Global investment titan J. Todd Morley (pictured above) on women and the blockchain imperative.

I have completely upgraded our thinking to account for the effects – and to invest in businesses – which take advantage of the blockchain. Why? Because it’s Internet 3.0.

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The blockchain will open new ideas and markets and it will unleash the power of humanity at an exponential pace. And it’s very likely that 50% of the world, WOMEN, can take the lead and utilize the powers of the blockchain. 

The blockchain is the great equalizer that can be the key catalyst for the Decade Of  Women. The protocols of Ethereum and others are gender neutral. The blockchain doesn’t feature gender bias, it doesn’t care! The blockchain, Internet 3.0, will allow women to create and exchange services and ideas…with intention…and with connection to like-minded people. Women need to understand the awesome power of Internet 3.0.

“The super powers of women are about to roll throughout the world, with tsunami-like force. But women need to quickly understand the gifts of Internet 3.0.”

Education is critical because the utility of the blockchain is here, and now. The super powers of women are about to roll throughout the world, with tsunami-like force. But women need to quickly understand the gifts of Internet 3.0. It is simply the latest in a string of disintermediation technologies that decentralize power. A good place to start is “The Truth Machine: The Block-chain and the Future of Everything,” by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna.

The quest for empowerment, at its essence, is power transference. It has arrived with the blockchain.

The blockchain offers safety and connectivity with intention. Purpose-driven people are proliferating these new protocols so unheard voices and unseen faces can find a market, find capital, and find protection due to the unique state of the blockchain protocols and the open ledger system. Intention is now unhackable!

That’s why I participated in the Decade Of Women Collaboratory led by 5th Element Group. And it’s why I am pledging to focus my best (100%!) energy toward this blockchain space. This frontier technology represents a game-changer moment, when financial inclusion and independence for women can be achieved at a dramatic new scale. I’ll do all I can to help make it happen with partners that can bring the change.

By J. Todd Morley, Quantum Agent of Change / Founder of G2 Investment Partners, Co-founder of Guggenheim Partners

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When a South African Airways Boeing 737 took off from O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg two years ago, headed for Cape Town, it was powered by an unusual fuel: tobacco.

South Africa hasn’t yet repeated the jet biofuel feat, but in an effort to cut its climate-changing emissions and promote greener power the country’s researchers are looking for innovative ways to manufacture green aviation fuel at larger scale.

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A new “Waste to Wing” project aims to one day produce a significant share of the country’s aviation fuel from waste plants, including invasive species.

“South Africa produces a large amount of agricultural waste, as well as waste from plantation forestry and waste biomass from alien vegetation clearing programmes,” said Tjasa Bole-Rentel, an energy economics and policy specialist for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), one of the groups involved in the biofuel push.

So far the effort is a small “proof of concept” project, likely to produce just enough jet biofuel for one more flight, she said.

But if the technology works, production could be scaled up significantly – perhaps to as much as 15 percent of the aviation fuel used at Johannesburg’s international airport, she said.

Finding clean fuel for planes, ships and other forms of transport hard to plug into a clean energy grid remains one of the biggest challenges for reducing climate changing emissions.

But as airlines face increasing pressure to become more sustainable, countries around the world are trying to find solutions, from hydrogen powered barges to, in South Africa’s case, planes that could fly on weeds.

Scaling up jet biofuel – and making it cost effective – hasn’t been easy, however.

TOO EXPENSIVE?

Farmers in South Africa’s Limpopo province today continue growing solaris, a nicotine-free tobacco that produces large amounts of oil and that was used as a feedstock for the country’s first tobacco-powered flight.

But “there is no local refining capacity available and the sheer scale of farming needed to make the economies of scale work at this moment in time” is difficult, Merel Laroy, a spokesman for SkyNRG, a Netherlands-based alternative jet fuel supplier, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

One of the lessons learned, she said, is that making the biofuel locally is key.

“When there’s no local production capacity, the feedstock must be shipped out of the country and shipped back after refining. This makes the sustainable aviation fuel much more expensive,” she said.

