Will Allen: Growing power—and gaining influence in development circles, too. At the Clinton Global Initiative wrap-up on Friday, ex-President Clinton made waves in the sustainable-ag world by declaring Will Allen of Milwaukee/Chicago-based based Growing Power his “hero.”
The real news was buried in the press release, though. Toward the bottom of a listing of verbal “commitments” from NGOs and foundations, we find this:
Growing Power commits to strengthen food security for school children and their care givers in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Growing Power will build a new model of local food systems to ensure adequate nutrition in the short-term and build a long-term foundation for competitive African human capital in the global market place.
So Growing Power will be bringing its community-based, low-input style of agriculture to Africa—under the aegis of a group most known for its top-down, Big Solution way of development work.
I got Erika Allen, daughter of Growing Power founder Will and leader of the group’s Chicago operations, on the phone Monday to talk about the announcement.
She told me that in the current phase, Growing Power is hoping to raise $2 million to get its Africa initiative started. (The Clinton Global Initiative doesn’t so much fund specific projects as match funders with projects.)
Allen described the proposed initiative as a “cultural exchange”—Growing Power reps would be learning about how food production currently works in South Africa and Zimbabwe; looking closely at local assets, resources, gaps, and needs. And food-system actors from those places would visit Growing Power sites in the United States—not just at the flagship enterprises in Milwaukee and Chicago, but also at partner projects in Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Mississippi.
From there, Growing Power and its partners in southern Africa would work on “modifying our production systems to local resources there.”
She stressed that what works in Milwaukee won’t necessarily fly in Zimbabwe. Here in the United States, Growing Power essentially siphons off some of the enormous food waste generated by a modern U.S. city and transforms it into fertile soil, which is then used to grow food. But African cities generate less compostable waste.
Erika Allen of Growing Power. “The challenge will be to find the systems that work in areas with less excess,” Allen told me. She cited Growing Power’s aquaculture setup, where waste from tilapia tanks is used to fertilize watercress, one example of a low-input system that could work in Africa.
“Overall, it’s about helping people use their resources to build soil and grow food,” she said.
In a single sentence, Allen had articulated a vision completely counter to the top-down model of development that has dominated U.S. policy since at least the Cold War—the agricultural model most famously promoted by the recently deceased Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug. In this model, imported agrichemicals and seed varieties provide the path to food security in the global south. And trade is venerated with an almost religious zeal—nations should only produce food insofar as they have a “comparative advantage” in a particular crop. “High-value” crops like fresh produce should be exported to the industrialized north, where consumers can pay top dollar for them; “low-value” staple crops should be imported when expedient.
Make no mistake—even though more than a billion people globally lack sufficient access to food and farmers in the global south operate in a state of permanent crisis, that model still dominates today. The “Millennium Villages” concept for Africa championed by Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs hinges on “new advances in science and technology.” To help boost food security, these showcase villages receive subsidies for imported fertilizers and seeds.
And the Gates Foundation, which has been organizing a massive attempt to transform food production in Africa, has made a game attempt to be open to new models of ag development. But as Annie Stattuck, Raj Patel, and Eric Holt-Gimenez show in an excellent recent article in The Nation, the overall thrust has been in the direction of high-tech “solutions” to the continent’s food problems.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration has recently taken a deep bow to the conventional ag-development gods, by putting agrichemical-industry stalwarts in charge of both agriculture negotiations at global trade talks and USDA-funded research. Analyzing the latter appointment, that of the Monsanto-affiliated Roger Beachy to lead the USDA’s new National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Science blog recently wrote that:
Beachy’s interests in biotechnology and the developing world closely match those of his new boss, USDA’s Under Secretary for Research Rajiv Shah. They also fit with President Barack Obama’s desire to increase agricultural assistance to developing countries.
The Growing Power initiative points to a new direction. In place of costly and often ecologically and socially ruinous high-tech methods, the Allens present a vision of appropriate technology: techniques that communities can own and manage themselves, without the perpetual need to commit precious resources to toxic agrichemicals and patent-protected seeds.
As debate rages about how to “feed the world” amid population growth, climate change, and fossil-fuel depletion, projects like this one are critical. I’ll be watching it closely.
USDA’s Deputy Secretary discusses local, organic farming
Seeking sustainability, finding skeptics at the American Farm Bureau meeting
Russ Parsons on launching a civil, inclusive food-system debate
Comments
View as Flat
mtvyfan Posted 2:45 pm
28 Sep 2009
Permalink
Whiskerfish Posted 4:41 pm
28 Sep 2009
Some groups I know of have been operational for almost 30 years, and have devised an array of methods to build soil cheaply, organically and easily in a huge variety of conditions.
