Precipitation reporting of Swedish Agroholdings

I have been studying the so-called Swedish agroholdings, and hope to have an article out this year about them. One thing – that won’t be in the paper –that I noticed and want to comment on is how they report on the impact of precipitation on crop yields. Naturally of course precipitation is one of the main factors affecting crop yields, but in dry or drought years, the companies tend to simply report that particular season’s deviation from monthly precipitation averages over a seven or ten year period. See Black Earth Farming’s Q4 Results p2, or Trigon Agri’s 1H Results from 2010, p 10, for examples. This is all fine and good, but it doesn’t address the question of how frequently such deviations from the average occur. The climate in the Eurasian steppe is quite variable, and how frequently droughts occur and how long they last would seem to be important information to know. Also, seven or ten years is simply too short a period to be talking about climate.

For this purpose, I have been looking at the Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), which is what the US government uses to asses drought conditions in the US (See the website of the US National Drought Mitigation Center). Basically the SPI is a measure of meteorological drought, only taking rainfall into account. (An important distinction: “agricultural drought,” for example, would take into account soil moisture). Here is a definition of SPI from this website: “The SPI was formulated by Tom Mckee, Nolan Doesken and John Kleist of the Colorado Climate Center in 1993. The purpose is to assign a single numeric value to the precipitation which can be compared across regions with markedly different climates. Technically, the SPI is the number of standard deviations that the observed value would deviate from the long-term mean, for a normally distributed random variable. Since precipitation is not normally distributed, a transformation is first applied so that the transformed precipitation values follow a normal distribution. The Standardized Precipitation Index was designed to explicitly express the fact that it is possible to simultaneously experience wet conditions on one or more time scales, and dry conditions at other time scales, often a difficult concept to convey in simple terms to decision-makers. Consequently, a separate SPI value is calculated for a selection of time scales, covering the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, 60, and 72 months, and ending on the last day of the latest month.”

Basically to summarize, the SPI provides a score for the rain anomaly for each user-defined period against the longer record for that period.

According to the US classification scheme, an SPI of around -1 signifies moderate drought conditions, while an SPI of -1.3 to -1.5 indicates severe drought conditions. For more on the classification of SPI values, look at this website, which compares SPI with different drought indices. I do not know the degree to which this classification scheme would be appropriate for Russian conditions. For more on how to interpret SPI values look at this site.

Here is the 3 month SPI for a weather station in Kursk, an oblast in western Russia where the Swedish listed company Black Earth Farming operates.  What this means is that for each month, the precipitation amount for the three month period ending in that month is measured against the longer climate record. Though only 2013 and 2014 are shown here, the calculations are based on a climate record going back to 1974. So you can say that the fall of 2014 in Kursk was indeed very dry in terms of the longer climate record, though late Spring (June) had favorable conditions. I say "indeed" because BEF has called the fall weather in their operational area, which includes Kursk, unusual.

(By the way, I used the SPI-app available at the web-site of the US National Drought Mitigation Center to make the SPI calculations. The Kursk weather station data comes from this web-site, which I have noticed in other contexts appears to be the same data as the climate data available on the FAO web-site, though not in the case of Kursk where the website had more data than FAO. Below I also use precipitation data from a weather station in Voronezh and that data comes from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) Version 2. The web-site source for Kursk compiles monthly values based on daily precipitation, and in some cases some daily values were missing. In those cases I just used the provisional monthly precipitation sum. Also in some cases GHCN lacked values for Voronezh, and where possible I filled in those values using data on Voronezh from the same web-site. Sub-optimal but this is just a blog.)

This next graph shows the potential usefulness of SPI. It shows the average of the 3-month SPI for the month of August between 2007 and 2014 for a weather station in Kursk and one in Voronezh (the SPI for the two stations are averaged together) plotted against Black Earth Farming’s Corn (Maize) yield for the same years. (Voronezh is another oblast where Black Earth Farming (BEF) is active). Note that BEF also farms in the neighboring oblasts of Lipetsk and Tambov, but I could not find rain data for weather stations in those oblasts going up to 2014, so I had to make do with what I had. In any case a pretty neat correlation resulted. I have modeled the corn yield and SPI relationship using a 2nd order polynomial based on the assumption (perhaps mistaken?) that, after a certain amount, there are diminishing returns to rain. I tried the same for wheat and 3 and 6 month SPI for June. If you eliminate 2012, you also get a good result here. A case can be made for eliminating 2012 because BEF themselves, when explaining their disappointing 2012 harvest, seemed to put that blame on odd temperature dynamics, i.e. an unusually late spring, combined with sudden increases in temperature resulting in wheat going through its growth stages really fast at the same time that there were 3 weeks with no rain in May (2012) (See their 2Q report 2012, p. 2). Under such circumstances SPI will be less successful in correlating with yield.

