Ensuring More Food for All: An Interview with Danielle Nierenberg of Food Tank As the world population grows, and as its resource bases shrink, producing enough food to feed the world becomes a steeper and steeper challenge. But the world’s small farms are up to the task, argues Danielle Nierenberg, president of the “food think tank” Food Tank. Her organization’s new report, Food Tank By the Numbers: Family Farming, finds a steady rollout of innovations that small-farm owners are pioneering in growing crops chemical-free, boosting their output, getting their produce to market sooner, and ensuring that less of it gets lost in transit. It’s “smallholder” farmers such as these, and not large corporate-owned farm conglomerates, that Nierenberg places hope in for meeting the world’s future food needs. The key, she says, is to help them all to effectively organize so that they can represent their interests, influence policy makers, and share their best practices and innovations with other farmers far and wide. Nierenberg shared her thoughts on farming and world food security with THE FUTURIST in the following interview. The interview was conducted by Rick Docksai, THE FUTURIST’s senior editor. THE FUTURIST: Food Tank By the Numbers addresses some very pertinent issues, especially that of food security. We all saw food prices rise very quickly in the last 10 years, so much so that some analysts have called it a “food prices crisis.” And as your report notes, world food demands will rise precipitously higher later this century. How technologically ready are the world’s small farms to up their production and meet this soaring demand? Danielle Nierenberg: It’s not just producing more food. We really need to utilize the food that we produce better than we do now. About 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year. That’s about one-third of all food produced. And that’s almost enough to feed every person that’s struggling with hunger today. And some of the best innovations we’ve seen are in the developing world. Some of them are simple things, like cutting the tops off sweet potatoes after you harvest them, so that they last longer—it helps drain the moisture that can otherwise create problems when you put the harvested potatoes into storage, and plus, the farmers can put the potato tops back onto the soil for fertilizer. And there are technical things like cooling and refrigeration; or cooperatives that farmers in Rwanda use to help them get their milk to market. Eliminating food waste is the low-hanging fruit in the food system. We can do it quickly, and the impacts are big. THE FUTURIST: The report identifies many of these innovations, and they seem to all be surprisingly simple and low-tech. Many, in fact, rely on the same time-tested methods that the world’s farmers have been practicing for centuries or even millennia. Nierenberg: For the most part, investment in agriculture has been “let’s invest in the silver bullet; let’s find the techno fixes.” Whereas we have found that looking forward by going back, by finding time-tested farming strategies, can be really impactful, too. And other farmers are finding ways to integrate old farming practices with the new technologies. One example is the new Web-based information networks that let farmers get up-to-date information on weather patterns, new seed varieties, and better farming practices. THE FUTURIST: Those information networks have reportedly grown very extensive in rural India. Rural villages have all over the country have set up community “information kiosks” where farms can go online to sell their produce and get information on how to grow more and better crops. Nierenberg: Those kinds of information sharing centers become important, because there is a lack of extension services that are formalized for farmers. The extension services that universities here in the United States used to offer to farmers have declined in the last few years, and they just aren’t sufficient anymore. A lot of them are now for monoculture and large-scale crops. Small farm owners are not getting the expertise that they could have benefitted from in the past. It’s not always the technology that makes a difference, but the sharing from other communities and learning what they have done. And that’s especially true with climate change, because farmers need to learn what to do on the fly. The rains don’t come at the same times as they used to, so they can’t just keep doing what their grandfathers were doing. They need to learn from their neighbors and share information so they can be as successful as they can in learning from one another. THE FUTURIST: What other kinds of opportunities do farmers who come up with great new farming methods have for disseminating their ideas to other farmers? How adequate are the systems they now have for doing so? Nierenberg: More needs to be done. There is a real lack in communities where I have visited, especially so in many parts of Africa. Oftentimes, one community doesn’t know what the community next door is doing. The opportunity for more farmer cooperatives and unions and organizations to organize and communicate with each other is important. I think it’s important that farmers be able to share information with each other and not just get their information from the guy who’s trying to sell them pesticides. They need sources of independent, nonbiased information. THE FUTURIST: The report points out another challenge that small