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Africa: Green Revolution?
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Oct 15, 2006 (061015)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
The Gates Foundation has joined with the Rockefeller Foundation in
promoting a new "Green Revolution" in Africa. But will the new
effort learn from the mistakes of earlier "Green Revolution"
initiatives? Sceptics say that the new proposals still disregard
the interests of small farmers and the environment.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains a press release from the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation announcing the new initiative, and a
critique from GRAIN, an NGO that promotes sustainable management of
agricultural diversity. Another AfricaFocus Bulletin sent out
today examines the case of African rice development in particular,
which proponents say is one Green Revolution initiative that does
incorporate participation of small farmers and promotes
biodiversity.
For additional background on the "Green Revolution," see the
website of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural
Research (CGIAR - http://www.cgiar.org). Two clearly written
critical articles, particularly stressing the folly of relying only
on yield measurements as a measure of success, without taking into
account social, economic, and ecological factors, are "Public
Research: Which Public is That?" by Aaron deGrassi and Peter Rosset
(http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=242), and "Lessons from the
Green Revolution," by Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances
Moore Lapp‚ (http://www.foodfirst.org/node/230
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
Bill & Melinda Gates, Rockefeller Foundations Form Alliance to Help
Spur "Green Revolution" in Africa
Major Effort to Move Millions of People out of Poverty and Hunger
Begins with a $150 Million Investment to Improve Africa's Seed
Systems
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
http://www.gatesfoundation.org
September 12, 2006
Seattle, New York -- The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the
Rockefeller Foundation announced today that they will form an
alliance to contribute to a "Green Revolution" in Africa that will
dramatically increase the productivity of small farms, moving tens
of millions of people out of extreme poverty and significantly
reducing hunger.
This joint effort builds on the work of the Rockefeller Foundation
between the 1940s and 1960s to launch what is known as the "Green
Revolution," an effort that pioneered the historic transformation
of farming methods in Latin America and South and Southeast Asia,
helping to double food production and stave off widespread famine.
Among the pioneers in this effort was plant pathologist Norman
Borlaug, a Rockefeller Foundation scientist for 39 years, who was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work developing
improved crop varieties and farm management practices and promoting
their widespread use around the world.
"The original Green Revolution was a huge success in many parts of
the world," said Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller
Foundation. "Unfortunately, in Africa, while there are many
positive efforts, momentum is going the other way. Over the past 15
years, the number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day
has increased by 50 percent. Working with the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and with African leaders, farmers and scientists, we're
committed to launching an African Green Revolution that will help
tens of millions of people who are living on the brink of
starvation in sub-Saharan Africa."
Over the long term, the partnership, called Alliance for a Green
Revolution in Africa (AGRA), intends to improve agricultural
development in Africa by addressing both farming and relevant
economic issues, including soil fertility and irrigation, farmer
management practices, and farmer access to markets and financing.
Almost three-quarters of Africa's land area is being farmed without
improved inputs such as fertilizer and advanced seeds.
"No major region around the world has been able to make sustained
economic gains without first making significant improvements in
agricultural productivity," said Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates
Foundation. "In Africa today, the great majority of poor people,
many of them women with young children, depend on agriculture for
food and income and remain impoverished and even go hungry. Yet,
Melinda and I also have seen reason for hope - African plant
scientists developing higher-yielding crops, African entrepreneurs
starting seed companies to reach small farmers, and agrodealers
reaching more and more small farmers with improved farm inputs and
farm management practices. These strategies have the potential to
transform the lives and health of millions of families. Working
together with African leaders and the Rockefeller Foundation, we
are embarking on a long-term effort focused on agricultural
productivity, which will build on and extend this important work."
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa's first investment of
$150 million ($100 million from the Gates Foundation and $50
million from the Rockefeller Foundation) will support the Program
for Africa's Seed Systems (PASS). PASS will mount an
across-the-board effort to improve the availability and variety of
seeds that can produce higher yields in the often harsh conditions
of sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, PASS will help:
Develop Improved Varieties of African Crops
African agricultural environments are highly diverse with
significant differences in local pests, diseases, rainfall
patterns, soil properties and the desired attributes demanded by
local small farm communities. PASS will fund around 40 national
breeding programs a year that will use local participatory crop
breeding to address these barriers and provide more robust,
higher-yielding crops for small farmers. PASS will invest $43
million with a five-year goal of developing 100 new and improved
crop varieties suitable for the ecologically varied agricultural
environments in Africa.