The Waste to Wing project, with $1.4 million in funding from the European Union’s SWITCH Africa Green Programme, aims to solve that problem and cut costs and protect agricultural production and forests by using waste to create fuel.

The effort, a partnership by South African social enterprise Fetola, WWF, and SkyNRG, aims to create a clean jet fuel supply in South Africa, a country with a long history of developing and using alternative fuels.

As part of the project, 25 small businesses will collect and supply the plant matter needed to make the biofuel – an effort to create jobs in a country with one of the world’s biggest unemployment rates.

Amanda Dinan, Fetola’s project manager, said the businesses could use invasive plants, collected in environmental restoration projects and currently simply stored or abandoned, as the raw material for jet fuel.

Such stores of dried plants today can present a wildfire risk in a country suffering drought, so are often purposely burned to avoid that risk, she said.

But the waste could provide jobs “in its harvesting, collection, pre-treatment and transport,” Dinan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

She and Bole-Rentel said no biomass will be produced for being converted to fuel.

“As the name suggests, the Waste to Wing project will focus on waste biomass”, including leftovers from food and livestock feed production, paper making and furniture production, Bole-Rentel said.

At the moment, most of the agricultural waste produced in the country is burned, she said.

In some areas, harvested invasive plants already are being used to produce charcoal or fibrous products such as coffins, but most of the waste is unused, she said, and only that unused supply will be diverted to the jet fuel project.

PLENTIFUL SUPPLY

Bole-Rentel said the project was designed to stand up to worsening drought linked to climate change in southern Africa, and ensure food-producing land isn’t used to make fuel instead.

South Africa still has large swathes of invasive plants to clear, and the weeds are spreading faster than they can be cut back, Dinan said, which means the jet fuel project could both aid that effort and is unlikely to run out of stock to make fuel.

Sampson Mamphweli, director of the Centre for Renewable and Sustainable Energy Studies at Stellenbosch University, agreed the country has plenty of organic waste.

“Whether they use organic waste, or they plant the biomass for energy, whichever way the project is worth investigating,” he said.

One huge challenge with such projects is the cost of transporting plant waste, so material would need to be sourced as close as possible to where jet biofuel is produced, Mamphweli said.

And “the cost of the actual biomass material is also a big factor,” he said. Often, a once useless and free material becomes valuable when there is a use for it, he said.

Bole-Rentel said it was too soon to get any real picture of how much of South Africa’s aviation fuel needs might be met by the waste-to-fuel project.

But “our previous research into biomass availability suggests that, technically, there could be enough biomass to meet 100 percent of our aviation fuel demand,” she said.

But under current technology the biofuel would need to be blended with conventional jet fuel, meaning the waste technology could supply at best half of the country’s needs, she said.

By Munyaradzi Makoni, editing by Laurie Goering

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There’s no escaping the ever-growing threat of the “fake news” label – for media, and potentially as a huge PR crisis for communicators.

According to Cision’s State of the Media Report, journalists said that regaining trust amidst the rise of misinformation and fake news is one of the greatest challenges facing the media this year. Ninety-one percent of journalists report that the public has lost trust in the media over the past three years.

PR professionals and communicators face the same challenge as the media and must be careful to avoid even the appearance of false or deceptive content. But that’s nothing new to them. Communicators have always understood that transparency and clarity benefits their brand story. That’s how they retain the trust of audiences, who accept branded content so long as they have a full view of what it is and who it is from. That’s how communicators retain the trust of the journalists as well.

Journalists surveyed in the State of the Media Report rated press releases and story leads as the #1 most important PR resource. Earned media opportunities and media coverage rely heavily on brands’ storytelling integrity. Without it, a brand jeopardizes not only their relationships with the media and their customers, but they also risk backlash and damage to the brand.

Arm yourself with these five guidelines, supplied by PR Newswire, that will ensure your organization maintains credibility with your audience:

1. Straightforward Headline

As the gateway to your content, your headline should be clear and engaging. It should also be an honest teaser of what’s to follow, in order to maintain trust. If you make a promise in your headline, be sure you fulfill that promise in your content. And it’s usually best to include your company or brand name, so it’s clear to journalists and your audience who is originating this news.