farms face, and it’s that they don’t always get the best land. It says that large corporate farms tend to be in “high potential yield areas,” while the smallholder farmers “are often the stewards of marginal lands, and use their knowledge and abilities to sustain production under challenging circumstances.” Those would probably be the areas that will be most at risk of the harms brought on by climate change. How much trouble are these farmers in? Nierenberg: It puts them in a really precarious situation. These are the farmers who are farming on slopes, or in rocky or arid areas. And as the effects of climate change become more evident, and urbanization pushes more farmers out of their traditional areas, they are going to have to find ways to get more access to land. Again, farmers will need to organize themselves into cooperatives, unions, and advocacy organizations, and push for policy changes. The political arm of the farmers’ movement really needs to take a stronger stance, so that the smallholder farmers have the input they need—and that input is the soil. Some of the hungriest people in the world now are the farmers, ironically. We have rural areas in the United States where large numbers of the people farming the land depend on food stamps. THE FUTURIST: I noticed that there was no mention in the report of genetically modified crops; how helpful (or unhelpful) would this branch of crop science be toward enhancing global food security? Nierenberg: I think the need for science, it cannot be underestimated. Farmers will benefit from greater investment in and knowledge around research and development in crop drought resistance, and the role that traditional crops can play in food security and the role of nutrition. As for biotechnology, in my experience and the experiences of the farmers I’ve talked to, at this point genetically modified crops aren’t really at a stage where they can help small farmers. They aren’t producing higher yields, they aren’t reducing reliance on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, and they aren’t improving revenue for the farmers. Genetically modified crops haven’t lived up to their promises. Farmers benefit more from the traditional method of planting a diversity of crops, which is one of the things that the smallholder farmers are best at. Diverse cropping systems are resistant to pests and diseases, so if one crop fails because of a pest, there are others that can replace it. THE FUTURIST: Some people might presume that those large, corporate-owned farms will be more efficient at churning out crops in bulk, since they have more personnel and resources at their disposal, and can enforce standards and coordinate operations over very large swaths of land. But it sounds like that isn’t the case, in your experience. Nierenberg: Bigger obviously isn’t always better. And it depends on how you measure efficiency. The big farms are good at producing the monoculture crops that are high starch, like wheat and grain. But those crops aren’t really nutritional and often go to feeding livestock. For feeding the human populations and making sure that they get access to nutrients and not just calories, small farms are more efficient at that. THE FUTURIST: How might the relationship between the large corporate farms and the small farms change in the near future, ideally? Do you foresee a division of labor—i.e., we rely on large farms to grow bulk commodities of a few staple crops and count on small farms for everything else? Or, would we ideally see fewer corporate farms in general and more small farms form in their place, as anything that the large farm can grow, the small farms can grow better? Nierenberg: I think there needs to be more of a focus on regional and local food systems. You can’t just have all the grain in one place, grown by one farmer, and consumers relying on that one big farmer. One strategy that small farms have been able to use is growing more nutritious grain like millet, or perennial grains that don’t need to be planted every year and are more effective at keeping soil in place. I think the big farmers need to take a step back and to diversify their crops, too. We saw the need for this in 2012, when big droughts hit many of these monoculture farms, and many of them lost their crops. More diversified crops could have withstood these droughts. So I think the food of the future isn’t going to be big versus small. It’s going to be the diversified crop growers that are the winners. We’ll also be changing how we eat. We won’t be eating strawberries and asparagus in the middle of January; we’ll eat more seasonal foods—for example, more root vegetables in the winter. We’re also going to go back to canning and freezing foods. And it requires this education from the very beginning. We’re not used to planning meals now, because food is so accessible at any hour, any time of the year. We snack all day. Kids think food comes out of the bag or out of a microwave. They don’t realize where food comes from. There needs to be a shift. We need to revive culinary traditions and culinary practices. A hundred years ago, we didn’t have this 24-hour access to food. We’ll need to relearn more of what we did back then. Share/Bookmark this post with wfs.org/futurist-interviews/ensuring-more-food-for-all-interview-danielle-nierenberg-food-tank-0
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 18:18:02 +0000
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