New Food Safety Mapping Approach Wins Olam Award for Innovation 2019

Company News from Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Source: asempanews.com

2019-06-11

A unique mapping approach that will give small farmers the best solution for what to grow, where and how was rewarded by the 2019 Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security, thanks to its potential to improve productivity in food insecure areas and countries.

The approach, called Innovation Mapping for Food Security (IM4FS), is being developed by a team coordinated by Dr. Tomaso Ceccarelli of Wageningen Environmental Research, the Netherlands, and Dr. Eyasu Elias Fantahun from the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Safety was launched in 2014 in partnership with Agropolis Foundation. The winner receives an unrestricted grant of US $ 75,000 to intensify his research.

Since the inaugural award was awarded in 2015, farmers around the world have benefited from winning innovations, recognized for their potential impact on the availability, affordability, accessibility or adequacy of food .

For the most part, IM4FS builds on the dynamism of the CASCAPE project, carried out in close cooperation with the Ethiopian Government's Agricultural Growth Program (AGP).

CASCAPE designed and implemented site-specific combinations of crops, soils and agricultural practices, enabling about 200,000 farmers to increase their yields above the Ethiopian average (yields tripled for wheat and doubled for Tef bean and bean) and start becoming self-reliant by applying these best practices.

While existing land valuation approaches are focused on improving agricultural productivity, CASCAPE combines data with stakeholder engagement to ensure that the proposals will work in practice. To do this, farmers, extension agents, local experts and planners are involved from the start, providing an understanding of the realities on the ground for all approaches.

This data and information is then fed into the GIS3 tool, which maps agricultural best practices to biophysical and socio-economic conditions in a given area.

The tool will then create "recommendation cards" highlighting the areas most suited to specific innovations. Local stakeholders will then check the recommendation against their knowledge and expectations.

IM4FS goes even further in this learning through its unique ability to provide a scenario planning function that informs decisions about agricultural landscapes and food-insecure areas.

This ultimately creates a more dynamic and interactive tool for providing simulations and helping stakeholder engagement. Together, this was essential for the judges to award the prize of $ 75,000.

"It's really exciting to work with local researchers and other parties to develop smart solutions to tackle such a devastating problem as hunger.

The price of USD 75,000 will help fund the deployment of in situ data collection by extension agents and other local staff, and to develop the mapping tool to include the 'planning' function. scenarios, "said Dr. Tomaso Ceccarelli, principal investigator at Wageningan Environmental Research.

Dr. Ceccarelli said the maps could then be used by government institutions, planners and others to simulate interventions and agricultural investments to undertake where, when and how.

Eyasu Elias Fantahun, co-project manager and professor at the University of Addis Ababa, added, "Ethiopia is the perfect example of a country that needs of an innovative solution to increase productivity: it is the second largest country in Africa for arable land, imports half of its food.

This is not necessarily the case: there is a potential for self-sufficiency in cereals and other staple crops, and the Ethiopian government supports this ambition with national policies.

"Olam's funding will strengthen the engagement between our researchers, our planners and our farmers, by accelerating the adoption and implementation of specific agricultural innovations to improve the food productivity and livelihoods on a larger scale. "

Sunny Verghese, co-founder of Olam and CEO of the group, said: "As a global agri-food industry, investing in farmers and in our own plantations around the world, we continually monitor and evaluate the best growing areas.

But with the pace of climate change and severe warnings about biodiversity loss, air pollution and land degradation, there is a growing risk that what is planted today is no longer adapted to these fields in the future. IM4FS will help inform this risk with a better understanding of the interactions between land resources, demography, climate change and agricultural technology, and define the optimal conditions for boosting food production. It will provide farmers, as well as local and regional actors, with the information they need to solve the problem of food security. "

Marie-Christine Cormier-Salem, director of Agropolis Foundation and scientific partner of the Olam Award, said: "IM4FS combining the use of computer tools such as GIS and participatory approaches, you have Not only a visually accurate tool, one that stakeholders can relate to. In the end, you have a product that combines knowledge of best practices and adoption factors with biophysical resources and socio-economic conditions. "