No development project in the sustainable-ag world generates more controversy than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations' efforts around agriculture in Africa.
On the one hand, Gates officials say they have learned the hard lessons of the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s -- the one that, funded by U.S. foundation cash, brought the genius of industrial agriculture to the global south (except for Africa, where it failed).
Surveying the wreckage of the farm sector in India -- site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative success -- the Gates people say they won't promote huge irrigation projects or push agrichemicals as a panacea for Africa.
On the other hand, Gates plucked a 25-year Monsanto veteran named Rob Horsch as "as senior program officer, focusing on improving crop yields in sub-Saharan Africa," and hasn't been exactly transparent about what precisely it's up to over there.
In last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, David Reiff has published what I think might be the most evenhanded article I've seen on the foundation's controversial effort.
Reiff travels to Tanzania and talks to Gates officials working on the ground to bolster domestic markets and "improve" seed genetics. The officials swear they aren't pushing genetically modified seed technology; and one official, Joseph DeVries, insists that the green revolution that he's pushing relies on locally adapted crops that "produced high yields without large quantities of pesticides and fertilizers that small farmers could not afford."
They strain to say the right things, but they can't quite veer away from there-is-no-alternative rhetoric. Here's Reiff describing his conversation with DeVries:
"The choices that confront African farmers and the world at large," he went on, are simple and stark: "Either we will increase agricultural yields on the lands now under cultivation, or the combination of low yields and population increase will force smallholders" -- small farmers -- "to cut down virgin forest lands and cultivate them. There are no other realistic possibilities."
No mention of low-tech ways of boosting yields through biodiversity and compost; no mention of local agricultural knowledge.
Reiff also gives a broad hearing to Gates' prominent critics, including Stuffed and Starved author Raj Patel, the Indian organic-agriculture pioneer Vandana Shiva, and Peter Rosset of Via Campesina.
They criticize the Foundation for its lack of democratic accountability and its ties with the very agrichemical firms that it strains to distance itself from. Reiff quotes ETC Group lamenting "a growing trend toward privatization of foreign aid, and the fusing of the private sector with governments."
I think that nails it. The public sector in Africa withdrew from agriculture -- pressured by the IMF and World Bank -- and U.S. food aid has for decades focused on delivering U.S.-grown surplus commodities, not rebuilding food networks. In the ensuing food crisis, there's been a vacuum of leadership and resources, into which the Gates Foundation has stepped, with no obligation of democratic accountability.
When ag policy and foreign aid gets privatized, can we be surprised if private interests impose their agendas? Like Raj Patel, I accept that the Gates folks have the purest of motives in the Africa project. But I wonder how, without a mandate from and accountability to the people they're trying to help -- Africa's farmers -- they can possibly avoid the colossal blunders of the first green revolution.
Do diesel-based farmers dream of electric tractors?
Copenhagen climate summit (part 1): the expectations
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Jonas Posted 10:41 pm
17 Oct 2008
Norman Borlaug responds:
"If [environmentalists] lived for just one month among the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals."
Tom, have you ever lived and farmed in Africa?
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Wolverine Posted 3:03 am
18 Oct 2008
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Delay And Deny Posted 3:13 am
18 Oct 2008
In America there are 1.9 billion acres of land.
Yet, 75 percent of our population lives on 66 million of those!
Far from destroying the planet, we are paupers when it comes to the amount of land that each person has.
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Jonas Posted 10:24 pm
18 Oct 2008
Scientists don't think that way. They look at reality. And what did they find?
They found that if you give people a certain level of development and security, their fertility rates drop. Look at Europe, Japan, China, Russia,... these regions even have declining populations.
Now where do you find the highest fertility rate on the planet? Exactly, in the world's most food insecure regions: Central Africa, 7 kids per woman, and populations booming.
The best thing to do is to help speed up the transition towards lower fertility rates in these countries, which implies food security and working agricultural systems - that's the sine qua non for development.
Next up follows a transition from agrarian to (post)industrial societies, a stabilisation of populations levels, and then a decline.
