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Is There Such a Thing as
Agro-Imperialism?
By ANDREW RICE,
NYTimes
Published: November 16, 2009
Dr. Robert Zeigler, an
eminent American botanist,
flew to Saudi Arabia in
March for a series of
high-level discussions about
the future of the kingdom’s
food supply. Saudi leaders
were frightened: heavily
dependent on imports, they
had seen the price of rice
and wheat, their dietary
staples, fluctuate violently
on the world market over the
previous three years, at one
point doubling in just a few
months. The Saudis, rich in
oil money but poor in arable
land, were groping for a
strategy to ensure that they
could continue to meet the
appetites of a growing
population, and they wanted
Zeigler’s expertise.
There are basically two ways
to increase the supply of
food: find new fields to
plant or invent ways to
multiply what existing ones
yield. Zeigler runs the
International Rice Research
Institute, which is devoted
to the latter course,
employing science to expand
the size of harvests. During
the so-called Green
Revolution of the 1960s, the
institute’s laboratory
developed “miracle rice,” a
high-yielding strain that
has been credited with
saving millions of people
from famine. Zeigler went to
Saudi Arabia hoping that the
wealthy kingdom might offer
money for the basic research
that leads to such
technological breakthroughs.
Instead, to his surprise, he
discovered that the Saudis
wanted to attack the problem
from the opposite direction.
They were looking for land.
In a series of meetings,
Saudi government officials,
bankers and agribusiness
executives told an institute
delegation led by Zeigler
that they intended to spend
billions of dollars to
establish plantations to
produce rice and other
staple crops in African
nations like Mali, Senegal,
Sudan and Ethiopia. “They
laid out this incredible
plan,” Zeigler recalled. He
was flabbergasted, not only
by the scale of the projects
but also by the audacity of
their setting. Africa, the
world’s most famished
continent, can’t currently
feed itself, let alone
foreign markets.
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