Diversity in local and regional food production is positively associated with household dietary diversity in rural Africa. On average, farms produce 5.5 different foods. The Household Dietary Diversity Score (HDDS) .
High egg prices in the U.S. due to shortages are driving demand for vegan substitutes like Just Egg, made from mung beans and canola oil. Companies are increasing production, expanding.
The U.S. will continue to buy agricultural products to supply some of the poorest countries receiving U.S. aid, the Department of Agriculture announced. Purchases of products such as corn, soybeans.
Sustainable food products, such as sweet kelp beer and bread made from regenerative wheat, are being highlighted as part of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Big Food Redesign Challenge. Food systems.
A group of over 150 Nobel Prize laureates and World Food Prize recipients recently issued an urgent call for the development of revolutionary technologies to combat global hunger. In an.
L’Union africaine a tenu un sommet extraordinaire sur le Programme détaillé de développement de l’agriculture africaine du 9 au 11 janvier 2025 à Kampala, en Ouganda. Cet événement a été.
The African Union held an extraordinary summit on the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) from January 9 to 11, 2025, in Kampala, Uganda. This event provided an opportunity for.
Plant diversity holds the promise of the future, with experts emphasizing its significance for the survival of various species, including our own. One-fifth of the world's flora is under threat,.
China's water needs are on a national scale, and to sustain its growth, it must secure its water supply, sometimes at the expense of neighboring countries. Large-scale water infrastructure projects.
Farms of less than 2 hectares are predominant across the African continent. These are particularly vulnerable to climatic events and other crop damages. They could consider index insurance as an.
The Ministers of Agriculture from France and Italy have announced the creation of a joint expertise hub to combat the spread of African Swine Fever (ASF) epidemic. This dedicated hub.
In a recent publication, the FAO highlighted the impact of disasters on the agricultural world and the need to organize a more sustainable and resilient global ecosystem. Experts predict a.
The OECD and FAO anticipate increases in meat production and demand in emerging countries. To combat malnutrition, the FAO and other global organizations encourage the consumption of meat and dairy.
After raising 100 million euros in funding, the biotechnology giant continues its development in the insect protein industry. In the Ardennes region of France, the company has built a first.
French scientific institutes collaborated with Yunnan Agricultural University in China to assess the impact of planting different crop varieties together on the immunity of the crops. It turns out that.
Famine is an ongoing threat in Africa, severely impacting populations due to multiple factors. They face numerous challenges to their food security, ranging from extreme events like droughts or floods.
Just like fertilizers, irrigation aims to improve crop yields, mitigate drought, or satisfy water-intensive crops like corn or cotton. With the agricultural sector consuming 70% of available water resources, the.
Climate change jeopardizes water reserves. The shared and equitable management of this resource ensures food production in the poorest areas. Houssine, a Tunisian producer of dates, pomegranates, and vegetables, is.
Last July, the Indian government banned rice exports to meet its domestic demand in terms of both volume and price. This initiative has a significant impact as Indian exports account.
Climate change, consumption patterns, new food sources, urban agriculture, and biotechnologies are all elements to consider in future strategies for restructuring food systems. The goal of countries is to meet.
The tourist island of Kos in Greece is experiencing more frequent and intense heatwaves that are altering the island's economic capacity. The cultivation of olive trees is directly impacted by.
Proposals to build a more reasoned agri-food chain are often associated with a risk of food insecurity for emerging countries or with deprivation for developed countries. Accompanying consumers and producers.
Established in 1980, Finnfund is a Finnish public investment fund that supports projects led by private institutions in developing countries. The company recently granted a $10 million loan to a.
By: Noureddine Radouai There is no good time to launch a war. Armed conflicts are always horrible at any time. However, the war in Ukraine broke out in the worst.
Between conflict, health crisis and climate change, eradicating hunger is looking like a pipe dream. The multiplication of crises is dramatically increasing the number of hunger-related deaths. This number exceeds.
To strengthen their development strategies, players in the agri-food industry are now calling on startups. They finely identify consumer expectations and develop specific know-how to the point of representing a.
[inbound_button font_size="14" color="#8d0100" text_color="#ffffff" icon="download" url="https://dev.willagri.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Dossier-Willagri-03-20-EN-1.pdf" width="" target="_blank"]Télécharger le dossier en PDF[/inbound_button] At the start of this decade, France has been at war in the Sahel for seven years, and.
Forecasts on the potential of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa on the basis of which large scale land transactions are being deployed, are based on a rhetoric of the "empty continent", adapted to establish agricultural policies as well as to justify all manner of greed. This thesis of the existence of "dormant resources" which would amount to approximately a billion hectares in useful agricultural surfaces area is incorrect. This article introduces the concept of actual availability of agricultural land and takes into account all the real estate constraints in order to assess the surface area likely to be actually devoted to agriculture.
The most optimistic production forecast theories rely on the rhetoric of an Africa rich in “dormant land resources", "vacant and without masters". There would be an abundance of available land, unassigned and ready to be used. 50 million hectares of arable land has already changed hands, between 2000 and 2018, 90% of which to the benefit of foreign interests (Oakland Institute, 2019). It is thought to be concentrated in certain regions particularly favoured in terms of land fertility, access to water and transport infrastructure.
