|
|
Africa Could Feed Itself But Many
Ask: Should It?
Issue Sets Affluent Donor Countries Against Man Who Sowed Green
in Asia
BY SCOTT KILMAN and ROGER THUROW
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Farmers who use only their hands and machetes to squeeze food
from the stingy soil around the village of Fufuo, Ghana, still
recall the crop of 1989 with disbelief.
A team working with Norman E. Borlaug, engineer of the "green
revolution" that saved millions of Asians from starvation in the
late 1960s, had arrived bearing seeds of a new breed of corn, a
few bags of fertilizer and several bottles of weed killer.
Villagers bought these curious items with small, low-interest
loans from the group Dr. Borlaug runs and then followed his
directions. For the first time, they planted in straight rows,
with a uniform distance between seeds. They spread the
fertilizer on a regular schedule. They sprayed the herbicide in
carefully measured amounts.
Then they harvested a miracle. "The crops were so
big, and there were ears on each stalk," says Emmanuel Boateng.
"We were used to having many stalks with no ears." Farmers
accustomed to gathering only five 220-pound bags of corn per
acre reaped 15 bags. Never before had the people of Fufuo
produced enough to feed themselves and still had something left
to sell to others beyond their collection of mud brick homes.
They paid off their loans and began planning investments in
schools and roads.
But in the years since Dr. Borlaug moved on to
spread his methods to other villages, Fufuo has been sliding
back toward mere subsistence. Western governments and the
development agencies they fund no longer countenance his methods
or provide aid on a large scale to support them, as they once
did. Instead, they say, the free market should determine how
Africa feeds itself. The Ghanaian government, pressured by its
Western creditors to keep its fiscal house in order, doesn't
provide fertilizer subsidies, crop-price supports or other
equivalent to the cheap financing Dr. Borlaug started the
farmers on. Local banks charge 30% interest on loans.
So the villagers of Fufuo are skimping on
fertilizer, and their plots are yielding a third less. Without a
well-functioning market for their crops, they struggle to sell
even these diminishing yields before they rot. The temptation
grows to switch to cash crops such as cocoa and ginger to sell
to the West, though with more than two million of its people
undernourished, according to the United Nations, Ghana needs
more of a food staple such as corn.
"We have shown we can produce more, but sometimes
we wonder, 'What's the use?' " says Kwaku Owusu, a Fufuo corn
farmer.
The answer is rooted in a profound shift in the
international politics of economic development in the decades
since Dr. Borlaug was lauded as a savior of the world's hungry
poor. In 1970, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for having helped
stave off mass starvation in India and Pakistan by introducing
high-yielding wheat plants to farmers there. The success of this
green revolution depended on Western support, financial and
political, as well as local government intervention. The U.S.
was unequivocal: In 1965, President Johnson threatened to
withhold food aid from India unless New Delhi adopted
farmer-friendly policies. It complied, replacing price limits on
grain with price supports. By the mid-1970s, India was growing
enough grain to begin building vast reserves.
Now, sub-Saharan Africa is staggering toward its
worst food crisis in decades, with as many as 38 million people
threatened with starvation in the coming months, according to
the U.N. To Dr. Borlaug, the solution is simple: sow the seeds
of a second green revolution. With backing of about $9 million a
year from a foundation of the late Japanese speedboat-racing
magnate Ryoichi Sasakawa, he has been working with President
Carter's Atlanta-based Carter Center to develop several million
demonstration plots in 10 African countries, including Ethiopia,
Uganda and Mozambique, as well as Ghana.
"I've done my job. We could double or triple
grain production in Africa in three years," says the 88-year-old
scientist, bringing his fist down hard on his desk in his office
at Texas A&M University. "Something has to change."
Something has changed but not in Dr. Borlaug's
favor. To the World Bank and the industrialized governments that
control it, giving free rein to free markets is more appropriate
for Africa -- even though the U.S., for one, is expanding the
subsidies it pays to its own farmers. The theory, as it applies
to policy toward Africa, is that an unfettered private sector
will jump in to serve efficiently where governments once served
inefficiently, and people and resources will be channeled to
their best purposes.
Indeed, given Africa's disadvantages -- thin
soil, fickle climates, few paved roads and weak governments --
some development experts now argue that helping farmers produce
bigger food harvests may only prolong Africa's penury. In the
view of the World Bank and other development organizations,
Africa needs to develop businesses that can earn the money to
import the food it needs.
