World Bank reiterates new emphasis on local food security versus export agriculture

World Bank President Robert Zoellick told Africa's leaders the World Bank wanted to expand its "efforts to help countries produce their own food, instead of relying on imports.”

During his first visit to Africa since becoming World Bank President, Robert Zoellick attended the African Union (AU) summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, marking the first time a World Bank head has addressed the pan-African body.

Zoellick focused on increased global food prices as an argument for increased spending on agriculture.

This would represent a reversal of course for the World Bank, which has spent much of the last 25 years encouraging countries in Africa and elsewhere to devote more of their land and resources to growing commodities like cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa, and flowers for export, and to rely on international markets to purchase the food they were no longer growing.

Indeed, this shift from self-sufficiency to dependence on international trade is the foundation of the contemporary model of globalization that has been so heavily, and effectively, promoted around the world.

Agricultural reforms were among the Bank’s main foci throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Africa, with great efforts made to liberalize markets, reduce and eliminate subsidies, and restructure or do away with state marketing boards. As a report by the Bank’s internal watchdog, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), released in 2007 makes clear, the World Bank’s agriculture policy impositions had a dubious track record at best in Africa.

At the AU, Zoellick also spoke of the controversial “Green Revolution” for Africa - the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) - supported most visibly by an initiative of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, which aims to replicate programs in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s that increased crop yields.

Those earlier programs’ successes were offset, however, by environmental damage and crowding out of small farmers who could not afford the expensive inputs (pesticides, fertilizers, water) demanded by the high-tech Green Revolution methods. AGRA has sparked an outcry from African civil society organizations who fear it will damage small farmers’ livelihoods and serve as a vehicle for introducing genetically-engineered seeds on the continent. Zoellick said an African Green Revolution “would need to be different from that of Asia,” but provided few other details.

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