MUNIR A. HANJRA

The government of Ethiopia has invested in groundwater development for smallholder irrigation in the Raya Valley and Kobo Valley, north-eastern Ethiopia, where the hydrogeological potential is large but not fully developed. A cost-benefit analysis shows that investment in deep groundwater irrigation development is viable at a 9.5% discount rate in 75% of the wells. Assuming full cost recovery of capital investment, the annual payment rates (annuity) that irrigation users should pay over the wells’ service life (25 years) were estimated. It is recommended that future investment be based on cost sharing rather than full cost recovery to facilitate uptake and address financial realities.

Investments in irrigation contribute to poverty reduction and enhance food security. This paper considers irrigation investments more broadly in the context of rural–urban linkages and thus examines rural irrigation schemes and peri-urban and urban agriculture using freshwater, groundwater and wastewater. We present case studies from East, West and Southern Africa, while focusing on the imperative of smallholders and of food security and nutrition. Evidence from Big Data and telecoupling show that, amid global change and sustainability issues, irrigation development strengthens connections between humans and nature with notable benefits to food security. Transforming investments to feed the future generation require priority investments in irrigation, solar energy for groundwater pumping, groundwater development policy, and integration of peri-urban and urban agriculture into food systems. Equally important will be no-regret interventions in wastewater reuse, water storage and groundwater buffer, micro-irrigation, and wholesale reconfiguration of farming systems, through anticipatory investments, to safeguard food security and sustainability into the distant future.

Recovering nutrients, water and energy from domestic waste streams, including wastewater and faecal sludge, is slowly gaining momentum in low-income countries. Resource recovery and reuse (RRR) offers value beyond environmental benefits through cost recovery. An expected game changer in sanitation service provision is a business model where benefits accrued via RRR can support upstream sanitation services despite the multitude of private and public stakeholders involved from waste collection to treatment. This paper shows options of how resource recovery and reuse can be an incentive for the sustainable sanitation service chain, by recovering costs where revenue can feed back internally or using generated revenues from reuse to fill financial gaps across the service chain to complement other supporting mechanisms for making waste management more attractive.

Phosphorus (P) is a critical, geographically concentrated, nonrenewable resource necessary to support global food production. In excess (e.g., due to runoff or wastewater discharges), P is also a primary cause of eutrophication. To reconcile the simultaneous shortage and overabundance of P, lost P flows must be recovered and reused, alongside improvements in P-use efficiency. While this motivation is increasingly being recognized, little P recovery is practiced today, as recovered P generally cannot compete with the relatively low cost of mined P. Therefore, P is often captured to prevent its release into the environment without beneficial recovery and reuse. However, additional incentives for P recovery emerge when accounting for the total value of P recovery. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the range of benefits of recovering P from waste streams, i.e., the total value of recovering P. This approach accounts for P products, as well as other assets that are associated with P and can be recovered in parallel, such as energy, nitrogen, metals and minerals, and water. Additionally, P recovery provides valuable services to society and the environment by protecting and improving environmental quality, enhancing efficiency of waste treatment facilities, and improving food security and social equity. The needs to make P recovery a reality are also discussed, including business models, bottlenecks, and policy and education strategies.

The concept of ‘Underground Taming of Floods for Irrigation’ (UTFI) is introduced as an approach for co-managing floods and droughts at the river basin scale. UTFI involves strategic recharge of aquifers upstream during periods of high flow, thereby preventing local and downstream flooding, and simultaneously providing additional groundwater for irrigation during the dry season for livelihood improvement. Three key stages in moving UTFI from the concept stage to mainstream implementation are discussed. An analysis of prospects in the Ganges River Basin are revealed from the earliest stage of mapping of suitability at the watershed level through to the latest stages of identifying and setting up the first pilot trial in the Upper Ganges, where a comprehensive evaluation is under way. If UTFI can be verified then there is enormous potential to apply it to address climate change adaptation/mitigation and disaster risk reduction challenges globally.