A few words of caution here. While one would expect that there would be good correlations with precipitation anomalies and crop yield, these two tables can just be flukes. The R2s are just too good, and there are not a lot of data points. I have however gone back and double-checked various parts of the data processing I have done. I also checked how well SPI predicts corn and wheat yields for Trigon in Kharkiv and Kirovgrad, and in some cases got good results, and in some cases not so good results. With respect to wheat, you can improve the not so good results by some tinkering based on reasonable assumptions. The only thing that cannot be improved by tinkering with the data is the relationship between Trigon corn yield and SPI in Kirovgrad.

In general, I can say, for obvious reasons, sometimes 3 Month SPI is a better predictor of yield and sometimes 6 Month SPI is. This is the advantage of SPI. There can be a 3 month dry period in a 6 month period that is otherwise considered wet.

In the end, there are not enough data points to base a proper analysis on. I’m just playing around with data and this is what I get. As I’ve said before, this is just a blog. Also, I am no expert in precipitation or meteorology. You can see this as me putting up my notes on this blog for other people to react to if they feel like it.

I do however think that these companies should consider using SPI to report on precipitation in their operational areas.

Time running out for EcoEnergy?

Has the Swedish-financed ethanol/sugar project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, finally reached its critical moment?

Sida has declared that it will withdraw its support to the project if the private company EcoEnergy is not able to find capital for its intended investments before 30 April, which should mean that the project turns bankrupt. If on the other hand EcoEnergy is able to raise private capital to finance its operations Sida guarantees bank loans of 600 million SEK.

Meanwhile the Swedish Economic Crime Authority is looking into how the predecessor of EcoEnergy, Sekab company owned by three municipal energy companies in northern Sweden, sold their subsidiary companies in Tanzania to the owner of EcoEnergy for the symbolic sum of 400 SEK.

The details of the perplexing story of how three municipalities in north Sweden came to invest 170 million SEK in growing sugar cane outside Bagamoyo, has been a serial story in newspapers in northern Sweden and also covered in documentary films. Swedish and Tanzanian researchers as well as environmental NGOs have studied the project. I visited the project site in 2008 and wrote about the discrepancy between the management’s high-soaring plans for local development and participation and the scepticism and disappointments expressed by farmers and pastoralists in the area. There were great promises but the company’s activities on the ground left lots to be desired. Corresponding documentation came from the Rufiji area where Sekab also was active.

In April 2009 four researchers from the Stockholm Geography Departments (Annika Dahlberg, Karin Holmgren, Mats Widgren and myself) together with Tor Arve Benjaminsen and Ian Bryceson of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and documentary film maker Lars Johansson wrote an opinion piece in Dagens Nyheter expressing our concerns about a number of issues regarding the environmental, social and developmental aspects. The proposed sugar cane plantations would push several thousands of small-scale farmers off their land. We used the word land-grabbing which at the time was not yet a household concept.

Over the years academics continued to rise critical questions about the project. The Swedish municipal energy companies eventually pulled out and fired the Sekab director who is the current owner of EcoEnergy. Surprisingly Sida stepped in with loan guarantees to EcoEnergy and has (until now?) retained faith in the project.

The most recent report on developments in Bagamoyo project comes from ActionAid and is available at

http://www.actionaid.org/sites/files/actionaid/take_action_-_stop_ecoenergys_land_grab_embargoed_report.pdf

ActionAid is organising an international petition in favour of the rights of the smallholders and pastoralist who will be evicted if the project is able to proceed with its plans. The petition can be signed at:

http://landfor.org/

Sekab and EcoEnergy have all along had high-level political support in Tanzania and this still continues as recently reported in Tanzanian news media:

http://www.ippmedia.com/frontend/index.php?l=78473

The prospects for EcoEnergy look bleak, as Sida now has decided to pull out if the company cannot raise capital for its investments before the end of April. But Sekab and EcoEnergy have been reported as insolvent a number of times before, and what the situation will be on 1 May remains to be seen.

New publication on Venezuela

This week an article was published in Spanish in the journal  Revista Latino-Americana de Geografia e Genero. The title of the article in English is

""Does the Revolution have a Peasant Face?" A case study on the active participation of women in an irrigation project in the Venezuelan Páramo". 