2. Clear Attribution

Embrace your brand’s perspective and write clearly from that viewpoint. Attribute any statements of analysis or opinion to your organization. Audiences are more likely to trust your content if you’re upfront about who it’s coming from. This extends to quotes as well, which enrich a content piece, provide easy copy for journalists to use and adds a “human element” to the story.

3. Identifiable Source

Include a note identifying the “Source” organization within every release. Along with clear attribution within the release text, that “Source” tells the media and other readers the company or group responsible for the information. 

4. Available Media Contact

Your media contact should be a real person, with a working phone number and an email address. Journalists prefer not to be directed to an 800-number or a website for information – that makes their job harder, and makes it less likely they’ll cover your news.

5. Authentic Voice

Once you’ve gained your audience’s trust through the above tactics, work to maintain it. How? Be firm in telling the whole truth and don’t exaggerate. And stick to your organization’s realm of expertise. There are times when it makes sense for a company to join in on a conversation about a timely topic, like when a financial institution writes about a recent change to the tax code.

That’s valuable thought leadership. Just make it clear who your organization is, their connection to the topic, and why audiences should see you as an expert.

Once your content is ready to be shared, connect with a trusted distribution partner to help you engage new and existing audiences and build out a distribution strategy that helps enhance your brand’s credibility and visibility.

 

Tucked away in a mediaeval Spanish square, an unconventional restaurant is training refugees and telling their stories, hoping to change the lives of migrants and how people see them.

Espai Mescladis is both a restaurant and culinary school – and part publishing house.

It trains migrants from as far afield as Venezuela, Senegal and Pakistan to cook and cater so they have a better shot at finding jobs and integrating in Catalan life. The interns also get help with asylum paperwork, and customers get insight into what it is to be new, penniless and scared in a strange land.

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The social enterprise was founded in 2005 by Argentine entrepreneur Martin Habiague, whose interest was sparked by volunteering with a humanitarian organisation in Belgium.

“Immigration has always interested me. I’m a migrant here and my family were immigrants to Argentina from Europe, going back generations,” he said in an interview.

With mistrust of migrants on the rise in many Western societies, Habiague said it was important to stress the positives of incomers who “bring richness to a culture”.

He founded Mescladis in his 30s after leaving consultancy and said he chose a restaurant because food unites people.

“Working in a restaurant is all about action, not words, and so it’s easy to bring people together,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Also, everybody loves food.”

Each year, about 80 students join the culinary course – known as “Cooking Opportunities” – during which time they intern in the restaurant and at other eateries in the Catalan capital.

NOT WELCOME

More than 1.8 million migrants have entered Europe since 2014. Greece and Italy receive the most asylum claims, with Spain only receiving a small share of all claims..

However there is public support in Spain for admitting more migrants, especially in the wealthy region of Catalonia.

Just this month, the Spanish government agreed to take in hundreds of refugees and migrants aboard the Aquarius rescue ship, which had been rejected by Italy and Malta.

Barcelona’s City Council said this week that the Catalan capital would accept 100 of the 629 people on board.

For incomers who seek asylum in Spain, applications can drag on for seven years, during which many resort to casual labour or illegal activities like street selling to make ends meet.

It is challenging for newcomers to fend for themselves without any work, Habiague said. “I was shocked at the treatment of migrants in Europe when I first arrived here.”

POET’S CORNER

Tucked in the corner of a neglected square, Mescladis is bustling and offbeat. Its walls are hung with photos of those who have passed through its doors, its shelves laden with quirky objects from around the world.

The cavernous building – it was the birthplace in 1860 of revered Spanish poet Joan Maragall – was long abandoned before Habiague turned it into a restaurant.

Now it employs 14 former alumni of the school, as well as a constant flow of interns from the course.

Senegalese-born Soly Malamine, who is manager of the restaurant, completed the cookery course in 2010, after arriving in Spain by boat six years earlier.

The 33-year-old left home because he couldn’t find work and disliked the level of corruption. First he tried construction work in southern Spain before moving north to Barcelona.

