Kofi’s time

In 2002, while UN secretary general, Kofi Annan asked, “How can a green revolution be achieved in Africa?” After more than a year of study, the appointed expert panel of scientists (from Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa and elsewhere) replied that a green revolution would not provide food security because of the diverse types of farming systems across the continent. There is “no single magic technological bullet…for radically improving African agriculture,” the expert panel reported in its strategic recommendations. “African agriculture is more likely to experience numerous ‘rainbow evolutions’ that differ in nature and extent among the many systems, rather than one Green Revolution as in Asia.” Now Annan has agreed to head the kind of project his advisors told him would not work.

That extract is from a long and thoughtful piece on the web site of Foreign Policy in Focus, an American “think tank without walls”. It is a response, as you might have guessed, to the appointment of Kofi Annan as head of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the initiative funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

If you have any interest in the problems of poverty and agriculture in Africa, I urge you to read it. This is not shrill propaganda. This is carefully considered commentary. Carol B. Thompson, the author, makes several trenchant points that, to me, skewer the rationale behind the Gates/Rockefeller strategy. (Not that I was in favour before, as regular readers will know.)

They say that generals are always fighting the previous war. Alas, the same seems true of the war on poverty.