A reminder of course that it all takes time, but that is now internet
time as I like to remind folks. They all have cell phones and a good
idea is shared immediately with half a billion folks who know
farming. Next year will be different.
More important than even the science is the new atmospheric water
device that I posted on here recently. It is the no technology
version of the Eden machine that draws a hundred gallons a night out
of the atmosphere and waters an adjacent crop row or a tree. It
needs no power and is completely passive.
Better yet, the collection pool is ideal for growing water cress or
something like it as well to lower evaporation. Thus it grows even
food that can be harvested daily to provide food or even fodder if
one has a lot of these set up.
What is most important is that the upward growth spiral has well
begun and we will not be disappointed.
A Green Revolution,
This Time for Africa
By TINA ROSENBERG
APRIL 9, 2014
Last month was the
100th anniversary of the birth of Norman Borlaug, the father of the
Green Revolution.
In 1944, Borlaug moved
to Mexico to work on breeding high-yield, disease-resistant strains
of wheat. Mexico adopted them — and in 1970, wheat yields were
six times what they had been in 1950.
In 1965, India and
Pakistan, then on the brink of widespread famine, began growing the
high-yield wheat. Over the next 30 years, wheat yields in India
tripled. The same happened with high-yield rice strains that had
been developed in the Philippines.
Borlaug, who died in
2009, directed the wheat improvement program of the International
Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, which goes by the Spanish
acronym Cimmyt.
Today Cimmyt
researchers grow and test new varieties of corn, or maize, along with
the wheat. Their purpose is to contribute to a new green
revolution — this time for Africa.
The high-yield wheat and rice of the Green Revolution produced dramatic gains in harvests in Asia and Latin America. But not in Africa. There, the climate was too varied, the soils too degraded. Africa lacked infrastructure such as roads, or India’s railway system, that helped farmers to commercialize their grain. It did not have a network of companies to sell farmers the hybrid seeds for the high-yield varieties, nor the fertilizer and pesticides necessary to take full advantage of those seeds.
Asian governments had
large programs to provide credit, extension agents to teach new
farming methods and subsidized inputs; the Food Corporation of
India bought surplus grains at a guaranteed price.
African governments,
for the most part, did not do these things. And today Africa’s
agricultural yields are less than half the global average, and about
25 percent of what they could potentially yield. Agricultural
productivity in Africa is growing at about half the rate the
population is growing.
Africa has long been a
continent of small farmers, half of them women, raising maize with no
fertilizer, pesticide or irrigation, on a tiny plot with a hoe. Now
the little these farmers have is endangered by drought. Climate
change is making Africa’s weather more extreme and erratic. Africa
loses about a fifth of its maize crop because of drought. In many
years, the loss is near-total. A survey of farmers in 12
countries found that in the last decade, they averaged about three
wipeout years.
Maize is the natural
focus for a Green Revolution in Africa, as it is the poor person’s
crop, and the most widely planted in Africa.
In 2011, I walked
through the fields at Cimmyt with Marianne Bänziger, the
center’s deputy director general for research and partnerships. She
is a Swiss crop physiologist who specializes in developing maize for
low-water and low-fertility environments.
Cimmyt began working
on drought-tolerant maize in the late 1980s. In 2000, the first
seeds for drought-tolerant maize were planted in Malawi and
Zimbabwe. Now three million farmers in 13 countries in
Africa are using them. (All these strains are conventionally bred,
not genetically modified.)
“One drought is
something that throws farmers back into poverty,” said
Bänziger. “They lose everything. During a severe
drought, a farmer may harvest 5 percent of the ears of a normal
crop. With drought-tolerant maize, the farmer can get 50
percent. We want to get to the point where we can save every
plant.”
The Green Revolution
of the 1960s and 1970s is still debated today. The bumper yields
came not only from new strains of wheat, but also from the use of
chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Farmers, who had lived for
millenniums using the seeds they grew, now had to purchase them to
get these gains. Buying seeds and fertilizer, of course, was
easier for the wealthy than the poor. And vast planting of only a few
varieties reduced biodiversity.
But Mark Rosegrant,
the director of the environment and production technology division at
the International Food Policy Research Institute, said that small
farmers did, with some lag, adopt the new technologies — the
record yields they saw others achieve convinced them to buy the
seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. They also benefited all along
from a newly revitalized rural economy, higher wages and lower food
prices.
Pesticides and
inorganic fertilizers are bad for the environment. But this is
not an argument that anyone who eats in America should be making to
African subsistence farmers. In 2006, an African Union
Declaration (pdf) on agriculture adopted the goal of 50
kilograms of fertilizer per hectare planted. At the time, Africa
was using only eight kilos per hectare; America was using 120. Africa
needs vastly more fertilizer use, not less.
But the Green
Revolution also produced enormous environmental benefits. Borlaug’s
research was motivated in part by a desire tosave forest from
being turned into farmland. And he succeeded — as cereal production
doubled in Asia, the area under cultivation increased by only 4
percent.
Most important, the
Green Revolution’s critics have no good answer to what would have
happened to Asia’s exploding population, already hungry, absent the
doubling of yields. The Green Revolution saved a billion people
from starvation. (For a concise summary of the debate see this short
paper (pdf)).