“It was very hard finding work when I first arrived here. I was almost a year without work – and I didn’t have papers which made it more complicated,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The international charity Caritas helped him find Mescladis.

“I was like ‘wow’ because it was the only place I could find to work where they didn’t ask me who I was, where I was from or anything,” he said.

Now he enjoys helping others facing the same sort of problems, and showing it is possible to overcome them.

“I like working here, for the human side. At the end of the day, you don’t feel like it’s a job, you feel like it’s a family,” he said.

The team routinely sits and eats together – an important ritual for immigrants excluded from much social life, he said.

ONCE UPON A TIME

As well as breaking down barriers through food, Habiague is keen to tell the stories of the people of Mescladis, aiming to humanise his staff through initiatives such as photography exhibitions and comic books.

A graphic novel, called “A Present for Kushbu”, tells the stories of nine asylum seekers on their often perilous journeys to Barcelona. Kushbu, after whom the book is named, works at Mescladis, as do some of the book’s other characters.

Mescladis is also launching a craft beer this month, which Habiague hopes will broaden the work opportunities for its alumni, in production, marketing and distribution.

By Sophie Davies, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths. 

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Increasing food production through intensive farming will not necessarily end world hunger, experts said on Thursday in a finding that flies in the face of established policy.

The United Nations has said countries must double the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers by 2030 to eliminate hunger and ensure all people have access to food.

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“The underlying assumption is that this creates food security on one hand and also improves the livelihoods of smallholders. But we really need to question that,” said Adrian Martin, a professor at Britain’s University of East Anglia.

One in nine people already do not have enough food and the world population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050.

Martin, and a team of international researchers, reviewed 53 studies on intensive farming in low- and middle-income countries and found few benefits for poor farmers and the environment.

Intensive farming increases productivity through chemical fertilisers and pesticides, among other activities.

The group’s research, published in Nature Sustainability, found “scant evidence” of success and said such methods “rarely” lead to positive results.

“It surprised me how few examples we found that were really positive,” Martin told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

Poor farmers instead face a “double whammy” – least likely to afford new crops and most likely to suffer from environmental damage, he said.

In Bangladesh, investors and large landowners profit from salt-water shrimp production but poorer farmers suffer from soil salinisation that undermines their rice production, he said.

Rwandan smallholders had to switch to government-regulated crops but could not then afford extras such as fertiliser, the paper said.

Intensive farming might increase production in the short-term but reduce it in the long run because intensification often undermines vital underlying conditions for growth, Martin said.

It also replaces complex local knowledge with “a one-size-fits-all” approach, advocacy group Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Experience in Africa shows this path leads to poverty, poor health, a degraded environment, high-risk business ventures, loss of biodiversity, and weakened resilience,” it added.

The latest research “identifies the importance of seeing the bigger picture,” said Phil Stevenson, a professor at the University of Greenwich’s Natural Resources Institute in Britain who was not involved in the research.

“(It showed) that it isn’t just about producing more food… especially if you don’t consider what the fallout of that could be,” he said by phone.

Both Martin and Stevenson suggest instead “an ecological intensification of agriculture” that has fewer chemical inputs and relies more on natural processes, such as pollination.

“The approaches we’ve used up to now, which have largely relied on, for instance, fungicide and pesticides, we’ve reached a point where they’re no longer delivering,” said Stevenson.

“We need to change the way we produce food.”

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By Thin Lei Win @thinink, Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths.

Banana trees that fit inside a test tube. Burgers made without a cow in sight. Fish farmed in the desert. Robots picking fruit. Welcome to the brave new world of food, where scientists are battling a global time-bomb of climate change, water scarcity, population growth and soaring obesity rates to find new ways to feed the future.

With one in nine people already short of enough food to lead a healthy, active life, supporters pushing for a Second Green Revolution argue without major changes hunger will become one of the biggest threats to national security and human health. To tackle this looming crisis, scientists and agricultural experts are looking to the future – and back to the past – to find innovative ways to produce food.

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But they admit getting billions of farmers globally – and consumers – to change will be a battle.

Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) – a global network of scientists – said agriculture had to change to meet global goals on climate change and ending poverty and hunger.

