MONTPELLIER, France (AlertNet) - Feeding a fast-growing global population in the face of climate change and stagnant funding for food aid and farm research will require a fundamental revamp of agriculture, according to leading experts in the field.
But unlike the Â?Green RevolutionÂ? that dramatically hiked agricultural production in Latin America and Asia from the 1950s, a new restructuring will need to focus as much on good governance, women's empowerment and curbing commodities' speculation as on new seed varieties, said experts at an agricultural conference.
"We cannot address world food security risks effectively only through a science and technology agenda. We need to get appropriate market regulations to prevent excessive speculation," Joachim von Braun, former director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said on Sunday at the opening of a conference on reforming agricultural research to meet development goals.
Speculation in food markets sparks fuel price swings that can undercut the ability of farmers to plan, often leading them to over- or under-produce.
Jacques Diouf, director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), said lack of political support and financial resources for agricultural research were the two biggest problems holding back efforts to boost farm production and feed what his agency believes are more than 1 billion hungry people in the world.
"We have the programmes, we have the projects, we have the knowledge, though it has to keep being adapted and developed to deal with new problems. We have everything we need but political will," he said.
The will, however, may be starting to develop because "we have realised the problem of food security is not only a technical, economic, ethical problem," Diouf added. "It's a problem of peace and security in the world."
HUGE CHALLENGES
By 2050, the world's population of 6.3 billion today is expected to surge to more than 9 million, the World Bank estimates.
Feeding those people will require agricultural production in developing countries to grow by 70 percent, particularly as people in increasingly wealthy developing nations adopt diets more like those in the West, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
But the world will face dramatic challenges in achieving that level of production increases. Investment in agricultural research has stagnated or fallen around most of the globe for decades, and growth in crucial crops like rice has leveled off.
High national debt levels, in part as a result of the global financial crisis, make boosts in donor aid for research unlikely.
In addition, climate change is bringing more unpredictable weather, including worsening droughts, floods and storms. Those stresses could slash agricultural production in the world's hungriest regions - particularly Africa and South Asia - and exacerbate existing problems like overuse of aquifers, desertification and erosion.
"Climate change will make an already deteriorating situation worse," said Kevin Cleaver, a spokesman for IFAD, the agricultural development fund.
Reversing the problems, he and others said, will require a diverse host of changes, such as curbing rich-world agricultural subsidies, ensuring small farmers - particularly women - have rights to their land, building databases to help coordinate research efforts, and finding creative new sources of funding for agricultural research.
Simply curbing bureaucratic red tape - particularly cutting the reams of reports donors require researchers to submit for their grant money - also could make a big difference, speakers at the conference said, to enthusiastic applause.
"There is a complexity of problems facing the agricultural sector (and we) need cooperation to solve them," said Adel Ed-Beltagy, chair of the Global Forum on Agricultural Research, one of the organisers of the Montpellier conference.
The alternative, he said, is "misery" for hundreds of millions of poor people around the world.
RAISING AMBITIONS
One of the most effective ways of bettering life for farmers in Africa, may be simply to raise the level of ambition about what they're capable of achieving, suggested Kanayo Nwanze, president of IFAD.
Working to double the income of a subsistence farmer who scrapes by on $1 a day is simply "poverty management," he said. But helping that farmer launch an agribusiness, perhaps by giving a loan to help buy refrigeration equipment to store vegetables for sale in the off-season, is "poverty eradication," he said.
Women, he said, produce from 60 to 80 percent of the food in Africa, though they own only 1 to 2 percent of the land and get just 10 percent of agricultural loans. Any project aimed at boosting Africa's farm production, he said, must focus on helping women.
Another missing ingredient in Africa, he said, is sustained political will.
"Development is not a project you can turn on and off like a tap," he said, noting that continuing investment is needed to achieve key aims like improving food security.
Close to a thousand researchers, scientists, ministers and others gathered at the four-day conference aim to come up with a roadmap for restructuring agricultural research to meet the needs of the world's poor and hungry.
The focus will be on quick action, Nwanze said, because "declarations, commitments and speeches donÂ?t feed hungry people."
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