Criticism of the Gates Foundation’s attempt to re-create the Green Revolution in Africa is not uncommon in some circles, and it will be interesting — if probably not particularly edifying — to see how those circles will parse Norman Borlaug’s legacy now that he’s gone. But the recent article in The Nation, although mostly predictable, is actually more balanced than most. After a description of some of the unintended consequences of the first Green Revolution, the authors admit that these are acknowledged by the Gates Foundation, and also that “[s]ome of the changes made possible by Gates’s funding are welcome.”
The architects of Africa’s new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation’s agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as “smallholders”) and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because “if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse.”
My main comment about all this is one I’ve already made, and that is that it does nobody any good to present the (bio)technology vs “ecological agriculture” debate as a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. Both paradigms have a role to play, they are not mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as “the African farmer,” or even “the African smallholder” for that matter. There are millions of African smallholders, all different, and what they need are options, and lots of them.
But what I specifically wanted to flag about the article in The Nation is its section on Malawi. We talked about the Malawi fertilizer subsidy before, and it has become a sort of “poster child.” Its apparent success is of course mentioned in the article, but so are various critical reactions to it. The point is that Malawi seems to be emerging as a fertile testing ground for the blending — or at least the co-existence — of different kinds of approaches to agricultural development. There was another article recently which brought this home for me. It includes an interesting quote from Amos Tizora, executive director of a Malawian NGO called Circle for Integrated Community Development (CICOD):
“As much as farmers are encouraged to grow hybrid crop varieties due to environmental challenges, they are also encouraged to complement these with indigenous varieties which have high nutrition value, long storage period and can easily be managed by low income farmers.”
Why don’t we get more such public recognition, by everyone involved, of the complementary nature of what are all too often seen as competing visions of the future of African agriculture(s)?