“You need a revolution in the agriculture and food system within the next decade because without it, we’re never going to achieve any of the really important (global) goals that we’ve set,” Campbell told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A visit to a series of white, low-rise United Nations-backed laboratories 35 km (22 miles) outside Austria’s ornate capital Vienna provides a glimpse into the food of tomorrow’s world.

Here, in laboratories and greenhouses packed with genetic sequencing machines, robotic equipment and plants and insects of all sizes, scientists are using nuclear technology to stop insects reproducing and to spur disease-resistant banana trees.

Sub-Saharan Africa has for decades struggled to control bloodsucking tsetse flies that kill more than 3 million cattle and other livestock each year.

Meanwhile in Southeast Asia and Australia, the fungal disease fusarium wilt threatens to wipe out bananas, a global favourite rich in micronutrients.
But the labs, set up by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have helped Senegal almost eradicate tsetse flies in one area and created bananas that can stand up to pest threats.

“Under climate challenge … we face many challenges in agricultural production. One of the major issues is more and emerging diseases for plants and animals, and insects,” said Qu Liang, director of the joint FAO/IAEA division.

Scientists are also working on other innovations – from gene editing of crops and lab-grown meat to sensors on drones and tractors – that could help to reboot the world’s food system and fundamentally change how food is grown, distributed and eaten.

But technology is only part of the answer, experts caution. Finding sustainable ways to overcome escalating challenges will require everything from delving into culture and tradition to rethinking subsidies and politics around food, they say.

However almost everyone agrees that change is needed.

“Our agri food system is at a critical stage. It must be re-shaped,” Shenggen Fan, director general of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Food monopolises a huge share of scarce resources, Fan said, and numbers bear this out.

Crops take up 11 percent of the land surface, livestock grazing covers 26 percent of ice-free land, and farming accounts for about 70 percent of all water used, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Livestock generate more greenhouse gas emissions than transport, according to the FAO, accounting for about 14.5 percent of world emissions.

Faced with growing climate concerns, many people – including billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates – are pushing for a Second Green Revolution to develop crops that can be grown in droughts and resist new pests and diseases.

The first Green Revolution, which peaked in the 1960s, dramatically boosted harvests in poor parts of the world by introducing high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and irrigation which helped stave off famine in hungry parts of the world.

But the industrial farming era it spurred has failed both consumers and the environment, critics say, by leading to a food system that cripples the environment, contributes to climate change, and concentrates wealth in multi-national companies.

“We live in a changing world and we are limited in resources, in terms of land, water, fertiliser,” said Ivan Ingelbrecht, head of the plant breeding and genetics laboratory in Vienna.

“So having sustainable food production systems is very important,” he said, holding a test tube containing a miniature banana tree in his hand.

One problem, experts say, is that agricultural practices can be hard to change. Nearly 2.5 billion people are involved in small-scale farming, managing about 500 million small farms, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

“Agriculture has kind of been stuck for the last 500 years,” said Andy Jarvis, research director at the Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).

Machinery and better crop varieties have made agriculture more productive but fundamental problems remain, from reliance on heavy manual labour to difficulties managing pests and diseases, he added.

The world’s population, meanwhile, has grown both in size and bulk, with no signs of the upward trend abating. Of the world’s 7.6 billion people – a population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050 – about 815 million people go hungry daily while 2 billion are overweight or obese, sending health costs soaring. Among them is Yatzyri Martinez, aged six from Mexico City, who weighs 38 kg (84 pounds), loves spaghetti and fast-food snacks, and comes from a family plagued by type 2 diabetes.

Salvador Villalpando, a specialist doctor who treats her at a child obesity clinic at the Federico Gomez Children’s Hospital in Mexico, one of the world’s fattest nations, said keeping people from becoming obese is the aim.

“When you get to treat obesity, you’re one day too late,” he said.

Mexico is not alone. Adult obesity rates are increasing in all of the United Nation’s 193 member states, including in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where the focus for decades was eradicating hunger. Globally, about 40 percent of adults are overweight and 13 percent obese, says the World Health Organization (WHO), with the surge in obesity in the last three decades presenting a major public health epidemic in both poor and rich nations.