In a report issued in July, the World Bank
suggested, among other things, that rural Africans grow cash
crops for export and cater to tourists to earn income. While the
report does acknowledge that bigger food crops would help some
farmers, it suggests that many are so isolated that they should
grow only what they need for themselves as cheaply as possible.
"No one wants to fight with Dr. Borlaug, he is
one of the greats," says Kevin Cleaver, the World Bank's
director of agriculture and rural development. "But he doesn't
bring appropriate technology to Africa."
Dr. Borlaug and his backers say that the poorest
countries don't have enough of a private sector to take the
place of foreign aid and government support, or to find economic
alternatives for the poorest farmers. That, they say, is why in
Fufuo and other places where Dr. Borlaug has helped farmers
expand their harvests, decline has usually followed initial
success.
They also point out that wealthy nations have
practical motives for their faith in free markets as the key to
economic development, even if they don't practice that faith as
purely at home. For one thing, it's cheaper. Development
assistance to agriculture from rich nations and international
lenders dropped by half in the 1990s, to less than $5 billion a
year. While the World Bank has recently increased its loans for
agricultural projects in sub-Saharan Africa, the total, at $416
million this year, is less than half the 1990 level.
Incentives to Overproduce
At the same time, the industrialized nations
continue to pay their own farmers the subsidies that stymie
development in poor nations -- a total of $311 billion last year
alone. The subsidies not only protect American and European
growers from low world-market prices; they also depress global
prices by encouraging overproduction.
"If you want to do an agriculture experiment in
Africa, experiment with taking away subsidies in the West for
one year," says Kwame Amezah, the assistant director of
extension services in Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
The World Bank estimates in a recent study that
if rich nations eliminated their farm subsidies and agricultural
import restrictions, rural income in low- and middle-income
nations would jump by $60 billion. As it is, world grain prices
have fallen more than 50% over the past two decades, helping sap
whatever incentive African farmers may have to push their own
green revolution.
"I'm a biologist, not an economist, but even I
can see [Western and African] policies aren't working," Dr.
Borlaug says. "It's time to face up to reality."
Dr. Borlaug is himself the son of a farmer. Born
and raised in Iowa, he studied forestry and plant pathology at
the University of Minnesota, where he compiled a wrestling
record that helped get him into the National Wrestling Hall of
Fame. In 1944, he was working at DuPont Co. testing condoms and
other World War II military supplies for their susceptibility to
the elements when he learned of a job at the International Maize
and Wheat Improvement Center, a research institute near Mexico
City supported by public and private foundations.
The young Dr. Borlaug arrived at the center as a
plant disease was devastating Mexico's wheat fields, making the
nation dependent on foreign grain. He was assigned to create a
resistant variety, a process that then typically took a decade.
He greatly shortened the time with a trick he called shuttle
breeding: After his prototypes produced seeds in a plot in
northern Mexico, he rushed them to southern Mexico, squeezing
two growing seasons out of one year. His disease-resistant
strains were in the hands of Mexican farmers within five years.
By the 1950s, Mexico's wheat fields were so
abundant with grain that the plants had to be retooled so they
wouldn't topple over. Dr. Borlaug solved the problem by using a
dwarf Japanese variety to develop a shorter, sturdier plant.
Soon, Mexico was growing all the wheat it needed.
Shuttle breeding also had the unintended effect
of creating wheat strains much more tolerant of variations in
climate and light conditions than typical wheat. So when the
exploding populations of India and Pakistan overwhelmed those
countries' antiquated farming sector in the 1960s, Dr. Borlaug
had an antidote ready.
Farmers clamored for his seeds after seeing
chemically fertilized plots produce five times as much grain as
the same amount of land using traditional seeds and old methods.
Dr. Borlaug warned political leaders of a public backlash if
they didn't encourage construction of fertilizer plants and
guarantee profitable prices for growers. In short order, Indian
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ripped up a flower bed in front of
her residence and planted Dr. Borlaug's wheat. Farmer-friendly
subsidies were created.
Meanwhile, researchers in the Philippines began
developing rice plants that would also be used throughout Asia.
The Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank
and the U.S. Agency for International Development were among the
institutions backing Dr. Borlaug's efforts.
By the mid-1970s, India was self-sufficient in
grain, depriving U.S. farmers of a client for their wheat.
