CRWRC Tops In Sustainable Farming

CRWRC Newsroom | February 15, 2010

The Christian Reformed World Relief Committee is in the top quartile of all non-governmental agencies that are currently working to bolster food security in countries around the world.

That is the assessment of Roland Bunch, director of Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods for World Neighbours, a US-based NGO working in some 25 nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Bunch, who lives in California, was hired by CRWRC to do an in-depth study of its international agriculture programs. Out of that study has come "CRWRC’s Agriculture & Food Security Programs Evaluation Report."

The report describes the seven-month evaluation he did last year of CRWRC's agricultural work in several nations, including Laos, Cambodia, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Niger, Guatemala and Nicaragua. The report also discusses the deep concern that Bunch has over the poor quality of soil in many countries.

While some of the CRWRC programs he visited can be improved, farmers in a CRWRC program in West Africa, and CRWRC work in western Guatemala are prime examples of sustainable agriculture, he says.

Other programs he noted were a fish-farming project in Laos, and a project in Zambia where farmers use a certain type of water pump for irrigation that has yielded onions, lettuce, tomatoes, eggplant, beans and chili peppers.

Bunch did his report amid what he considers a serious crisis of a lack of soil fertility, due to the over-use of expensive, chemical fertilizers.

"In much of the developing world, but especially Africa, we are facing a dire crisis.  Increased population pressure on the land has largely brought to an end all the traditional ways people maintain their soil fertility," he said in an email interview. 

:Animal herds have mostly disappeared because there is nowhere to pasture them, so animal manure is now scarce.  Nor can people let their land lie fallow to allow nature to restore its fertility," Bunch says. 

The final blow, he adds, is the reality that industrialized and unindustrialized nations have now used up much of the world's cheap energy, "which means that chemical fertilizer prices have risen so high that using them on most subsistence crops (with the possible exception of rice) is no longer economically feasible."

 Probably a billion people depend on chemical fertilizers to grow their subsistence crops.  They have no alternative but to look for some other way to maintain their soils' fertility, says Bunch.

He says that he fears that as the result of all these factors' coming together, the world in the next decade could experience famines "across the developing world that will dwarf anything we have ever seen."

In the email interview, he said, "I believe very deeply that it is one of the most important commitments we Christians have is to feed the hungry (Matt. 25).  It is going to take a tremendous amount of work to do that, and CRWRC, as one of the best organizations out there, could play a major role in heading up the effort ..."

Overall, Bunch visited 300 development projects in 70 countries. Almost invariably, every farmer he interviewed told him lack of good soil was becoming their biggest problem.

The solution, given the many challenges, is for farmers to allow plants and trees to grow on the farmed land to produce copious amounts of leaves, "and thereby rejuvenate the land," Bunch says in his report.

“We have to produce the biomass on their farms, amidst their crops. That is,” says Bunch in his report, “we grow trees, bushes and creeping and crawling plants that can fertilize the soil, and/or control farmers’ weeds, right in among their crops during the dry season, in such a way that farmers’ yields are maintained or increased.”

His seven-month investigation convinced him that CRWRC can play a significant role in helping farmers make the necessary changes. "In the vast, majority of cases, CRWRC programs have done a good a very good job of reaching the most needy," he says.

—Chris Meehan, CRC Communications