An hommage to Marthijn Sonneveld

When you write a PhD in the Netherlands, you not only get a supervisor, a well known professor who mostly has not time for you, but also two or three daily supervisors, younger scientists who are assistant professors. The great thing of this approach is that you get to work closely with people who have time for you. It does not come as a surprise that these people really influence your vision of the world and science.

At my PhD defense : Marthijn, Jan Huigen (the farmer who initiated my research project), me and Roel

Marthijn Sonneveld was one of my daily supervisor, next to Jetse Stoorvogel and Roel Jongeneel. He was probably the most silent one of all the three, nonetheless his understanding of soils and how they influence the landscape dynamics had a deep impact on my PhD. Not only he had great knowledge about Dutch soils, it formation and use, but he was passionate about teaching. He was not afraid to stand in the field and dig deep wholes to show concretely what he is talking about. Like no one else he was capable of explaining relationships of soils with the landscape as a whole in a easily understandable and yet fascinating way. I guess Marthijn taught me to appreciate and feel home in the openness of Dutch landscapes.

During on of the excursion with students in Friesland

Also Marthijn had a great network of stakeholders through out the whole of the Netherlands. He was one of the few scientists in my surroundings, who truly tied contact with Dutch non scientific partners to make science work for people out there in the landscape. I got a lot from his vision about involving a broad number of stakeholders to answer societal questions, something I try to keep doing in my daily work at ILRI.

Marthijn passed away before the end of the year 2013 after a short fight against cancer, leaving behind a young family. It left me, like many of my colleague speechless in front of powerlessness that we faced and filled me with a deep sorrow. I am glad and privileged that i got the chance to work with him and learn from him. He might have left us, but his ideas and visions will remain and evolve through us, students and colleagues who had the chance to interact and learn from him.

May his family and close friends get a lot of strength to overcome this difficult time and may he rest in peace.

The openness of Dutch landscapes

Meat Atlas : the global dimension about those animals we eat

Especially in the Western world, meat is seen as a bad. Indeed, livestock production accounts for about 18% of the greenhouse production, it requires more land and water to feed one person than on vegetarian diet.With the increased globablisation, impact of livestock production can be exported to poorer countries. A well known example is the cut rainforest in Brazil to grow soya that feds cows in the Netherlands.

The emerging economies (such as China or Brazil) have a growing middle class that demands more animal protein, and the trend of increased globalized negative impact will pressure on the environment, especially in the poorest country where short term economic benefits is weighted more than the environment.

But livestock is not only a curse in developing countries, it is also an opportunity. Livestock play a key role in many smallholder systems : they create manure used to fertilized fields, they bring in the healthy animal protein into very unhealthy diets of the poor, they act as bank, they are mean of traction. The benefits of making livestock smallholder systems more productive definitely overweight the negative aspects of livestock production. The latter is often forgotten in the debates in the Western world, missing out on an opportunity to think about how to support smallholders to improve their livelihood and diets.

This week, I came across the Meat Atlas, a report from friend of earth Europe, that presents all these globalized aspect of meat production in an easy but nice spatial way. Their aims is to  present a global perspective on the impacts of industrial meat and dairy production, and illustrates its increasingly devastating impact on society and the environment. The way we produce and consume meat and dairy needs a radical rethink. The cover a broad range of livestock related topic, focusing mainly on the industrialized meat production but also cover discussion about some small scale production in Africa. It aims at polarizing, so pushing forward the negative aspect of livestock and missing out the discussion of the positive aspect of livestock in developing countries. Nonetheless it is a nice presentation of existing statistic, and an eye opener to the troubling facts about what we eat.

So get your own copy here!

