In his first annual letter on the doings at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates devotes a page to his foundation’s efforts to boost agriculture in Africa.
Like the software wizard he once was, Gates identifies a problem and conjures up a solution. The problem is that African food production has stagnated while population has grown; the solution is to develop “new seeds” and make available “other inputs like fertilizer” so that farmers can “increase ... output significantly.”
That, in a nutshell, is what happened in the U.S., Western Europe, and to a lesser extent India over the past half-century with the rise of industrial agriculture. Gates wants to repackage it for Africa, in what he calls a “new Green Revolution.”
The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?
A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.
The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa—and build food security and soil fertility in unison.
The model of development that Gates favors—essentially moving in the direction of nearly post-agricultural Western societies—may be a relic of an era of cheap fossil energy and low awareness of ecological costs. Other ways of progress exist—and I wish our most influential and best-funded foundation would explore them.
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Comments
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EnviroFan Posted 1:16 am
27 Jan 2009
Let's make this place better.
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archigeek Posted 1:16 am
27 Jan 2009
The mellotron is your friend.
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Stephanie Ogburn Posted 2:08 am
27 Jan 2009
The problem (a common one) seems to be that the basic research question asked by groups such as the Gates Foundation: How can we move farmers into the production agriculture model? This question takes as an essential premise that entering the realm of production agriculture is unequivocally good for farmers.
Yet anyone who has paid attention to the plight of farmers and farmlands in both the developed and developing world could find abundant evidence that production agriculture leads to an overall decline of the number people making a good living on the land. And that's not even taking into account ecological costs resulting from the transition to Green Revolution-style agriculture.
If influential organizations like the Gates Foundation would take a fair look at the sorts of farmers who are thriving in today's environment (smallish, local, organic, innovative, ecological) and ask the question: "How can we get farmers in developing nations to have the success that these farmers are having?" I bet they would come up with a vastly different development model.
Stephanie
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Delay And Deny Posted 5:01 am
27 Jan 2009
The biggest killer of Africans was not using DDT.
The UN now approves usage there.
People who delayed or denied use of DDT did not help the situation.
You know you're not a liberal when...
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Whiskerfish Posted 6:37 am
27 Jan 2009
A big problem with DDT was that mosquitos were becoming resistant to it -- before it was phased out.
And now that outdoor use has soared again in many countries, we are seeing unprecedented deformities of young crocodiles, fish being wiped out of streams, and, well, we know the birds of prey will be next.
Crawl back in to your hole, bailo.
Whiskerfish in Africa
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Solacel Posted 5:56 am
28 Jan 2009
Nancy Miller, RN
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