1. Slide 1: “Intro”
Good morning. It’s such pleasure it to be here today.
First, let me thank the organizers of the Sustainable Food Summit and The Organic Monitor for
bringing together so many amazing panelists and speaker. I’m looking forward to not only
hearing what the other speakers have to say, but also the questions you all have.
Again, my name is Danielle Nierenberg and I’m the Director of the Worldwatch Institute’s
Nourishing the Planet project. Worldwatch is an environmental think tank based in Washington,
DC and will celebrate its 38th birthday this year. Our Nourishing the Planet project started in
2009.
I spent most of these last two and a half years traveling to 35 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and
Asia, highlighting agricultural innovations that are working on the ground. During my research I
met with more than 500farmers and farmers groups, research institutions and universities,
businesses and corporations, and local and government officials, collecting their thoughts about
what’s working on the ground to help alleviate hunger and poverty, while also protecting the
environment.
Fifteen sets of innovations are highlighted in our book State of the World 2011: Innovations that
Nourish the Planet, which was released last year. State of the World is Worldwatch’s annual
publication and the 2011 edition is the first time it focused entirely on food and agriculture.
We will also be highlight many of these innovations in a book we’re working on with the Barilla
Center for Food and Nutrition that will be released this spring. And this summer, we’re headed to
one dozen countries in Latin America to focus on the innovations farmers there are using to
protect the environment.
Slide 2: “Agriculture is the Solution”
What I’d like to talk about briefly today is agriculture’s changing reputation. For so long,
agriculture has been villanized for the world’s worst environmental and social problems—
everything from deforestation and land degradation to rising greenhouse gas emissions and
obesity has been blamed on the current food system. But today agriculture is changing and so is
its image. Thanks to several recent reports, including the International Agricultural Assessment
and major reports by the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme, the UK
Foresight Analysis, and others, agriculture is being viewed very differently than in the past.
In fact, agriculture is now seen as the solution to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.
Of the 15 set of innovations we uncovered, there are really 4 that stand out in terms of their
ability to create resilience in agriculture, improve incomes, increase yields, and promote
environmental sustainability. The innovations I’m going to describe today, include

2. -Innovations that help prevent food waste
-Innovations that help youth
-Innovations that help cities feed themselves
-And innovations that help mitigate climate change.
From sub-Saharan Africa to right here in San Francisco, farmers are using agriculture to not
only improve their food security and livelihoods, but they are growing and processing food in
ways that contribute to environmental sustainability. These innovations that are working on the
ground are changing the image of agriculture from a creator of problems to a provider of
solutions.
Slide 3: “Innovation 1: Cutting Food Waste”
Let’s start off by talking about food waste.
With the holidays over, I think a lot of us realize how much we overindulged the last few
months. Unfortunately, a lot of the turkeys, pumpkin pies, Christmas cookies that were part of
holiday celebrations ended up in landfills. It’s estimated that Americans waste about 34 million
tons of food per year, 5 million tons of which gets thrown away just between the Thanksgiving
and New Years holidays.
And last November, when the United Nations announced the birth of the 7 billionth person,
many news articles focused on how it would be possible—or impossible—to feed the world’s
growing population. By 2050, world population is expected to hit 9 billion and experts at the
Food and Agriculture Organization have estimated that food production will need to increase
anywhere from 50 to 80 percent over the next 40 years. And there are questions about where that
food will come from—will more of the Amazonian rainforest need to be cleared to satisfy our
increasing meat consumption, for example? Or will sub-Saharan Africa become the bread basket
for China and the Middle East as a result of foreign acquisition of land, also known as land
grabs? And what will happen to our groundwater supplies and soil nutrients as we farm more and
more of the world’s arable land?
Slide 4: “Cutting Food Waste: Waste in the Food Chain”
But an effective way to make sure everyone is fed is by reducing food waste. Today, roughly 30
percent of the global harvest is wasted before it ever reaches people’s stomachs.
Food waste tends to be insidious—a little bit is lost in the field; a little bit is lost in storage; a
little is lost in transport; and then finally, a few percent is lost at home.
In the U.S. households and retailers throw away an about one third of edible food annually.
When you get home tonight, take a look way in the back of your refrigerator and you’ll realize

