English: According to conservative estimates, producing food and getting it to the table accounts for around 30% of energy consumed worldwide, most of which is provided by fossil
fuels.
In places where renewable energies such as biomass
already drive agricultural value chains, particularly in the
developing world, they often originate from traditional
sources – fuelwood, for example, which in most cases is
harvested in unsustainable ways. With world population
on a path of unbridled expansion and energy resources in
dwindling supply, experts in science, business, civil society
and development cooperation who are active in the energy
and food sectors all face the same problem: how do we
produce more food using as little energy as possible, while
increasing the share of renewable energy? The GIZ-DIE
symposium ʻSustainable Energy for Food’, held on 12 June
2014 in Bonn, Germany, placed itself at just this juncture.
With a line-up of 16 speakers drawn from development
cooperation and research in energy and agriculture, the
symposium sought to provide a comprehensive overview
of where the various stakeholders stand on the issue. Input
from project managers, researchers and finance officers in
working groups during the afternoon hours supplied additional
perspectives rooted in hands-on experience. Collaboration
and project work are crucial to making progress
in the overlapping areas of sustainable energy and food, for
although the international community finds itself facing
unprecedented challenges within this nexus, possible
solutions are to be found there as well; indeed, energy- and
climate-smart technologies and practices, as the FAO has
come to call them, already abound in agri-food systems.
The challenge is to identify them and to fully develop their
upscaling potential. The ultimate obstacle looming over
any effort that targets sustainable energy and food, be it
a small-scale applied project or a sweeping international
campaign, is also the key to its success: mainstreaming.
Recognising that knowledge management and dissemination
are of utmost importance to achieve excellent
results in the field, the German Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) joined
forces with the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) the Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency (SIDA), OPIC and Duke Energy
to found to found the global initiative ʻPowering Agriculture:
An Energy Grand Challenge for Development’. The
overall objective is a shared one: the integration of innovative
clean-energy solutions into developing countries’
agriculture sectors as a means of increasing agricultural
productivity and value. On behalf of the German Ministry,
GIZ implements the German contribution to the international
initiative and complements its activities through the
project ʻPowering Agriculture – Sustainable Energy for Food’.
Under this theme, GIZ focusses on knowledge management
and networking, training and implementing model projects
in cooperation with private and public partners. The
symposium was a kick-off meeting for a network of experts
on the energy and food nexus, designed to spawn designed
to spawn personal contacts within what has up to now
been a very loosely knit community. The lively exchange
and sharing initiated there will continue, it is hoped, on a
newly founded virtual platform, the Powering Agriculture
wiki portal. This documentation is intended to serve as one
of its resources, and as a stimulus for further discussion.