Growing demand for meat and dairy as countries become wealthier is placing a heavier demand on world food systems, driving climate change as land is stripped of forests and ploughed. The volume of food transported around the world also is exacerbating global warming.

However, calls to use more pesticides and fertilisers to get more food from the same land are based on wrong assumptions, said Emile Frison of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). He said there is already enough food available to feed the planet today and in 2050 – but it’s in the wrong places or wasted.

Globally, one third of all food produced – worth nearly $1 trillion a year – is binned or otherwise wasted, according to the FAO.

“It’s a matter of access, of waste, of consumption models that are unsustainable. Recommending a technology fix approach is certainly going in the wrong direction,” Frison told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

James Rogers, CEO of Apeel Sciences, a California-based start-up company, agrees the planet is producing more than enough calories to feed everyone. But he believes technology can help resolve some key issues, particularly food waste. His company produces a plant-based coating that comes in powder form and, when applied with water, can double the shelf life of fruit and vegetables without refrigeration so farmers in remote areas can get them to market without spoilage.

The coating is being tested on mangoes in Kenya and cassava in Nigeria, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Technology is also helping meet the growing demand for meat, without more emission-producing livestock. The ideas harken back to predictions former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made in a 1931 essay. “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he wrote.

Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, companies that produce high-tech burgers that taste like the real thing but contain only plants, are winning investment from backers as diverse as Gates and Tyson Foods, the largest U.S. meat processor. Memphis Meats, meanwhile, is growing meat from animal cells in laboratories, something advocates call ‘clean meat’ because it is better for the environment. Its backers include Virgin Group boss Richard Branson.

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Such alternative meats offer “a far more efficient way” to feed demand for tasty protein while cutting environmental damage, said Bruce Friedrich, executive director of The Good Food Institute (GFI), which supports alternative meat companies and lobbies on their behalf.

“Plant-based meat and clean meat would be cheaper, more efficient, and would not have bacteria or drug residue contamination. They would be better in every conceivable way,” Friedrich told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

To grow enough food despite increasing water scarcity – agriculture today sucks up about 70 percent of global freshwater used each year – farmers are also looking to technology.

By tweaking a gene found in all plants, for instance, a team of international scientists have tricked tobacco plants into partially closing their stomata, microscopic pores in the leaf that let water evaporate. The plants grew with a quarter less water and little impact on harvests, said Steven Long, a crop sciences professor at Britain’s Lancaster University.

Researchers hope the tweak will work as well in cowpea and soybean, main sources of protein in developing countries, and in rice, a major staple food. Despite the benefits of such innovations, some critics fear they could widen the divide between farmers who can access innovation and those who cannot.

Farms which rely mainly on family labour produce the bulk of food in developing countries but many cannot afford the latest agricultural technologies.

Many farmers also live in countries that lack access to reliable weather information, which can make planting and harvesting crops a risky endeavour, experts say.

Agriculture’s technological revolution, in its current form, is neither inclusive nor democratic, said CIAT’s Jarvis, in part because few of the innovations are aimed at small-scale farmers. What those farmers grow is “not a monoculture of 20 hectares of lettuce production in California or Europe but half-hectare plots of maize,” he said. But farmers do have mobile phones, so finding ways to use them to improve farming is essential, added Jarvis, who co-founded the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture.

One company bringing technology to small farmers is Hello Tractor in Nigeria, known as “Uber for tractors”.

Founded by Jehiel Oliver, a former American investment banker, it started by selling two-wheel tractors equipped with GPS antennae – but most farmers found the prices too steep.

Hello Tractor now uses mobile phones to link those able to buy tractors with farmers who want to use tractor services. “Most farmers can’t afford to own a tractor and most tractor owners struggle to identify customers within rural, disjointed markets,” Oliver said in an email.

A Kenya start-up, meanwhile, is banking on mobile phone technology to help small-scale farmers get much-needed credit from banks. FarmDrive, founded by two Kenyan computer scientists – both women who grew up in farming families – aims to help farmers who need loans use satellite images and sensors to paint a detailed picture of their potential yields and risks.