3. that those take out containers and left over rice and pad thai probably won’t make it to your
dinner tables or lunch bags later this week, it will end up in the garbage.
Food releases methane gas as it decomposes in landfills. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 20
times more potent than carbon dioxide. And according to the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United
States.
In the developing world, a staggering 40 percent of food is lost before it can be sold or eaten,
meaning that all the hard work that farmers do to fertilize and irrigate crops goes to waste,
putting them further into poverty.
Slide 5: “Cutting Food Waste: Solar-Powered Dryers”
The good news is that preventing food waste can be both simple and inexpensive.
Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, solar powered dehydrators are preserving abundant
harvests of fruits and vegetables. In The Gambia and India, for example, drying papayas and
mangos helps makes sure that families have access to vitamin A throughout the year; In Bolivia,
farmers are using driers to preserve a number of different crops, such as tomatoes and potatoes,
throughout the year.
Slide 6: “Cutting Food Waste: Hermetic Sealing”
And in West Africa, hermetically sealed bags, or what are essentially really big Ziploc bags, are
helping farmers to protect their crops from moisture, insects and fungus. Researchers from
Perdue University are working with farmers to manufacture these bags locally and help distribute
them to cow pea farmers across Niger, Nigeria, Mali and other nations. This very low-cost
technology has the potential to save farmers in the region around $44 million annually.
And in Pakistan, the United Nations helped 9 percent of farmers reduce grain storage losses by
up to 70 percent by replacing jute bags and mud silos with metal grain storage containers that
prevent moisture and insects and rats from eating grain.
Slide 7: “Cutting Food Waste: Consumer Education”
Consumers are also learning how to become better users of the food we buy.
In the United Kingdom, activist groups like Love Food, Hate Waste, are educating consumers
about how to prevent household waste. Love Food, Hate Waste has saved consumers about $970
million dollars over the last decade. The organization offers consumers tips for food
storage and recipes to make use of leftovers or food that is close to its expiration date. They
provide cooks with a portion size calculator that shows how much spaghetti or meat or
vegetables to cook per person.

4. The organization FareShare, which is also based in the UK, gleans food from grocery stores that
is perfectly edible but would have been thrown away. It then distributes that food to
organizations, such as schools or food banks. Last year, the food redistributed by FareShare
contributed to more than 8.6 million meals, and benefited an average of 35,500 people every day.
And in 2010, San Francisco became the first city to pass legislation requiring all households to
separate both recycling and compost from garbage. Those food scraps are providing an important
source of organic fertilizer to both urban and rural farmers.
And Food Runners is an NGO here that delivers approximately ten tons of leftover food to
shelters, soup kitchens, and senior centers in the city each year. This one organization alone
provides food families with over 2,000 meals every day.
Slide 8: “Innovation 2: Reaching the Young”
The next solution agriculture is helping provide is more opportunities for young people. At the
end of 2010, there were an estimated 75 million young people in the world struggling to find
jobs. Between 2008 and 2009, the number of unemployed youth increased by an unprecedented
4.5 million.
In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, up to 70 per cent of youth live in rural areas and half of
the young labor force works in agriculture. Although employment in agriculture declined over
the last decade, it still remains the main source of employment for more than half of people
working in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
In the United States, the average age of farmers is 57 years old. And despite the recent interest in
farming and food from hipsters and young hippies, only about 1 percent of the U.S. population is
involved in farming, making farmers one of the country’s biggest minorities.
But agriculture can be something that not only provides nourishment to communities, but
something that provides intellectual stimulation, opportunity, and an income to youth and older
farmers alike.
Slide 9: “Reaching the Young: Developing Innovations in School Cultivation”
For example, Slow Food International is working across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia to help
reignite an interest in—and a taste for—indigenous foods. In Uganda, Project DISC, or
Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, is showing students at 30 schools that agriculture
can be both profitable and a way to help protect the environment. The project teaches kids how
to grow, process, and cook indigenous fruits and vegetables—vegetables that are not only in
demand in urban areas, but that can also help mitigate climate change because of their resistance
to drought and disease.

