About
Feeding the growing global population within planetary boundaries is a monumental challenge. With dwindling land and water resources, agriculture must adapt to climate change, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and alleviate poverty. Sustainable intensification (SI) offers a potential solution by boosting food production without overusing natural resources.
Building on SI, the concept of Circular Food Systems (CFS) has emerged. CFS aims to produce food more efficiently, reduce waste, and strengthen local economies. By integrating crop and livestock production, CFS can enhance food security, improve farmer livelihoods, and protect the environment. Small-scale farmers, who often practice diverse and sustainable farming methods, are crucial to CFS success.
Ultimately, CFS seeks to decouple food production from resource consumption. By optimising water, nutrient, and energy cycles, CFS can increase agricultural yields, build resilience to climate change, and create economic opportunities, especially for women and young people.
The ‘Circular Food Systems in Africa’ project will incorporate the above ideas and build upon our recently finished, Transforming Irrigation in Southern Africa project (TISA; 2013-23; LWR/2016/137), which rebooted dysfunctional small holder irrigation schemes into functional and efficient agricultural systems generating many community benefits. The TISA research saw unrealised opportunities in these communities to integrate dry land and livestock production and utilise idle or under-utilised infrastructure. TISA research showed that socio-economic benefits increased for those households who proved small-scale services or further processing businesses, and the nature of multi-livelihood activities means there is a complex and synergistic relationship between farming and non-farming activities. It is in this context we hypothesise that strategic development of complementary small and medium sized business can form CFS that enable local communities to achieve a step change in sustainable development and rural economic development.
Objectives
The CFS project aims to test how the global concept of circular food systems can be applied in Mozambique, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. The research will explore how integrating irrigation, livestock and dryland agricultural production based on existing water and land use can accelerate rural development and circularity through tighter water, carbon, and nutrient cycling, without increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Our objectives are:
- To identify conditions for the successful establishment of circular food systems (centred on irrigation schemes serving smallholder farming communities).
- To identify approaches to improve gender equality and social inclusion in CFS and local food systems and the conditions that improve food security and livelihoods.
- To investigate whether CFS results in decoupling resource use from increasing socio-economic benefit and enable more resilient communities and low-emission agriculture.
Project outcomes
Intermediate outcomes
- Project interventions have resulted in the establishment of new businesses that add value to natural resources used in agriculture.
- Natural resource use is quantified and monitored to identify the extent of socio-economic benefits derived from further use of limited natural resources.
- Businesses fostered by the project are profitable and are being used as models for further development in the private and public sectors.
- Women, youth, and other under-served groups are significantly engaged in CFS businesses and other governance processes.
Our intended long term outcomes:
- Evidence base for CFS. A stronger evidence base is developed on how CFS interventions use natural resources (particularly water and land) more productively and create more sustainable local food systems and resilient rural communities in a changing climate.
- Decoupling of growth and resource use. A stronger evidence base is developed on how CFS interventions support decoupling of growth in social and economic benefits (including local livelihood opportunities for women and youth) from consumption of natural resources.
- Scaling out. A stronger evidence base is developed on how CFS interventions have the capacity to be self-sustaining and scale out autonomously and can be scaled out through policy reform at the district, provincial and national scales.
- Gender. The interventions improve leadership and decision making of women, youth, and other underserved groups and promote their access to economic assets and opportunities.
The initial research will conclude in mid-2026, but we are hoping that during this phase that additional support will be secured to be able expand and extend activities for up to ten years.