CAWR Newsletter

April 2019

Our monthly newsletters are an easy way to keep up-to-date with new developments at our research centre. From successful project bids to upcoming events, our newsletter informs you on how we are 'driving innovative transdisciplinary research on resilient food and water systems.'

News

Workshop on collective and/or community rights to natural resources in East Africa

If properly recognised and implemented, collective and/or community rights over land, seeds and other natural resources represent a powerful and viable alternative to private ownership, contributing to the sustainable management of natural resources, and protecting them against land grabbing.

This workshop was organised by Dr. Priscilla Claeys and Dr. Stefanie Lemke, in collaboration with the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA). The workshop was funded by The 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation within a larger project called "How to govern natural resources for food sovereignty?" It took place in Entebbe, Uganda, from March 24-26 with 25 participants from Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, ensuring balance of region, gender, and constituencies (pastoralists, small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, feminist/women’s rights’ organisations, NGOs, academics and lawyers). Innovative dynamic methodologies maximised participation and contributions of participants.

The workshop helped identify emerging issues in relation to the governance of land, seeds and other natural resources for food sovereignty, through mapping and analysing ongoing struggles to protect and defend these resources against grabbing and appropriations; discussing the role of researchers and lawyers in these struggles; developing an improved understanding of how customary or collective rights regimes operate in practice, and of the roles of women, youth and other marginalised groups within these; and discussing strategies to enhance the effective legal protection of community rights to resources, as well as ways to address conflicts between different users of the land.

This workshop builds on a previous workshop that was conducted in June 2018 in Bamako, Mali, in collaboration with Mamadou Goïta from IRPAD, with representatives from seven countries in West Africa (we had reported in the July 2018 Newsletter). In the coming months, we will consolidate outcomes of the West and East African processes and elaborate a three-year participatory action research project, in collaboration with local partners.

For more details contact:     priscilla.claeys@coventry.ac.uk or stefanie.lemke@coventry.ac.uk

New Research Suggests Alternative Food Systems Can Be Less Wasteful than Conventional Supply Chains

This research draws from a master’s thesis undertaken by the late Nigel Baker. As part of his thesis work, Nigel sought to recognise the low levels of food waste associated with alternative, smallholder food systems and to find a mechanism of comparing this with large-scale, conventional systems. His study focused on collecting data on food waste from a local CSA system in the UK and then comparing this with available data on food losses and waste from conventional UK food systems. The data on conventional food systems were published by the Waste Resources and Action Programme (WRAP), a UK charity.

The resulting, novel NYE concept was developed by Nigel within his thesis and he was keen to promote its broader potential. Very sadly, he passed away before he had time to write up his thesis findings for publication. His supervisory team (Bennett and Kneafsey) and a current Ph.D. student (Popay) at CAWR have ensured that his pioneering work is now recognised through this article.

The efficiency of human food consumption within food production systems is a function of the amount of food produced in relation to the food losses and waste these systems incur--but currently there is no simple way of measuring or comparing this. 

Click here to find out more about the article.

Democratising Food and Agricultural Research 

The web site of a CAWR-led project on Democratising Agricultural Research has just been re-designed and fully updated. This global initiative questions the often narrow interests of agricultural research. It focuses on four regions aiming to make the voices of small scale producers and other excluded citizens heard — and count — in the governance and process of agricultural research.

Click here to visit the website. 

Conifer workshop

Katharina Dehnen-Schmutz and Samantha Green attended a Conifer Workshop at Brueton Park, Solihull, UK organised by Warwickshire Flora Group, especially useful as BSBI (Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland) County Recorders have recently been encouraged to collect records of planted trees, and these records can be used to help our understanding of species distribution, which could be used to study the spread of tree pests or diseases. The workshop was aimed at conifer identification using vegetative keys. There followed a visit to the small conifer collection on-site. Katharina and Samantha attended for the HOMED project work at CAWR. (HOMED-Holistic Management of Emerging Forest Pest and Diseases, HORIZON 2020 project.)

