Dansk

GlobalOrg:

Sustainability of organic farming in a global food chains perspective

The overall objective of this project is to determine to what extent and under which conditions organic farming may reduce local and global negative environmental impacts and provide sustainable improvements in poor farmers’ livelihoods within the framework of the global food supply chain and the increased urbanisation.

June 2008

GlobalOrg visible at ISOFAR conference Modena June 2008

The GlobalOrg project team took advantage of the ISOFAR conference in Modena to meet in the project group and discuss progress and future planning of the project.

With 9 papers presenting findings related to GlobalOrg, the project was very visible at the conference, and the acceptance of the papers shows that the GlobalOrg project idea has a solid interest. The papers are available in the ISOFAR proceeding. A number of the presentations by project team members can be found under "Presentation" in the menu.

December 2007

A survey of the successful development of Organic Agriculture in Uganda.

The first Ugandan pioneers in organic agriculture started a small export of tropical fruit to EU 10 to 15 years ago. Today more than 45 000 small scale farmers witha total of 250 000 ha are certified organic. Nobody knows how many more farmers are actually organic, as only those who are exporting are certified, but there are many. And they all want to export to gain a premium price of top of their improved yields. Uganda has a great potential for further organic export. Read more of the background for this surprising organic development by Inge Lis Dissing, who herself has been part of this development as a consultant to one group of smallholder farmers producing and exporting sundried fruit.

Inge Lis Dissing was sponsored by Danida’s Oplysningsbevilling. Her report can be found here

May 2007

Niels Halberg participated in FAO’s International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security, Rome, May 3-5, 2007

The conference was organised to reflect the four dimensions of food security; Food availability, access, stability and utilisation, which is used by the FAO and Committee on world food security to address the different problematic situations, which limits food security for poor people. For each dimension a synthesis paper had been commissioned by FAO from key international resource persons in order to present and discuss the experience linking (support to) OA with the particular food security dimension. Finally, on the last day, a fifth synthesis paper summed up the main findings and messages and gave recommendations.

The synthesis papers are interesting reading and is worthwhile downloading them from the conference web-site

As part of this final session, Niels was invited to present the findings of a simulation study of the consequences of large-scale conversion to OA for food security in Sub Saharan Africa. The results of this study, which was undertaken in close collaboration with IFPRI in Washington, was published jointly with Mark Rosegrant and Tim Sulser from IFPRI in the book, “Global Development of Organic Agriculture: Challenges and Prospects” (CABI, 2006, see elsewhere on this web-site).

The participation of Niels Halberg was supported by Danida, for which my sincere thanks are kindly presented. A short resumé of the conference can be found in the “Back to Office Report” here.

All presentations are available at the conference web-site: http://www.fao.org/organicag/ofs/presentations_en.htm

May 2007

PhD student Panneer Peramaiyan arrives to Denmark

The PhD project is part of the GLOBAL ORG project and the aim of the PhD project is to assess the effect of large scale conversion to organic farming on food production and food security of selected regions in India. The objectives are

To estimate the effect of certified and non-certified organic farming on food security of smallholding farms.
To assess the potential of farming units for large scale conversion to organic agriculture.
To assess the consequences of large scale conversion to organic farming for food supply and food security among rural and urban poor at a regional scale by use of and further development of relevant international food security models.