The New Scientist begs for mercy.
Confusion at New Scientist
The New Scientist’s blogger manages to confuse the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with the Millennium Seed Bank. I guess it was inevitable.
LATER: No, it wasn’t me that left that first, rude comment! And I’m offended that you think it might have been.
Gates speaks
The Annual Newsletter of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is online. Page 3 deals with agriculture. The emphasis is clear:
New seeds and other inputs like fertilizer allow a farmer to increase her farm’s output significantly, instead of just growing enough food to subsist.
A big reason [for the Green Revolution’s failure there] is that African countries have widely varying climate conditions, and there hasn’t been the same investment in creating the seeds that fit those conditions.
Since I grew up as a city boy and didn’t know anything about farming, I have been on a steep learning curve to understand things like fertilizer, drip irrigation, plant breeding, and which crops are best for which conditions.
Our optimism about technology is a fundamental part of the foundation’s approach. … Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda’s and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture.
But as Tom Philpott over at Gristmill points out:
The document never considers the complex history of agriculture in Africa; nor does it mull the social and ecological effects of industrial-style agriculture in the West and India. Are we still so enamored of our food system that we feel compelled to export it to Africa?
A more robust vision for that continent’s food future is laid out by the United Nation’s Conference on Trade and Development and U.N. Environmental Program. Called “Organic Agriculture and Food Security in Africa” [PDF], the report emerged in 2008 with the support of more than a dozen civil-society organizations throughout Africa.
The report concludes that organic and near-organic agriculture is ideally suited for millions of marginalized smallholder farmers in Africa — and build food security and soil fertility in unison.
Making better use of agricultural biodiversity and other solutions that do not involve what the Gates’ think of as technology is, I think, an even more exciting challenge that just trying to duplicate the Green Revolution again for Africa. And if Africa’s “widely varying climate conditions” were the problem (to say nothing of widely varying soils), how exactly will new seeds and fertilizers address that problem?
Gates also makes much of climate change, whose “negative effects will fall almost entirely on the poor, even though they did not cause the problem”. Does he really think he can breed, from scratch, fast enough to keep up? Or would he do better to devote at least some resources to making more and better use of existing agrobiodiversity in ways that can deliver the improved stability and size of harvests he says he wants?
Kenyan farmers reject technology solutions
Farmers are saying traditional crops were much better because they rarely ever lost everything even in the worst of droughts.
Well, well, well. That’s from a news piece in The Nation, explaining that many farmers are turning away from improved varieties of maize and beans because they don’t deliver a reliable harvest. Kenya does put a little money into its “orphan crops programme,” designed to rehabilitate traditional crops such as cassava, sorghum and millet; The Nation stops just short of calling for more research into these crops.
And that, in a microcosm, is the entire story of international investment in agricultural R&D. Not enough, on the wrong things, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Philip Pardey and his colleagues Julian Alston and Jennifer James have published a paper on Agricultural R&D Policy: A Tragedy of the International Commons that makes for pretty grim reading. They analyse the extent of the current failure to invest and the reasons for it, useful ammunition for anyone who needs to know these things. And they offer some possibilities for the future, which personally I found less than convincing.
The Nation noted that scientists need to move speedily, to prevent the current food crisis one day being remembered as a picnic. But not all scientists are the problem. They chase money, and they solve the problems the money asks them to solve. The money needs to sit up and pay attention.
Rice thrice
Our chums at the International Rice Research Institute have been busy, with no fewer than three press releases in two days.
First up, US$11 million over three years from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to re-engineer rice’s photosynthetic pathway. For the record, there are two different pathways, known as C3 and C4. ((Read all about it in Eating the Sun.)) Rice is C3. C4 is more efficient. So, hey, let’s make rice C4. The release says that as a result of this grant “rice plants that can produce 50% more grain using less fertilizer and less water are a step closer to reality”. But it doesn’t say how many more steps there might be. And if C4 rice is such a good idea, you might wonder why Nature, consumate tinkerer that she is, hasn’t already made it. ((see Denison, Kiers and West for some clues.))
Then there’s another US$30 million over three years (from Bill and Melinda and USAID) to create The Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA).
Major objectives of CSISA include better crop management and postharvest technologies and practices; the development and dissemination of improved rice, wheat and maize varieties; and the creation of a new generation of agricultural scientists and professional agronomists. The initiative will focus initially on eight hubs in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Nepal, which represent key intensive cereal production systems that play a major role in feeding close to a quarter of the world’s population. …
CSISA’s 10-year goal is for four million farmers to achieve a yield increase of at least 0.5 tons per hectare on five million hectares, and an additional two million farmers to achieve a yield increase of at least 1.0 ton per hectare on 2.5 million hectares.
That deserves to be a success, and I don’t think it depends on C4 rice.
And finally, to implement those two programmes, and STRASA (Stress-tolerant rice for poor farmers in Africa and South Asia), another one supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IRRI signed a new three-year agreement with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).
Go IRRI!