Abstract

In Venezuela, women’s participation in decision making processes has improved thanks to the Bolivarian revolution. While it has been shown that legislative changes have brought about achievements for women in urban areas, there are no similar studies done in rural zones. This article is a first attempt to fill this scientific gap. Qualitative data have been gathered with a focus on gender, in order to investigate women’s participation in the spatial organization of the economic and productive system of Mixteque, in the municipality of Rangel, in the state of Mérida, Venezuela. The results show that while women are mainly in charge in the municipal council, their participation is passive in decision makings related to the productive processes. The irrigation committee is indeed mainly composed by men, who consequently control agriculture, which is the most important economic activity in Mixteque. Our study also indicates that although patriarchal relations are changing in some families, at the community level there has been a reinforcement of the productive/reproductive work division between men and women, respectively. This article confirms that Venezuela is a unique case when it comes to the legislative impulse towards women’s participation and that gender equality has been improving. Nevertheless, it emerges, most importantly, that women farmers in the Venezuelan Andes are no different from their counterparts in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia: none of them has direct access to water management decision making. Given its novelty within the discipline of geography in Venezuela, this research can help to illuminate how new organizational processes could – if they could – change gender roles in Venezuela.

Find the full article in Spanish here.

What is a furrow? Another idea.

I have just watched this video by IFAD where Pablo Tittonell, Professor and Chair of the Farming Systems Ecology Group at Wageningen University explains the advantage of conservation agriculture in enhancing food security for farmers in the Global South.

The short lecture, which could be even considered reinventing the wheel for those of us that study these processes on the field, I think is very illustrative and could be certainly used in teaching our students the challenges and the solutions that smallholders deal with on a everyday basis.

What however triggered me to bring our readership´s attention to this video is the use that Prof. Tittonell does of the word "furrow". According to him a furrow is not a water canal or channel but a rut where seeds are planted. His take on the term goes along the argument by Prof Widgren, earlier on this blog, that furrow should not be used to define irrigation canals in Africa as it doesn´t fit into the existing engineering terminology hence not opening up for international comparisons.

Some comments on Oakland Institute's report on Ukraine

Oakland institute released a report last year about Ukraine – Walking on the West Side – that has recently been getting a lot of attention. There was a rather interesting revelation in the report that the EU Association agreement that Ukraine signed contained a clause stating that Ukraine and the EU “will cooperate to extend the use of bio-technology in the agricultural sector”. (I am quoting Oakland here and not the EU agreement, which I have not read). As the Oakland institute report highlighted this may be a way to induce Ukraine to legalize the cultivation of GMO crops, and if so, this is indeed troubling news, which would be unpopular in Ukraine. So this definitely needs to be followed up.

I want to turn now to some parts of the report that I thought were not so good. In particular, the report contained some wrong information and it also had – what I felt was – misinformed criticism of reforms, urged by the World Bank, to improve the business climate in Ukraine. For example, the report states that “in recent years 1.6 million ha have been signed over to foreign companies for agricultural purposes.” (p.4). There is a chart of these companies. The problem is that four of the largest of these companies (in terms of their land bank), totaling around 950,000 ha, are actually Ukrainian companies that are incorporated abroad. Kernel, Mryia, Sintal and MCB Agricole are Ukrainian owned and run companies. Sintal, by the way, was undergoing bankruptcy proceeding earlier in 2014 (here is somewhat dated info on Sintal’s Ukrainian owner) and MCB Agricole (or rather their Ukrainian daughter company Ukrzernprom) got eaten up by competitors already by 2013 (See this article in Russian). And of course Mryia is technical default as of August 2014. This is not to deny that foreign companies are investing in Ukrainian agriculture, but the biggest companies, such as UkrLandFarming or MHP, remain Ukrainian. Generally, it is not going well for the large agroholdings – foreign or Ukrainian – due both to the current conflict and to problems that pre-date the current conflict, so there is a real question concerning the viability of these super large farms. (This is something I am currently researching and hope to have something out soon...)

Also, I do not deny that there are “land-grabbing” concerns, particularly as the new government moves towards lifting the moratorium on agricultural land sales (something, that the previous government was also intent on doing). Nevertheless up to 2013 most land reform proposals still limited corporate ownership of agricultural land and banned foreign ownership of agricultural land. I say up to 2013, because I have not been following this issue over 2014. This issue definitely needs to be monitored, but I think that Oakland exaggerates the degree to which foreigners are taking over or are poised to take over Ukrainian farmland and the Ukrainian ag-sector. To the extent that there is a landgrab going on in Ukraine – and this question is not as clear-cut in Ukraine as it is elsewhere in the world – it is mostly Ukrainians grabbing land from Ukrainians.