Bringing order into chaos

The year 2014 arrived so fast, and i did not have the time to have my traditional reflection on the past year up until today. In many perspectives the year 2013 has been a year to bring order into chaos. I just had left Ethiopia and moved back to Switzerland, to take time to relax, but also get healthy again. It was a year, to reflect on the meanings of life, of the meaning of working in a developing country, of dedicating one's life to rural areas and its people. I traveled the world, namely Philippines, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Kenya for job interviews and consultancy work and to Ethiopia for inside travel, a social enterprise that uses tourism to bring new opportunities to rural communities off the classical tourism route.
My life in 2013 felt a bit like visiting big African city, such as Nairobi or Addis, trying to figure out where to go, and especially how. You know there are bus lines, but you don't know where they stop, where they go, nor where you need to switch. You end up walking around lost, talking to people, trying to figure out what's the best way to go further. So that's what i did, for almost 6 months, working as a consultant, checking my option and figure out where my life should lead me. By mid of the year, i had a clearer vision of where my life could go, with four job offers on the table. Suddenly, i had to choose. My health was good again, and my heart felt very strong about going back to Africa. My two years of Ethiopia, taught me that i will never save Africa, nor do these people need me. But Africa, especially Kenya, has a lot to offer, there is an emerging economy with a generation that has the chance to reinvent a modern Africa. It is a place to be part of what is yet to come. By end of 2013, my cargo was ready, and my new year day started with a one way flight to Nairobi, where i join ILRI as a GIS analyst.

So I start 2014, knowing which bus line my life is taking, i have a clue about which route it is driving, but not where it will ends ups. I guess in life one never knows. Funnily, at the same time, i found the matatu (bus) line maps for Nairobi, which helped me a lot to navigate through this crazy city during these first days. And it has worked, i got around in town smoothly.

So I wish you a very happy new year full of interesting paths, hoping that one of them will lead you to Nairobi to visit me. Hopefully the matatu maps will help you to reach my place :-).

And just in case you would need direction to other areas of the town

Find the map here . (jambo nairobi)

Embed your google earth map in your website

The Inside Travel team asked me whether it is possible to show the destination with picture and tourist offer on a map in our webpage. I had no clue about who to do this, but my intuition said, it should be possible, and indeed it is and it is quite simple : you just need to do the following steps :

1. In google earth, you can create you own layers, named kml files (native google earth geo-data format not to be confused with a famous airline name). In my particular case i added placemarks for the different destinations. You can even add pictures that are on the internet, and description (https://support.google.com/earth/answer/148142?hl=en)
2. save the kml file to the computer
3. load the kml file to a server (such as google drive or google sites) 
4. use the google reach out gadget found here 
5. indicate the link to the kml server file, and choose the setting
6. get the code and embed it into your website (with a html widget for wikispaces or blogpost)

Find here the google support concerning embedding a google earth project. 

Interesting in this procedure is that all the data need to be on the internet. Crucial is to find a stable location and not use links that depend on others (for example using a picture on Wikipedia) which could be removed.
One option is to put all the documents on google solution, namely using picasa for the picture and google drive for the klm file. But I just discovered another elegant solution is to use a google site (find google explanation here). Google sites allow to have webpages made in a very simple manner and has a feature called "file cabinet". A file cabinet is like an FTP server that is hosted by google and can easily be linked to any website or can be used in the Google gadget above. The advantage of the file cabinet is that all the documents needed to embed your map (pictures, text, kml) are stored in one location only.

Pretty cool, what google allows you to do with maps. This could be a smart way to present agricultural research results in a spatially explicit way and is definitely a feature you will find back on the new Inside Travel website. Until then, try it out yourself, it is less difficult than what you might think!

Swiss development cooperation in the Horn of Africa : a move towards pastoral areas

On the 5^th of December 2013, the second Swiss Development cooperation day took place at the Hilton in Addis Ababa. The objective of the day is to bring together all people related to Switzerland and to some development cooperation in Ethiopia. By chance, I was in Addis and could join this event, and see the evolution since the last development day.

