Impediments to African green revolution yield increases need to be kept in mind

by Markus Reichardt

A new initiative claims Africa's food production can be tripled by 2015. But we've been here before.

It was announced in Oslo at the beginning of July that the board of the Yara Foundation had awarded the African Green Revolution Yara Prize for 2007 to Josephine Okot and Akinwumi Adesina for their work with agricultural inputs and agro-dealer networks. The Yara Foundation that awards this prize springs from Yara International, the world's largest producers of mineral fertiliser and seeds. It was part of Norsk Hydro until a few years ago.

Josephine Okot, founder and managing director of Victoria Seeds, has built new markets for a local private-sector agricultural inputs industry in her native Uganda. She has also been active in reversing the decline in agricultural productivity. Akinwumi Adesina works for the Rockefeller Foundation developing rural agrodealership models to allow owners of small village shops to develop into agro -dealers selling agricultural inputs.

The recently embarked on initiative called the African Green Revolution focuses on African agricultural productivity and food security in response to Kofi Annan's call for lasting improvements in agriculture. The initiative says, "A green revolution in Africa can neither be achieved nor sustained without private sector entrepreneurship to provide agricultural inputs and develop agrodealer networks."

There's more : "Essentially with better access to fertiliser (both mineral and organic) and water, plus more plant varieties and agronomic expertise, Africa's food production could be tripled by 2015."

Where have we heard this all before? Trebling Africa's food production within eight years? Noble as they sound these PR assertions ignore a few basic realities.

First and foremost, in the future the continent of Africa (except for parts of east Africa) will get dryer, so water will get scarcer. Then there is the matter of the Green Revolution itself. Partly sponsored by the fertiliser giants of Europe and North America, it did make an impact in India, south-east Asia and parts of South America, where food production did rise due to the introduction of new fertilisers and new seed strains.

Some yields rose by spectacular levels,30% to 50%! But then so did the farmers dependence on the better strains and the more expensive fertilisers. In short what they gained on production they partially lost on cash outlays for inputs that they had often previously sourced at zero costs (like manure, etc.)

A nasty by-product of the "revolution" was a rise in pesticide and herbicide use, since the new strains needed more protection from natural pests. Critics of the Green Revolution back then were quick to point out the self-interest of those sponsoring these initiatives.

But ideological critiques apart, these initiatives have not led to sustained improvements of net income, either in cash or crop yields, for the farmers. The high-input high-output agribusiness approach to rural agriculture just did not work.

Then along comes Yara, advertising itself as "world's largest producers of mineral fertiliser and seeds," aiming to treble Africa's food production within eight years. That would literally require 25%-40%% increases in yields per annum compounded over eight years to achieve. And that is assuming all of Africa's food production is derived from seed-based plants. Of course, it doesn't. Animal-based protein accounts for over a third of the continent's food.

It is true that better access to fertiliser and better agricultural methods could help increase food production, but claims of trebling food production in eight years using a method that did not sustain such promises in the past is bad PR.

There is no doubt that the laureates that Yara rewards are helping their communities be more productive and grow more food. They are doing this often in the face of hardened opposition of their own governments. For them it is generally more important to have agricultural commodity control boards packed with political appointees to soak up any surplus from rural farmers than to create the regulatory frameworks and invest in infrastructure that would encourage the growth of these agrodealers.

Why must foreign agencies work on what African governments often seem unwilling to do for their own economies? But what these often narrowly focussed initiatives overlook is that in order to raise agricultural standards of living you need all of these things in moderation, but more than that you need stability, both political and in terms of population.

Growing food production is completely nullified when population growth stays at 3% as it does in most of Africa. Female education, which is the proven way to reduce population growth (by letting the woman make reproductive choices), can make much more significant and lasting contributions to food stability. And it does so without all the nasty little side effects that fertiliser-sponsored green revolutions forget to mention.

The award ceremony for the Yara prize will happen as part of the second African Green Revolution Conference in Oslo in late August. NORAD, the Norwegian government's international development department, is hosting the conference to "explore the potential behind public private partnerships in the field of sustainable agricultural productivity."

Maybe they should just read their history books to discover that this has been done before. Perhaps they were too busy looking for the next big thing in development to read the assessments of the first fertiliser-sponsored green revolution to think critically and deeply about the value of doing this again.

Ethical Corp.