What will happen to
Africa? It is not only possible to get more maize from every
acre planted, it is necessary. Africa cannot feed itself while
getting only a quarter of its potential yields.
The strains of maize
bred at Cimmyt in Mexico are spread throughout Africa by the Drought
Tolerant Maize for Africa project, or D.T.M.A., with
headquarters in Nairobi, which is run by Cimmyt and the International
Institute of Tropical Agriculture. The project has released 140 new
varieties of maize so far.
But a key lesson of
the Green Revolution is that getting a new strain of maize out of the
research station is not the same as getting it into the fields.
Bänziger spent nine years in Zimbabwe and five years in Kenya,
working with local governments, farmers, seed company officials and
agricultural extension agents who train farmers.
Her career — a
combination of scientific research and on-the-ground cajoling,
politicking and marketing — reflects both parts of the job. The
science, she said, is the easy part. “So far, it’s a success
story,” she said. “And we can further increase tolerance to
drought.” The more difficult challenge is on the ground — farmers
don’t know about the seed, or they know about but can’t get it,
or they can’t afford the initial investment, or they are afraid to
try it. Cimmyt’s job is to pollinate not just a plant, but a
practice.
Drought-resistant
maize is now providing a better livelihood for some 20 million
people. The organization aims to double that reach by the end of
next year. The drought-tolerant varieties do as well as or better
than traditional maize when the rains are good, and when they are bad
they will save a farmer from ruin. Overall, said Tsedeke Abate, an
Ethiopian agricultural biologist who directs D.T.M.A., they improve
yields by 20 to 30 percent.
One setback came two
years ago with the emergence of Maize Lethal Necrosis, a new disease
that destroyed maize crops in Kenya and Tanzania. Kenya is a major
producer of drought-tolerant maize seed — and none of it could be
used, for fear of spreading the disease. Cimmyt is testing its
strains to see which are most resistant to the disease, and rapidly
breeding new ones.
The impact of the
disease on the drought-tolerant maize program underscores a basic
lesson: farmers can’t plant the seed if they can’t get it. Maize
Lethal Necrosis has not been the only obstacle to seed production,
and Abate is now traveling around Africa encouraging seed companies
to produce their own foundation seed — the first generation after
the breeder seed.
Until recently, there
were very few seed companies in Africa, most of them state-run. In
many countries, a farmer could look at her neighbor’s high yields
with envy — but have no place to buy the seed herself.
As with many products
in Africa, creating a distribution chain is a bigger challenge than
inventing the product itself. Seeds have to be grown — of high
quality and in large amounts. Agro-dealers — especially those in
remote places — have to get them and stock them. Government
extension agents or seed company employees have to plant
demonstration plots; seeing the plots of traditional and high-yield
maize side by side is persuasive. Farmers have to find out about
these marketing efforts. They need credit to buy the seeds and
the fertilizers.
D.T.M.A. doesn’t do
any of this directly. It works with national programs and seed
companies, often alongside the Program for Africa’s Seed
Systems, which is part of a group called AGRA — an
acronym for A Green Revolution for Africa. (Two giant
foundations — Rockefeller and Ford — financed much of the
original Green Revolution, and two giant foundations — Rockefeller,
again, and Gates — are financing much of the Green Revolution
today.) These groups have successfully midwifed dozens of new seed
companies and distributors — private sector, government and
community-run.
The Seed Systems
program also provides fellowships for African seed scientists,
another crucial need. Abate said that in the 13 countries where
D.T.M.A. works, which account for about three-quarters of Africa’s
maize, there are only about 65 full-time maize researchers.
“Just imagine — a crop that’s the most important source of
income on the continent,” he said. “To have less than 70
researchers is really obscene.”
The Green Revolution
failed in Africa for reasons that remain major obstacles today.
Absent research, roads, storage, extension capacity, credit and
subsidies — high-yield maize will produce little, or its gains will
go only to wealthier farmers. But when governments invest in
agriculture, dramatic gains are possible. (The book “Millions
Fed” details some of the success stories.)
One example — not in
the book — is Malawi. In the 2004-05 growing season, drought
produced a catastrophic maize harvest, and five million people —
more than a third of the country — needed emergency food
aid. Malawi then started a program that heavily subsidized
fertilizer and instituted smaller subsidies for seeds. The
effect was immediate: Yields reached double the traditional levels,
and remain there. Malawi became a food exporter, selling maize to the
World Food Program and to other countries. Inside Malawi, hunger
dropped sharply and poverty hasdeclined significantly (pdf).
Abate’s own country,
Ethiopia, has also doubled yields. In 2001, he said, Ethiopia had a
very good harvest — but it had no storage facilities for grain. “So
the bag that contained the grain to transport it to the market was
worth more than the grain itself,” Abate said. Ethiopia has since
invested heavily in infrastructure, extension agents and marketing;
maize is traded, for example, on Ethiopia’s new commodity exchange.
Ethiopia is now second to South Africa among African countries in
production per hectare.
“Successful
countries have invested in agriculture and they are now benefiting
from that investment,” said Abate. “Lessons should be drawn from
their experiences. This is what the future of African
agriculture should look like.”
Join Fixes on
Facebook and follow updates ontwitter.com/nytimesfixes. To
receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here.
Tina Rosenberg won a
Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s
Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The
Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer
Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story
e-book “D for Deception.”
No comments:
Post a Comment