widespread poverty, limited human capital, and poor governance in many poor countries.
According to Achim Steiner, the Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), ‘Agriculture needs to be understood within the greater context of livelihood sustainability’. Steiner believes the threat of climate change offers opportunities for agricultural development if new innovative ways of enhancing agriculture are explored. For example, agricultural practices that help communities reduce carbon emissions should be considered. ‘If we can demonstrate that a farming or production system reduces emissions, communities could be paid to develop it for expansion to solve two challenges at the same time. ‘The future of agriculture is not just in increasing production,’ the UNEP head said, ‘but in having working systems that protect the planet and that benefit those who engage in practices that protect the planet and livelihoods of the poor.
Thomas Rosswall, who chairs the CCAFS Steering Committee, noted that the ‘big disconnect [in addressing agricultural production] has been because development and global change have been addressed, researched and funded as unrelated issues’. He said ‘the approach to research needs to change so that it can link the local experiences to global needs while working with the poor to improve agricultural productivity.
Participants of the meeting agreed that ‘transformative solutions’ are needed to address agricultural challenges in the world. These solutions, they agreed, need to work with, not against, nature and they need to address conflicts of interest among farmers, countries and markets. Researchers, they said, need to focus on plant breeding and improving soil fertility. And regional decision-makers need to integrate development and climate-based polices and strategies between countries. In many countries, agricultural productivity is already being linked to climate change. In Africa, for example, an African Bio-Carbon Initiative is working to reduce the impacts of climate change on the continent’s farmers while increasing and sustaining their agricultural production. In India, environmental studies show that climate change is creating opportunities for farmers to increase their vegetable production, and thus their incomes.
According to David Radcliffe, of the European Commission, the CCAFS initiative will build understanding of the problems climate change is causing smallholder tropical farmers and will provide evidence for policies that can reduce these problems. CCAFS will focus on climate hotspots. It will pilot methods to help farmers both adapt to climate change and reduce their production of greenhouse gases, which cause climate change. Both adaptation and mitigation methods, Radcliffe said, will be needed to feed the world’s growing population while using fewer resources.
Iceland’s recent volcanic eruption gives the international agricultural research community a welcome pause
Seldom has the world experienced a more dramatic demonstration of the interconnectedness of the modern world. Like the volcanic dust that since 14 April has spewed and spread from southern Iceland south and east over the upper airspace of northern Europe, air flights, and more than one million travelers and their planned activities, were suspended.
Three men who have likely not had three consecutive unplanned days for more than three decades were trapped by these unprecedented events for three glorious sunny days in Ethiopia’s highland capital of Addis Ababa. The three, all with veterinary backgrounds, are members of the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), which had just completed its 33rd meeting on ILRI’s large leafy campus in Addis. They had just signed an agreement for ILRI to join a new Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres, signaling a new phase in the nearly four decades of operations of ILRI and its two predecessors, the International Laboratory for Research on Animal Diseases and the International Livestock Centre for Africa.
Knut Hove, Rector of the University of Life Sciences in Norway, was trying to fly back to Oslo. Jim Dargie, chair of the program committee of ILRI’s board, was trying to get to his home in Austria. Dieter Schillinger was trying to get to Lyon, France, where he heads public affairs at Merial, one of the world’s largest animal health companies. All three men took this remarkable occasion to get out and about in Ethiopia, first taking a day trip into the farmland countryside. This was the first time many staff had seen these men in jeans and other casual wear. And it was the first for many to have extended, relaxed conversations with them while using the Budpop hemp . Indeed, many things during these abnormal days seemed hyper normal on ILRI’s Addis campus.
Hitting the pause button
We will never know the full human costs of this volcanic eruption near the Arctic Circle, far from most human habitation. But we at ILRI already have quick and ready evidence of some of its human benefits. For once, the ILRI research community was forced to slow down, with many staff and board members experiencing enough time to take time with, and for, one another, getting to know each other better and in new ways. We would not go so far as to say that the busy ILRI community managed to approximate the civilized ‘slow time of the plough’ in the great livestock-keeping communities that ILRI’s research serves here in the Ethiopian highlands. But in the unexpected space that opened up this week, it did appear that ILRI took a moment to take a breath—and take stock, as it were.