Even a typical 'developing' country like Brazil recently announced that it's population will begin to decline from 2035 onwards. Can you imagine? Brazil! Well, guess what, the country has also massively succeeded in boosting food security and in raising rural incomes.
So get of your simplistic horse please. The real choice is between: high fertility rates and rapidly growing populations who keep dieing and living in misery, on the one hand, and the 'long road' to modernity and ultimately declining populations.
The latter is better for the environment (and obviously so for people too, because starving is not so pleasant, in case you wonder.)
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Jonas Posted 10:33 pm
18 Oct 2008
Then you can learn what farmers there want. Because now all you do is project your right-wing bourgeois ideas on the world, ideas that can only come from someone who lives in opulent luxury and has not the vaguest clue about the reality on the ground.
Or you can start by reading the actual words of a farmer in Malawi. Here, the BBC made the trip for you:
Seeking Africa's green revolution
October 2008.
From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - a minor agricultural miracle.
[...]
And it is not only maize. There are hybrids for every local crop - cassava, sweet potato, soya, ground nuts and legumes.
But the most remarkable thing about these "miracle seeds" is that many are not new at all.
"They have been with us for decades, but they never made it to the fields," says Agra's Fred Muhhuku, an expert on agronomics in East Africa.
"Traditionally, farmers have either been too poor or too afraid to take a chance on these new varieties, even though they can triple their yields," he explained.
"If they plant their hardy traditional strains, they know that come drought or flood, some crop will survive to harvest. The harvest will be tiny - maybe 800kg per hectare - but it is guaranteed, so they take no chances."
The result was six successive years of food shortage in Malawi - beginning in 2000.
"And there was no lack of rains, I can tell you," says Dr Jeffrey Luhanga, technical co-ordinator at the Ministry for Agriculture.
"I experienced the famine in 2005; there were lines of people queuing for food aid.
"The thing you have to remember is that these were the ones who were still strong enough to walk to the depots. The hungriest - the ones who really needed the food - they were stuck at home, starving.
"Now look around Malawi, you see only healthy faces. Yes, this is a green revolution. And it is being driven by science."
He reels off a list of programmes - irrigation, agronomy, planting patterns, science-based economic practices.
"These technologies have been in our research institutes for years, but they went nowhere. Now, for the first time, the technology is in the farmers' hands."
[...]
"We hear this accusation from western development workers. We are told 'why make farmers buy seeds every year? Why let the companies trap you?' But this is based on a misunderstanding. Storing the hybrid seeds - it takes a lot of technical knowledge.
"The farmers can stick to their traditional ways. But the yields are not worth their sweat."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7651977.stm
Wolverine, you too can get rid of your misunderstandings. Just book the ticket. Norman Borlaug aks this from you. It's the least you can do.
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Whiskerfish Posted 1:21 am
19 Oct 2008
my feeling is that many African farmers 'cry out' for industrial ag because that's what's presented to them as being 'modern' and they can see the reliable yields that it delivers.
There's little question that many traditional 'slash and burn' techniques used in Africa are inadequate, unreliable and (yes) environmentally-damaging.
But all over the continent there are people very successfully building eco-friendly and highly productive farms using permaculture techniques and the like. They just don't have access to the politicians, marketing budgets and so on that the Monsantos do.
The fertilizer subsidies in Malawi have boosted yields: We need to ask, though, 'is there a better way'?
Cheers
Whiskerfish
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Avelhingst Posted 3:50 pm
19 Oct 2008
What, then, happens to peasants who take initiative and improve their soils and hence their crop yields? Who knows! The effemeral nature of land tenure or rights-of-access in many African countries cannot but stymie efforts of farmers. If someone likes your land (say, a corrupt petty government officer) and can appropriate it through intimidation, then what incentive does said farmer have to improve his or her farm?
The night grows old. Perhaps I should sleep and feel more optimistic in the morning. However, tonight it lays before me like an arid plain; nigh insurmountable.
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