I hope that Allen's crowd realises this and acts with the appropriate respect -- because the story of international do-gooders who come in with the best of intentions on paper, and then try to dominate funding streams while simultaneously failing to co-operate with locals who have been in the trench-gardens for a very long time is by now a depressingly familiar one.
The reason that some community gardens have failed is because South Africa's commercial, chem-intensive agricultural system produces veg rather cheaply, and there is really no open land to farm in many intensively-settled urban shackland areas, where the tin-and-plastic houses are put up right against each other. People in poor areas often aspire to being lawyers and doctors -- urban people, not farmers with their hands in the dirt. Urban farming is all to close to the rural subsistence life that many have fled.
It's fashionable to rail against Big Ag, and any fool can see the problems with the big chem-oil system, but the meltdown in Zimbabwe shows one what happens when productive, modern monocultural farms disappear from the scene overnight. Their output has not been easily replaced by small-scale organic farming.
South African grassroots farmers know how to build soil. What they need is help to make local and national policiticians accountable, and a restructuring of markets to make their efforts viable.
It remains to be seen how Allen's efforts can help with this.
Best
Adam Welz
(South African, currently in New York)
Permalink
minifarms Posted 7:28 pm
28 Sep 2009
I have taught organic, no-till workshops in several African countries. It works. The farmers do not buy anything, from anybody for their farms. That does not sit well with many people.
Ken Hargesheimer, (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
//
var l=new Array();
var output = '';
l[0]='>';l[1]='a';l[2]='/';l[3]='';l[24]='\"';l[25]=' 109';l[26]=' 111';l[27]=' 99';l[28]=' 46';l[29]=' 108';l[30]=' 105';l[31]=' 97';l[32]=' 109';l[33]=' 103';l[34]=' 64';l[35]=' 115';l[36]=' 109';l[37]=' 114';l[38]=' 97';l[39]=' 102';l[40]=' 105';l[41]=' 110';l[42]=' 105';l[43]=' 109';l[44]=':';l[45]='o';l[46]='t';l[47]='l';l[48]='i';l[49]='a';l[50]='m';l[51]='\"';l[52]='=';l[53]='f';l[54]='e';l[55]='r';l[56]='h';l[57]='a ';l[58]='
Permalink
jaginsburg Posted 2:07 pm
29 Sep 2009
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to tag along with a group of environmental lawyers being given a tour of Growing Power's flagship farm by Will Allen himself (afterwards, they gamely rolled up their sleeves and began digging a six foot-deep trench that will become part of a water harvesting system). Although nothing Allen is doing is completely unique, the scale, detail and clarity of message were riveting. This is biomimicry on a grand scale, an elegant collection of interconnected ecosystems where inputs and outputs endlessly cycle. There is a real joy when someone figures out yet another product to harvest from the farm (e.g., a windrow of vermicompost is piled against an outside wall of a greenhouse to provide insulation and heat - this is Wisconsin after all...)
Allen's work is a variation on a theme also brilliantly played Joel Salatin and Willie Smits. (If anyone's interested - http://tinyurl.com/ybu2ks4).
To Adam Welz' point that urban agriculture is already alive and well in Africa, I would very surprised if Allen's "Growing Power" staff were not respectful of that. In fact, I suspect this is going to a genuine exchange, with ideas flowing in both directions, not only about farming, but distribution, marketing, recycling, water harvesting and biofuels (Growing Power just finished up a demonstration test converting waste to acetic acid, which diluted is a good fertilizer, but can also serve as a feedstock for biofuels and bioplastics.)
I edit an aggregator - http://www.TrackerNews.net - that focuses on health issues, humanitarian work and technology that supports both. TrackerNews is a little unusual in that stories appear as groups of contextually related links, which can include research as well as breaking news stories. It's very v.1, but even in its proto state has some nice texture. The grouping on urban agriculture includes a couple of links to the RUAF Foundation. For those interested in learning more about what's already happening in Africa, Asia and South America, here's a link to their "Urban Agriculture" webzine: http://www.ruaf.org/node/2066 (page down for links to individual articles). The current issue about "Resilient Cities" is terrific.
Permalink
gaiapunk Posted 2:30 pm
29 Sep 2009
For more info about Growing power and will Allen see:
http://punkrockpermaculture.com/2009/07/18/heroes-profile-will-allen-leader-in-urban-farming/
Permalink
stockexplosion2 Posted 8:00 pm
29 Sep 2009
http://www.pennystockexplosion.com
Permalink
Kiara Posted 12:50 pm
30 Sep 2009
Permalink