After a quick introduction round, in which I could present Inside Travel, we got some presentations about BurnaNest project (creating a new town near Tana Lake), about civil society (which I could unfortunately not attend) and one on the evolution of the Swiss involvement in the Horn of Africa, by Manuel Flury, the representative of SDC in Addis. 

From the last one, we could learn that the Swiss strategy has changed. Whereas in the past the Ethiopian Highlands and land and water management was the focus, also thanks to the Land and Water resource center, there is today a clear willingness derived from the Swiss development policy to address the challenges of the drier areas of the Horn. 

The “whole government approach” of the Swiss development strategy for the Horn of Africa foresees involvement in 4 sectors, namely i. food security and rural development ii. health sector iii. good governance, state and peace building, conflict transformation iv. migration.

For the first sector, food security and rural development, three goals have been set : 1. Increased adaptive capacities of dry land communities to cope with drought and other incidents that trigger food insecurity (including food assistance as a coping mechanism in case of acute and chronic food insecurity) 2. Good practices of natural resources management (NRM), including water, are increasingly integrated to local, national and regional policies and institutions. 3. Improved need-based services for livestock production, dry land agricultural and local value chains, with focus on vulnerable persons, including women.

As the Swiss Embassy and the Swiss Development cooperation have relatively little experiences in these areas, they will work with a whole range of partners. In this perspective, a strategic partnership with IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) is in the process of being established (a memorandum of understanding is about to be signed). IGAD is composed of all the countries of the Greater Horn of Africa, is supported by several big donors and has the role of addressing divergent political interests among its members. Though its today still weak implementation capacities, IGAD is expected to increase its importance in the region also thanks to its close collaboration with the African Union.  

Research has always been an important component of Swiss involvement in the Horn of Africa. Is there scope for livestock and value chain research? What could the role of ILRI be? 

If you want to brainstorm these questions with Manuel, feel free to contact me.

find the official communication about the meeting here 

Overcoming the middlemen : an example from Kenya

One reason why smallholders remain poor in Africa, is the lack of transparency about the market price of food. As smallholders do not know the market price, middle men have a lot of power and push the price down. Several options exist to overcome the middlemen's power. In Ethiopia for example, real time screens in major market towns show the current market price of most agricultural products. This week, i found another interesting option, that has been implemented by a young Kenyan smallholder : a website to share information but also create a virtual market place to connect smallholders directly to each other for agricultural input and to consumers for agricultural output. Like in Europe, some farmers decided to develop short supply chains to avoid the middle man. A great initiative, check it out yourself  : http://www.mkulimayoung.com/

Clothing industry in Ethiopia, slavery or a great opportunity?

In the Ethiopian highlands, the fertile parts of Ethiopia, landholding size is around a hectare per household. Assuming an average household size of about 6 persons in rural areas, then this would suggest about 600 persons per square kilometer. Even if this number seems at the upper edge, it is undeniable that population pressure is huge, and agricultural productivity (agricultural output/person) is low. Though several opposing theories exist, one suggests that countries should heavily invest into the secondary sector, so that people move out of the rural areas to work in the emerging industries. Because less people are working on the field agricultural productivity would automatically improve.

Ethiopia is a country that is trying this strategy. Lately, even Swiss free newspaper were announcing that H&M would start producing low cost cloth in Ethiopia. Having seen horrible images from Bangladesh, where cloth production is just modern slavery, I am wondering if the industrialization strategy is a “winner’s curse” ? is Ethiopia becoming a new Bangladesh? Is it really slavery?

I recently found this movie on internet showing how shoes and shirts are produced in Ethiopia, by Chinese and Turkish. The movie is entitled modern slavery, a title I would like to challenge…

L'Ethiopie casse les prix - Escalave moderne par kersanti

In the movie, we see well-built factories with quite good working conditions. Nothing to compare to the overcrowded badly build factories in Bangladesh. Ok, we see some women who do not use the right protecting cloth when gluing shoes, yes it is bad, but “self-employed” smallholders producing onions also use chemicals without protection. It is bad, but the understanding of the importance of correct protecting material has not yet reached Ethiopia, and I would even believe the Chinese bosses who say why should I oblige them, they would not use it anyway.

