Last week, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) hosted “Agriculture, Land Use, and Climate: Implications for African Development,” a panel discussion on agriculture’s essential current and future role in Africa’s development. As panelist Martin Bwyala of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) noted at the beginning of the discussion, 60 to 70 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa depends on agriculture or another form of direct land use for their livelihoods. “Africa’s foundation for sustainable growth lies in enhancing the productivity and sustainable use of its natural resources,” said Bwyala. The panel highlighted the adverse effects of unsustainable land use and climate change on Africans’ livelihoods, and examined the merits of potential solutions.

The panelists emphasized that governments and NGOs are better positioned to aid Africa today than ever before, and that the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) provides an important opportunity to do so. A joint venture by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and NEPAD, with the support of other agencies, CAADP is “a manifestation of African governments’ commitment to address issues of growth in the agricultural sector, rural development and food security,” FAO’s website explains. [w1] The panelists’ overwhelming consensus was that NGOs and governments can and should collaborate to pursue CAADP’s goals, which include: achieving an annual agricultural production growth rate of 6 percent; strengthening domestic and international markets for African agricultural products; spending at least 10 percent of annual public expenditure on agricultural investment; and expanding sustainable management of land and water resources.

Elaborating on CAADP’s goals, Arati Belle of the World Bank explained precisely what is at stake in increasing the sustainability of African agriculture. 485 million Africans are adversely affected by land degradation, which is not surprising, she said, considering that 30 percent of Africa’s GDP and 70 percent of its employment come from the agricultural sector. The goal of the TerrAfrica initiative, launched at the CAADP Partnership Forum, is to “scale up the effectiveness and efficiency of sustainable land management in sub-Saharan Africa.” The need for sustainable land management couldn’t be more urgent: On average, soil and nutrient loss cause a 3 percent annual reduction in African countries’ GDP, said Belle. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Belle warned that unless sustainable and adaptive solutions are implemented, declining crop productivity and increasing variability in precipitation over the course of this century are likely to exacerbate the agricultural sector’s woes.

Continuing this line of reasoning, WWF’s David Reed argued that agencies, governments, and companies involved in Africa “have to change the very base case of their investments, calculations, and thinking, particularly in the agricultural sector.” When thinking about the future of African agriculture, it is crucial to incorporate the impacts of the continent’s massive population growth, said Reed, because the 15 million sub-Saharan Africans who enter the labor market each year are likely to move predominantly into agriculture. It is important that NGOs help African countries take advantage of this influx of labor, Reed said, by promoting agro-forestry best practices, working with agricultural ministries, and encouraging more diverse production systems at the household and community levels.

The final panelist was Angel Elias-Daka of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), who used statistics—as well as anecdotes from his 20 years working in the wetlands of Zambia and Malawi—to shed light land degradation in Africa. Elias-Daka’s field experiences showed him that millions of people depend heavily on wetlands that—due to climate change and unsustainable use—are drying up and losing their biodiversity. He explained the link between COMESA’s work in the region and Africa’s agricultural production as follows: “If you promote trade and investment and people are able to trade their agricultural products, you are also going to promote agricultural production because people know they can trade their agricultural products easily.” Sustainable agricultural development will serve both the economic and the environmental needs of the continent, said Elias-Daka.

The unearthing of significant oil reserves in 100-mile long Lake Albert—shared by Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—has already led to violence, and the conflict could easily escalate further. Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil Corporation, which have drilled wells in the lake, recently estimated that it contains at least 1 billion barrels of oil. Uganda and the DRC both want the lion’s share of this treasure, and their competing ambitions have ignited violence in parts of the disputed Uganda-DRC border.

The November issue of International Affairs focuses on security issues in Africa, with several articles investigating the links among environment, population, and security.

Chatham House’s Nicholas Shaxson explores poverty and bad governance in oil-rich countries in the Gulf of Guinea. “Oil, corruption and the resource curse” builds on the author’s extensive research into the politics of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, including interviews with numerous key players.

“Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa,” by Oli Brown, Anne Hammill, and Robert McLeman, reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa. Climate change could precipitate socio-economic and political collapse, the authors say. However, good adaptation policies could help prevent environmental stresses from triggering conflict.

In “Human security and development in Africa,” Nana K. Poku, Neil Renwick, and Joao Gomes Porto note that Africa is unlikely to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal by the target year of 2015. Arguing that security and development are closely intertwined, they identify four critical developmental security issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis.

Finally, David Styan of Birkbeck College, London, examines the relationship between international migration and African economic security in his article “The security of Africans beyond borders: migration, remittances and London’s transnational entrepreneurs.”

“What we’re changing is how we do business, not what we do. And it is true, in Africa our focus has been basically around three issues…the first is civil control of the military and defense reform, which we see as sort of two sides of the same coin. The second is military professionalization, and the third is capacity building. And those three things are the things that DOD has been focused on in Africa for the probably about the last 10 years. And those three things will continue to be DOD’s focus in the context of capacity building and the mission of the command,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan, discussing the creation of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s new Africa Command, with a group of foreign policy and security bloggers.

One issue Whelan expects AFRICOM to focus greater attention on is maritime security. She explained that several illicit maritime activities are hurting African economies and environments, including trafficking in people, weapons, and drugs; piracy, which has been on the rise recently; and illegal fishing—which can also damage coral reefs. “I think the World Bank did a study not too long ago—a couple of years ago—in which they found that…countries like Mozambique were losing in excess of a billion dollars a year in lost revenue from illegal fishing and also the destruction to their reefs—reef structures and also the depletion of their fishing resources,” said Whelan. A full transcript of the October 24, 2007, discussion is available online.

