Profil des membres
Dr. Daniel Nyagawa
Organisation:
Micronutrient Initiative
Pays:
République-Unie de Tanzanie
Domaine(s) de spécialisation
I am working on:
Maternal, Infant, Young Child Nutrition
Micronutrient deficiencies
Dr. Daniel Nyagawa
Dear V0 draft authors,
Thank you for this first version of the ambition endeavor of analyzing the complex relationships between agroecological approaches and “other innovations” for sustainable agriculture and food systems and food security and nutrition. This HLPE report is timely and might help to make serious steps to go beyond somehow sterile debates between two opposed sides, and this open consultation around the proposal should allow this.
I warmly commend the expert group for this first version, based on a large corpus of references and making original propositions in terms of definitions, concepts, frameworks on this very broad and “risky” issue.
My major suggestions for revision refer to questions 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Question 1.
The report seems well balanced between agroecological approaches and “other innovations”, and the outline is respecting the order passed to HLPE, even though the addendum “other innovations” sounded a bit strange from the start. It gives the right volume to agroecology and makes a reasonable job to explain the connections.
Question 2
The range of innovative is diversified and satisfactory even though others could have been found. My main concern is that merging conservation agriculture, ecological intensification and sustainable intensification, you are losing some very important nuances. In the debate about “models”, sustainable intensification is closer to conventional “environmentally improved” and ecological intensification refers to a very different rationale, closer to agroecology (see Griffon M. 2018, Griffon M. 2014).
Question 3
I think this is one of the weak part of the draft. Because of your choice of consolidating various lists on principles, from different natures and maturity, you had to work with too many principles, sometimes redundant. Therefore, in your consolidated list of 16 principles, there is a strong bias toward social principles that are extremely detailed, and somehow overlapping, and environmental principles that are very poorly detailed (e.g. environmental footprint in the text and in box 4 that should detailed the positive and negative externalities). Incidentally, when speaking about dependency, it should be said that it refers not only on external inputs but also on credit, technologies, far away markets, etc. It is said latter in the text but it should appear earlier.
Furthermore, the report should carefully explain the aspirational nature of principles, especially social ones, avoiding to build a “perfect” wish list, that would make agroecology perfect and virtuous by construction.
I think that the four “overarching pathways” (resources efficiency, environmental footprint, resilience and social equity/responsibility”) represent a better base and the report should reduce the principles in a balanced way among them.
The V0 draft captures well the various controversies around the agroecology (1.3. and 3.2.) and, without expressing arbitration, provides different tools to evaluate the changes that might improve FSN. And this is very right. The text could go a bit further in saying that these controversies, and the diversity of possible change pathways, are a very good thing, they are part somehow of the “richness of biodiversity” (see Griffon 2012 and Hainzelin 2014); but they should be thought in the light the imperative of sustainability and FSN. It is not a model versus another model, it is the necessity of radical changes aiming at agroecological transition. The analysis the report makes of the “other innovations” illustrates the fact that each ones of them, by stressing one specific aspect (climate, sustainability, nutrition, value chains, etc.), can enrich the vision of the others.
Questions 4
I think the idea to add a fifth dimension to “explicit ways of addressing critical aspects of human empowerment, recognition of rights and reinforcement of community capacities” is very good. However, if the argument / definition is rather clear, I do not find the term « agency » capture well the meaning of it. To be convincing, this fifth pillar’s name should be very easy to catch, which I do not think it is the case.
Question 8. In the recommendations, I strongly suggest to mention, beyond of public policies, the needs to mobilize funds to make the expected transformations possible. Public budgets, private investors, private sectors, international aid and cooperation, etc. should be mobilized in larger amounts considering the importance of agriculture and food system for SGDs. 10 years after the 2008 food price crisis, agriculture sector represent a very small part of investments (less than 8% of international aid, less than 10% of public budgets in Sub-Saharan Africa, etc.).
The introduction should be reinforced in terms of the reasons why it is extremely urgent to explore agroecology and other innovations. The balance of industrialized/green revolution agriculture, connected to industrialized food systems, should be made both in gains (yields, unit costs, etc.) and in losses (pollutions, fossil fuel and inputs dependency, social and environmental externalities, ultra-processed food, etc.) to explain why we have to change paradigm and cannot reduce any more agriculture performance to yields. This is very well treated in the text, but it should appear in the introduction.
Other comments
- To complete the references used in the 3.2.2., I invite you to use the very detailed foresight exercice « Agrimonde Terra », that has just been published “Land and Use and Food Security in 2050: a Narrow Road” (https://www.cirad.fr/en/news/all-news-items/articles/2018/ca-vient-de-s…)
- p. 33 l. 12: The text should stress the fact that agroecological innovations are completely connected to local conditions, both in terms of available biodiversity and resources and in terms of specific constraints. This is not the case for conventional intensification that relies on external inputs. Thence agroecology cannot be as prescriptive as conventional agriculture since basically each farmer will need to assimilate its principles and translate them into its own local context.
- in the 3.2.6., about GM technologies, the report should briefly mention the evolution of this technology, including the genome editing and Crispr Cas 9, that blurs the border between conventional and transgenesis breeding.
- Even though the report is centered on food systems, it should be mentioned in the main text (not in a foot note) at some point that agriculture sl does not only produce food (cotton, wood, biomass, fiber, rubber, etc.) and these other productions contribute to jobs and incomes, that will in turn affect food security and nutrition.
- on Bt Cotton and Box 16, two recent additional references in Burkina Faso and in China (Fok 2017 and Guiyan Wang and Fok 2017)
Additional references
Fok M. 2016. Impacts du coton-Bt sur les bilans financiers des sociétés cotonnières et des paysans au Burkina Faso (Financial impacts of Bt-cotton on cotton companies and producers in Burkina Faso). Cah. Agric. 2016, 25, 35001
Guiyan Wang, Fok M. 2017. Managing pests after 15 years of Bt cotton: Farmers' practices, performance and opinions in northern China. Crop Protection. Volume 110, August 2018, Pages 251-260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cropro.2017.06.007Get
Griffon M. 2017 Ecologie intensive. La nature, un modèle pour l’agriculture et la société. Buchet-Chastel éditeur. 248 pages.
Hainzelin E., 2014. Introduction in Cultivating biodiversity to transform agriculture. Springer Netherland 262p
Hainzelin E. 2014. Enhancing the functions and provisioning in agriculture: agroecological principles. Invited keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Agroecology for Food Security and Nutrition. FAO 18-19 September 2014
Griffon M. 2013. Qu’est-ce que l’agriculture écologiquement intensive ? Ed. Quae, 2013
Le Mouël Ch., De Lattre-Gasquet M., Mora O. 2018. Land and Use and Food Security in 2050: a Narrow Road. Agrimonde-Terra. Ed. quae, 2018