Let’s now look at the benefit schemes a worker gets. The lady that is hired to fold the Aldi t-shirt is earning 50 cent an hour. So let me make some computation, if she works for 8 hours, she gets 4 dollars. Then she also gets a free meal, and a free service bus bringing her home (ILRI where I worked abolished the services bus). Ok, this is not a lot and ok she pays half of her wage to say in a small room without water and electricity. But looking at my former’s driver wife. She is running her own small burger place on a road side near to some condominiums. On good days she makes double than the girl who folds shirts in the factory, but she does not get a free meal, and 20% of her earnings goes into transportation, she had to invest money and bares risk. Also my cleaning lady was not earning much more per day than the girl folding Aldi shirts, but her days were shorter and she had many more benefits...

My former driver's wife running her burger place

So is it really modern slavery, or is cheap labor just the comparative advantage of Ethiopia to industrialize and move more and more people out of poverty? I understand, for us it is a moral question if it is fair that the Tommy Hilfiger shoes that we pay more than 200 usd are produced in Ethiopia only for 8 USD. But the clothing industry in Ethiopia is just paying local wages that by the way are more than double than in the commercial farming sector (a worker that picks the roses you buy in your supermarkets gets less than a dollar a day). And workers could walk out of the factories and go back to their rural homes, yet they stay, because there are no other jobs for uneducated people that pays as much as the clothing industry. Slavery starts there where people have no choice than working for low wages (for example because their passport has been taken away and can’t leave), I don’t think that is (yet) the case in Ethiopia. Ok these worker might have no choice because they can’t find any other job, but this applies to many many many other people in the developed world too. Lack of education and poverty makes them slaves.

I definitely feel that the emerging clothing industry is a great opportunity for Ethiopia to develop, to lift people out of poverty so that they are freer in future. Remember that the developed world did not get rich by preserving nature and human rights. But a critical eye should be kept on this industry to make sure that we are not getting a second Bangladesh…

Despite of all this, we should not look away from how things we eat and use are produced. Though, conditions are ok in local terms, it is a moral issue. Could working conditions not be improved in such a way that they contribute to a faster positive change for the Ethiopian society? For example by letting the industry invest in education and health care? In the end, it is you as a consumer who decides!

Looking back on fieldwork in the Ethiopian Highlands

Attentive readers of this blog will remember Jennifer Veilleux' fascinating blog post about the Grand Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia. Up until today, this post is  one of the few source that shows exclusive pictures of the areas before flooding.
In return for this post, i have written an exclusive post for her blog, making sense of what field work in Ethiopia taught me and how these lessons learnt are shaping the inside travel start-up today. So check it out!

Do you know who the grand-father of the green revolution is?

Currently Dutch TV is showing a series that investigates where our food comes from, called Fresco's paradis. Louise Fresco, professor at Amsterdam University and former director of reserach at FAO (and what a surprise a Phd from Wageningen), takes us into her paradis : "Food is our most intime way to interact with nature, because we in fact eat Nature. Handeling it in a carless way, wasting it or not knowing where it comes from, goes against any principle of a responsible life"

With this moto Louise takes us around the world, showing us how agriculture has emerged. In the first part of the series she visits the gene bank in Spitsbergen, and explains why agriculture could only develop thanks to dompting water in Turkey. (Watch it here)

In the second part, Louise takes us on the trip of the apple. I have been fascinated by the story on how the apple could reach Europe from the Middle East thanks to silk road. The horses on the silk roads where not only carries goods but also apple seeds, from the apples they were eating in the natural apple forests of Kazachstan. Apples very fast became a very good food items for Europe because it does not need any processing for being eaten and can be stored for a pretty long time. Intersting that today, apples are brough to the Ethiopian highlands to increase food security : the Silk road has been replaced research and extension service.
Also Louise introduces us to Nikolaj Vavilov (1887 –  1943), the Russian botanist who studied these apple forests and is considered as the first scientist who introduced the concept of genetical selection to improve crop productivity. This concept has been used to improve the crops in Asia, and therefore Nikolaj can be considered as the grand-father of the green revolution.

