The world is losing too much of its biological heritage.
Ecologists agree that we are in the middle of a global mass extinction event. Already, more than 600 species have been recorded as having gone extinct since the 1600s, and those are just the ones we know about. Iconic animals like the vaquita, the world’s smallest dolphin species, are on the verge of vanishing forever. Others may become extinct before we even know they existed.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) acknowledges that several species have been pulled back from the brink of annihilation thanks to conservation initiatives, but thousands more remain at risk, particularly sharks and freshwater aquatic species. Scientists even recently issued an alert and the decline of the monarch butterfly, a species that was once ubiquitous throughout North America. The situation is alarming.
Hunting has wiped out too many species, but habitat loss is the main recent cause of this devastation. Urban expansion is pushing out wild animals and plants, but farming is the greatest culprit. Vast areas have been tilled and planted with crops we need to keep people fed, including most of the US Midwest, Central Europe, and eastern China. Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America are seeing land losses for farming continuing today. And no place on Earth is safe from climate change—the latest major threat to our planet’s biodiversity.
April is Earth Month, so we’re exploring ways farmers can benefit from the natural world and ways that smallholder farms and nature can and must coexist. Maintaining Earth’s biodiversity while the climate is changing and while people are putting more hectares under cultivation remains one of the greatest challenges we face. Innovators can help by discovering how smallholder farmers can increase yields without expanding the area of land under cultivation.
Grow Further and our grantees and other partners are helping, both to expand productivity and shrink the footprint of agriculture and to make agricultural lands more ecological.
Growing more with the land we have
Norman Borlaug introduced the so-called Borlaug Hypothesis in a speech in 2000 on the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Peace Prize. Under this hypothesis, which is difficult to prove or disprove with current economic techniques but seems to at least explain increasing forest cover in the eastern US, higher productivity reduces the land footprint of farming and allows expansion of forests. Several projects funded by Grow Further help to improve agricultural productivity and may as a result help natural areas to expand.
Ethiopian farmers traditionally grow wheat during the rainy season as their fields are rain-fed. The government there wants to drastically increase wheat output to head off a rising import bill and for the sake of food security.
Ethiopia could expand wheat production by simply expanding the size of wheat farms, but to its credit, the government has focused on promoting year-round cultivation on existing farms via strategic irrigation projects. Our partners at Madda Walabu University are investigating ways to match optimum irrigation technologies and techniques with better wheat varieties, ones that are relatively easy to cultivate in Ethiopia’s new wheat off-season.
This work is important both for climate adaptation and biodiversity. A study published late last year in the journal Land estimates that more than 44% of Ethiopia’s land isn’t suitable for wheat farming, and warns that the country is losing arable land due to global warming. “In 2050, non-suitable areas for wheat cultivation are expected to increase by 1% and 6.9%,” the Kenyan and Ethiopian research team wrote. “Areas currently suitable for wheat may face challenges in the future due to altered temperature and precipitation patterns, potentially leading to shifts in suitable areas or reduced productivity.”
Growing more wheat on existing farms through irrigation and better seed varieties will help Ethiopia meet its food security goals while avoiding more arable land losses due to climate change. This work will also help prevent additional habitat losses threatening endangered species, at least until humanity can come together to curb the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
It’s much the same story in Zimbabwe, where Grow Further allies are joining forces to develop iron-rich, climate-resilient varieties of pearl millet.
Zimbabwe has been buckling under the strain of longer and more severe droughts. That’s why we’re proud to be working with the Ministry of Agriculture, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), and HarvestPlus in an effort to encourage Zimbabwe’s smallholder farmers to farm more productively on lands they’re already tilling, hopefully saving the rest for nature.
New technology to raise old crops
In Tanzania, scientists are closing in on developing and unleashing a handheld technology that will keep farmers informed of the conditions in their fields, saving current and future harvests from the attacks that nature and climate change will bring.
The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) is developing a machine learning-based smartphone application that can detect the earliest, most subtle signs of crop diseases and pest infestations. This is another example of a Grow Further-sponsored initiative that will help smallholder farmers harvest more food on lands they are already tending to.
The smartphone app will make Tanzania’s smallholder farmers more efficient, and there’s good reason to believe that more efficient farming will benefit Tanzania’s biodiversity. Research published 20 years ago found a positive correlation between Tanzania’s smallholder tobacco farmers’ efficiency and neighboring forest and wildlife conservation—efficient farms harvested less wood from forests, resulting in healthier adjacent forests. New infrastructure development continues to threaten biodiversity, however, so more could be done to promote conservation throughout the country.
Our project in Ghana is also focused on innovation to help farmers adapt to climate change. It should have knock-on benefits for Ghana’s flora and fauna, as well.
The Bambara groundnut has been cultivated by farmers in Ghana for thousands of years, yet it’s hardly a staple crop there. We’re hoping to change that.
Through a partnership with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR-SARI), Grow Further is funding work to develop the world’s first commercial variety of Bambara groundnut to be cultivated on a large scale. This nutrition-packed legume is famously drought tolerant, and thus climate-resilient. Where it is grown, women smallholder farmers are primarily the ones growing it. Therefore, an enhanced, easy-to-grow, and climate-tough varieties of Bambara groundnut will improve food security and help to alleviate gender imbalances in Ghanian agriculture.
This project may be arriving at an opportune moment in Ghana’s social development. A recent study argues that a growing social movement is taking root there seeking ways to match rural economic development with ambitious conservation objectives. Projects as diverse as beekeeping, mushroom farming, and even heliciculture—snail farming—are being designed with biodiversity in mind. The aim is to show interested participants how they can profit from protecting ecosystems.
“These activities have become very relevant to Ghana’s current collaborative policy because they are used to buy-in local support for natural resource and biodiversity conservation,” that paper argues. Perhaps our Bambara groundnut farming initiative can join this social movement.
30 by 30
Nations party to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have pledged to protect 30% of the world’s surface by 2030 in a bid to halt the mass extinction underway and save species from oblivion. They’re calling it the “30 by 30” pledge and it’s only 5 years away. By some estimates, CBD signatories are barely halfway to that goal. But it’s a noble aim and an indication that nations are determined to meet the world’s growing food needs without sacrificing more wildlife habitat to farms and farming.
We can grow more food on the same amount of land, or even less, and we can invent new technologies to make smallholder farms more efficient, more resilient to climate change, and less damaging to endangered plants and animals. Earth’s biodiversity depends on it.
— Grow Further
Photo credit: A hyena crossing a road in Kenya. Curt Carnemark/World Bank and Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