Understanding links between climate and boreal forest fires

Jonathan Eden presented recent work on seasonal prediction of forest fire risk at a two-day meeting on boreal climate-fire linkages hosted by the Forest Research Centre of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Alnarp, Sweden. The meeting included field activities in the forests of the Skåne province to explore the link between beech tree reproductivity and historical periods of extreme climate. The team also visited Ales Stenar, a mysterious megalithic monument constructed in the shape of a ship around 1400 years ago (pictured).

CAWR PhD Student Graduation

On 10th April, CAWR doctoral student Georgina McAllister graduated with a PhD on the subject of: Cultivating Social-Ecological Relationships at the Margins: Agroecology as a Tool for Everyday Peace Formation in Zimbabwe.  The research considered the transformative potential of agroecological processes in rural farming communities beset by a history of violence. The research involved three communities of agroecological practice in Zimbabwe to define concepts of resilience, agency and peace, and co-develop a series of indicators in order to explore how these were experienced in the everyday by their own communities.  The research explored the extent to which these communities were able to employ agroecological strategies as a set of  tools to shape their physical landscape and negotiate social change by reforging farmer networks based on principles of reciprocity and trust.  The research was co-supervised by Julia Wright and Andrew Adam-Bradford from CAWR, and Alpaslan Ozerdem from the Centre for Peace, Trust and Social Relations. 

2019 EGU General Assembly

credit: EGU/Kai Boggild

The 2019 EGU General Assembly was held in Vienna, Austria, earlier this month. With over 16000 scientists attending, this is one of the foremost geoscience conferences worldwide. Bastien Dieppois, Moussa Sidibe, and Marco Van De Wiel presented their recent research on “Impact of decadal variability on ENSO diversity, and its impacts on rainfall” (Dieppois et al.), “Hydroclimatic variability in West and Central Africa by mid-21st Century” (Sidibe et al.) and “Modelling Late Holocene Evolution of the Rio Bergantes, Spain” (Van De Wiel and Coulthard). The presentations generated excellent interest and discussion. Bastien and Marco also organized two conference sessions, respectively on “Challenges understanding the links between hydrological variability and large-scale climate variations in a changing climate and environment” and on “Bridging the gap: combining numerical models of surface processes with Earth observations”. These sessions were very well attended and generated ample discussion among conference participants.

ART OF THE EVERYDAY: Collaborative Film for Doctoral Research Performance

Shrine to the Living Food Cycle, Doubleday room, Ryton Gardens

On 3 April 2019 Miche Fabre Lewin performed her doctoral research ‘Artful Bodymind: enlivening transformative research methodologies’ within a four-hour Installation and Food Ritual. Moving between the Doubleday Room and the Cook’s Garden, nine participant-researchers (including her two PhD examiners) were in an encounter with the room curated with diverse materials and arts-based methods of Miche’s practice-as-research. These were evidence of how Miche came to understand the contributions her Ritual Methodology brings to transdisciplinary research cultures.

Miche preparing the space for the Food Ritual in the Cook’s Garden

The doctoral research performance was skillfully and respectully filmed by Benjamin Cook and edited into an eighteen minute art film called ‘Art of the Everyday’. In Benjamin’s words: ‘The film was a true collaborative project, from pre-production, through principal photography, to the last sound tweaks of the final draft. Our aim was to evoke the personal sense of place and action, using movement, light, color, composition and sound. It is as much a document of the event as it is an interpretation of the research ideas within the thesis’. In Miche’s words, 'In its sensuous spaciousness, evocation of soulful qualities, and expression of many ways of knowing, the film manifests poetic encounters which enliven holistic research with the artful bodymind.’ 

Miche and Flora curating arenas for people to encounter Miche’s research practices

Thank you to Michel Pimbert who supported this pioneering research event.

WATCH THIS SPACE

In summer 2019 we will host a Film and Food Forum at CAWR to share the film ‘Art of the Everyday’ as part of a conversation on transformative research methodologies through artful collaboration.

