Amsterdam Centre for World Food Studies Research

FEED4FOOD promotes a shift to sustainable, inclusive, healthy city food systems, piloting 4 Urban Agriculture Living Labs (LLs) tackling needs in Strovolos (Cyprus), Drama (Greece), Bucharest (Romania), and Gdansk (Poland). It will improve income and food security for the most vulnerable, optimizing circularity and sustainability, and generating eco-services. The project has 3 pillars: (1) LLs, (2) Central Knowledge & Learning Hub, (3) Transition Strategy. Each LL has a special focus on one or more vulnerable groups - migrants, women, mentally or physically challenged, dropped out youth, elderly. The LLs close skill gaps; share practices; and address participants' challenges through coaching, training, and adjusting working spaces. Sustainability is ensured through co-creation of LLs with local stakeholders. Monitoring and lessons for scaling are derived from data collected in each LL, as they are fed into the integrated Hub, with a Dashboard for live information on the LLs performance, and analysis of the success or failure. The Hub’s tools are all environmentally and socially sustainable by design. To kickstart the scaling of the LLs, FEED4FOOD includes an explicit strategy of supporting and training of LL participants selected by the communities to foster their transition to self-sustaining entrepreneurs. Lead researcher at VU and consortium lead: Lia van Wesenbeeck (SBE, Economics), other VU team members: Patricia Lago (Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science), Ben Sonneveld (Faculty of Science, Athena Institute)

ACWFS participated in a FAO project that focused on the water management on Small Island Development States (SIDS). The findings of the project were report in the publication "Sustainable Management of Freshwater Resources for Food Security and Nutrition in Small Island Developing States". The report highlights the challenges associated with the geographical constraints of SIDS. The prevalent scarcity of suitable land and water resources, coupled with a heavy reliance on imported foods, contributes to widespread food insecurity and an elevated risk of micronutrient deficiencies. The role of freshwater management in ensuring food security and nutrition is crucial.

The report outlines a roadmap advocating for judicious water governance, legislation, control, and enforcement, alongside institutional and inter-island collaboration.

Rapid urbanization and economic development of African cities may cause food insecurity and poor nutrition with severe health and development impacts. This challenge especially holds true for secondary cities and peri-urban areas: these are growing at the fastest rate and see strong transitions in food systems from rural and subsistence food systems to those for more convenience-oriented diets. Climate change and internationalization of value chains affect consumers and producers through changes in food system configuration with potential impacts on the food security and nutrition of growing urban populations in African cities. Hence, there is a need to develop and implement interventions and governance processes that adapt urban food systems to changing climate, support territorial development (diversification, employment), and provide urban populations with sufficient food and improved nutrition.

The overall objective of the project is to assess urban food system transformations under climate change and increased production for international value chains. Using systems analysis and modelling, the project aims to co-design, with stakeholders in government, the private sector and civil society, possible interventions and governance processes that contribute to improved urban nutrition and a higher resilience of urban food systems to climate change. While the project aims to develop a generic overall approach for addressing urban food systems, the testing, learning and comparison will take place within 3 case-studies of secondary cities in Africa that have clearly different contexts: Worcester in South-Africa; Nakuru county in Kenya; and Constantine in Algeria.

More information about the project can be found here.

Under the supervision of Dr. Lia van Wesenbeeck and Dr. Philip Ward, PhD candidate Wei Li is conducting research on the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China. The imbalance between growing demand and limited supply capacity has threatened the provision of reliable water, safe food, and sustainable energy. Despite previous studies have recognized that the production, utilization, and security of water, energy, and food are inextricably linked, they have rarely evaluated the trade-offs and synergies of WEF nexus. This study attempts to quantify the trade-offs and synergies of the WEF nexus for the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region by using the general equilibrium model and case study method to promote the sustainable development of food, energy, and water resources. For water sustainability, taking Tongzhou district, the sub-center of Beijing, as an example, water sustainability under climatic and socioeconomic changes is discussed. In terms of energy sustainability, we aim to investigate the potential of desalting seawater in Tianjin while maintaining sustainability in the context of other water supplies being limited. Regarding food sustainability, the pig industry in Hebei province is taken as an example to explore the market potential of cultured meat and its impact on society, economy, and environment. Finally, the water division between Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei are discussed. Overall, this study could be a powerful policy support tool both for China and countries with similar resource constraints to achieve sustainable development.

A collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute, the national institute of public health in Lao PDR and the Council for Science and Technology, Lao PDR.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a comprehensive set of targets for humanity, and progress towards each of the SDGs is considered a positive development. SDGs can be considered synergetic when progress towards one SDG yields additional benefits towards another SDG. However, in other cases progress towards one SDG might cause trade-offs by limiting the progress towards another SDG, which is not unlikely in a world of limited resources. In this project we will assess how and to what extent improvements towards food and nutrition security (SDG2) is associated with synergies and trade-offs with poverty reduction (SDG1), health (SDG3), climate change (SDG13), and biodiversity (SDG15). We focus on Lao PDR and Myanmar, two developing countries in Southeast Asia where hunger is still prevalent in many locations. We will first create country wide indicator maps for each of the selected SDGs, based on various data sources. Then, we analyze relations between multiple SDGs at the subnational level and select both hotspots (synergies between SDGs) and coldspots (trade-offs between SDGs) for further investigation. These hotspots and coldspots will be further investigated using time-line analyses and other participatory approaches to find the moderating role of policies in these synergies and trade-offs, and use the results to develop computational models that can support the development and implementation of future policies towards sustainable development. Throughout the project we will continue discussing research design and progress with the project partners and other relevant stakeholders (including the local governmental institutions as well as international actors such as the World Bank), to ensure that results are scientifically sound, but also relevant to support further sustainable development in the region.

The FIT4FOOD2030 project, coordinated by Athena, is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) funded by the European Commission (EC) (https://fit4food2030.eu/). The aim of the project is to facilitate the development and implementation of FOOD 2030, a European research and innovation policy framework for food and nutrition security (FNS). FOOD 2030’s objective is to ensure that European food systems become ‘future-proof’, i.e. sustainable, resilient, responsible, diverse, competitive and inclusive. This requires a transformation of the research and innovation (R&I) on FNS towards a 'food system’s perspective’. This encompasses land and sea, and connects a wide diversity of actors across the whole food chain: 'farm-to-fork-to-gut-and back'.

In order to support the urgently needed transformation towards future-proof food systems, FIT4FOOD2030 will establish a sustainable multi-stakeholder, multi-level platform that has the character of a transformation network and will develop instruments, guidelines and tools to support FOOD2030. This platform will operate at three, interlinking levels. Firstly at the European level through an ‘’EU Think Tank’’ which will link the EC and members states. Secondly at a national level, ‘Policy Labs’ will be set up to mobilize stakeholders and build on existing networks to align research policies and investment schemes. Lastly, ‘City Labs’ will be formed to engage with the local stakeholders.

This project aims to contribute to the body of knowledge about smallholder farmer’ anthropogenic climate change perceptions, and how said perceptions shape adaptability and resilience resulting in the adoption of new and old strategies grounded in local knowledge. The research aims to move away from the Cartesian divide between nature and society that the classical adaptation framework entails, to a political ecology of climate change adaptation approach which posits that Cartesian divide as a domain of entanglement wherein nonhuman and human networks of power and influence are at play.

86% of the farms in Indonesia are owned and cultivated by smallholders. This group is among the poorest and most vulnerable in Indonesia, whilst they contribute the largest part to the available food production in the entire country. Smallholder farmers from Lombok are, in particular, among the most vulnerable due to their socio-economic status and the vulnerability of the region to climate related hazards. This group’s perceptions and discourse of anthropogenic change are shaped by local knowledge and the social environment but also by top-down initiatives from the institutional bodies and NGOs. The interplay of interaction shapes the material climates and lived environments of the smallholder farmer, and possibly has influence on the perception of climate change.

This research is ethnographic and qualitative, and will be conducted during 1 field-site visit of 12 months. In the school of apprentice anthropology, the notion that the farmer is the expert on local knowledge and new strategies as means to adapt will be included. Therefore, methods such as participant observation, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and group discussions will be used.

ACWFS has engaged with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) to carry out the final evaluation of the Ghana Netherlands WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) Program and its PPP facility Ghana WASH Window (GWW), implemented by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), respectively. In the period of 2012 – 2022, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Accra (Ghana) rolled out a large-scale, multi-annual WASH program. The program was developed to offer support – with joint contribution from the Government of Ghana – to several Ghanaian cities in achieving improved service coverage in their respective water, sanitation, solid waste and hygiene sectors. The program focuses on the integrated development of WASH infrastructure and sustainable and inclusive (pro-poor) service delivery. This review was carried out based on a study of the total project portfolio, interviews with program and project managers, site visits and beneficiary surveys. The final report will been submitted to the Ministry in December, 2023.

ACWFS has engaged with Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) to carry out the 2^nd midterm review of the Sustainable Water Fund, a program managed by the Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (Netherlands Enterprise Agency, RVO) on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This program aims to support water safety and security in developing countries through subsidizing Public-Private Partnerships that try to improve infrastructure, knowledge and water management skills. This review was carried out based on a study of the total project portfolio, interviews with program and project managers, site visits in a number of selected countries where the program is active (in Africa, Asia and Latin America) and beneficiary surveys. The final report has been submitted to the Ministry in September, 2023.

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) contribute to availability and quality of water for productive purposes and human consumption. Concurrently, they aim to safeguard the integrity and intrinsic value of ecosystems.

 Implementation of effective NBS for water management presents a challenge that is primarily attributable to the widespread severe degradation of numerous ecosystems. These ecosystems, characterized by their vastness, necessitate an analysis at system-wide level. Moreover, various stakeholders and custodians champion in distinct interests which further complicates the landscape.

 In this discussion paper, we evaluated twenty-one NBS case studies, for successful and unsuccessful experiences. The case studies reveal a limited emphasis on valuation of ecosystem services. Unsuccessful water management projects often suffer from deficiencies in factual and scientific foundations, as well as uncoordinated or insufficient stakeholder involvement and a lack of long-term planning. Conversely, successful case studies underscore the importance of a satisfactory understanding of ecosystem functioning, the establishment of multi-stakeholder platforms, well-defined funding schemes, realistic monitoring and evaluation systems, and the perseverance of project promoters.

For the FAO publication on Nature-Based Solutions, click here.

For the policy brief, click here.

ACWFS, together with Al Quds University, Hebron University, the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture and two private partners, have won a competitive €160K grant from the Palestinian-Dutch Academic Cooperation Program on Water (PADUCO).  The grant will support the 3-year research project “Precision irrigation and optimization of using fertilizer in date palm tree cultivation in the Jordan Valley”. The main objective of the project is to enhance food security by improving the feasibility of date palm tree cultivation in the Jordan Valley through integrating precision irrigation and optimizing the use of chemical fertilizer applying Real Time  SMART software. In the reporting period, the kick-off workshop was held, the site selection for trials on precision agriculture and fertilizer applications (micro-nutrients) has been done and water balance tables for Jericho over five layers, two weekly intervals and four water qualities have been prepared.

Globally, more than 200 million urban citizens are involved in urban agriculture (FAO). Urban agriculture therefore has an essential role in the promotion of food security, livelihood and environmental diversity. The selection of a suitable site is one of the first steps in the development of a successful urban garden. Dr. Ben Sonneveld from the Amsterdam Centre for World Food Studies (ACWFS) and Dr. Donald Houessou, who conducted his PhD at VU Amsterdam and the University of Abomey-Calavi (UAC), developed a site selection tool to support the decision-making process. In the Jardin Pro Pauvre project, UAC-staff members and local policy-makers were trained in the use of this tool. The project includes a collaboration with the Centre for International Cooperation
(CIS-VU).

