Feeding the Future: Cultivating Resilience and Food Security in Congo

A chartered truck carrying seeds makes its way to Congo. The timeframe is tight but feasible to have the material arrive just in time before the rainy season starts so the crops can be planted and later harvested. However, the truck was delayed in several borders by customs and an important documentation was missing.

The truck nearly missed the planting window, but in that year the rain started pouring later than expected. As the rains slightly poured, the seeds could be planted. Climate change played a favorable role in this case, emphasizing the delicate balance between climate change impacts and food security as it is not always that the outcomes would have had a favorable effect on the food chain.

Food security is a major issue that underlines the availability, accessibility, and affordability of food. Nearly 350 million people experience extreme hunger in the World and only in the DRC, this number sums up to 26 million according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). Among conflicts and the rise of costs as factors for the food crisis, risky weather events become more intense, threatening agricultural production, and disrupting local and global food supply. 

Climate change directly affects food availability by impacting crop and animal productivity. In some cases, having stability in the food supplies is not only a basic need but also a means of earning income to survive and to keep the productivity cycle for internal and external supply.

The predictions are that climate change will be (if not already) a contributing factor driving trends in poverty and food insecurity, determined by overall socio-economic development and vulnerability.

A nation of contrasts, DRC boasts one of the richest agricultural potentials in Africa but faces overwhelming levels of food insecurity linked to unpredictable rainy seasons, low standard of agricultural practices, and irregular mining practices increasing deforestation and biodiversity loss.

Efforts to address food security in a country that faces a 9-month rainy season can be a multi-dimensional challenge, not only due to the pressing climate change matters but also because solutions must also consider economic instability of prices and inflation, civil unrest that constantly disrupts food distribution and a high population growth where the demand for food increases faster than the ability to produce it.

To tackle some of the concerns, the DRC’s Ministry of Agriculture launched a 15-year National Program together with the World Food Programme and the World Bank to provide support to agricultural development and to set up a financing mechanism to protect small farmers against possible losses caused by climate adversity.

The initiative aims to help family farming structures move towards market-oriented agriculture, develop the agricultural capacities of small farmers, improve transport infrastructure, and increase investment in agricultural research.

The project’s results are seen as quantifiable advancements in capacity building and societal engagement. However, it is worth considering an additional range of relevant and strategic actions to promote investment in food storage systems to face extreme weather events; diversify food sources to reduce supply risk and hence encourage sustainable crop rotation; develop water management systems aiming to reduce crop damage from floods; stimulate reforestation initiatives; increase credit lines to small farmers; and to raise investment to boost the research and development of climate-resilient food crops.

On a different note, agricultural and food systems can contribute to mitigating climate change while the focus on a food security approach is kept. According to the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), this mitigation potential in agriculture can be directly linked to managing land carbon stocks.

One alternative to managing these “land stocks” is to dissociate production growth from emissions growth by adopting sustainable practices and making changes throughout the entire food production chain to reduce emissions per kilogram of food output.

Sustainable management of crops and livestock production would enable the capture and storage of carbon in biomass and soil, known as Carbon Farming, which would avoid emissions. This can be a pivotal win in the long term.

Much work remains to be done to achieve food security across DRC and Africa in general, as well as in terms of regional and international cooperation. But it is also important to stress that DRC can play an important role in paving the way for climate change mitigation.