This paper examines the short-run climate variability (change in the levels of temperature and precipitation) with a focus on the Manas River Valley, North-Western China, over the past 50 years (1956 to 2006) using data collected from four meteorological stations. The results show that the annual mean temperature had a positive trend, with temperature increasing at 0.4 C per decade. Application of the Mann-Kendall test revealed that the overall positive trend became statistically significant at the p = 0.95 level only after 1988. The increase in temperature was most marked in winter and spring (0.8 and 0.7 C per decade, respectively), absent in summer and very small in autumn (0.1 C per decade). Concerning precipitation, our results indicate a negative but not significant trend for the period between 1956 and 1982, while annual total precipitation tended to increase thereafter and the increase was mainly during the crop growing-season. Concerning variability in temperature and precipitation, the characteristic time scales were identified by application of wavelet analysis. For temperature the quasi-decadal variations were found on time scales between approximately 5 and 15 years, with a peak in wavelet variance on a time scale of 9 years. For precipitation, the most striking features were a precipitation increase (6.7 mm per decade) during the crop growing season. Irregularities and abrupt changes in both temperature and precipitation were more common at scales less than 10 years, indicating the complexity and uncertainty in the short-period climate variability. Possible causes of climate variability in the Manas River Valley may include anthropogenic factors such as intensive human activity and the expansion of both farmland and irrigation. Global climate variability might also have some impacts on the local climate variability; analyses of local and regional climate trends can better inform local adaptation actions for global impacts.

Increasing the productivity of smallholder agriculture holds the key to poverty reduction. The empirical literature is limited to ascertain the linkages and the implications for policy uptake in Ethiopia. We examine the impact of growth in agricultural productivity on household poverty dynamics in rural Ethiopia using a panel data set (1994–2009). Findings suggest that government policies aimed at reducing poverty should adopt a growth plus approach—designing policy interventions to support agricultural productivity growth, plus to protect assets and enhance market access for rural households in the country.

This paper analyzes the effect of the shallow water table on water use of the winter wheat (Triticumaestivum L.) that has replaced alfalfa (Medicago sativa) on the irrigated lands of the Fergana Valley,upstream of the Syrdarya River, in Central Asia. The effect of the shallow water table is investigated using HYDRUS-1D. Numerical simulations show that the contribution of the groundwater to evapotranspiration increases with a rising water table and decreases with increasing irrigation applications. Under irrigation conditions, an increase in the groundwater evapotranspiration is associated mainly with an increase in evaporation loss, causing a buildup of salinity in the crop root zone. Evaporation losses from fields planted with winter wheat after the harvest amount up to 45–47% of total evaporation thus affecting soil salinity and ecosystem health. Promoting the use of groundwater for irrigation in order to lowerthe groundwater table is suggested to achieve water savings from the change in the cropping pattern.Unlocking the potential of groundwater for irrigation in the Fergana Valley can also contribute toward managing soil salinity and improving the health and resilience of water, land and ecosystems of water,land and ecosystems (WLE).

Australia is a major food exporting country. Recent droughts reduced dryland farming production and the volume of water allocated to irrigated agriculture, with a resulting decline in aggregate agricultural production and exports. This paper analyses the possible impact of increased water scarcity on Australian agricultural production and the magnitude of subsequent impacts on global food security. Using the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data on land and water use coupled with a hydro-economic stochastic modelling approach, the impacts of reduced agricultural production in the southern Murray–Darling Basin, and more generally for Australia, are analysed. Changes in agricultural activity, reduction in agricultural exports and altered composition of products exported attributed to the severe 2000–2009 drought are also analysed to highlight the implications for global food security. The impact of climate change on food production is examined. The analysis shows that climate change, when modelled as the extreme case, along with other factors such as land use, will impact Australian food exports. Despite its relatively small contribution to total global food supply, Australia’s contribution to international trade in wheat, meat and dairy products is substantial and could affect global food prices. Furthermore, Australia’s agricultural exports are of disproportionate importance within the South- and South–East Asian and Oceania region, both in terms of volume and for strategic reasons. Adaptation along with investment in agriculture production is needed to maintain Australian agricultural production and enhance global food security.