5. DISC is also part of Slow Food’s 1,000 Gardens in Africa initiative which is working across the
continent to increase the number of gardens growing foods that are indigenous to communities.
Slow Food is also working to professionalize agriculture in other ways. The University of
Gastronomic Sciences in Italy attracts food enthusiasts from around the world. Students learn
various farming practices that are helping to increase biodiversity. Students also have the
opportunity to gain hands-on experience of cultivating fruits and vegetables through the school
garden helping them connect to agriculture directly.
School feeding programs can be especially important in areas where there’s conflict. Food from
the Hood is a group of student gardeners that began in Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. The
students grow kale, eggplant, and 16 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Twenty-five percent of what
they grow is given to the needy and the rest is sold for profit, half of which has been funneled
into scholarships for students.
And in Costa Rica, EARTH University is developing an innovations toolkit that will help
farmers thousands of miles away in sub-Saharan Africa learn how to be successful agricultural
entrepreneurs. EARTH focuses on building the skills of small-scale farmers and younger farmers
to not only protect the environment, but also as the key way of moving families out of poverty.
These sorts of innovations make agriculture something that youth want to do, not something
they’re forced to do because they don’t have opportunities. Agriculture can provide the economic
and intellectual opportunities and excitement that have been missing in rural areas of both
developing and industrialized countries.
Slide 10: “Innovation 3: Urban Agriculture”
The decline of youth in rural areas leads to the next issue I want to discuss. That’s the increasing
role cities can have in feeding not only themselves, but also rural areas.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an estimated 800 million
people are engaged in urban agriculture worldwide, producing 15-20 percent of the world’s food.
And the urbanization of the world’s population shows no signs of slowing down.
In India, for example, around 100,000 people move to cities each year in search of jobs. And
experts predict that India’s urban population will increase to 40 percent by 2020, meaning that
more than 540 million people will be living in Indian cities.
And in Africa, 14 million people to move to cities each year, a migration that is second only to
the massive rural to urban shift taking place in China.

6. Slide 11: “Urban Agriculture and the Poor”
Because many urban dwellers’ access to healthy food usually depends on the amount of money
they have, and food prices can skyrocket without much warning, urban agriculture can release
people from this dependence on the global food market.
By 2020, some 35-40 million Africans will depend entirely on food grown in cities, making it
important to find ways for them to grow food more easily.
Fortunately, there are no shortages of successful models of productive urban farms, and these
farms are often found in some unlikely places.
Slide 12: “Urban Agriculture in Columbia”
Bogota is the capital of Columbia, and home to over 7 million people, 20 percent of whom live
in poverty.
The Cities Farming for the Future program is spreading an innovative garden design that helps
farmers grow food where there is no soil. The "Farming In My House" Project is establishing 20
container gardens on concrete areas around the city. The project does a couple of things. One, it
improves the diets of families by increasing the diversity of vegetables, fruits and grains they are
consuming, and two it helps them market these vegetables to other consumers, helping them
increase their incomes. And the project is working to promote innovative waste management
systems, such as composting, as well as encouraging households to collect rainwater.
Slide 13: Urban Agriculture: Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya)
I also had the opportunity to visit Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. Kibera is the largest slum in sub-
Saharan Africa with roughly 1 million people. It’s everything you imagine a slum in a
developing country to be. It’s extremely crowded, it’s very noisy, it doesn’t smell very good, and
it’s not a place you would expect crops to flourish. But there are a couple of big pockets of hope
there.
Several thousand of the women in Kibera have organized themselves into self help groups. These
groups are finding ways to grow food and raise animals in their small backyards. One innovative
thing they’ve done is develop what they call vertical gardens, or growing food in tall sacks that
allow them to grow a lot of vegetables, like kale or spinach, in a very compact space, similar to
the container gardens in Bogota. The Kibera farmers sell their produce to other folks in their
neighborhood and also consume part of what they grow. These sacks turned out to be a very
important source of food security during the riots that occurred in Nairobi in 2007 and 2008—no
food could come in to Kibera, but the vertical farmers didn’t go hungry because they were able
to grow their own food.
Another group of farmers in Kibera is also doing some innovative gardening in an empty lot in
the slum. The farmers are not only growing food to eat and to sell, but perhaps surprisingly