In December, FarmDrive teamed up with Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest telecoms company that set up the revolutionary mobile money platform M-Pesa. Now Safaricom’s DigiFarm mobile platform offers small farmers everything from discount vouchers for fertiliser to help getting small loans or training, all in one place.

Using the new platform, FarmDrive reached 10,000 farmers in four months, compared to just 5,000 farmers in two years when the company was working alone, co-founder Rita Kimani said.

“It’s showing the possibility of partnerships … and that’s really how we are going to solve the challenges the farmers face. One tool or one organisation is not going to solve everything,” she said.
Others are coming up with more unusual solutions.

The Sahrawi refugee camps in western Algeria, near the border with Mauritania, Western Sahara and Morocco, might seem an unusual spot to try hydroponic farming, in which plants are grown in water rather than soil.

Land around the camps is arid, isolated and prone to sandstorms and extreme swings in temperature – and the 173,000 Sahrawis from Western Sahara, stuck in the camps for the past four decades, are nomads who prefer meat and milk. But the pastoralists are now using bare-bones hydroponics units of metal and plastic to grow mats of barley as animal feed.

The plants – the only green thing visible for miles – are ready to use in just seven days, and are grown with just a tenth of the water needed for traditional crops. “As refugees, we are poor people and can’t afford expensive things like fertilisers and hybrid seeds,” said Taleb Brahim, one of the brains behind the project.

Nearly 2,000 km (1,240 miles) east, in Ouargla in southern Algeria, date and palm farmers are similarly turning to an unusual strategy – rearing fish in the Sahara.

The switch is part of the North African nation’s push to increase fish production as catches from the Mediterranean Sea dwindle. The project aims to help farmers not only earn cash selling fish but also boost their harvests by using nutrient-rich water from fish ponds on crops.At the Coopedota cooperative in Costa Rica, meanwhile, sustainable techniques such as reducing chemical sprays, planting more shade trees, and cutting energy and water consumption have brought an added benefit for farmers.

Beyond cutting costs and improving efficiency, they now sell the world’s first officially certified carbon neutral coffee. Farmers hope customers will pay a premium.

“We can put our coffee in the international market and if the market is at $120, we might get $180 or $200,” said grower Fernando Solis Arguedas, a third generation coffee farmer. In developing countries about 40 percent of food grown is spoiled or lost after harvest. Then another 40 percent of what gets to retailers or consumers in developed countries is wasted, according to the FAO.

Cutting that waste is crucial to reducing climate change and growing demands on limited water and land, experts say. And now chefs are moving to the forefront of the effort.
In the leafy seaside town of Brighton, Silo, Britain’s first zero-waste restaurant, turns leftover whey from making cheese into sauce, bread crust into miso soup and inedible parts such as egg shells and bones into compost.

Michelin-starred chef Massimo Bottura of Italy opened a new restaurant in central London last year, the Refettorio Felix, that doesn’t welcome wealthy diners but caters for the poor with meals cooked from supermarket scraps. In Leeds, in northern England, Adam Smith’s The Real Junk Food Project started out as a single cafe in 2013, taking food destined for landfills to local schools to support low-income families and teach pupils about food waste.

It has since ballooned into a network of more than 120 eateries and stores, including Britain’s first pay-what-you-like food waste supermarket, offering anything from zucchini to breakfast cereals.

Smith says he hopes one day the network will go out of business, as food waste is reduced from field to plate.

“Ideally the measure of success … would be that we would no longer be here,” he said.
Richard Horsey, co-author of “Ugly Food: Overlooked and Undercooked”, thinks part of achieving that is persuading people to diversify what they cook and include things they might bin.

He lists octopus, pigs’ trotters and wild rabbit as some of the ingredients often overlooked in Anglo-Saxon food cultures.

“I really do think that if you can make a change to what people are putting on the table every evening, that’s where the numbers are, that’s where the impact is,” he said. A more diverse diet is also is a resilient one, experts say.

Historically, farmers cultivated at least 7,000 plants to eat but today 60 percent of global calories come from just three plants – wheat, rice and maize.