The aim of this project is to promote sustainable and nutrition-secure city food systems by developing knowledge and tools for local and national development planning. Specifically, we will use two case studies (Cape Town, South Africa and Kampala, Uganda) to develop and test planning tools for enhancing city food and nutrition security. The project addresses the need for sustainable agricultural intensification by developing tools to quantify and evaluate alternative food transformations in African cities. We address the following questions:

i.     What are the local to global food system drivers that influence city food and nutrition security, and how do these drivers interact?

ii.    How can city food systems be represented in a conceptual model that integrates within-city dynamics with broader global change dynamics, and acknowledges the feedbacks between these?

iii.   What do different city food transformations mean for food and nutrition outcomes, and which pathways minimise trade-offs with other SDGs?

iv.   What are the opportunities and interventions for city authorities to incorporate food and nutrition dimensions into their planning?

v.    In what ways can joint reflection on the case studies offer new opportunities for building positive food futures elsewhere?

It is often revealed that agriculture is the mainstay of the economy of Ethiopia. This assertion emanates from the size of population it supports and its contribution to the national economic growth. Nearly 84% of the country’s population relies, either directly or indirectly, on agricultural activities to earn their livelihood. Furthermore, agricultural products constitute dominant share of export trade. 

Agriculture accounts for about 45% of the GDP and 85% of export revenues. The smallholder subsistence farms occupy about 90% of the crop land and produce around 95% of the total agricultural output. 

Thus, the performance of agricultural sector is detrimental not only to feed the ever-increasing population but also to boost national economic growth. 

In this light, the research attempts to address the following questions: (a) why are the previous and existing policies and strategies unable to achieve sustained agricultural growth and food self-sufficiency at a household level? (b) What are the factors explaining food insecurity at the household level? (c) What is the effect of food insecurity on the wellbeing of household members? 

How do households respond to (cope with) food insecurity? What are the pros and cons of these response strategies in terms of reducing vulnerability to food insecurity and ensuring healthy development of household members?

Food insecurity and malnutrition remain persistent challenges among upland populations in Asia. Interventions are often fragmented and address immediate rather than underlying causes.

Nutrition-Sensitive Agriculture (NSA) is an inter-sectoral, multi-level food system approach maximising agriculture’s contribution to improved food security and nutrition. However, it still lacks a robust evidence-base. Building upon existing interventions in Vietnam and Lao PDR, this project generates evidence on the effectiveness of, and best way to scale-up, NSA amongst ethnic minorities in mountainous areas. It utilizes Complex Adaptive System Theory and Transition Management to analyse processes of embedding NSA interventions in food systems.

A transdisciplinary research methodology is used to assess effectiveness and enhance adaptive and transformational capacities of studied interventions. Comparative case study analysis results in a generic framework to develop and scale-up NSA interventions in different contexts. Lessons learned advise a wide variety of stakeholders to address food security and malnutrition of vulnerable populations.

Building upon existing interventions in Vietnam and Lao PDR, this project generates evidence on the effectiveness of, and best way to scale-up, NSA amongst ethnic minorities in mountainous areas. From September 2017 to May 2018 data is collected to inform intervention selection. Data consist of literature review (ongoing), retrospective study into old/ongoing interventions in Laos and Vietnam (ongoing) and quantitative data and qualitative baseline data. Since September 2017 four PhDs have started field work (baseline data collection) in Laos and Vietnam. Quantative baseline data was collected in November and December 2017 in Laos and March 2018 in Veitnam. Data collection in Laos was led by three PhD students of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, of which two are based in Lao PDR and one in the Netherlands, together with the Nationional Institute of Public Health (Laos). In Vietnam Data collection was led by a VU PhD and staf member of MCNV in cooperation with the Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Data was collected with the use of questionnaires at several levels; village, school, household. All questionnaires were validated at national level by the NIOPH and included sections that were developed, validated and standardized by international organizations (e.g. the FAO and World Food Program). In total, nine questionnaires were developed or adjusted focusing on five primary indicators: (1) production and diversity (techniques, quantities, diversity of produced foods (vegetables, fruits, livestock, fish)) using household questionnaires, (2) food intake (24 recall questionnaires), (3) nutrition literacy, (4) anthropometric data and (5) market access. Part of the validation process was pre-testing the data collection instruments, to ensure valid and reliable results.