On Friday, October 12, 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their respective efforts to document and raise awareness of the effects of climate change.

Some observers are perplexed by the Committee’s decision to award a peace prize for work on an environmental issue. The Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), however, has long been cognizant of the myriad ways in which the environment is linked to peace and conflict. Climate change is only one of many environmental issues—including water scarcity, pollution, deforestation, and natural resource exploitation—that can affect security.

This is the second time in three years that the Committee has awarded the Peace Prize to an environmentalist. 2004 winner Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement were recognized for their efforts to develop sustainable livelihoods and empower women through tree planting and other environmental activities. In the latest issue of the ECSP Report, Maathai explains the close linkage between good governance, sustainability, and peace: “When we manage our resources sustainably and practice good governance we deliberately and consciously promote cultures of peace, which include the willingness to dialogue and make genuine efforts for healing and reconciliation…Whenever we fail to nurture these three themes, conflict becomes inevitable.”

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko reflected on the Committee’s selection of Maathai—and its implications for the international community’s notions of peace and security—in several articles on leading environmental blog Gristmill. Dabelko’s words on Maathai’s selection still ring true: “Yet the criticism may miss the point by missing the widespread violence that goes on within states, violence that is not necessarily well-organized or by force of arms. The structural violence of poverty, corruption, and environmental degradation affects literally billions every day. The Nobel Prize rightly stretched the prior confines of the award and called attention to these ‘conflicts.’”

Egyptians took to the streets to protest water shortages this summer, reports Inter Press Service (IPS), but despite widespread domestic press coverage of the groundbreaking protests and repeated assurances from Egyptian government officials, Egypt seems to have made little progress in resolving its water shortage problems. Even after President Hosni Mubarak and his cabinet announced a plan to invest $180 million in the construction of small water purification centers in areas susceptible to shortages, popular protests began or continued in multiple provinces. Mohamed Nagi, head of the Habi Centre for Environmental Rights in Cairo, told IPS, “The recent demonstrations show that citizens have lost faith in longstanding government promises to provide them with adequate drinking water.”

Indeed, as the University of Maryland’s Ken Conca points out in “The New Face of Water Conflict,” “Amid the talk of looming ‘water wars,’ a less dramatic—but more immediate—link between water and violence is often ignored: the violence engendered by poor governance of water resources.” The IPS article seems to confirm Conca’s assertion that how well water is managed can be as important as how much water is available. According to Nagi, Egypt’s water infrastructure is chronically underfunded and mismanaged. The article also notes that a study by Egypt’s state-run National Research Centre found that 85 percent of Egypt’s total potable water was wasted due to the poor condition of water distribution systems.

Egypt faces persistent water shortages despite the fact that it and Sudan hold absolute rights to use 100 percent of the Nile’s water under agreements signed in 1929 and 1959. The other countries that depend on the Nile—Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—are poorer and less powerful than Egypt, so their access to water is even more precarious than Egypt’s. For one scholar’s vision of how the 10 countries of the Nile River basin could cooperate around shared water management, see Patricia Kameri-Mbote’s “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons from the Nile River Basin.” Kameri-Mbote believes that the combined efforts of local and national civil society groups and the Nile Basin Initiative, a high-level forum that brings together ministers from the Nile basin countries, could lead to more stable, sustainable, and equitable use of the Nile’s water.

Last week, policymakers, business leaders, and farmers gathered in Oslo at the second annual African Green Revolution Conference to discuss ways to increase agricultural productivity in Africa. The conference, inspired by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s July 2004 call to revolutionize African farming, and co-sponsored by two Norwegian public development organizations and two transnational companies, focused on how partnerships between the public and private sectors can offer valuable opportunities for agricultural development. Pedro Sanchez of Columbia University’s Earth Institute cited Malawi, which last year managed to turn a 40 percent grain deficit into a 25 percent surplus, as the first successful African Green Revolution country. Yet other attendees warned that this growth had been achieved partially at the expense of environmental degradation—particularly deforestation—and urged agricultural development programs in Africa to strive for growth that will be sustainable in the long-term.

Also last week: Representatives from 158 countries met in Vienna for a weeklong UN conference on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The delegates agreed that industrialized nations should aim for a non-binding target of reducing their emissions by between 25 and 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2020. This goal is expected to serve as a loose framework for the major UN-sponsored international climate talks that will be held in Bali, Indonesia this December. At the conference, China rejected criticism that it has not been doing enough to combat climate change, arguing that its one-child policy, by preventing 300 million births over the past three decades, has also kept the country’s levels of greenhouse gas emissions significantly lower than they would have otherwise been.

A new study (login required) by the UN High Commission for Refugees and the University of Copenhagen, published in the June 30 issue of the Lancet, contradicts the prevailing belief that conflict fuels the spread of HIV. Data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Southern Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Burundi “did not show an increase in prevalence of HIV infection during periods of conflict, irrespective of prevalence when conflict began.” Additionally, the study finds “insufficient data to support the assertions that conflict, forced displacement, and wide-scale rape increase prevalence or that refugees spread HIV infection in host communities.”