Disrupting Food Systems: Harnessing The Power Of Informed Predictions

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.” – Carl Sagan.

Change is formed of deliberate habits. How do we move from the mediocre to genuinely innovating along the entire food system?

When the?“Prospects For The 2022/2023 Rainfall Season For Malawi”?(PRS4MW, for short) report comes out in September every year, we know that the rainy season is imminent. Christmas is around the corner. Most importantly, will the Enukweni bridge make it into the news again this year?[1] [2]

At this point, I will be charitable and believe the report’s purpose is to empower informed decisions. Apart from the majority of the words reading precisely the same as the previous year, who is it intended for, is it timely, does the target audience know of its existence, and do they trust it enough to use it?

The report contains facts about the primary bearing systems influencing rainfall in #Malawi (South Eastern Africa). These include the mechanics of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), Congo air mass, easterly waves, and tropical cyclones - facts most of us will remember from earlier schooling. It then adds historical context to the prevailing predictions of the?La Ni?a?conditions for the 2022/2023 season.

“La Ni?a results in wetter-than-normal conditions in southern Africa from December to February, and drier-than-normal conditions over equatorial east Africa over the same period.” -?National Geographic.

The Sendai Framework Indicator G4?measures the availability of plans to act on early warnings at the local level. How long does it take to receive alerts of impending floods? Is there an evacuation plan directing communities toward elevated areas, for example?

Aside from the tropical cyclones and other factors we cannot predict reasonably, I am more interested in the infrastructure that continues to fail yearly, like clockwork. Specific examples include:

• The Enukwenu bridge on M1 road.
• Inner-city flooding from clogged drains.
• Other agriculture production zones are impassable during the rainy season.

How deliberately can we use data to prepare, plan and design better?

There are many platforms for unintelligent screaming and finger-pointing, but what intelligent questions can we advance toward viable solutions? What quick practical #engineering wins do we need to include?

If we start by embracing the idea of global citizenship, we will learn to leverage the skillsets in our global village massively.?

The most interesting observations in the?PRS4MW?report, however, and the subject of my curiosity, are these:?

1. “However, extreme weather events such as heavy rains leading to floods are likely to occur in prone areas while some parts of the country may experience pockets of prolonged dry spells during the season.”
2. “In applying this forecast, users from different sectors such as Agriculture, Disaster Management, Energy, and Water are encouraged to seek advice from the relevant ministries.”
3. “The [flood-prone] areas need to get prepared with measures to mitigate the impacts of the above normal rainfall predicted. Cities and councils should start dredging the waterways to avoid flash floods that are very likely during this season.”

The Impact on Rainfed Agriculture

It is common knowledge that most of the food in Malawi relies on rainfed agriculture. Most family units produce yearly maize, rice, and cassava yields solely based on rainfed #agriculture. Food security in the Malawian context easily translates to grain production.?

In other words, the impact of rains on grain production is a healthy analog for food security in Malawi. Therefore, consider the rain patterns regarding how they impact grain production.

Rainfed agriculture grain is highly vulnerable to short-term dry spells and long-term droughts, contributing to a reluctance to invest in agricultural inputs.

David McKee?writes in?World Grain:?“To many informed observers, preoccupation with maize monoculture, despite low yields and prices, is helping to keep Malawi impoverished. Agricultural diversification as a path to development is a major focus for the government with support from World Bank lending and other international development partners.”

Much as irrigation is proposed as a viable means to alleviate the complete dependence on rainfed agriculture, erecting such infrastructure requires knowledge and resources beyond most smallholder farmers. Improved rain harvesting systems would boost the potential of many rainfed areas.

Many surface water irrigation systems require some on-farm storage. The flows onto farms from central waterways are usually not sufficient or timely enough to meet irrigation needs. Reservoir construction usually requires labour to establish and some purchased inputs to reduce water seepage and requires farmers to give up some cropland.

Water harvesting, however, is mostly only useful for bridging short-term dry spells. There are too many cases of large-scale rainfed agriculture losses to develop sensible insurance products.