At the premises of the SEKU University in Kitui a research site has been developed, to study improved water management in semi-arid regions, with a specific focus on small scale water harvesting systems. The IVM has been involved in project research in Kitui since 2005. In September 2016, Dr. Ralph Lasage and two MSc Hydrology students of the VU have installed the meteorological and hydrological instruments, jointly with staff and MSc students of the Southern Kenyan University (SEKU).

The current experiments focus on the infiltration and evaporation rates from water harvesting systems, to improve understanding of the water storage capacities. Knowledge developed from this research will help implementing organisations (NGOs, governments) in the design and choice of suitable water harvesting measures. Earlier research shows that limited empirical information has been published on these types of systems (Lasage and Verburg, 2015). Also, the field information will be used to validate a water harvesting storage model which has been developed at the VU. The results of the field scale analysis are used for a regional assessment of the potential of water harvesting systems to help bridge the dry season, including the investment costs, for Sub Saharan Africa.

In 2017 we will study the effect of water harvesting on crop yield, jointly with the agricultural department of SEKU, and also research the effect of water harvesting systems on households income, diet, and time allocation through a household survey. The goal is to explore the benefits of increasing water availability for rural farmers and to find out critical factors for the implementation of similar water harvesting systems.

l’Environnement et le Développement Durable (ACED), in partnership with ACWFS and the Faculty of Agronomic Sciences of the University of Abomey-Calavi, implements from 2016 to 2019 the project “Enhancing urban food security through development of allotment gardens in and around the cities of Benin”. The project aims to create an integrated framework for the development of allotment gardens, providing urban poor with access to fresh foods and with a safe haven for women to gain additional income. The project is funded by the Food & Business Global Challenges Programme of NWO. In April this year, the report on allotment pilots was finished. The preliminary findings in this report show that there is a high participation of female and male and no conflict in the gardens. On Abomey-Calavi site, there is already a sense of organization where participants gave a local name to their group and subscribe to a small membership fee. The Porto-Novo’s site is a bit behind because they did not start at the same moment as those of Abomey-Calavi. To gain practical knowledge on the appropriate organization and incentive structures for successful cooperative garden management, the project conducted a survey with experienced gardeners to understand indigenous knowledge on common garden management. The report shows that allotment gardens have many benefits on food security and incomes of gardeners, as well as on social relationship and the environment. It also indicates how experienced gardeners are organized, what could be improved and which optimal organizational form can be advised to participants of the pilots.

Current global-scale research on environmental change and assessments of food production have a strong focus on the physical processes that underlie changes in the earth system and crop growth.

Although global environmental change is driven by individual and collective human decisions, most earth system and integrated assessment models lack a proper representation of human decision making and the barriers to adopting more adapted land use systems. The importance of variation in local context has caused much social-science research on the underlying driving factors and decision making structures to focus on local case studies. Consequently, important insights from social-science have been ignored in global-scale assessment models.

The GLOLAND project, which focuses on land system change, contributes to a new generation of integrated global assessment models. These models will explicitly account for the (spatial) variation in decision making to support the design of earth system governance.
An improved understanding of the factors that drive decision making will be obtained through a novel meta-analysis of existing case studies of land change worldwide. Supplementary empirical evidence will be collected by analysing a number of transects and disentangling the global and local factors that influence land change decisions. 

Generalized, global-scale multi-agent modelling systems that represent variation in decision making will be developed. While current global land models are driven mainly by changes in consumption patterns and demography, we propose an alternative approach that accounts for the full range of ecosystem service demands and explicitly addresses the spatial relationship between demand and supply of those services that influence decision making.

