Soils, Food and Healthy Communities

Supported by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Ecological Learning Collaboratory (ELC) launched last week at Cornell University. The ELC was born out of several international organizations’ shared interest in supporting healthy communities, food sovereignty, fair trade and control of production, and ecologically sustainable solutions. Organized by Cornell faculty members Neema Kudva, Rachel Bezner Kerr, and Stacey Langwick, international partners from India, Malawi, and Tanzania participated in an intensive workshop from May 29th through June 2nd. Agroecology, wildlife, health, social justice, value-addition and engaged knowledge were just some of the topics covered. Speakers from many different fields presented their work to the group, and participants took trips to health clinics, farms, festivals and markets.

The SFHC team had the honor of hosting a dinner for over 40 guests, including workshop participants, donors, students and interested members of the Ithaca, NY community. They shared videos of project trainings and spoke on the nature of their work in Malawi, emphasizing the ways SFHC engages with complex social issues while supporting sustainable agricultural landscapes.

The workshop was a terrific opportunity for collaboration, knowledge exchange and spreading awareness. To read more about the ELC and its future, visit the project’s web page here.

SFHC affiliates and team members (Rachel Bezner Kerr, Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong, Laifolo Dakishoni, Esther Lupafya, Lizzie Shumba, Isaac Luginaah and Sieglinde S. Snapp) have just released a new paper on the political ecology of climate change in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

The paper, entitled “Knowledge politics in participatory climate change adaptation research on agroecology in Malawi,” is available online for free reading here.

Check out the abstract below:

“Climate change is projected to have severe implications for smallholder agriculture in Africa, with increased temperatures, increased drought and flooding occurrence, and increased rainfall variability. Given these projections, there is a need to identify effective strategies to help rural communities adapt to climatic risks. Yet, relatively little research has examined the politics and social dynamics around knowledge and sources of information about climate-change adaptation with smallholder farming communities. This paper uses a political ecology approach to historically situate rural people’s experiences with a changing climate. Using the concept of the co-production of knowledge, we examine how Malawian smallholder farmers learn, perceive, share and apply knowledge about a changing climate, and what sources they draw on for agroecological methods in this context. As well, we pay particular attention to agricultural knowledge flows within and between households. We ask two main questions: Whose knowledge counts in relation to climate-change adaptation? What are the political, social and environmental implications of these knowledge dynamics? We draw upon a long-term action research project on climate-change adaptation that involved focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys, and participatory agroecology experiments with 425 farmers. Our findings are consistent with other studies, which found that agricultural knowledge sources were shaped by gender and other social inequalities, with women more reliant on informal networks than men. Farmers initially ranked extension services as important sources of knowledge about farming and climate change. After farmers carried out participatory agroecological research, they ranked their own observation and informal farmer networks as more important sources of knowledge. Contradictory ideas about climate-change adaptation, linked to various positions of power, gaps of knowledge and social inequalities make it challenging for farmers to know how to act despite observing changes in rainfall. Participatory agroecological approaches influenced adaptation strategies used by smallholder farmers in Malawi, but most still maintained the dominant narrative about climate-change causes, which focused on local deforestation by rural communities. Smallholder farmers in Malawi are responsible for <1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet our results show that the farmers often blame their own rural communities for changes in deforestation and rainfall patterns. Researchers need to consider differences knowledge and power between scientists and farmers and the contradictory narratives at work in communities to foster long-term change.”

We are pleased to announce some exciting new developments at the SFHC Farmer Research and Training Center! A new pig and poultry enclosure, pictured above, was made possible through funding received from Friends of SFHC. We extend our deepest gratitude to our donors, and invite anyone interested in following the center’s development to check out our construction page here.

Pictured below, you’ll see we also have a new water tank at the center built by farmers.

Once again, a big thank you to our donors for making projects like these possible. If you’re interested in contributing, you can find more information here. We hope to have many more exciting developments to share with you as construction continues.

As we’ve announced on our projects page, SFHC is currently taking an important step to expand its work in Malawi–and connect with students, researchers, and collaborators around the world.

The SFHC Farmer Research and Training Center, when complete, will serve as the hub for all SFHC activities. Large, open rooms stand ready to seat farmers attending training events. Space is set aside for a soon-to-be constructed kitchen for recipe testing, and more empty rooms will one day serve as offices, seed storage, and more. SFHC also plans to build dormitories for visitors working with SFHC.

Visiting the center today, you’re likely to meet Burton Gama and Chance Msangu, pictured to the left in front of the center. Burton and Chance, along with the rest of SFHC’s community promotors, have played a critical role in both the center’s physical construction and the oversight of the example gardens.

The gardens demonstrate a great diversity of crops, trees and agroecological techniques. At one end of the property, you’ll find a long row of banana tree collection pits; at the other, the vegetable nursery. Beside the nursery sits the medicinal herb garden and the flower gardens. In the far corner, an excavated pit waits to be filled with water and fish. A huge field of pigeonpea stands tall in its third year. Behind it, many other legume varieties are grown, contributing to the center’s seed bank.

Burton Gama holds a bag of legume seeds from the seed bank.

The center’s construction thus far has been made possible through funding from the Government of Canada. However, more funding will be necessary to complete the building. Plumbing, electricity, and other carpentry work will need to be finished, and the cost of training farmers is still outstanding. We’ve laid out all our construction goals here, as well as information about how far a dollar will go toward completing construction.