7. becoming a source of seed for rural farmers. In small double dug beds, fertilized with compost,
the Kibera farmers are growing seeds of tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables and then selling the
seeds to rural farmers. There aren’t many local seed companies in Eastern Africa and rural
farmers often have a hard time finding good quality sources of seed.
And the seed beds are profitable--- one of the farmers I met in Kibera explained to me that the
seed beds have helped her not only pay for her daughter to go to school, but she’s also saved
enough money to own her own piece of land outside of Nairobi.
Urban farming isn’t just occurring in the developing world, however. It’s also something that is
occurring literally in our backyards. In Chicago, where I live, the organization Growing Power,
is operating five urban farms that employ dozens of formerly unemployed adults and at-risk
youth. The food they grow is sold locally farmers markets and in a mobile grocery store and
Growing Power recently received a $1 million grant from Walmart to expand its operations.
Here in San Francisco the Urban Agriculture Alliance helped change laws in the city, making it
easier for urban gardeners and farmers to grow crops.
And Urban Sprouts is an organization cultivating school gardens in under-served areas of San
Francisco. In the 2011 year they taught more than 800 kids to grow and cook food at their
schools.
These projects are helping dispel the myth that urban agriculture only benefits poor people living
in cities and they’re providing an example for other cities to follow.
Slide 14: “Innovation 4: Carbon Storing “
The last innovation I want to talk about is how farmers are combatting climate change.
According to the World Agroforestry Centre, African farmers have the ability to sequester 50
billion tons of CO2 in the next 50 years, primarily by planting trees among crops, stewarding
nearby forests, and keeping their soils planted with crops for more of the year. That 50 billion
tons of carbon is like eliminating an entire year of all the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—
and it would be a generous contribution from a region of the world that emits only a tiny share of
these gases.
Already roughly 75 projects in 22 countries across Africa are in the works in to begin
compensating farmers and rural communities for providing this climate-healing service,
including a proposal to create an African Agricultural Carbon Facility that could incubate
projects and help connect them with buyers.

8. Slide 15: Farm or Forest
The International Fund for Agricultural Development is helping to finance agroforestry projects
across sub-Saharan Africa to help farmers not only sequester carbon, but also to reduce soil
erosion on farmland. Agroforestry also has the potential to provide organic fertilizer as well as
shade for other shorter crops.
This is one of my favorite photos. When you look at it, you can’t tell if it’s a forest or a farm and
in reality it’s both. And this type of farming and conservation has multiple benefits.
In Burkina Faso and Niger, for example, farmers are restoring the Sahel’s degraded land with a
farming technique called Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). The farmers prune
tree shoots that periodically and naturally sprout from below-ground root webs. This helps
promote forest growth and gives farmers a naturally occurring source of fuel, food, or animal
fodder. The trees also produce fruit and nuts and help restore the soil by releasing nitrogen and
protecting the ground from erosion. The practice also reduce deforestation because the trees that
are used for fuel are replaced with seedlings and tended by farmers, further holding down and
regenerating the soil.
I think there’s a tendency to think of sustainable agriculture as backward and industrial
agriculture as more sophisticated. But agroforestry and agro-ecological practices are not a return
to old-fashioned or outdated practices. On the contrary, these approaches are highly complex,
relying on extensive knowledge from farmers and an understanding of local ecosystems.
Slide 16: “Moving Forward”
Finally, I think all of these examples really help show how agriculture’s reputation is changing—
farmers and scientists and government leaders from Africa to California are realizing that
agriculture can be the answer.
Agriculture, when done in the right way, can improve biodiversity, improve soil quality, heal
degraded land—and even mitigate climate change.
Agriculture is emerging, not as an instigator, but as a solution to many of our global problems.
Around the world, farming is being used to strengthen communities by providing a means of
income and livelihood, nourishing families through improved crop production and protecting the
Earth through agroecological practices. Every day we highlight these solutions on our website
NourishingthePlanet.org and I invite everyone here to share with me your ideas and innovations
for improving the food system. Because we are all part of the answer!
Slide 17: Final Slide (NtP Logo)
Thank you and I’ll look forward to your questions.