LUC4C - assessing the net climate forcing, and options for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Description:

LUC4C will advance our fundamental knowledge of the climate change - land use change interactions, and develop a framework for the synthesis of complex earth system science into guidelines that are of practical use for policy and societal stakeholders.
Our aim is to identify the beneficial and detrimental aspects of alternative land use options. To do so, we work on improving and evaluating a suite of modelling approaches at different levels of integration and complexity. My part in the project is to simulate future demands for food (crops and livestock products), while considering the reality of limited water resources. This demanded improving land system modeling, as such models until now did not take into account water resources when simulating future cropland expansion and intensification.

Project website: http://luc4c.eu

The spatial dimension of development is of great importance for poverty reduction and food security in Mozambique, especially in the view of the north-south and the rural-urban divide and also for stability reasons. Yet, important knowledge gaps exists in the research department of the Ministry of Economics and Finance and its partner institutes regarding the spatial assessment of poverty and food security.

The project provides training and research collaboration to fill these gaps. The subjects addressed cover a range of theoretical issues and practical hand-on training, including methodologies for poverty and food security assessment, an action research component where participants learn about new poverty calculation methodologies, and the improvement of writing skills is (joint) research papers.

Where necessary, adaptations are made in an effort to make the training as tailor-made as possible and to respond best to the needs of the Ministry of Economics and Finance and its partner institutes.

 This research project investigates the segmentation of the avocado sector in Kenya, comparing a modern and innovatively programmed and a more traditional and non-programmed mode of farming. 
In the former, farmers directly linked to exporters through contractual relationships and produce according to (certified) Global Good Agricultural Practices (Global GAPs) and agricultural products can be traced back to the producer. In the latter, farmers sell their outputs to ‘brokers’ or middlemen using non-certified production methods and products cannot be traced in the production chain.  
The aim of the project is to study the effects of moving from the traditional to the modern sector on small-scale avocado growers.  At the end of 2016 baseline household and farmer group survey data were collected from Murang’a County in central Kenya among three types of farmers, namely (i) farmers who already had a contract with an exporter during the previous season, (ii) farmers who had just signed a contract with an exporter that would become effective during the following season, and (iii) farmers who had no contract signed. 

In the first three months of 2018 various project activities were wrapped up as the project was officially closing by March 31. Two policy briefs were written to disseminate key messages produced by the project and published on the website of the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) (https://www.pep-net.org/presm-policy-briefs). The policy brief ‘Avocado contract farming in Kenya: Does it work?’ argues that contract farming is the best option for Kenya to transform its avocado sector with exporters and many smallholder avocado farmers benefitting. But it also discusses the 

challenge that side-selling is widespread and that a lack of loyalty and trust threatens contract sustainability.  This points to the need for policies to increase investment in training and trust, to innovate contract design and to discourage side-selling (and side-buying). The policy brief ‘The Booming Peruvian Avocado Export Sector: Lessons for Kenya’ points out that 

Kenya can learn from the Peruvian experience relying on a strong public-private partnership to develop new market opportunities, but also that the government needs to stimulate the participation and inclusion of small producers in this process. A scientific paper ‘The Impact of Smallholder Export Participation in Avocado Export Market on Farm Productivity in Kenya’ was finalized for publication and submitted to an international journal.  The paper examines the determinants and impacts of smallholder producers' participation in global value chains on farm incomes and productivity. In terms of impact, it is found that participation in the export market results in increased prices fetched for avocados, but lower harvested yields, probably because of the more stringing requirements of exporting firms. Also, labor inputs increase with participation. The net effect on avocado incomes seems to be positive, in the order of 22 percent, but the effect is imprecisely estimated. Also endowments of the farmers, in terms of family composition, assets, land, number of avocado trees and training explain most of the observed differences in incomes and prices fetched. This suggests that barriers to entry do not play a major role in determining participation in the export market.