This rhetoric is also well adapted to respond to the question of the Africa’s ability to occupy an agricultural labour force which is very likely to increase by approximately 330 million people over the 40 years between 2010 and 2050 and its ability to cover its own food needs by farming its available land.
The reality is more complex. Land availability is a relative concept in a continent where various modes of ownership and use overlap, but which is also marked by strong agronomic and ecological constraints.
A robust, detailed knowledge of agricultural availability is essential to estimate production potential as well as installation possibilities for newcomers. On the basis of new estimates and a more demanding analysis, this case study draws from a previous Willagri article (20 November 2017), entitled “The Myth of the abundance of arable land in Africa", and attempts to answer three questions: Can we assess the true availability of agricultural land? Can we identify the constraints that are opposed to its extension? And glimpse the dynamics in play when it comes to commercialising African land?
In order to assess the surfaces likely to be devoted to agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, let’s introduce the notion of land availability by distinguishing 5 balances one after another:
Let us measure this using data from the recent Bauhaus Luftfahrt carried out in Munich (Riegel, Roth and Batteiger, 2019) established on the basis of high resolution geospatial data to estimate the areas devolved to different types of use of the soil, supplemented by that of the United Nations for agriculture and power supplies (FAOSTAT).
The approach is called "residual", in that we gradually identify the areas which are not available for agriculture, thus varying the balance if changes occur in any of the subject areas.
With a total of 2 456 million hectares, the sub-Saharan sub-continent is vast.
The areas considered to be useful, i.e. virtually likely to be devoted to an economic activity of one kind or another, cover nearly 1 537 million ha of this zone, after deduction of continental waters, land considered non-cultivatable because it is affected by desertification and areas of population settlement, cities, transportation routes, etc. (ELD-UNEP, 2015; Riegel et al., Op. cit.).
To obtain the potential, we must remove the forests (677 Mha) and protected areas (155 Mha[1]), recognized for their ecological value and whose exploitation for agricultural purposes seriously affect environmental balance.
Within the potential available balance, the land already exploited, with annual and long-term cultivation account for approximately 240 million hectares (OECD/FAO, 2016; FAOSTAT, 2019).
Finally, prairies (including the trails, pastures and cropland, comprising trees, pasture and fodder) devoted to permanent pasture and extensive pastoralism, cover approximately 29% of the useful available surface areas (not uncultivated for livestock), or 445 million ha (FAOSTAT, 2017).
*A correction is made in order to take account of the overlap between protected areas and forests, estimated at 12% (Riegel and Al, 2019). The sources of data are indicated at the end of the article.
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The net balance of exploitable land is approximately 100 million hectares. The accuracy of the data is relative, but one conclusion appears evident: "There is still substantially less available viable land than is often stated once taken into account all the constraints and trade-offs between various functions" (Lambin et al. , 2014, p. 900). We must include functions other than those which are strictly agronomic or economic and often obscured in arguments which boast the opportunities associated with the agricultural potential of the sub-Saharan sub-continent.
Since 2018, the African swine fever epidemic has been rife in Asian countries. Although harmless to people, this viral disease decimates more herds than any other and represents a major.
The World Food Programme (WFP) has made the development of new tools a priority in order to achieve the objective of zero hunger in the world. The most spectacular of.
Contrary to all predictions, in the 21st century, agriculture has emerged as one of the most pressing issues of our times. Until now, and for centuries, people’s great fear was that they would not be able to produce enough to feed themselves properly. But today, the future of human societies and even the sustainability of life on earth is at stake. Agriculture will not, by itself, solve these problems crucial to the future of humankind. But it can contribute to solving them.
Within this context, agriculture must also respond as positively as can be to four major challenges:
Nobody can argue with the importance of each of these four challenges taken in isolation. The problem is that the objectives to be achieved are, in part, incompatible. Essentially, we must square the circle by conserving core objectives, but by making sacrifices in certain respects.
In 2015, the FAO estimated that it would be necessary to increase agricultural production by 50% by 2050. It was an ambitious objective, but one which seemed compatible with progress observed in the 20th century. But is it compatible with our three other objectives? Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. Such an increase would require higher agricultural yields, an expansion of agricultural land and an increase in industrial livestock farming.[1]
A significant increase in agricultural production is probably incompatible with the need to reduce greenhouse gases. This is because it would both require continuing to clear forests and cultivating the best grazing lands (both of which are excellent carbon sinks), using large quantities of nitrogen fertilizers (a source of N2O, which is very harmful to the environment, and to increase industrial livestock farming. The FAO also recommends increasing the number of rice fields, particularly in Africa. However, these produce large quantities of methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas whose effects on global warming represent, it has been claimed, over 10% of emissions for the entire agricultural sector.
In this way, increasing agricultural production at the same rate or greater than in the past can only harm the environment and biodiversity. Previous forecasts should therefore be revised more or less extensively, while ensuring people throughout the world are fed enough and healthily.
[1] Despite the size of natural grazing lands worldwide (3,300 million hectares, or almost twice the area of farmland), the potential for production is very low as these are often in arid or semi-arid zones.