Watch this fascinating story here! 


And if you don't speak Dutch, then you need to be patient, it seems that the whole series will be available on DVD with English subtitles.

About local farmers feeding the world and other stories from the air

Some months ago, i took a flight from Geneva to Nairobi via Amsterdam with KLM for a job interview. On my first flight, from Geneva to Amsterdam i got a traditional Dutch egg sandwich served. It is one of these very Dutch sandwich, soft dark bread with some strange egg mixture in it. You really need to be Dutch to love this stuff.

The sandwich box on the KLM flight from Geneva to Amsterdam

What impressed me most was the box in which the sandwich came in. It was full of information that triggered my thoughts. Next to a pretty classical recipe for bread baking (inside the box), it said, that the wheat was ground in a wind mill. Cool, it means this product contributes to the conservation of the traditional and authentic Dutch landscapes with windmills. I just noticed, that never the word traditional or authentic was mentioned and i wonder if there are modern wind mills and how they look like... I don't know (just probably like all the other passenger on this flight), but great that KLM is trying to support the Dutch landscape, which in the end will attract the tourists and help them to fill the planes.

But i was more astonished by the other side of the box, it says "local farmers feed the world"and "we produce our bread with respect for our planet". Up until today, i am wondering what that means. The Netherlands is the second biggest agricultural product exporter of the world, so de facto feeding the world. Also the Dutch agriculture is one of the most intensive ones, and sometimes pretty unsustainable and polluting. Nota bene, the sandwich was not labeled as organic, which would guarantee that this Dutch product has not been produced above the capacity of the land. And by the way the box talked only about the bread, what about the eggs? how many antibotics did the chicken get, and did they ever see the sky?

how do local Dutch farmers feed the world and produce in respect our planet?

I ended up with some really funny thoughts : did you ever meet a global farmer? what would that be? or is every farmer bound to his land and therefore local? And is not every farmer somehow feeding the world? And if feeding the world should suggest that food has been traded on a world market, then is KLM against the principle of food sovereignty? Can't be... it is just a sentence that does not make any sense to me... and i really wonder what all the other passengers were thinking while reading this. 

Anyway, it was this terribly early morning flight, I was on my way since 4 am. And even if my bread had been produced by global farmers to feed people on Mars, I just ate that sandwich : I was hungry and it has this incredible and unique taste of the Netherlands that recalled many very nice memories.

Finally, I landed in Amsterdam, happy as my stomach was full of sandwich and coffee and my mind full of nice memories. I stepped out of the plane and wished the flight attendant a "fijne dag verder en tot ziens" (have a good day and good bye). Upon which the flight attendant wished me "wel thuis" (have a save trip home).

I moved to the gate to board my flight to Nairobi, wondering what the flight attendant meant with "wel thuis".  I recently was offered to go back to ILRI (International Livestock Research Institute) as a GIS specialist to be based in Nairobi. I finally understood that the flight attendant meant : Nairobi will become my home soon. Going back to the "wild South", where everything is yet to happen, was too tempting, i could not refuse. Making sense of modern technologies and approaches and combining them with traditional local knowledge with the aim to support farmers to feed themselves and maybe the rest of world remains a fascinating challenge. Somehow I feel that i want to be part of this challenge and to its solutions, trying to make Nairobi my new home : a place where you can  enjoy the taste of samosas, definitely produced by local farmers for the local local market and a place where you will be welcome in a near future. 

eating a samosa at Java house in Nairobi