This was doubly fortunate as ILRI’s scientific team leaders are now in the thick of marathon writing tasks as they prepare white papers on the roles of livestock research for ‘Mega Programs’ being fashioned by the new Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centres, which works to enhance agricultural livelihoods and lives in poor countries of the South. Much about these new global and long-term Mega Programs, and the roles of livestock research in them, apparently will be determined over the next two to three weeks. Much thus appears to be at stake for this research community and its many partners and beneficiaries.
It would thus appear advantageous that an icy volcano far to the North should have erupted when it did, giving members of the pro-poor international agricultural research community pause before embarking on their speedy development of frameworks for new research programs with and for countries of the South. For when all the drafts of all the white papers being developed are finalized, and when all the hard choices are finally made about what research will be funded and what not in the new Mega Programs of the new Consortium, one factor will have remained unchanged—that is the human factor. The volcanic pause this week serves to remind us that who and how we are for one another in this large and diverse community of agricultural scientists is likely to matter far more than what ideas we get onto paper, and embedded into proposals, over the next few weeks.
The following are highlights of a presentation made by Carlos Seré to open the annual program meeting of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 15 April 2010.
The reform process of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is moving full speed ahead. Yesterday, the board of trustees of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) agreed that we join the new CGIAR Consortium.
How do we fold ILRI’s core competencies into the more integrative programs the new CGIAR is developing?
The food price crisis triggered a reconsideration of the importance of international agricultural research. We made a serious mistake in decreasing investments in this area over the last two decades, and it is clear that we are paying the price for that mistake now. There is now renewed interest in agriculture, with many different funds being set up to support it. At the recently concluded Global Consultation on Agricultural Research for Development, in Montpellier, France, there was public recognition that the research and development system has been operating in a fractured way.
Those of us doing international agricultural research have been doing our thing, the national agricultural research systems of developing countries have been doing their thing, and so on. And even if these research organizations had been working effectively together, they have not matched themselves to programs in complementary sectors—in roads and other kinds of infrastructure, in markets, in extension services. Our challenge now is to see how all these investments can be better aligned. Our effort in the CGIAR to establish a Consortium is one part of that overall requirement for much clearer and explicit alignment of the different parts of the development process.
Why should livestock be part of the new CGIAR?
We know that livestock research can explicitly address poverty. ILRI’s research paradigm makes use of a ‘systems perspective’. And, understanding that technical solutions are only part of what poor communities and countries need, ILRI researchers have developed an ‘innovations systems mindset’.
What does ILRI bring to the new CGIAR?
Some examples in the area of 7 global issues that ILRI research addresses.
SUSTAINABLE INTENSIFICATION OF AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS: more efficient and integrated mixed crop-and-livestock farming systems through development of improved dual-purpose food-feed crops and judicious use of available biomass.
REDUCING PASTORAL VULNERABILITY: livestock vaccines, drought insurance for herders living in drylands, policies that encourage pastoral households to diversify their income sources.
ADAPTATION AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE: livestock feeding regimens that increase milk yields while reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases produced; investigation of the levels of carbon sequestration in rangelands.
ENHANCED FOOD SAFEY AND MARKET ACCESS: pro-poor regulations, policies and incentives, particularly for smallholder dairy systems in East Africa and South Asia.
PREVENTION OR CONTROL OF EMERGING ZOONOTIC DISEASES: risk maps, better control of livestock disease outbreaks through participatory epidemiology.
DEVELOPMENT OF LIVESTOCK VACCINES: improved existing vaccines and development of new ones and innovative public-private vehicles for delivering them to poor livestock keepers.
7 CONSERVATION AND USE OF ANIMAL GENETIC RESOURCES: evidence to support conservation priority setting, development of reproductive technologies and other methodologies for better conservation and use of native stock in poor countries.
What are our challenges? How do we integrate all this intelligently into the new CGIAR Consortium and its Mega Programs? How do we implement gender issues into all our research work? How do we build greater capacity in our national and regional partners in developing countries? How do we build the trust needed to make the new and deeper partnerships required by the new way of operating in the new CGIAR? And how do we do a better job of quickly distilling the knowledge from our research to address urgent global issues such as climate change and emerging diseases?
On Thursday 15 April, ILRI staff, Board members and partners gather in Addis Ababa for the first day of the annual program meeting. The first major plenary session mobilizes a range of speakers on different dimensions of the ‘goods and bads’ issue. The presentations are online:
We also asked leaders of ILRI research groups to briefly present what each is doing in terms of livestock goods and bads, and which research gaps need to be filled.