Reducing obesity and food waste would, in theory, reduce global needs. Indeed, a section of the population in Western countries is already reducing consumption of meat, sugar and oil for health reasons. But we also know that, until now, obesity levels have continued to increase, in particular (but not only) in developing countries. In certain countries, 50% of the population is already overweight. Significant savings are therefore possible in this area, but they currently remain out of reach. However, any improvement in agricultural losses (up to 30% in certain countries) and food waste would represent direct progress in reducing needs.
Tens of millions of hectares of arable land have been assigned to production of cereals, oleaginous grains and sugar cane for ethanol or diester. Abandoning this production would free up land or avoid clearing thousands of additional hectares of forests. For example, the United States uses 300 million tonnes of maize for ethanol production, which requires at least 30 million hectares of good agricultural land. This represents around 2% of arable land worldwide (around 1,600 million hectares). And yet, the USA, the world’s number one producer of petrol, does not need this type of fuel. It could therefore give up ethanol production without any losses, except to producers.
The latest available statistics show that, contrary to the hopes (and objectives) of the FAO, the number of people going hungry, which had dropped to 200 million at the start of the 21st century, is now rising again. In 2017, 821 million people, or one person in nine worldwide, were going hungry. Unfortunately, it seems that this number will remain steady, and may even increase. This will be due to overpopulation (in certain countries in sub-Saharan Africa in particular), climate change and political uncertainty in various countries. If this hypothesis turns out to be true, world food production will automatically drop. This, it goes without saying, is not morally acceptable.
Of course, agriculture, like all other economic activities, contributes to the production of greenhouse gases. It is estimated that it accounts for 13.5% of greenhouse gases (30% including downstream businesses). There are many sources of gases: direct consumption of energy by agricultural machines, N2O emissions from nitrogen fertilizers, production of methane... If we want to limit global warming, these emissions must urgently be reduced. Of course, agriculture must play its part, but in what form and in what proportions?
As a priority, let’s stop clearing forests or prairies and get better at fighting forest fires, which wipe out millions of hectares every year. Also, let’s avoid setting fire to the vast African savannahs during the dry season.
Simplified agricultural techniques will reduce fuel consumption. These practices are developing rapidly throughout the world. They must continue.
By modifying certain agronomic practices, it is also possible to reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizers and therefore the amount which is emitted into the atmosphere. But it will be difficult to avoid a drop in yields (in countries where these are very high, such as Europe or China), whereas agricultural production must increase because an extra 2 billion people will have to be fed by 2050.
Even though the majority of the 3,300 million hectares of natural grazing lands often have low productivity, too often they are over-exploited. To resolve this situation, flock sizes must be reduced, and grasslands must be restored so that CO2 can be trapped in the soil.
Scientists are researching types of feed which lead to less methane being released by ruminants. This path should be explored further too. It is also possible to reduce animal numbers, for example by eating less red meat or breeding more productive and therefore fewer dairy cows. Think of the millions of cows in India which are virtually unproductive and yet are releasing methane!
The increase in the size of farms and the widespread use of modern production techniques has harmed the environment, in particular wild flora and fauna. Ever larger plots, the disappearance of hedges, the destruction of humid zones and increased use of crop protection products have led to these phenomena. We now know that their consequences for soil protection, water and air quality, and simply the future of agricultural production are extremely serious and long-lasting. For example, atrazine can still be found in groundwater, even though its use has been forbidden in maize production for 20 years.
However, these difficulties do not mean we should set aside our objectives, even though much work remains to achieve them.
This will be very difficult. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine dividing up huge agricultural plots in new countries to return to a more human scale. However, small or medium farms are better adapted to the preservation of traditional plots and to good use of rural land. These must be protected.
The priority should be to stop clearing forests and cultivate natural grazing lands. However, this is less than ever the direction taken by countries such as Brazil, which are claiming the right to grow their exports of soya, cereals or meat as they please.[1]
In the same way, soil restoration with its flora and fauna is complicated, as it requires completely modifying agricultural methods. This is one of the objectives of organic farming and agro-ecology.
A network of hedges should also be created or brought back around fields. In France, Brittany has already started re-planting some hedges, particularly in catchment areas to prevent chemicals from being swept into rivers. Currently 2,500 kilometres of new hedges are thus planted every year, which is good. But in the 1960s and 1970s, we destroyed 250,000 km of hedges!
All of this can be expensive, pushing up cost prices for agricultural products.[2] While managers of large farms are perfectly able to implement these changes when they are imposed, smaller farmers must be given training in these new techniques.
[1] Based on satellite observations, deforestation has accelerated dangerously in Brazil (+278% between 2018 and 2019).
[2] It should be remembered that, in organic farming, yields are lower than in conventional farming, leading to higher production costs and therefore higher sales prices.
Will Agri est un blog consacré à l’agriculture, plus précisément, comme on a coutume de dire aujourd’hui, à l’agriculture écologiquement intensive et inclusive.
Will Agri is a blog dedicated to agriculture, specifically focusing on what is now commonly referred to as ecologically intensive and inclusive agriculture.