The impact of changing precipitation patterns is felt immediately by smallholder farmers. 80% of Malawian live in rural areas and are employed directly in agricultural economic activities.

The?PRS4MW?report is the most up-to-date local long-range prediction of rainfall for the season, informing crop selections for the farming calendar for most farmers. However, I have yet to witness farmers who actively reference it or make choices based on it.?

Most smallholder farmers are locked in a specific specialization and can only choose to move when they should sow the seeds. Cycling between crop types is tied to land tenure, quality, and specialist knowledge or resource availability.?

We can develop several academic arguments about the content and robustness of the?PRS4MW?report methods, but only a few about its intention. However, most smallholder farmers might still need to learn of the existence of these predictions.

The potential impacts of agricultural activities on health and nutrition extend across several channels, including the ability to produce, purchase and consume more, better and cheaper food.

Agriculture contributes to nutrition and health. It increases rural income, allowing people to improve their diets. The Malawian rural communities primarily derive their income from agricultural activities. On the other hand, a healthy community can significantly improve agriculture production.

During the rainy season, increased malaria and waterborne disease cases can negatively disrupt local agricultural value chains, reducing potential output. There are several very sensitive feedback loops between community health and agricultural production.

There is a?need to rethink?the weaknesses of the policies and strategies exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical conflicts to ensure stable food security worldwide, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.?

Agriculture is already not considered a?sexy?field.?It is nigh impossible to achieve parity between the income of small and marginal farmers?and non-agricultural workers.

Stopping the drain away from farm economics will require a directed regional effort. These reports need to furnish artisanal knowledgebases with critical information and curated pointers to the actual references to provide up-to-date facts toward a more precise agricultural threat analysis. A seasonal calendar is only valuable for those that can access it, internalize the problem, and have ample time and resources to plan or react.

Several scholarly works have identified various corrective measures to improve crop production in rainfed agriculture, including better soil and water conservation, good quality seed, and proper husbandry. Specifically, for the Global South, curbing intergenerational land fragmentation and improving credit facilities are other areas to be addressed. Credit facilities must assess the regenerative potential of appropriate water and soil resource management.

Farm activities are a single pillar of the food value chain. The seasonal key logistical bottlenecks are another crucial component.?

While the Agricultural challenges are very relevant, I would like to re-examine the report regarding logistics and infrastructure damage. Specifically, why do we have the same infrastructure failing every time?

The Impact On Infrastructure And Logistics In The Food Value Chain

Transportation of agricultural produce to the market and access to the farms to deliver inputs and supervision are critical during the farming calendar. In Malawi, this remains a challenge during the rainy seasons, with some areas utterly cut off from supply routes.

In 2021, I witnessed the beginning of the collapse of the Enukweni bridge and, in 2022, another major bridge on the road to Majete Game Reserve and Kapichira Hydro Power Station in Chikwawa.?(As one would imagine, plenty of what-if scenarios adjusting for time and speed followed.)?The thing that is harder to digest, though, is our assessment of the impact of such infrastructure failure.

The locals informed me that this was a yearly event. And true to that, the temporary Enukweni bridge was damaged again in 2022. We had to use a temporary military bridge to cross either way.

What is clear is that hampered access and natural disasters affect marginalized communities more in lower-income countries. According to?World Bank?data, disasters often disproportionately affect children, women and girls, older adults, persons with disabilities, and indigenous peoples.

How often does the bridge need to collapse to admit that this is an engineering problem? Do we have the data on the maximum projected volume of water? The locals at Enukweni can educate us about historical hydrological flow if such data is absent. The soil texture is known not to support any significant structures without fortification.

Tuning into the conversations, when the bridges collapsed, it seems that the moment something is described as an accident, it is fully explained, and we leave it to fate to fix it. We are still caught unaware, forgetting that we had predicted these events before they happened.?