Train New Generation of African Crop Scientists
Accelerating a new Green Revolution for Africa is a multi-layered
challenge. While it starts with improved crop varieties at the most
fundamental level, it also requires the development of new
generations of trained African agricultural scientists. That is why
PASS will invest $20 million to provide graduate level training in
African universities for the next generation of African crop
breeders and agricultural scientists upon which the seed system
depends for growth and productivity.
Ensure Improved Seeds Reach Smallholder Farmers
Africa has the lowest levels of improved seed utilization of any
region in the world, mostly because such seeds are not physically
or financially available to the majority of farmers. The poor state
of rural transportation infrastructure, a lack of effective points
of seed delivery to small farmers, and inadequate access to
financial services all contribute to low utilization and inadequate
agricultural productivity. PASS will invest $24 million to ensure
that improved crop varieties are produced and distributed through
private and public channels (including seed companies, public
community seed systems and public extension) so farmers can adopt
these varieties.
Develop a Network of African Agro-Dealers
Another challenge particular to Africa is the lack of a robust
market for bringing new products to farmers. PASS hopes to address
this by providing training, capital and credit to establish at
least 10,000 small agro-dealers who can serve as conduits of seeds,
fertilizers, chemicals and knowledge to smallholder farmers, and in
doing so help increase their productivity and incomes. This will be
a $37 million investment.
Monitor, Evaluate and Manage
A new organization, based in Nairobi, Kenya will be created to
ensure learning takes place and projects are well managed. The
organization will conduct monitoring and evaluation of PASS
projects, oversee sub-granting and implementation of all PASS
activities and carry out financial management activities. A total
of $26 million will be allocated for these activities.
The Rockefeller Foundation has already spent more than $600 million
(in current dollars) on Green Revolution work around the world,
including nearly $150 million during the last seven years in
Africa.
Another silver bullet for Africa?
Bill Gates to resurrect the Rockefeller Foundation's decaying Green
Revolution
GRAIN
http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=16
September 2006
"Now it's Africa's turn. This is only the beginning of the
continent's Green Revolution. The end goal is that within 20 years,
farmers will double or even triple their yields and sell the
surplus at market. This is a vision of a new Africa, where farmers
aren't doomed to a life of hunger and poverty, where people can
look toward the future with promise."
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 12 September 2006
In a fanfare of publicity, the Bill & Melinda Gates and the
Rockefeller Foundations announced on 12 September that they have
teamed up in a new 'Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa'. A
day later, probably in an orchestrated move, Jacques Diouf,
Director General of UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO),
called for support for a second Green Revolution to feed the
world's growing population. UN boss Kofi Annan also weighed in to
support the initiative.
The core of this Gates/Rockefeller initiative is the breeding of
new seeds and getting Africa's small farmers to use them. Gates
will put up US$100 million, and Rockefeller will contribute another
US$50 million plus its long experience in this field. The Gates
Foundation, which had been focusing on health care since it was
started, has only recently spotted agriculture as an issue to spend
money on. At the press conference launching the initiative, Bill
Gates stressed that this is just one of the first of many
investments in the agricultural arena likely to come from his
foundation, currently the world's richest charity with over $60
billion in funds.
While the head of the Microsoft empire puts up most of the money,
the real mover behind this initiative (and its primary beneficiary)
is the Rockefeller Foundation. The new money provides a tremendous
boost for its programme and strategy in Africa. Rockefeller was the
lead agency behind the push for the Green Revolution when it
started in the 1950s. Launched at the height of the cold war to
counter the threat of red revolution sweeping the countryside in
large parts of Asia and Latin America, the Green Revolution is
often described as an agricultural development project based on the
breeding of new crop varieties that respond better to fertilizer,
agrochemicals and irrigation. Its impact on farming and food
production has provoked bitter controversy: its proponents claim
that it has saved millions of lives by increasing agricultural
productivity, while its critics point to the devastating impact it
has had on small farmers and the environment. Nobody denies that it
generated a massive global market for seed, pesticide and
fertilizer corporations.