If you’re interested in helping us complete this important project, find out how to donate through Friends of SFHC.

SFHC team members Esther Lupafya and Anita Chitaya have arrived in the United States, marking the beginning of a month-long journey across the nation. Working with Raj Patel and Generation Food, they will make stops to share their experience with food systems, social issues, and climate change consequences–and much more. Their trip will put them in touch with a myriad of audiences, spreading awareness and telling their stories along the way.

Today’s stop–Washington, D.C.!

You can follow Raj Patel on Twitter at @_RajPatel, and read more about Generation Food’s mission to share food system stories from around the globe here.

Photo Credit @_RajPatel— From left to right: Anita Chitaya, Esther Lupafya and Raj Patel

SFHC members spent the day planting legumes, fruit trees and other crops in the new SFHC Centre garden today. They are building a living fence to keep out livestock and are building contour ridges to reduce soil erosion. They have received support from Seeds Knowledge Initiative, a like-minded organization based in South Africa that is helping SFHC build alliances across the region focused on food sovereignty, agroecology and equity. John Nzira from Ukuvuna in South Africa has provided training and support for permaculture design to be integrated into the SFHC Centre.

Pressings Moyo, Esther Lupafya, Esther Maona, Laifolo Dakishoni and other SFHC members build contour ridges and plant crops as part of their new permaculture-designed garden at the SFHC Centre.

Timothy Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University, recently visited the MAFFA project site in Lobi. After his visit, Wise published an article with Food Tank highlighting our work while discussing the importance of seed sovereignty in Malawi and in Africa more broadly.

Seed Sovereignty and Climate Adaptation in Malawi

An article that is critical of the draft seed policy in Malawi has been published in the Malawi Nation newspaper by Blessings Chinsinga (at Chancellor College, University of Malawi) and Rachel Bezner Kerr: http://mwnation.com/draft-seed-policy-risks-marginalising-smallholder-farmers/   This article is an outcome of the discussions held during our recent policy workshop in May. Dr. Rachel Bezner Kerr is a professor at Cornell, collaborating researcher with SFHC as well as project director of MAFFA. We hope that this article adds to the growing voices of civil society who have expressed concern and discontent about this policy.

The MAFFA project team has been busy the last few months with a packed schedule of project activities!  See below a few of the highlights!

Policy Workshop

On May 10, 2016, the MAFFA project team hosted the ‘Agroecology-Based Smallholder Farming in Malawi’ policy workshop in Lilongwe, Malawi.  Government officials, academics, farmers, and representatives from local and regional NGOs came together to discuss 6 key policy recommendations that were based on findings from the work SFHC and partners have been doing for the past 15 years.  The key policy recommendations are:

1. Invest in agroecological research, training and support
2. Promote agrobiodiversity
3. Integrate farmer-to-farmer teaching and farmer experimentation into extension more explicitly, with a focus on mentoring those farmers who are highly food insecure, poor, and socially marginalized
4. Address gender and other social inequalities and assess gendered impact
5. Promote diversified and viable rural economies through local value-added processing, small to medium scale rural enterprises, and cooperatives
6. Promote local seed sovereignty through protection of farmer varieties

Thanks to all who attended and contributed to these important discussions, especially to the MAFFA farmers who shared their personal experiences!  Special thanks also to Dr. Sekhar Nagothu and the Norweigan Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO) for their support of this workshop.

Integrated Pest Management

Pests are an ongoing challenge for farmers and can have devastating impacts on yields.  As part of our agroecological approach we do not promote the use of chemical pesticides.  Instead we encourage farmers to experiment with a variety of strategies including intercropping and using repellent plants to control pests.  This approach can be effective, but it can also take time to figure out the right approach or combination of approaches required.

We received a lot of feedback from farmers on the MAFFA project who were having difficulties controlling a variety of pests, with a number of farmers having a particularly tough time controlling a beetle that was attacking their pigeon pea stand.  Pigeon pea is a valuable crop both for improving soil fertility and as a nutritional addition to diets.  To help farmers combat this beetle, among other pests, and to prevent them from becoming discouraged from growing this crop, we arranged for 6 MAFFA staff to attend Integrated Pest Management (IPM) training in August 2015.  The MAFFA team attended a week-long training at the Grow Biointensive Agricultural Centre of Kenya (G-BIACK) and met with Entomologists at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) in Nairobi.  Our staff learned about many different agroecolocial approaches to combatting pests that could be tried with multiple pests and crops.

Upon returning to Malawi, field officers from both Lobi and Ekwendeni provided this training to our farmer promoters and set up experimentation plots in each area at the start of the 2015-2016 growing season to test the efficacy of the new approaches they learned about.  Observations from these plots and interviews with the farmers who used these approaches are currently being done now that the growing season is coming to an end for most crops. The results from these experiments will be shared later this year! 

Yield Assessment

Most crops, aside from pigeon pea, have been harvested in both Ekwendeni and Lobi and yield assessments are currently underway.  This year Malawi, like many countries in the region, experienced the worst drought in decades, which has devastated crops and left millions of smallholder farmers across the country with no food.  The President declared a state of disaster for the entire country in April 2016, stating that there will be high need for food relief assistance through the duration of the 2016-2017 consumption year.  The impacts of this drought are particularly disastrous as many farmers in Malawi also experienced low yields during the previous growing season due to drought and flooding.