Back in the 1960s, Africa and Asia each produced about one metric ton of food per hectare under cultivation. Today, Africa still produces one, but Asia now produces around four. What changed for Asia’s fields and rice paddies was the incredible rise in agricultural productivity now remembered as the Green Revolution. The revolution was marked by the introduction of technologically advanced farming techniques – more mechanization, more fertilizer and hybridized seeds -- particularly in India and the Philippines. Today, some believe that despite limited water supplies and a weak infrastructure, Africa may have a similar miracle on the way. “There should be no doubt in your mind that a green revolution is possible 5 to 10 years from today,” says Dr. Namanga Ngongi, the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Robert Sagna, minister of agriculture for Senegal from 1993 to 2000, also believes a green revolution is possible in Africa. “If the political will is there to make major structural reforms and allocate the right resources,” he says, “it can be done.” If the backing for Ngongi’s group is any indication, the political will does seem to be there, at least on the international level. Ngongi’s organization is chaired by Kofi Annan, the former UN Secretary-General, and backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, the latter a major supporter of a number of key institutions and initiatives that led to the first Green Revolution. Certainly, the need to grow more food is there. In the sub-Sahara, the poorest part of the continent, 265 million people, or 32 percent of the region’s population, don’t get enough to eat each day, according to 2009 UN Food and Agriculture Organization figures. Even as the number of malnourished people in the developing world has fallen – it dropped from 32 percent in 1970 to 17 percent in 2007 -- Africa’s level of malnutrition has remained stubbornly high, according to FAO figures. Overall, the World Bank estimates that in 2005, 51 percent of sub-Saharan people lived on less than $1.25 a day, 2 percent less than in 1980, with a lower mean consumption level than any other region in the world – just $0.73 in 2005. Despite widespread water shortages, some experts say there are places where agriculture could thrive on the huge continent (a land mass so vast that China, Europe and the United States could all fit comfortably inside it). In the 1980s, for example, before Zimbabwe’s current descent into economic hell, well-run farms and an advanced national agricultural research system briefly gave the country the distinction of being home to some of the highest-yielding maize fields in the world, higher even than in the United States. But as the Zimbabwe example suggests, political stability and advanced infrastructure can’t be taken for granted in Africa. Some critics argue that the kind of state-of-the-art farming that tends to be associated with the idea of a green revolution might not be sustainable for farmers trying to manage with weak energy and transportation systems. The Obstacles Are DauntingSkeptics of high-tech farming’s prospects in Africa say that only more advanced economies have the cash, technology and expertise to manage sophisticated electrical systems and seed distribution networks. They argue that it’s a tall order in Africa, given that less than 24 percent of sub-Saharan people have access to electricity, according to World Bank figures. In some countries, even major roads can become impassable in certain seasons. Modern farming is a machine that requires a lot of maintenance, critics say. If a distribution system begins to break down, as it did in Zimbabwe, it can take only three years for all the productivity gains to be lost, because new hybrid seeds need to be introduced every year, says James McCann, a professor of African history at Boston University and author of Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Harvard, 2005). Indeed, McCann has written that maize became Africa’s leading crop precisely because it didn’t require a lot of fuss in its cultivation – an important consideration in areas wracked by war, ethnic conflict and other upheavals. Some experts argue that extremely sensitive development will be needed if this green revolution is to avoid serious unintended consequences, including environmental destruction and perhaps, ultimately, even an increase in agricultural precariousness. However, Ngongi says African agriculture is at such a low base now that even modest improvements could have an outsize impact. When it comes to fertilizer, for instance, farmers use only 8 or 9 kilograms per hectare in the sub-Sahara, compared with 150 kilograms in India and 300 in China. Even going from 9 to 30 kilograms could produce a dramatic rise in yield, says the Nairobi-based agronomist. Other kinds of changes could also lead to major productivity gains, according to Ngongi and Sagna. In Senegal, for example, improved irrigation systems, better highways and roads, easier access to electricity and potable water and a more carefully tended countryside would all help advance the state of agriculture, Sagna says. The Malawi MiracleIndeed, a government productivity program in Malawi, in southern central Africa, has already demonstrated that real gains are possible. For ten years in a row, small landlocked Malawi, roughly the size of Greece, had been a constant recipient of food aid. Finally, after the failure of the 2005 crop, President Bingu wa Mutharika decided he had had enough. Over the objections of the International Monetary Fund, which reportedly opposed the idea of subsidizing Malawi farmers (although Mutharika supporters have noted that American, European and Japanese farmers are all heavily subsidized), Mutharika set up a program that issued fertilizer and hybridized seeds at a subsidized price. The result: a harvest in 2006 double the size of the 2005 crop, and when the program was repeated in 2007, an even larger harvest than in 2006. Now, for five years in a row, Malawians have brought in larger and larger harvests – and today this poor, densely populated country of 15 million is exporting food to its neighbors. More importantly, it is exporting an approach some are calling the Malawi Miracle to nearly a dozen other African countries. Some critics, however, including GRAIN, a nonprofit group that advocates organic development for small farmers worldwide, argue that the program has significant shortcomings, particularly for encouraging what they claim is an unsustainable use of chemical fertilizer and hybrid maize. Other agronomists, however, see it is an important step forward. “Malawi is a shining example that a green revolution is possible,” says Ngongi. “The Malawi Miracle can serve as an example for many African countries,” Sagna agrees. “It’s worked just as well in India and in Bangladesh. Giving small producers better equipment, better training and more access to credit can lead to rapid improvements in production.” Beware the Unintended ConsequencesOf course, most revolutions have unintended consequences, and some critics warn that a green revolution may be no exception. Speaking from Ethiopia, McCann says that a focus on just one attribute can have a terrible outcome. “When the focus is purely on increasing yield or disease resistance or drought resistance . . . the unintended consequences are the ones that you have to watch out for,” he says. For example, he says, in a case he is researching for a book right now, an outside aid group gave special high-performing hybridized maize and fertilizer to a group of Ethiopian farmers. The farmers loved the maize, which increased production to eight tons per hectare, from two tons. However, the new variety had a terrible side effect: it created much more pollen, and pollen, it turns out, is an almost perfect food for all kinds of larvae – particularly mosquitoes, a serious problem in a region prone to malaria. “It’s like dumping gasoline on a fire,” McCann says. “It doesn’t cause malaria, but it accelerates it.” In areas where the special variety is used, he says, people contracted malaria at a rate ten times higher than normal for the region. Although this phenomenon was well-known to health specialists, it came as a total surprise to the agricultural scientists, according to McCann. “The health people never talked to the agricultural people,” he says. For McCann, the lesson is not necessarily to stick with old methods of food production, but rather to proceed with some awareness of the possible impact of the new variety outside of yield. “Of course, try, but . . . one has to understand the agro-ecological context, not just the pure science of new seed types,” he says. Ultimately, McCann argues, tremendous difficulties often arise out of a yearning for simple solutions to complex problems, such as hunger or malaria.
