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Africa needs markets,
as well as technology, for a green revolution to take root NORMAN BORLAUG,
who won the Nobel peace prize in 1970 for his role in the green revolution,
remains as sturdy and “high-yielding” as the varieties of wheat he helped to
invent. Last week, at the age of 92, he gave a stirring lecture in
Washington, DC, calling for a renewed effort to bring his revolution to
Africa, the one continent it bypassed first time around.
As if in answer to his
plea, the Rockefeller Foundation, Mr Borlaug's former employer, and the
Gates Foundation—run by Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and his wife
Melinda—said this week they would devote $150m over five years to the
cause. Some of this money ($63m) will be spent training more crop
scientists and breeding new seed varieties suited to sub-Saharan Africa's
parched climate, denuded soils and stubborn pests. But the two foundations,
appreciating that technology is not the only obstacle, will spend almost as
much ($61m) on the distribution of seeds as on their discovery. They will,
for example, help village retailers and seed wholesalers set up in business,
and push for financial reforms that would enable farmers and their suppliers
to get credit.
The money is welcome,
because crop science of the sort Mr Borlaug made famous has fallen out of
fashion in recent decades. The International Rice Research Institute, for
example, lost a quarter of its core funding between 2001 and 2003. These
days biotechnology is mainly a profit-driven enterprise, creating seeds for
big farms, often in rich countries. This skews its research, says Michael
Lipton, of the University of Sussex. Herbicide-resistant crops, for
example, allow weeds to be killed chemically, rather than plucked manually.
This might reduce the demand for farm labour, which is scarce in rich
countries, but in need of employment in poor ones.
But the sums announced
this week, spread across as many as 20 countries, are not much in the scheme
of things. The World Bank, for example, lent $537m to Africa for rural
development in fiscal 2005 alone, without exciting much media interest.
More importantly, the member governments of the African Union promised in
Maputo in 2003 to devote at least a tenth of their budgets to agriculture by
2008, a scale of resources orders of magnitude greater than the Gates and
Rockefeller millions.
This matters, because
the green revolution's triumph in Asia owed as much to political commitment
as it did to technical ingenuity. As Peter Timmer, a fellow at the Centre
for Global Development, points out, Asian nations were too big to rely on
food imports and too proud to depend indefinitely on the food aid America
offered in return for loyalty in the cold war. New technologies were a
necessary condition for the green revolution, but not a sufficient one. It
succeeded because Asian governments made sure their farmers, big and small,
were able and willing to avail themselves of fertiliser, irrigation and
connections to markets. If Mr Borlaug was the father of the revolution,
political necessity was its mother. Continue in next
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Why
did Africa fail to emulate this success? Neither nature nor technology is
the answer, according to a recent book on the subject*. Seed varieties
suited to Africa's difficult conditions—where crops are watered by
intermittent rains, not by a reliable system of irrigation—were invented.
The first synthetic maize was released in Kenya in 1961 and even lowly
cassava, a starchy root vegetable, benefited from genetic embellishments in
the 1970s. But with some exceptions Africa's governments saw the new seeds
and fertiliser as a way to secure political favour, not the food supply. In
Nigeria credit and subsidies were hogged by “absentee farmers, retired civil
servants and soldiers”. Ethiopia's poor roads left the country's markets so
fragmented that in 2001 smallholders in one part of the country were almost
ruined by a glut, even as farmers elsewhere were ruined by drought.
Farmers in sub-Saharan
Africa now use only about 9kg of fertiliser per hectare on average, compared
with 142kg in South-East Asia. Their reluctance has been put down to
ignorance (farmers do not appreciate the benefits of fertiliser until they
have tried it), timidity (they are wary of upfront commitments of money and
prefer farming that delivers a reliable, even if low, return) or illiquidity
(farmers cannot get the credit they need to afford seeds and fertiliser).
Food, glorious food Few
countries have ever enjoyed an industrial revolution without first
undergoing a revolution in agriculture, a point both Mr Gates and Mr Timmer
are keen to stress. Besides, raising yields on smallholder farms would have
happy distributional consequences. Food is doubly important to the poor,
because growing it accounts for a big share of their employment and buying
it accounts for a big share of their expenditure. Raising farm productivity
should, in principle, raise the incomes the rural poor earn from the food
they sell, even as it reduces the price the urban poor must pay for the food
they buy.
But cultivating a
resilient, bountiful crop may be easier than cultivating an equally thriving
market, with access to credit and distribution channels. The foundations
understand this task, but no charity, however large, can accomplish it.
African governments say they also understand it and have been as good as
their word, recently agreeing to drop tariffs on the cross-border sale of
fertiliser, a particular boon to landlocked countries.
For his part, Mr
Borlaug is undeterred. For a nonagenarian, he puts great faith in youthful
optimism. He wants to recruit “young people, right out of school” to his
banner, reaching them before they have become accustomed to failure. In
this business, the revolutionaries, as well as their seeds, must be
resistant to the common blight of defeatism and despair.
* ‘The African Food Crisis', edited by Göran Djurfeldt et al. CABI
Publishing 2005.
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