Finally, Oakland has rightly drawn attention to the real pain that IMF conditionality will bring about in Ukrainian society. That being said, they appear to be critical of World Bank programs to improve the business climate, arguing that it has nothing to do with fighting corruption. They provide no backing for this assertion. In fact, businesses have been mistreated by Ukrainian officialdom – I have heard loads of stories – and the Ukrainian economy is and was over-regulated, which provided ample opportunity for corruption. Improving the business climate is to a large degree about fighting corruption and arbitrary decisions. In 2013 Transparency International declared Ukraine the most corrupt country in Europe, so there is a lot of work to do here. Of course the World Bank should be monitored and criticized when appropriate, but in this case, I think the World Bank is right. Also, there is research that indicates that corruption is actually a reason why farms are so large in Ukraine and Russia – they need to be big to have enough negotiating power to deal with national and regional governments (Here is a link to the article by Ulrich Koester). Improving the business climate in other words, if it leads to more clear regulations and less corruption, may well level the playing field helping small and medium scale farmers to compete. 

Let me just say, in conclusion, that the Oakland Institute does good work. In this particular report, they raised important points, particularly the bio-technology clause in the EU agreement. I hope they continue to report on this. But this report would have been benefited from a strong dose of Ukrainian reality, which makes all these questions more complex.

PS. There’s a lot of context about the GMO question in Ukraine missing from the report. Basically, farmers in Ukraine have been using GMO seeds for a long time despite it being illegal. According to this article (in Russian) from Zerkalo Nedeli, a third of corn, and 70% of soy grown in Ukraine is from GMO seeds. See also this article (in Russian) from Kommersant, which basically says the same thing. The previous government – the one that negotiated the EU agreement with the EU – actually tried to legalize GMO in 2013.  The question is how those GMO seeds got into Ukraine. Now that would be an interesting report to read. 

Re-reporting and exchange trip to East Africa

Lowe Börjeson, Lars-Ove Westerberg and I have just come back from a 10 days field trip to Kenya and Tanzania. The aim of the trip was to conclude the research project financed by SIDA titled "Current expansion and past dynamics of small-holder irrigation farming in African dry-lands, measuring landscape, labor and climate interactions”. 

During this trip participants and research assistants from Tot, Sibou in Kenya and Engaruka in Tanzania had the opportunity to meet each other and visit the other study site. It was an insightful trip for all of them as they finally got to meet the people and see the places that I had been talking to them about in the last 4 years.

This 10 days were a great learning experience for all of us. Not only could participants and assistants share knowledge about farming and irrigation practices or reciprocal cultural customs, but it also created an amazing setting for us as researchers to share the results of our work.

The booklet that we had written in English and had been translated in Marakwet and Swahili was distributed among participants during several meetings we had with local farmers and women´s groups, for instance. In this setting, participants and research assistants could discuss about similarities and differences between their villages without our intermediation, which was truly the first objective of this trip: facilitate reciprocal learning. 

Often participants when they received the booklet asserted that we were the first researchers to come back to present the results of our study, especially in the form of a book. That was a rewarding comment, which made us reflect on the ethics of doing research. Research should primarly be for the benefit of participants. However, this principle is often bypassed due to lack of funding or time in the final stage of many research projects. 

Popular science publications

Fresh from the print three publications from the Dept of Human Geography on the SIDA financed research project that has been going on in Marakwet, Kenya and in Engaruka, Tanzania. 

These are popular science publications where we tried to simplify the language of our findings to report them back to informants and participants in our upcoming trip which will close the research project. 

The overall project looks at three variables: soil, climate and labor. These aspects can give an indication of the type of changes that happened in these irrigation systems and what have been the triggers behind them. In this booklet results are presented according to location and focus on: agricultural practices, women´s and men´s labor tasks, soil and water characteristics, adaptation weather variability and how all of these aspects have changed over time. 

Research results are seldom reported back to informants and participants. They can sometimes be of benefits for the community involved, but they most important can trigger further debate between researchers and participants. We are convinced that knowledge is situated and constructed with participants. Hence, trustworthy and socially responsible research must openly and critically engage participants until the end of research projects.  

PDF versions of these booklets are available here.