Agricultural innovation needed to support productivity
Published:Wednesday | March 13, 2024 | 12:08 AMAsha Wilks/Gleaner Writer
THE DISRUPTION of food availability and quality is one of the many devastating effects of climate change.
Experts are cautioning that in light of this impending global threat there is an urgent need for agricultural innovation systems to be adopted to support the industry’s productivity and prevent food insecurity.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) defines agricultural innovation as the process by which people or organisations bring new or existing products, processes or ways of organisation into use for the first time in a specific context with the goal of boosting efficiency, competitiveness, shock resistance, or environmental sustainability.
Speaking at the annual meetings of the Boards of Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and IDB Invest, which took place from March 6-10 in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, Paul Winters, professor of global affairs at The University of Notre Dame, stated that countries which depend heavily on agriculture are the ones more vulnerable to experiencing food insecurity brought on by climate change challenges.
The meetings consisted of five days of seminars. Last Thursday, Winters addressed seminar three titled ‘Agricultural innovation for food security in the context of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)’, and noted that “climate change is not just a farm level problem, it’s a bigger problem”.
He noted that currently we are witnessing shifts in production.
For example, he said that, “Coffee can no longer be produced in some areas that they used to be produced and so we need to shift agriculture.
“Our current approaches are insufficient. We tend to focus a lot on staple crops, and we tend to focus a lot on livestock and if we’re concerned about nutrition, we’re not focusing on making affordable and healthy foods, so we also need to consider how to shift,” he expressed.
SHIFT IN FOCUS
According to Winters, the existing strategies need to be concentrated more on nutrition and climate change. They also need to focus on the specific needs of each country, while figuring out how to involve the private sector in these activities for investment.
“Climate change and food security cannot be addressed without substantial productivity growth driven by innovations,” he said, further noting that there were already biological, technological and social innovations which remained essential.
Winters provided examples of innovation areas that required scaling. These included digital agriculture, microbial fertiliser, lowering methane emissions, climate-resilient social protection, alternative proteins, enhanced weather forecasts tailored especially for farmers’ interests to aid in anticipating weather patterns that may impact planting, and training for rainwater harvesting.
Among the panellists was Neha Kumar, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, who emphasised the critical need for a multidisciplinary approach to achieving zero emissions and nutritious food for all.
“We need to get together policymakers, researchers, academics, people who are on the ground implementing and find the challenges and then identify solutions,” she said.
Continuing, Kumar stated that, “Since emissions created by one country affects other countries as well, we need international collaboration.
“Time is a resource, and we are running out of it very quickly and so we need to start now, we need to make actions now, maybe yesterday,” she added.
Kumar went on to raise concern about the amount of healthy food that is widely accessible and how much of it citizens across the world consume.
In her call for action, Kumar stated that agronomists and environmental scientists could collaborate to identify which foods to produce, meanwhile engineers can then determine the optimal locations for these foods to be produced.
She continued that for individuals working in the agriculture nutrition space, they must determine ways how individuals will access and consume the wholesome food.
“So, you might have all the healthy food on the planet but if people still go for the cheeseburger and the coke (Coca Cola) then you know, what’s the point of it? So, I think for us, it’s important for us to identify what are the barriers to a healthy diet, what are the constraints and how can we get people to eat the healthy food that gets produced,” Kumar said.
The seminar also addressed the role of the private and public sectors in encouraging investments in innovations to support climate-smart agriculture in LAC.
CLIMATE CHANGE
The United Nations (UN) defines climate change as long-term changes in weather patterns and temperatures. These fluctuations may be caused by significant volcanic eruptions or variations in the sun’s activity. However, human activity has been the primary cause of climate change since the 1800s, mostly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas.