Internship: the role of dairy in a sustainable diet

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Els Hegger

There are many definitions of a sustainable diet. A sustainable diet should not only be sustainable, but also be nutritious and healthy. Furthermore, in order to insure compliance, attainability is also an important aspect.

Sustainability, health and attainability all are very broad, overarching terms. In order to create a better understanding of those terms one should break them down in smaller more concrete determinants. E.g. sustainability can be determined by CO₂ footprint, land use, water use, animal welfare, ……
In order to understand the role of dairy in a sustainable diet it is important to understand how dairy does score on the different determinants of sustainability. Furthermore, it is important to understand the influence of the dairy production process (from grass to glass) on the different parameters of sustainability.

Once the position of dairy in the sustainability landscape is defined, it is important to include other elements such as health, nutrition, food availability, habits, affordability etc. By taking all those elements together you can determine the position of dairy in a sustainable diet. Continue reading →

Urban Fish Farming in Lagos

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Dirk Roep

By Marc Wegerif. PhD Candidate, Rural Sociology Group Wageningen University, contact: marc.wegerif@wur.nl.

The grey concrete buildings and high rusty brown gate we were outside in a suburb of Lagos were not encouraging. Especially as we were looking for a farm, a fish farm, this did not look like any kind of farm. The yard beyond the gate with half finished buildings and concrete with rusty steel reinforcing sticking out was also not inspiring.

I was with a group of 12 amazing women farmers from all geographic zones in Nigeria, finalists in the Female Food Hero awards in Nigeria. This was an exposure visit for them as part of their training and build up to the announcement of the female food hero of the year (https://www.facebook.com/ffhnigeria?fref=ts).

When we looked a bit closer, behind an apparently collapsing shed, we saw three blue plastic water tanks. We gravitated to wards them as they were the newest and most functional looking things in the yard. Looking inside the first blue tank we did at least see some fish and a young man appeared from one of the buildings and admitted that he worked there. He was not the most talkative person, but did start to show us around. When he threw some fish food into the murky water it suddenly came to life, hundreds of fish rushing to get to the food, water splashing even outside the tanks.

When he threw feed into the slimy green water, of what I had thought were empty concrete tanks, these also exploded into catfish filled life. I was at last convinced we were not wasting our time. With a net he pulled some fish out, including a catfish that was probably weighed about 5kgs. There were close to 9,000 fish in the outside tanks. Most of them catfish in the concrete tanks, but one of the plastic tanks had about 1,000 pangasius fish as well.

In an incomplete building in a corner of the yard we were shown breeding tanks and the thousands of juveniles/fingerlings in them. The breeding tanks on the upper floor of the building contained exotic fish for aquariums. These days this fish farm sells only on Saturdays and focuses on selling parent stock as they get a better return, thousands of dollars a week. We did also see a few fish in a smoker, for the fish farmers own consumption.

This urban fish farm is part of a rapid expansion of fish farming and related industries in Nigeria. It was good to see that the fish feed came from a Nigerian company. The government has got ambitious programmes to promote fish farming with an aim to replace the 1.9 million tons of fish imported each year, at a cost of over $700million, with local production (http://www.fmard.gov.ng/news_inside/96 ). The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development gave each of the 12 female food hero finalists start-up kits including fish for them to go into or expand their own fish farming.

The yard remained a mess, but the fish production did impress, and fish farming at quite large scale in small urban spaces clearly has potential that I had never realised before. We got back on our bus and into the Lagos traffic. Along the way we saw women selling smoked fish from buckets on their heads and we also had cat fish as part of our dinner.

Hungry for Food Waste?

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Els Hegger

This course is organised by Boerengroep, RUW, WEP, Green Office, ILEIA, Rural Sociology Group.

The “Hungry for food waste” course is half way in terms of lectures. Time to check the balance. Each evening we have been moving to a different room to accommodate the growing number of students, yesterday evening we counted 100 students. That shows food waste is hot and students are hungry to discuss it. The course approaches the topic from a multidisciplinary way, which suits the audience very well: nearly all Bachelor and Master programmes of Wageningen University are represented in the audience of students. A short overview of the evenings so far and what to expect.

Last week on Tuesday 28^th of October, the new course ‘Hungry for Food waste” was kicked off with a dinner made with ingredients that would otherwise have gone to waste. The dinner was attended by 30 students and 2 speakers, who were very thankful to Humble Harvest for investing their time and energy in collecting the ingredients from the farmers, cooking the meal and delivering it to the Leeuwenborch.

This first evening was devoted to distribution. For this course we discuss food waste generated at different levels in the food chain. Logically, you start with production: how farmers (are forced by powers higher up in the chain to) produce food waste at the farm level. However, due to practical reasons, we started with distribution. We invited Han Soethoudt (FBR) and Drees Peter van den Bosch (Willem&Drees). Their presentations were very inspiring in resulted in good discussions about what is actually considered food waste and how is to blame? The course divides the evenings into nodes in the chain, but in reality these parts are interconnected and interdependent. What a farmer does is directly related to how it is distributed, to how the supermarket is organised to what the consumer demands.

Back to production on the second evening. Jan-Douwe van der Ploeg (Rural Sociology) introduced the students into the debate on peasant farming and how certain farmers are locked into a system where they are volatile to generating more waste. André Jurrius, an organic farmer close to Wageningen, then took over and presented the dilemmas he is faced with daily on his farm. Like every evening, the rest of the evening was easily filled with all the questions raised by the students.

The third evening was devoted to retailing with presentations by René Haijema (ORL), Onno Franse (Ahold) and Chantal Engelen (Kromkommer). We invited Stefano Pascucci to be our keynote listener but the students were so full of energy to comment on the presentations and criticise the speakers, that there was too little time to go in-depth. We had to stop the discussion with about 25 arms raised in the air. Hopefully, the questions will be kept for this Thursday when we continue.

Students aiming to collect 3 ECTS with this course, will start shooting a documentary on food waste next week, when we have the first workshop on ‘How to shoot a short documentary? ‘ by What to Film Wageningen (Emil Kuijs). Furthermore, these students will keep a personal food waste diary, based on pictures taken during the first 6 weeks of the course. What impact do the lectures have on your own food waste behaviour, how critical are you? On the 17^th of December the documentaries will be shown.

Are you inspired and want to join? There are still 2 evenings to come that are open to the public. Thursday 6 November we will talk about consumers and the efforts made to reduce waste at consumer level. It is often said that the big gains are to made at that level. Hilke-Bos Brouwer (FBR) will introduce us to the project ‘Food Battle’ and Wageningen Municipality shows are food waste is combatted at city level. Tuesday 11 November is the last evening and we will bring things together by closing the cycle. How do nutrients come back into the chain? How does waste create input for food? What is the role of policies to stimulate unwasteful practices? Jeroen Candel will touch upon the political & policy dilemmas, while Theo de Vries of Capuchinha Catering will talk about how a restaurant chef deals with food waste and how he closes the cycle. Finally, we will have a presentation by Stephen Sherwood who started an inspring initiative in Ecuador called ”250 thousand families! Ecuador’s agroecology collective’s campaign for closing the loop between production-consumption”.

For more information, go to the Facebook group on ‘Hungry for food waste’. Hope to see you one of these evenings!