Revolution and Rebirth: Transforming the food and Agriclture sectore

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ......9

I. THE DISRUPTION OF OUR GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM .......11

II. ON LIVES AND LIVELIHOODS ...........16

III. BEYOND REFORM: REVOLUTION AND REBIRTH: ..19

IV. THE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE SECTOR

AS AN EMITTER OF GHGS .......21

V. LAND USE CHANGES .......23

VI. WATER USE MANAGEMENT ...........25

VII. THE RIGHT PLANTS ...............28

VIII. REDUCING EMISSIONS ...........29

IX. ENHANCING CARBON SEQUESTRATION ..........31

X. FISH AND AQUATIC RESOURCES ..........33

XI. INCREASING EFFICIENCY AND ELIMINATING WASTE .......34

XII. MULTIPLE MEASURES to REDUCE GHG EMISSIONS .............36

XIII. YES, ALL THIS CAN BE DONE .......38

XIV. NEW TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE REVOLUTION IN

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE .........40

XV. FINANCE ........53

XVI. ADDRESSING THE GENDER DIMENSION ........58

XVII. A Just Transition ........61

XVIII. PEACE AND SECURITY .......62

XIX. CONCLUSIONS: AN EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE ......64

WORKS CITED .......67

****

PREFACE

I have had a long career in dealing with environmental issues. At the time of the Rio earth Summit in 1992, The World Bank decided that they must change their approach, and a new post of Vice President for Environmentally Sustainable Development (VPESD) was created. As a well-known activist on environmental and social issues among the senior managers of the Bank at that time, I was asked to take on that post. I did, and for the next seven years, I had a huge portfolio, overseeing all Bank-financed projects in environment, agriculture, infrastructure (including water and sanitation), urban development, and social issues (involuntary resettlement, gender, community action). We introduced major new standards dealing with Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of projects, and how to handle involuntary resettlement due to large infrastructure projects, and we expanded the work on water, micro-finance, and the study of wealth accounting, covering natural capital and social capital in addition to human capital, and produced assets. I also served as chairman of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the Global Water Partnership (GWP), and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) – a micro-finance Program. We established the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and expanded our studies of public goods.

Thus, our work on any subject was closely tied to the many facets of sustainable development.

I retain a special relationship to my work with the CGIAR. It was a system born in the 1970s to build on the enormous success the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s. In a world where many people speak and do little, here was an enormous network of exceptional scientists distributed in International Agricultural Research Centers (IARCs), working with National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS), deploying the best of science to feed the world, fight poverty, promote biodiversity, empower women and advance the cause of sustainable development.

I learned a lot from many of the great pioneers of the CGIAR, including Norman Borlaug and M.S. Swaminathan. Swaminathan became a lifelong friend and an endless source of inspiration. Beyond the CGIAR, he would be one of the original members of the Board of Trustees when I founded the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt. He and I would be the gurus of the campaign that the late Poonam Ahluwalia launched for youth employment. And during my early days with the CGIAR he gave me the advice that I still cherish to this day, when he advised me to always choose the path that was pro-poor, pro-women, and pro-environment. Wise advice indeed.

I am sure that he and my other mentors from the environmental movement, especially Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Maurice Strong, Henry Kendall, and Mustapha Tolba would approve of this essay. For they were all revolutionaries in their day. And they would agree that the challenges we face today require more than reforms at the margins. Global agriculture must be transformed and reborn. And a reborn Food and Agricultural Sector can do much to help us meet the challenges of climate change, global hunger and poverty, water and soil management, even as it helps us also work in harmony with nature, not against it.

This essay summarizes my views on this revolutionary transformation. It reprises many of my views expressed in other publications(1). But given the importance of the Food and Agriculture Sector, I decided to expand what was a chapter in my book on climate change into a stand-alone monograph. I hope that these ideas find the resonance that they deserve given the importance of the subject. It can be done. The world must learn to adopt science-based policies and enforce evidence-based regulations.

Finally, I am most grateful to the Nizami Ganjavi International Center (NGIC) which helped finance the preparation and publication of this book.

Ismail Serageldin

June 2024

(1)See Serageldin, Ismail, Climate Change and the Environmental, Social and Economic Challenges of a Changing World, Al-Dar Al-Masriyah Al-Lubnaniah, Cairo, 2024, also a shorter version of these ideas is presented in Serageldin, Ismail, Protecting vulnerable lives and livelihoods in times of Climate Change in Adel El-Beltagy, et.al. (eds) Climate Change and Sustainable Agro-ecology and Drylands (Forthcoming 2024).

I. THE DISRUPTION OF OUR GLOBAL ECOSYSTEM

We live in a world where our activities have been disrupting the global eco-system on which we all depend. From the mismanagement of freshwater resources, to deforestation, biodiversity loss and soil erosion, human activities have been responsible for much of the disruption and observed negative trends. But the overarching existential threat that we now face is Climate Change, a profound transformation of our atmosphere, due to the burning of fossil fuels since the industrial revolution, which has been releasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that have contributed to global warming on an unprecedented scale.

Today, there is no doubt that humanity is on a dangerous trajectory. Continued emissions of GHGs is taking us towards more global warming and its dangerous consequences. The IPCC(1) report (AR6) of 2021 shows that:

…we’ve currently reached 1.1°C above the average temperatures from 1850-1900. Not in 125,000 years has earth seen a time period with such a high average temperature for such a prolonged period of time, indicating that this is more than just a natural heat spike…This is coupled with reporting