Talk has been going on for decades now about giving Africa its own
Green Revolution. Everybody - proponents and detractors alike -
agree that in Africa the first Green Revolution wasn't a great
success. So how come? Why didn't the Green Revolution work in
Africa? More importantly, are those pushing new agricultural
technologies learning the lessons of the past?
Learning from the past?
The people at the Rockefeller Foundation, who are the real
masterminds behind this "new" initiative, point to the complexity
of Africa's agriculture and its lack of infrastructure to explain
that the Green Revolution largely 'bypassed' this continent. But
Green Revolution technology didn't 'bypass' Africa: it failed. It
was unpopular and ineffective. Fertiliser use, for example,
increased substantially from the 1970s onwards in sub-Saharan
Africa, while per capita agricultural production fell. In Malawi,
despite the widespread release of hybrid maize, the average maize
yield remains roughly what it was in 1961. Yield increases were
also low or stagnant across Africa in other important crops such as
cassava, yams, rice, wheat, sorghum, and millet. Even the
Rockefeller Foundation admits that Africa's experience raises
serious questions about the Green Revolution approach: "Lingering
low yields among African farmers for crops such as maize and rice,
where adoption of improved varieties has been appreciable, call
into question the overall value of the improved germplasm to local
farmers."
With this evidence on the table, and Rockefeller's own senior
officials questioning the Green Revolution's single focus on
improved seeds, one would expect the new Gates/Rockefeller
initiative to take a different approach. Instead, we get more of
the same. In the background document that the people at Rockefeller
drew up to explain the initiative they conclude: "A main reason for
the inefficiency [of Africa's agriculture] is that the crops on the
great majority of small farms are not the high-yielding varieties
in common use on the other continents". They point to the need for
more fertilizer use, more irrigation, better infrastructure and
more trained scientists.
From this rather simplistic analysis (essentially saying that the
problem is Africa, not the technology), we then get a
straightforward action plan repeating Rockefeller's approaches in
the past:
- Breed new crop varieties: at least 200 new varieties for Africa
to be churned out in the next 5 years.
- Train African scientists to work with them, spearheading the new
revolution.
- Get the new seeds to the farmers through seed companies and by
providing training, capital and credit to establish a network of
small agro-dealers "who can serve as conduits of seeds,
fertilizers, chemicals and knowledge to smallholder farmers".
In addition to getting new seeds to farmers, getting more chemical
fertilizers to them is stressed as an important part of the new
Green Revolution in Africa. Bad transportation and overpricing
because of government taxes and other tariffs are identified as the
main bottlenecks. So in essence, and despite some lip service to
the shortcomings of earlier efforts, this initiative replicates
exactly the approach of its ill-fated predecessor: the main problem
is that farmers don't have access to new technology, so we are
going to produce it and ensure that it gets into their hands.
The broader picture
It is incredible that this simplistic line of thinking is still
being followed after so many years of Green Revolution debate. The
whole question of the tremendous environmental damage caused by the
Green Revolution model of agricultural development relying on the
lavish use of water, fertilizer and pesticides is completely
ignored and pushed aside. The soil erosion and degradation caused
by the use of chemical fertilizer and pesticides, and the resulting
destruction of agricultural productivity in Africa are not even
mentioned. Instead, the old mantra of new seeds and more fertilizer
is repeated. The explosive question of genetically engineered crops
is cleverly avoided in the propaganda which doesn't mean that
it's not there: both the Gates and Rockefeller foundations are
amongst the most active supporters of genetic engineering in
Africa.
Also totally ignored is the central role of local communities,
their traditional seed systems and rich indigenous knowledge,
despite increased international recognition of their crucial
importance. Rather than building on these foundations and on the
tremendous treasure of biological diversity that is available in
the villages, Rockefeller has decided to replace it with "improved
varieties".
But perhaps the starkest omission is the project's failure to
consider the socio-economic consequences of its techno-fix model.