This study examined the links between food security and HIV/AIDS in urban Ethiopia taking Dire Dawa city administration as a case example. The household level primary data were collected from selected kebeles – the lowest administrative unit in Ethiopia, - using a two stage sampling technique. In the first stage, four kebeles were selected due to their large number of known cases of people living with HIV (PLHIV). In the second stage, 200 households were randomly selected, taking 100 households each from HIV affected and non-affected category. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected using well structured and pre-tested questionnaires, and key informant interviews and focus group discussions, which were held with the community members. Using weekly recall period, the data on food variety and quantity consumed were obtained from the principal person preparing food in the household, and then food consumption score was computed using the model developed by the World Food Program (poor consumption, borderline consumption, and better consumption with a score of lt;21, 21.5-35 and gt;35, respectively). Based on the results of the descriptive statistics, it was found out that food consumption score of HIV/AIDS affected and non-affected households were of 35.73 and 37.65, respectively suggesting that the latter are better off. About 70% of HIV affected households have food consumption score of less than 31.5 against 57% of the non-affected ones. Regression results of the ordered logit model also confirm this finding; holding all other variables constant, the marginal effect of being affected by HIV significantly increases the probability of the household being at poor and border line consumption category by 3.13% and 12.49%, respectively. On the other hand, being HIV affected decreases (by 15.62%) the probability of being in the better food consumption category. Thus HIV affected households were less likely to be food secure. Regression results further revealed that, ceteris paribus, participating in social networks significantly increased (by 20.01%) the probability of a household being in a better food consumption category. This suggests that socially isolated households may experience worse food insecurity situation because of lack of supportive safety nets that could shield them against shocks. Results further show that the coping strategies of HIV affected households include, among others, relying more on poor quality food, reducing the daily quantity of food intake and restricting the food consumption of adults in the family so that children can get a chance to eat. For households having fewer social networks and less diversified income sources, these stand out to be ‘better’ and affordable coping mechanisms. However, these coping strategies may hasten the death of HIV affected adult family members by weakening their health as they need more energy and proteins than non-affected ones. This was very well established during key informant

Gender is a socially constructed concept. It refers to the social, behavioral, and cultural norms, attributes, and expectations associated with being a woman or a man. Gender equality refers to how these aspects determine how women and men interact with each other and to the resulting differences in economic opportunities, endowments, agency and overall wellbeing outcomes for men and women. Gender mainstreaming refers to making general policies gender-smart - at various level of governance - to target the gender differentiated impacts and outcomes and implementing public policies and international development cooperation in a more strategic way that also improves gender equality and makes policies more effective in closing the key gender gaps even if their objectives has nothing to do with gender. Gender equality ranks high on the global development agenda and evidence-based gender targeting is emerging as a key criteria in international development assistance programs such as those for enhancing food security and reducing poverty and the broader development goals such as those set by the MDGs to 2015 and beyond. This chapter presents evidence on gender equality issues to highlight the key gender gaps such as assets, education, health, land, labor and commodity markets, and participation into decision making through six case examples from Asia and Africa. The case examples from Asia come from Pakistan and India, while the case examples from Africa are from Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. These case examples illustrate that gender gaps are huge and targeted interventions and gender mainstreaming can enhance economic opportunity, endowments, and agency of women. What is needed is the political will along with more funding, better data on gender, evidence, and global partnerships.

Climate change poses one of the gravest risks to mankind as it affects a wide variety of socio-economic activities, important to world food security. Agriculture is one of the most important sectors vulnerable to climate change. Agricultural production is sensitive to climate change, and food security is sensitive to agricultural production. Climate abnormalities such as perpetual droughts, floods, heat waves, and rainfall failure can have devastating consequences for agricultural production and the impacts could be immediately transmitted to food security and livelihoods. This chapter attempted to assess the short-run economic impacts of climate change (change in the levels of temperature and precipitation) with a focus on the Ethiopian economy. In doing so, it uses a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model based on the 2005/06 Ethiopian Social Accounting Matrix. One of the innovative approaches of this study is the explicit inclusion of different agro-ecological zones (AEZs) of the country in estimating the likely effects of climate change. The results of the CGE model simulation show that climate change has a dampening effect on economic growth and many key macroeconomic indicators. Investment is the only macroeconomic variable that increases despite the changes in climate. For instance, for a 3.260C increase in temperature and a 12.02mm decline in precipitation which will result in a 9.71% loss in crop production, the CGE model simulation indicated that real GDP declines by 3.83%. Moreover, almost all sectoral activities are affected negatively and different agro-ecologies are affected differently. For instance, the highland part of the country, which is the main producer of food crops, is severely affected compared to other AEZs in terms of agricultural production. The findings further revealed that household livelihoods (measured in terms of real income and welfare) are negatively affected, and the effect is unevenly distributed across different household groups. The highest losses in income and welfare are likely to be incurred by the poor households that are residing in smaller urban centers. Thus, the results of this study call for improved climate adaptation actions at farm level and beyond for reducing both economic decline and welfare loss and enhancing resilience. These results also provide critical information for informing economic policy on climate change and achieving food security.

