Mme Danielle Nierenberg
Danielle Nierenberg is President of Food Tank and an expert on sustainable agriculture and food issues. She has written extensively on gender and population, the spread of factory farming in the developing world and innovations in sustainable agriculture.
Danielle has traveled to more than 60 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America, meeting with farmers and farmers’ groups, scientists and researchers, policymakers and government leaders, students and academics, along with journalists, documenting what’s working to help alleviate hunger and poverty, while protecting the environment.
Her knowledge of global agriculture issues has been cited widely in more than 8,000 major print and broadcast outlets worldwide, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, The Guardian (UK), The Telegraph (UK), Le Monde (France), the Mail and Guardian (South Africa), the East African (Kenya), TIME magazine, the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, Voice of America, the Times of India, the Sydney Morning Herald, and many, many more.
Danielle has authored or contributed to several major reports and books, including Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry (2005), "In a World of Abundance, Food Waste is a Crime," USA Today (June 2010), "Could Acacia Trees Solve Africa's Hunger Problems?" Christian Science Monitor (December 2010), "To Reduce Hunger, Put Innovation on the Menu," The Guardian (December 2010), State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet (Editor and Project Director, 2011), “Charting a New Path to Eliminating Hunger,” State of the World 2011 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), Eating Planet 2012 (2012), Food and Agriculture: The Future of Sustainability (2012), “The Kindest Cut of Meat Is Ground,” New York Times (2012), “Going Green in 2012,” Chicago Tribune (December 2012), Food Tank by the Numbers: Family Farming Report (2013), “On Food Day, Let's Commit to Healthier Children,” Denver Post (October 2013), “How to Save Water on World Water Day,” Miami Herald (March 2013), “Hungering for a Solution to Food Losses,” Wall Street Journal (2013), Food Tank website: www.foodtank.com (Editor and Creator January 2013-Present), "Food and Agriculture: The Future of Sustainability" Sustainable Development in the 21st century report for Rio+20 (March 2012), "Marylanders Deserve to Know What's in their Food,"The Baltimore Sun (March 2014), "As the world's farmers age, new blood is needed," The Des Moines Register (October 2014), "The new yuppies: how to build a generation of tech-savvy farmers," The Guardian (January 2015), "How cultures of herder communities play a big role in habitat conservation," Kenya's Daily Nation (February 2015), "Preserving landscapes will promote health, culture," Santa Fe New Mexican (March 2015), and "Drought: California agriculture can learn from Africa," San Jose Mercury News (March 2015).
Danielle has an M.S. in Agriculture, Food, and Environment from the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy and spent two years volunteering for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.
Mme Danielle Nierenberg
I agree with Professor Kleijn that for ecological intensification to be successful farmers need to be involved from the beginning of the research and development phase through participatory research practices. A top down approach with recommendations coming from policymakers and researchers in laboratories will simply not be as effective--farmers need to be in the driver's seat at the beginning. This will also help farmers see the wide range of benefits--environmental, economic, and social--that ecological intensification practices can provide. And, as a result, this can help these practices spread more widely and quickly.
Thanks again for all of the great comments! Please keep them coming!
Mme Danielle Nierenberg
Hi, everyone:
Welcome to the disccussion on Harnessing the Benefits of Ecosystem Services for Effective Ecological Intensification! Thank you for the comments so far--please keep them coming!
I wanted to share with you some links to Food Tank's Harvesting the Research series. Food Tank is partnering with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to highlight original scientific research about Project LIBERATION. The LIBERATION project aims to provide the evidence-base for the potential of ecological intensification to sustainably enhance food security with minimal negative impacts on the environment.
Regarding the policies needed for farmers to adopt ecological intensification, we interviewed Dr. Brian Petersen http://foodtank.com/news/2015/08/harvesting-the-research-ecological-int… he discusses how the shift to ecological intensification would require political and economic support. According to Petersen "It would have to! In order for this to change, there would need to be a complete paradigm shift in how agriculture is viewed and funded. Many stakeholders would end up losing if there were a shift away from business-as-usual agriculture, which is a major barrier to implementation of ecological intensification. Many of the experts believe that a complete shift in paradigm will require a tremendous amount of public support, not only from the populations of different countries, but also from governments. They believe that subsidies and tax incentives currently benefit wealthy corporations profiting off of sustainable intensification or conventional agriculture. If we don’t shift public support toward more ecological agriculture, it’s going to have catastrophic consequences, in my view and in the view of the scientists we interviewed."
Thanks again for your comments and feedback. We look forward to the discussion!