The thinking is: improved varieties give more production, which
yields more income. But, as more than 600 NGOs put it in an open
letter to the Director General of the FAO in 2004: "if we have
learned anything from the failures of the Green Revolution, it is
that technological 'advances' in crop genetics for seeds that
respond to external inputs go hand in hand with increased
socio-economic polarization, rural and urban impoverishment, and
greater food insecurity. The tragedy of the Green Revolution lies
precisely in its narrow technological focus that ignored the far
more important social and structural underpinnings of hunger." It
is indeed hard to believe that this reality has not yet sunk into
the minds of US "development" planners like those at the
Rockefeller Foundation.
This reality has only been growing more dramatic. Under pressure
from international and bilateral trade instruments, especially
under the World Trade Organization and the impending Economic
Partnership Agreements with the European Union, African governments
are increasingly opening up their markets to let their farmers
"compete" with the heavily subsidised food and other agricultural
produce dumped into their economies by the US and the EU. Earlier,
structural adjustment programmes imposed by the world's financial
institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, forced African governments to dismantle public agricultural
research and extension programmes and drop whatever protection and
incentive mechanisms existed for their small farmers. To rub salt
in the wound, the same African governments are then forced by the
same agencies to devote their most fertile land to the growing of
export commodities for markets in the North, thus pushing small
farmers off their land and food production out of rural economies.
The bitter irony is that many of these measures that are now
destroying African farming are being supported, if not instigated,
by the very corporations whose charity foundations are now coming
to Africa's "rescue" with technology programmes.
The seeds of privatisation
If there is anything new in the Gates/Rockefeller push for a Green
Revolution in Africa, it is its reliance on the private sector as
the main vehicle to deliver the goods and control the process. A
substantial part of the funding is earmarked for seed companies and
'agro-dealers' to get the seeds and the chemicals to the farmer.
This approach fits very well with Rockefeller's agricultural
programmes in Africa, a major element of which is the development
of private seed companies. Not surprisingly, Bill Gates' vision for
Africa follows the same lines. After talking about the problems of
Africa, he says: "But Melinda and I also have seen reason for hope
- African plant scientists developing higher-yielding crops,
African entrepreneurs starting seed companies to reach small
farmers, and agrodealers reaching more and more small farmers with
improved farm inputs and farm management practices." The farmers
are the final object to reach, not the first point from which to
start.
Also new is the growing trend for corporate charities to take over
the role of publicly funded development programmes. Development aid
is shrinking, while private fortunes, and the need to give money
away through corporate philanthropy, are blooming. This initiative
is just one of the latest in a series of large private charities
turning their eye - and their money - on Africa's farmers. In the
same week that Gates and Rockefeller announced their initiative,
the foundation headed by George Soros pledged US$50 million for the
Millennium Villages Project, oriented to help rural villages in
Africa out of poverty. A few months earlier, Bill Clinton's
foundation had pledged fertilizers and irrigation systems support
to Rwandan farmers. Much earlier, another US ex-president, Jimmy
Carter, teamed up with a Japanese tycoon to launch the "Sasakawa
2000" project to bring seeds and fertilizers to Africa. Charity
foundations of companies such as Dupont, Syngenta and Monsanto have
been penetrating the international agriculture research system this
way for a while - and are set to do so increasingly. In the mindset
of such corporate foundations, progress is guided by the vision and
interests of transnational corporations, not by the collective
wisdom of its rural communities.
The problem is not that the Green Revolution has "bypassed" Africa.
It is that several decades of experience, lessons and new insights
have bypassed the Green Revolution sponsors - now backed by
corporate foundations - who insist on an outdated technology model
that benefits corporations, not farmers.
Sources & further reading
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: "New hope for African Farmers"
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/GlobalDevelopment/Agriculture/
- Rockefeller Foundation. "Africa's Turn: A New Green Revolution
for the 21st Century"
http://www.rockfound.org/Agriculture/Announcement/175
- Rockefeller Foundation: Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
http://www.africancrops.net/news/sept06/agra.htm
- "FAO declares war on farmers, not on hunger", Open Letter sent to
Jacques Diouf, Director General of FAO, Rome, 16 June 2004,
http://www.grain.org/front/?id=24
- Devlin Kuyek, Genetically Modified Crops in African Agriculture:
Implications for Small Farmers, , GRAIN, August 2002.
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=12
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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