A right to food: reducing hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond

The School of Biology, with University and international colleagues, has transformed agricultural knowhow into real, world-changing impact.

Our changing planet threatens the ability to feed growing populations nutritiously and sustainably.

Mass flooding, drought, pests and disease exacerbated through increased temperatures can destroy crops, diminish food supplies and devastate livelihoods.

The World Bank anticipates that around 80% of the global population most at risk of climate-led crop failure and hunger are in sub-Saharan Africa, and South and Southeast Asia.

At the same time, the global food system is responsible for about a third of greenhouse gas emissions, with agriculture being the number one source of methane and biodiversity loss.

So how can global partners develop a productive, sustainable and resilient global food system which is accessible to all?

GCRF-AFRICAP

GCRF-Agricultural and Food systems Resilience: Increasing Capacity & Advising Policy (AFRICAP), aimed to support international development of sustainable agriculture, reducing poverty and hunger.

The four-year programme concluded in 2022 and involved over 80 team members in multiple disciplines, including academics from The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN), School of Biology and School of Earth and Environment, as well as decision makers from Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.

The GCRF-AFRICAP programme covered:

Scenario planning and iFEED

Scenarios are a route to aid decision making under uncertainty, where past trends cannot necessarily result in confident predictions.

Rather than forecasting the future, they examine a range of plausible futures, and provide a systematic mechanism for thinking through the challenges that might be encountered and opportunities that might arise.

Through a series of workshops, around 200 participants identified four possible scenarios, and the associated risks and uncertainties, for Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia.

Using the four possible agricultural futures as defined by the scenario workshops, the project then developed an Integrated Future Estimator for Emissions and Diets (iFEED) - an assessment framework that incorporates models and in-country expertise with analysis from across the natural and social sciences in each country.

Food system research

The project team also used cross-disciplinary research in agricultural innovation, seed systems, pests and diseases, food safety and nutrition to underpin all areas of the project.

For example, a survey of 238 African seed system professionals found no concrete examples of long-term climate projections, despite climate models projecting growing examples of areas across Sothern Africa which are suited to longer lasting seed varieties.

Using iFEED, researchers also found that maize crop failure rates could increase by more than 50% by 2050 under the most optimistic future climate scenarios and more than double under the worse-case scenarios. Average maize yields could fall by as much as a quarter under some scenarios.

iFEED also showed that:

• Nutritional deficiencies can be reduced by 2050, although this requires substantial increases to crop yields. Without these increases, nutritional improvements will require agricultural areas to expand and / or increased food imports.
• Farmers are already seeing increasing impacts on crop production due to pests and diseases, in places accounting for nearly a third of annual yield losses.
• Increases in rain intensities will likely increase soil erosion in Tanzania and Malawi, negatively impacting agricultural yields.
• Drought and high temperatures in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia will make the cassava (a substitute for potato), more toxic, making it harder to process into safe, edible forms.
• Although the impacts of climatic changes will be felt differently by different communities due to different vulnerabilities, and capacities to adapt, female smallholders will be disproportionately affected.

Impact

GCRF-AFRICAP proved to be a major, collaborative success because of its new research findings and evidence-based recommendations which can be integrated into policy planning.

Policy integration

The participatory scenario exercises undertaken at the outset of GCRF-AFRICAP, and the integrated assessments these informed, helped to join the dots between different policy domains and objectives, and assist policymakers to better understand the broader dependencies and consequences of their decisions.

Policy planning

GCRF-AFRICAP lead partners for all four countries have worked with policy makers to support the development and implementation of national policies and programmes.

Building skills

GCRF-AFRICAP has supported early career researchers and lead partners in each country by providing opportunities to engage in data collection and analyses and collaborate with a variety of researchers in different disciplines. They also provided training on project design, proposal writing and other key research skills.

For more information about iFEED and GCRF-AFRICAP, visit their websites.