Organic agriculture for food security in Africa

The third African Green Revolution Conference took place in Oslo on 28 - 29 August 2008. High level representatives of banks and industry, most of them engaged in seeds and chemical fertilizers, were meeting to discuss action for an African Green Revolution. While IFOAM was welcoming the attention for the agricultural situation in Africa, it expressed its deep concern about the direction the talks in Oslo were taking: back to the past instead of looking at the future, neglecting recent scientific and societal findings. Moses Kiggundu Muwanga, IFOAM world board member and coordinator of the National Organic Agricultural Movement of Uganda (NOGAMU), said that: the global food crisis had inter-linkages with other man-made crises and that one should search for solutions that responded to them systemically.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) held its concluding meeting in Johannesburg earlier this year. The core message of the final IAASTD report was the urgent need to move away from destructive and chemical-dependent industrial agriculture and to adopt environmental modern farming methods that championed biodiversity and benefited local communities. In the research paper ‘Organic Agriculture and the Global Food Supply’ published in 2007, Badgley et al., from the University of Michigan, focused on productivity of Organic Agriculture through a scenario study, comparing yields of organic versus conventional or low-intensive food production. The resulting estimates indicated that Organic Agriculture had the potential to produce enough food on a global per capita basis to sustain the human population without increasing the agricultural land base. The FAO conference on Organic Agriculture and food security in May 2007 aimed at identifying organic agriculture's potential and limits in addressing the food security challenge. In conclusion, organic agriculture was presented as a “neo-traditional food system” as it merged science and traditional farming practices.

The Tigray project in Northern Ethiopia has succeeded in reversing the negative agricultural developments, in an area once severely affected by problems such as soil erosion and hunger. Here, poor subsistence farmers, researchers, local advisors, agricultural experts, and the Institute for Sustainable Development have devised a cropping system. This system is based on local inputs, biological diversity and other ecosystem services.

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