Helping Asia – known for its insatiable appetite for rice – eat more millet, a forgotten rural diet staple that is rich in protein and can grow in salty soil – could help keep harvests sufficient as climate change takes hold, experts say.

Buyers in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and Hong Kong are already eating less rice, while India is pushing millets as a way to reduce a stubbornly high rate of malnutrition. Technological advances hold promise to make food systems work better. But experts warn there are no quick wins when it comes to reshaping something as fundamental as food and agriculture.

“Technologies are just a tiny part in the whole puzzle,” said Tom Anyonge, lead technical specialist for IFAD. Policies, institutions and food systems also need shifts if technology is to achieve its potential, he said.

He pointed to M-Pesa, which lets mobile phone users transfer or borrow money, pay bills and save via texts. Launched by Kenya’s Safaricom in 2007, it now has nearly 28 million users in a nation of 45 million and has been expanded or mimicked across Africa. Its success is due not just to the pioneering technology but to efforts behind the scenes to make it work, Anyonge said.

Those include improving mobile coverage, opening up Kenya’s telecoms sector, and enacting laws allowing partnerships between mobile companies and banks. “It would have stayed as a good idea” if not for that help, he said. “You need to touch on so many other things beyond technology.” IFPRI’s director-general Fan agrees. Innovations are key to rebooting the food system – but they should not be limited to just technological ones, he said.

“Innovation in policies, innovations in institutions, innovations in even new thinking, open-mindedness, will be important,” he said.

By Thin Lei Win. Editing by Belinda Goldsmith and Laurie Goering

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Americans don’t trust the Federal government. The Pew Research Center found that only 18 percent of Americans say they trust the Feds. It’s small wonder we have a disruptor in chief in the White House.

Can technology restore our faith in Uncle Sam? Blockchain, the distributed ledger system not only allows for greater transparency, but it also is a way to codify good government principles and best practices.

Steve Escaravage, SVP at Booz Allen, and Marek Cyran, senior lead technologist, data science for Booz Allen, share how blockchain could improve government transparency and efficiency.

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Open Government

Lack of transparency and various interpretations breed suspicion.  People want to know what is happening in their government–and blockchain can open the government to sunshine.

Escaravage said his interest in blockchain is centered on the flow of information from citizens through the Federal processes–especially where a Federal benefit is given to the citizen.

“Whether a citizen is sharing information with the IRS or Health and Human Services, these processes require coordination and organization,” he said. “Bringing in blockchain could give the processes greater transparency and efficiency. With blockchain solutions in place, we could see huge gains in citizen services and satisfaction.”

But how can blockchain help?

Blockchain uses a decentralized ledger–meaning all participating parties can see and verify data. By using a blockchain solution, there can be independent verification of government claims.

“There’s a lot of discussion across the Federal government about how to track information and data from an audit perspective,” said Escaravage. “Just having a way to enable awareness of how decisions are being made is perhaps what most excites me about blockchain.”

In terms of implementing blockchain to increase transparency, Escaravage said agencies need to go back to basics.

“You’re using blockchain as a framework to make business processes more transparent,” he said. “Before starting the solution, you need to understand the interactions. Go back to good business fundamentals and understand how your business processes are engineered.”

Good Government

A few short years ago, blockchain was almost exclusively discussed alongside the cryptocurrency Bitcoin–that is no longer the case.

“When we talk about blockchain, we aren’t talking about cryptocurrencies,” said Cyran. “We’re really talking about blockchain as a mechanism to create smart contracts.”

A smart contract is similar to a traditional contract, except it uses blockchain. It does have significant benefit over a traditional contract. Not only does a smart contract define the rules and penalties around an agreement in the same way that a traditional contract does, but it also has mechanisms to automatically enforce those obligations.

“Because blockchain allows you to codify your business’ rules and processes, we can really fundamentally model how government operates with blockchain,” Cyran said. “The Federal government can model those processes as programs that run on blockchain. So each individual transaction is just a single interaction with a smart contract.”

While donkeys and elephants agree on little, few would argue against greater transparency.  At least not in the open…

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