Participant researchers sharing a Deep Soup cooked from vegetables from Five Acres and quinoa grown in the UK by Hodmedod

Recently awarded project

Proof of Concept

Start date: 08/04/2019 | Total value: £10,000.00 

Funder: The project is managed through Coventry University Enterprises and is part funded by European Regional Development Fund through Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Events 

SEMINAR: Struggles for Organic Sovereignties: Networking and Conventionalizing Diversity in Latvia and Costa Rica with Guntra Aistara

2nd May 2019 | 11:30-12:30 

Live streamed via Facebook and recorded for our YouTube channel

Click here to book your place

SEMINAR: When Amartya met Paulo: Social Work, Human Capabilities and Critical Pedagogy with Dr Gurnam Singh

9th May 2019 | 11:30-12:30

Live streamed via Facebook and recorded for our YouTube channel

Click here to book your place

SEMINAR: What on earth do you mean “resilient ecosystems”? A perspective from large-scale biodiversity research with Martin Wilkes

16th May 2019 | 11:30-12:30

Live streamed via Facebook and recorded for our YouTube channel

Click here to book your place

Publications 

Claasen, N., Lemke, S. (2019). Strong ties, weak actors? Social networks and food security among farm workers in South Africa. Food Security. Published online 25 March 2019.

Gwiriri, L. C., Bennett, J., Mapiye, C., & Burbi, S. (Accepted/In press). Unpacking the ‘emergent farmer’ concept: evidence from smallholder cattle farmers in South Africa. Development and Change, (In-press), (In-press).

Gwiriri, L. C., Bennett, J., Mapiye, C., Marandure, T., & Burbi, S. (Accepted/In press). Constraints to the sustainability of a ‘systematised’ approach to livestock marketing amongst smallholder cattle producers in South Africa. International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, (In-press), (In-press).

Maclaren, C. A., Bennett, J., & Dehnen-Schmutz, K. (2019). Management practices influence the competitive potential of weed communities and their value to biodiversity in South African vineyards. Weed Research, 59(2), 93-106. 

MacLaren, C., Swanepoel, P., Bennett, J., Wright, J., & Dehnen-Schmutz, K. (2019). Cover crop biomass production is more important than diversity for weed suppression. Crop Science, 59(2), 733-748

Marandure, T., Bennett, J., Dzama, K., Gwiriri, L. C., Bangani, N., & Mapiye, C. (Accepted/In press). Envisioning more effective delivery of custom feeding programs using participatory approaches: lessons from Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Outlook on Agriculture, (In-press), (In-press).

Paganini, N., Lemke, S., Raimundo, I. (2018). The potential of urban agriculture towards a more sustainable urban food system in food-insecure neighbourhoods in Cape Town and Maputo. Economia agro-alimentare / Food Economy, Vol. 20, Iss. 3: 401- 423. 

Sidibe, M., Dieppois, B., Eden, J., Mahé, G., Paturel, J-E., Amoussou, E., & Lawler, D. (2019). Interannual to Multidecadal streamflow variability in West and Central Africa: Interactions with catchment properties and large-scale climate variability. Global and Planetary Change, 177, 141-156.

Tilzey, M. (2019). Authoritarian populism and neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: the unresolved agrarian question and the prospects for food sovereignty as counter-hegemony. Journal of Peasant Studies, (In-press)

Tilzey, M. (2019). Food Regimes, Capital, State, and Class: Friedmann and McMichael Revisited. Sociologia Ruralis, 59(2), 230-254

Wilkes, M., Gittins, J., Mathers, K., Mason, R., Casas-Mulet, R., Vanzo, D., ... Jones, I. (2019). Physical and biological controls on fine sediment transport and storage in rivers. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, 6(2), [e1331]. 

Wood, R. J., Mitrovic, S. M., Lim, R. P., Warne, M. S. J., Dunlop, J., & Kefford, B. J. (2019). Benthic diatoms as indicators of herbicide toxicity in rivers – A new SPEcies At Risk (SPEARherbicides) index. Ecological Indicators, 99, 203-213.