The calls from African voices are mounting for international donors to stop funding programs that promote an extractive model of industrial agriculture in Africa, including the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). A new letter signed by all 35 members of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), Africa’s largest civil society network, along with a growing list of international organizations, demands that donors redirect funding from AGRA and other Green Revolution programs to African-led efforts to expand agroecology and other low-input farming systems. AFSA members elaborated on the demands of the letter during a virtual press conference on September 2. Next week, AFSA will deliver the letter to AGRA donors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and U.S., British, German, Dutch and Canadian governments, during AGRA’s annual Green Revolution Forum. In June, AFSA sent a letter to AGRA donors asking for evidence that the program is benefiting African farmers. AFSA received few replies and no evidence, prompting the public letter. Two Visions for Agriculture in Africa During the press conference, Million Belay, general coordinator of AFSA, stressed that the vision of agriculture promoted by AGRA is wildly at odds with the vision of African farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, faith-based institutions, women’s networks, and civil society at large. The first vision, the Green Revolution, has very powerful proponents backing it, including corporations, governments and government agencies, and philanthropists like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explained Belay. The Green Revolution promotes intensive monocultural commodity crop production and heavy reliance on chemical inputs, agrichemicals, artificial fertilizers and pesticides. Converting farmers to commercial seeds and chemical use comes at a cost to famers, by increasing their dependence on corporations, and to the environment. This vision has had its chance to play out in Africa over the past 15 years under the leadership of AGRA. According to AFSA’s letter, “AGRA uses its financial leverage to encourage African governments to focus on boosting agricultural yields at the expense of hunger and poverty on the continent, including centuries of exploitation of the continent’s people and natural resources that have not benefited Africans.” Recent analysis by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s Senior Advisor Timothy A. Wise confirms that AGRA’s program has failed to increase yields substantially and sustainably, instead increasing hunger. According to Wise, “After 15 years and one billion dollars in outside funding, AGRA has failed to catalyze a productivity revolution in African agriculture. Farmers’ yields have not grown significantly, poverty remains endemic, and the number of chronically hungry people in AGRA’s 13 focus countries increased 30 percent. It is time for donors to listen to African farmers and community leaders.” AGRA itself has not produced any compelling evidence of the program’s effectiveness. The Agroecological Alternative The rallying cry of African civil society is not that funders stop investing in African agriculture. Rather, they are demanding that donors fund a different model of agriculture that is “democratic and responsive to the people at the heart of agriculture”—an agroecology system based on sustainable practices, equity and justice. Director of the Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya and a member of AFSA Anne Maina said, “We are here to state clearly and categorically that the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa does not speak for Africans.” African farmers want to be able to produce healthy, nutritious, culturally appropriate food that positively impacts the environment, Belay expressed during the press conference. They want their right to food respected and protected. They want to practice agroecology. “Farmers all over Africa have shown far more promising results sharing knowledge and working with scientists to establish low-input farming methods that leave the control of production in the hands of African farmers,” reads the letter. “What African farmers need is support to find communal solutions that increase climate resilience, rather than top-down profit-driven industrial-scale farming systems,” said Francesca de Gasparis, the executive director of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI). SAFCEI, too, initiated a letter signed by nearly 500 community faith leaders and sent to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation sent no reply. A Moment for Action The press conference fell strategically in the leadup to the U.N. Food Systems Summit schedule for September 23. With AGRA President Agnes Kalibata the U.N. special envoy to the summit, there is potential for the summit to devolve into a promotional forum for AGRA to renew its funding. Mariann Bassey-Orovwuje of Friends of the Earth Africa appealed directly to donors during the press conference, asking them to stop imposing schemes for industrialized agriculture on African farmers and communities. In the leadup to the U.N. Food Systems Summit and AGRA’s probable fundraising campaign, it is crucial that donors heed the call. “If a fraction of the billions of dollars that has passed through the coffers of AGRA had been given to an actual small-scale farmer who actually feed us, we would have healthy, nutritious, diverse food and enough food to feed our continent,” said Bassey-Orovwuje. Image courtesy of Maria Zardoya, Unsplash |