Pakistan's trajectory wasn't as smooth, but it now produces
roughly as much wheat as Canada. At the 1970 ceremony where he
received the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. Borlaug predicted that the
new crops sweeping Asia would give the world three decades of
"breathing space" from famine. He retired from the International
Maize and Wheat Improvement Center nine years later, with plans
to teach at Texas A&M.
He didn't anticipate the food crisis that then
swept Africa. In the 1960s and '70s, the newly independent
nations of Africa, though using primitive farming methods,
managed to grow enough to feed themselves when Asia couldn't.
But then Africa's population began growing so quickly that
subsistence farming couldn't keep up. In 1984, a famine centered
in Sudan and Ethiopia killed about one million people.
Mr. Sasakawa, the Japanese philanthropist, called
Dr. Borlaug at Texas A&M amid the 1984 famine and offered to
finance him if he would help farmers in Africa. "I told him I
was too old to start over and hung up," says Dr. Borlaug. "The
next day, he called back and said 'Young man, I'm 15 years older
than you.' "
Dr. Borlaug agreed to five years. They organized
the Sasakawa Africa Association, which started work in Ghana in
1986. "I had no idea what I was getting into," he says.
Many of Africa's farmers are poorer than Asia's
were before the green revolution. Tractors and irrigation
systems are rarer. Livestock for pulling plows are scarcer in
many places, killed off by parasites transmitted by the tsetse
fly.
Corn, the most important food crop in several
African countries, is so naturally promiscuous that its
descendants tend to quickly dilute any traits bred into it by
scientists. As a result, farmers who want to raise high-yielding
corn must regularly buy seed, an enormous expense for a
subsistence producer. In Asia, farmers don't face so much
expense. They set aside some of their wheat and rice harvests to
use as seed the following season. These self-pollinating plants
change little between seasons.
The ranks of the world's hungry are swelling the
fastest in Africa. One-third of the 590 million people living
south of the Sahara desert are chronically undernourished.
Foreign food aid puts only a dent in the problem: The food
deficit -- the amount the region lacks for meeting its
population's nutritional needs -- is five times the amount
donated.
Flirting With Disaster
Sub-Saharan Africa's vulnerability to famine is
only growing as its farm economy falls further behind its
swelling population. The amount of food the region produces for
each person has been dropping for two decades. Its farmers now
reap just half as much grain from an acre of land as do poor
farmers in Asia.
But even on a continent degraded by years of
famine and war, Dr. Borlaug has been able to deliver flourishes
of farming success. In the highlands of Ethiopia, where the
government has backed the work of Dr. Borlaug by lending him
personnel, legions of subsistence farmers doubled and tripled
their corn harvests in the mid-1990s, some even obtaining the
per-acre yield of the average American corn farmer. By 1997, the
perennially hungry country was able to export some grain to
Kenya. Now, drought once again threatens millions in the country
with starvation. To lock in his advances, Dr. Borlaug wants the
Ethiopian government to do far more to make fertilizer and
credit available to farmers.
His successes have made the white-haired Iowan a
household name in parts of Africa. "He's our hero," says Mr.
Boateng, the secretary of the Fufuo Growers Association, who
fondly recalls Dr. Borlaug sitting with the villagers and
husking corn. "Every time we pray, we pray for Dr. Borlaug:
'Lord, we know he's elderly. Please extend his life.' "
With a small staff of its own, the Sasakawa
Africa Association has concentrated on training a network of
government farm advisers throughout the Ghanaian countryside. It
provided a fleet of motor scooters so agents could reach areas
where roads are too rough for cars.
The organization also has intervened where the
free market has failed. When the Ghanaian government, under
pressure from international lending agencies, stopped supporting
the money-losing state seed-production company in the late
1980s, the business collapsed. At the time, the government,
desperate for development funding, adhered strictly to lenders'
requirements that the state withdraw from costly and inefficient
agriculture supports.
Ten former employees of the defunct state seed
business banded together in the village of Asuoyeboah, not far
from Fufuo, to begin growing seed on their own. But they lacked
money and technology. Then one of the Sasakawa-trained extension
agents came by. He instructed them in Borlaug growing
techniques, and production boomed. He also brought a herbicide
from Monsanto Co. that greatly reduced the time farmers spent
hoeing weeds, allowing them to expand their fields.
Soon, the corn cribs were overflowing. Sasakawa
arranged a loan of about $1,500 for the farmers to build 18 more
storage bins. Within three years, the farmers had paid off the
loan.