The global food security situation and outlook remains delicately imbalanced amid surplus food production and the prevalence of hunger, due to the complex interplay of social, economic, and ecological factors that mediate food security outcomes at various human and institutional scales. A growing population and rising incomes with the resultant nutritional transition of millions more people entering into the middle class are some of the unprecedented challenges that mankind has never handled before. Food production outpaced food demand over the past 50 years due to expansion in crop area and irrigation, as well as supportive policy and institutional interventions that led to the fast and sustained growth in agricultural productivity and improved food security in many parts of the world. However, future predictions point to a slow-down in agricultural productivity and a food-gap mainly in areas across Africa and Asia which are having ongoing food security issues. The problem of food insecurity is expected to worsen due to, among others, rapid population growth and other emerging challenges such as climate change and rising demand for biofuels. Climate change poses complex challenges in terms of increased variability and risk for food producers and the energy and water sectors. The major existing and emerging challenges to global food security are discussed in this chapter, giving relevant examples from around the world. Strategic research priorities are outlined for a range of sectors that underpin global food security, including: agriculture, ecosystem services from agriculture, climate change, international trade, water management solutions, the water-energy-food security nexus, service delivery to smallholders and women farmers, and better governance models and regional priority setting. There is a need to look beyond agriculture and invest in affordable and suitable farm technologies if the problem of food insecurity is to be addressed in a sustainable manner. This requires both revisiting the current approach of agricultural intervention and reorienting the existing agricultural research institutions and policy framework. Proactive interventions and policies for tackling food security are discussed which include issues such as agriculture for development, ecosystem services from agriculture, and gender mainstreaming, to extend the focus on food security within and beyond the agriculture sector, by incorporating cross-cutting issues such as energy security, resource reuse and recovery, social protection programs, and involving civil society in food policy making processes by promoting food sovereignty.

People across Africa are urbanizing and cities act as magnets that attract poor migrants from rural areas, looking for employment and better life. During the last few decades, the informal sector has been growing fast in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia due to the influx of many young workers into the sector who come from rural areas of the country with the expectation of a better life in the city. The informal sector employment includes casual, temporary jobs such as lottery selling, street vending, petty trade and other similar activities – coping strategies and earning strategies to escape food poverty. The informal sector is believed to play an important role in food security as it provides jobs, reduces unemployment, bolsters economic activity, and helps alleviate poverty. However, there is limited local knowledge about the role of this sector in enhancing food security and reducing vulnerability of the emigrants. There is also limited research about the problems and prospects of the informal sector, and via-a-vis its potential contribution towards food security. Therefore, this research was conducted with the major objective of examining the food security level and vulnerability status of emigrants worker and their households to identify the major challenges and prospects for future policy interventions. Primary data were collected from 240 respondents (60 from each of the four sub-cities) who were selected randomly. Secondary data were also collected from government offices. Data were analyzed using both descriptive and econometric approaches. Probit model was used to determine food security status of respondents; whereas ordered probit model was used to identify the factors affecting their vulnerability level. Results suggest that the daily life of the majority of migrants in Addis Ababa (most of them are young school dropouts) is highly connected with street-based informal economic activities such as marketing, vending and lottery selling, etc. Results show that the annual mean income a household would earn is Eth. Birr 7,786.2 ($442). Results of the vulnerability analysis show that informal activities in the study area serve migrants only as temporary safety nets, not as sustainable earnings/livelihood strategies. Results further show that lack of access to bank credit (due to collateral requirements), fluctuating market prices and lack of working premises impacts their work. Data shows that the workers are forced to consume less food or poor quality food. Therefore, future urban policy may need to give due consideration to informal sector employment in order to realize synergies between the formal and informal sectors for addressing food security and poverty issues.

The government of Ethiopia has invested in groundwater development for smallholder irrigation in the Raya Valley and Kobo Valley, north-eastern Ethiopia, where the hydrogeological potential is large but not fully developed. A cost-benefit analysis shows that investment in deep groundwater irrigation development is viable at a 9.5% discount rate in 75% of the wells. Assuming full cost recovery of capital investment, the annual payment rates (annuity) that irrigation users should pay over the wells’ service life (25 years) were estimated. It is recommended that future investment be based on cost sharing rather than full cost recovery to facilitate uptake and address financial realities.