Dr Marta Guerriero Global Sustainable Development M.Guerriero@warwick.ac.uk

1. Food and Sustainable Development Dr Marta Guerriero Global Sustainable Development M.Guerriero@warwick.ac.uk

2. What is Sustainable Development? Development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. (UN Bruntland Commission, 1987)

3. Food and Socio-Economic Sustainability • Agriculture is the main source of income and employment for the 70% of the world’s poor who live in rural areas. • 10 food companies collectively generate more than $1.2bn daily. • Some 795 million people in the world still go hungry while around 2 billion people are overweight and obese.

4. Food and Environmental Sustainability • 30% of GHGs emissions attributed to food production and distribution. • 53% of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, and 32% are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion. • 65% of Africa’s arable land is now degraded. Overgrazing is the main cause of this.

5. Border between Egypt and Israel. Aral Sea, 1989 and 2014. Gulf of Mexico “Dead Zone”.

7. Rural Development and Poverty Source: OPHI (2014). “So it is time to change the way we think. Farmers are not the cause of Africa’s poverty; they are a potential solution. They are key to creating the future envisioned by the SDGs.” K. Annan (2015)

8. Development in the 1950s:Heavy Emphasis on Industrialisation “Unlimited supply of labour” – W. Arthur Lewis (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1979)

9. Development in the 1960s:The “Green Revolution” Food is a “moral right”. - Norman E. Borlaug (Nobel Peace Prize, 1970)

10. The Impact: Crop Yields, 1961-2010 Source: World Development Report (2013).

11. Cereal Yield and Poverty Headcount,1981-2001 Source: World Development Report (2013).

12. The Impact: Emissions Source: FAO.

13. But… • The pace of improvement has slowed steadily. • Mainly benefited medium- and large-sized landowners: rural inequality worsened. • Rural employment did not grow as much as production. • … We need to analyse the structure of land.

14. Global Distribution of Agricultural Land Source: Grain (2014).

15. Global Encroachment of Industrial Crops Source: Grain (2014).

16. In Reality… • Small-scale farmers produce 70% of the world’s food (and up to 80% of the food in developing countries). • Small farms are the most productive (inverse relationship between farm size and output per unit of land area). • Small farms are more ecologically sustainable.

17. Development Today: “Institutions” • Need for Land Reforms: Unlike many other economic policies, it is one that may increase both equity and efficiency. Source: IFAD.

18. How To Govern the Land? “Driven by a concern with institutions, we re-enter the world of the behavioralists” – Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize in Economics, 2009)

19. A Second “Green Revolution”? • High vulnerability to shocks (price, weather and other uncertainty). • Encouraging farmers to undertake more sustainable practices could actually reduce their risks. • Policies targeted towards women and indigenous people can have larger impact on productivity, as well as human and environmental development.

20. Reading Suggestions • Dawson, N., Martin, A. and T. Sikor (2016). Green Revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implications of Imposed Innovation for the Wellbeing of Rural Smallholders, World Development. 78: 204-218. • GRAIN (2014). Hungry for Land: Small Farmers Feed the World With Less Than a Quarter of All Farmland. Published on 28 May 2014. Available here. • Lewis, W.A. (1954). Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour, The Manchester School. 22(2): 139-191. • Nawabi, J. (2015). Land Reform, Dollars&Sense. May/June 2015. Available here. • Pingali, P.L. (2012). Green Revolution: Impacts, Limits, and the Path Ahead, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 109(31): 12302-12308. • Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.