Category: Funding

This post has two purposes. The first is to try and explain the shenanigans yesterday. That’s possibly of interest to only a few geeks who care about journalistic ethics. ((Yeah, I know, an oxymoron on a par with military intelligence. Easily dealt with here. Organizations put out releases with an embargo, a time before which the press may not make use of that information. The press agrees to keep it a secret in exchange for having time to do more than simply copy and paste the release. And all have the same time to do their research. A gentlemen’s agreement, if that term isn’t too inappropriate under the circumstances. Sometimes someone will break the embargo. If they are judged to have done so deliberately, to gain some sort of advantage over their competitors, they may have their wrists smacked and be excluded from the club for a while. If it was an accident, which yesterday’s episode may have been, and especially if it all took place on the internet, then the offending item is withdrawn, wrist slap optional. The kicker is that once someone breaks the embargo, all are free to do what they like with the story. My only regret is that I was too dumb to download the whole of iAfrica.com’s story and publish this post yesterday. Just professional pride, getting in my way …)) The second is warmly to welcome some of the comments made by Bill Gates as he announced a further US$120 million for agricultural research. That should be of interest to everyone except monocultural thinkers.

Second things first. Judging from the stories we’ve seen, the Gates’ announcement might just mark a shift in the Foundation’s priorities. ((Weirdly, the latest speech from His Billness available today at the Bill and Melinda Foundation‘s web site dates to 22 September 2009, so we’re forced to rely on other press reports.)) That pesky iAfrica.com site, which started all the trouble, has perhaps the longest report, which contains several nuggets.

Gates will warn that as scientists, governments, and others strive to repeat the successes of the original Green Revolution, they should be careful not to repeat its mistakes, such as the overuse of fertilizer and irrigation.

“The next Green Revolution has to be greener than the first,” Gates will say. “It must be guided by small-holder farmers, adapted to local circumstances, and sustainable for the economy and the environment.”

That’s as clear a statement as any we’ve seen that Africa’s problems will require a huge diversity of solutions, and that African farmers may well know what they need. But this is the real money quote:

Gates will say that major breakthroughs in the fight against hunger and poverty are now within reach [and] he will caution that progress toward alleviating global hunger is “endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two.”

On one side, he will say, there are groups that support technological solutions to increase agricultural productivity without proper regard to environmental and sustainability concerns. On the other, there are those who react negatively to any emphasis on productivity.

“It’s a false choice, and it’s dangerous for the field,” Gates will say. “It blocks important advances. It breeds hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. The fact is, we need both productivity and sustainability — and there is no reason we can’t have both.”

That, quite simply, is music to our ears. We’ve been saying the same ourselves at every opportunity. And given that today is a rather special day for us, we’re going to delude ourselves into thinking that someone out there reads us and even pays attention to our ramblings.

Thanks.

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)?