The agents also brought a new seed strain that
Dr. Borlaug had rescued from the reject pile. The variety,
discovered by Purdue University researchers in the 1960s, didn't
produce yields big enough to win over U.S. seed companies. But
the seed is unusually high in protein, which Dr. Borlaug figured
would be attractive to Africans short of meat and milk.
The seed, locally called Obatanpa, or "good
nursing mother," now produces one-fifth of Ghana's corn. This
corn is a vital ingredient in the mix used by mothers weaning
babies from breast feeding and is one reason the number of
undernourished people in Ghana has been halved over the past
decade.
Mounting Inventory
Today, the Asuoyeboah cooperative is standing on
its own but precariously. The 17 members of the group net about
$250 a year each, which still leaves them below the rural
poverty standard of one dollar a day. Their shelling machine is
a 1957 model. They, like the farmers of Fufuo, have begun
skimping on fertilizer. And their inventory of harvested seed
continues to mount -- and sometimes rot -- for lack of a private
or government marketing agent that can purchase the seed and
store it until the market improves.
"We have increased our yields, but what do we do
with it?" asks William Barnes, the group's chairman.
He points to piles of seed corn covered with
plastic and canvas tarps. Farmers won't be buying until planting
season begins in March. Mr. Barnes pleads for some kind of
inventory credit or other form of intervention from a marketing
middleman.
"All of our money is tied up in the seed," he
says. "So what are we supposed to do for the next four months,
go hungry?"
These questions find echoes in Fufuo.
"Our capital base is so small, where can we get
loans from?" says Fufuo farmer Daniel Yaw Banahene. "We know how
to use the techniques, but where do we get the money to apply
it?"
Sasakawa provides small loans over a couple of
years to get farmers in one village started, and then it leaves
those farmers on their own and moves to another village. The
Fufuo farmers got about $12 for each acre to buy the necessary
fertilizer. A pittance in the West, it is a big sum for
subsistence farmers who had never profited from their crops
before.
"We paid it back 100%," Mr. Boateng says,
swelling with pride.
For the first couple of years, the farmers could
fund their purchases through sales of their surplus production.
But then their fragile economics shattered. The cost of imported
fertilizer and herbicide soared from about $12 per acre to
nearly $30 per acre over the past decade. At the same time,
income from their corn fell as local bumper crops and
international gluts depressed the market price.
Some farmers have turned to the rural bank in the
bigger village up the road, where interest rates can top 30%.
Others have started to cut corners on fertilizer and herbicide
use. A few have even stopped using fertilizer and returned to
carving new fields out of the bush. That negates an
environmental benefit of the Borlaug method, which emphasizes
intensive farming on existing fields to reduce the pressure on
farmers to constantly slash and burn new land.
The Ghanaian government elected two years ago is
trying to tilt the focus back to rural development, but it has
neither the financing nor the foreign support to pump huge
volumes of state money into agriculture. "With the mere mention
by us of subsidies, our development partners start howling, and
want to catch us and chew us up," says Franklin Domkoh, a top
official in Ghana's Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
So the farmers of Fufuo are once again looking to
Dr. Borlaug and his organization for help, not to prepare their
growing fields, but to compete better with U.S. and European
farmers. Sasakawa's Ghana office, with an annual budget of
$250,000, can't offer much more than advice on how the farmers
can organize to negotiate lower prices for fertilizer, market
their corn and lobby for a better deal. "If the farmers are
strengthened, they can walk up to the development agencies and
state their case," says Benedicta Appiah-Asante, who heads the
Sasakawa program in Ghana.
That will take time -- something that she fears
Dr. Borlaug may not have. She recalls a conversation with her
mentor three years ago in Accra, Ghana's capital. "Dr. Borlaug
was pouring me a cup of tea, and he said, 'Look at me, I'm old.
I won't live to see the breakthrough in Ghana's agriculture. But
you will. I'm counting on you."'
Now, as Ms. Appiah-Asante bounces along the
rutted road to Fufuo, she says, "Dr. Borlaug should have seen
the breakthrough. It should have come by now."
Write to Scott Kilman at scott.kilman@wsj.com3
and Roger Thurow at roger.thurow@wsj.com.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1038868837843204913.djm,00.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1021239830783624360,00.html
(2) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB976067179268347062,00.html
(3) mailto:scott.kilman@wsj.com
(4) mailto:roger.thurow@wsj.com
(5) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1038795827440356233,00.html
(6) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1038351358272742588,00.html
|