In the case of Enukwenui, nature has proven year-on-year that the capacity of water we are trying to force under the bridge is more than the maximum volume we should be designing for. Every year, we see the same dimensions and budgets allocated to this critical bridge. Yet we make the same mistake repeatedly without any reasonable challenge.?

Again, to whom does the?PRS4MW?report communicate?

We have standards bodies that could be more effective in policing the quality of the designs. The incredible thing is that approximately 30 km up this same M1 road, all the water passing through Enukwenu, added to other major tributaries, flows under yet another bridge that has not been touched for over 30 years. It would seem there is a pathological need to solve things from the first principles.

Where is the hydrological data showing the water flows at this point during peak times of the year, including the wettest seasons on record? Undoubtedly, the 2020/2021 rainy season was not the wettest on record. How does hydrological data feature in the bridge design?

Is the hydrological and civil engineering data available for an informed review?

Hydrologically how does having a bridge that stems the flow of water at that point affect the available cropland upstream? Hydrological investigations are preliminary studies carried out before and during the design and construction process.

Of course, severe floods can lead to bridge failures.?

However, in the case of our infrastructure, can we prove that the reason for failure is not structural deficiency? Inadequate hydrologic and hydraulic assessments may result in uncertainties in bridge design. The lack of relevant hydrologic data, such as precipitation and runoff capacities, makes obtaining the design parameters difficult.

Hydroeconomic analysis (HEA) is one of the approaches for integrating physical and economic dimensions of water resource systems to guide policy debates.

Frank A. Ward?writes in his paper published in?frontiers:?“Successful climate adaptation needs to sustain food, water, and energy security in the face of elevated carbon emissions. Hydroeconomic analysis (HEA) offers considerable potential to inform climate adaptation plans where water is an important element of economic activity.”

HEA typically consists of a spatially and temporally distributed computer-aided mathematical model. Where are the HEAs for Enukweni and the other bridges to inform the plans to improve the economic performance of water systems?

Know Thy Data!?

Data must have a sit at the table. The necessary hydrological investigations must focus on estimating the probable maximum discharge and designing discharge corresponding to storm events. The study must be sensitive to the economical use of the catchment area.

Few accidents remain magical in retrospect when we equip ourselves with knowledge. An objective root cause analysis should lead to early warning systems, reduce the impact of repeated accidents, and nudge us toward resilient solutions.

While the dynamics of nature are highly complex, accepting that we cannot learn anything useful from the event incapacitates us. Subtle as it is, the?PRS4MW?report highlights that we can reasonably predict some accidents. These models are built on top of historical events and standards. The custodians of the budget and policy must know of the existence of these best practices and control measures.

The standards provide a means for delivering defensible quality products and a framework for monitoring and assessing designs.

The standards and monitoring organizations are appointed custodians of all public interests in all these technical projects. Let the data speak. Any credentialed individual is considered an expert if we do not invest in relevant knowledge and the means to validate it.

If standard organizations lack the power to oversee and enforce regulations meaningfully, these problems will continue to exist.

A Sober Way Forward

Having said all this, rampant deforestation by communities upstream has altered flow patterns in these parts. The history of floods and subsidence in these parts of the country is recorded and archived. However, it needs a quick update. The question that should be interesting from an engineering perspective is how to create bridges that can handle the varying capacity of the rivers, given historical data and future projections.?

The answer is more complex. Most of these designs start with accounting as the basis instead of examining the broader economic outlook and engaging competent design authorities.

If we start with a budget in mind, the solutions will reflect budgetary constraints instead of solving real-world problems.

As engineers, architects, and?“people of the Internet,”?we must dare to dream.

Conflict of Interest:?The context of the Disrupting Food System series is primarily a data-driven commentary on first-hand experiences researching, implementing large-scale socio-technical solutions to locally-relevant issues, and venturing into large-scale commercial Regenerative Precision Agriculture, trading,?and ethical off-taking in Malawi, Tanzania, and South Africa.

Precision Agriculture integrates Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to adjust for many variables affecting yield. On the other hand, regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems.