Category: Funding

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What do you get when you cross a zoo with a seed company foundation?

I’ve no idea, but I’ll be watching this one with interest:

The San Diego Zoo’s Beckman Center for Conservation and Research is teaming teams up with the San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians to create a unique effort sponsored by The Burpee Foundation to restore and revitalize the tribe’s traditional ecological knowledge of native plants and their uses. The partnership, called Burpee’s Native Seeds for Native Americans Program, will join the expertise of scientists from the San Diego Zoo with the experience and knowledge of tribal members, to create outreach efforts that educate and empower tribal youth about their cultural and environmental heritage.

That’s a world class zoo and a world class seed company getting together to use their facilities and expertise to preserve useful plants and the knowledge that goes with them. Too good to be true? I hope not.

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Mo’ better beans

Iowa State University has been awarded $450,000 by the US Agency for International Development to improve beans in Rwanda. The University’s Center for Sustainable Rural Livelihoods will work with local partners to see whether improving yields will result in beans that are more nutritious or more marketable or — Jackpot! — both. Nice idea, and if it succeeds a valuable contribution to fighting hunger and poverty in the region. As ever with this sort of project, however, one wonders whether specific steps will be taken to preserve the existing bean biodiversity that improved varieties will almost certainly displace.

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Hot cocoa

fairtrade.jpgThe Fairtrade Foundation licenses this special mark to distinguish products that have been certified as meeting certain producer and trading standards, meant to ensure that small-scale producers and plantation workers in the developing world get a better deal. The producers “receive a minimum price that covers the cost of sustainable production and an extra premium that is invested in social or economic development projects.” And farmers are thus given an incentive to maintain agrobiodiversity on farm. However, as an article in last week’s Economist points out, this model is not particularly popular among the large corporations that control the global trade in agricultural commodities: “Fairtrade’s price-adjustment mechanism is intended to insulate small producers from volatile commodity markets and the free-trading, no-holds-barred capitalism that multinational companies espouse.”

And yet, Fairtrade-like strategies — The Economist calls them “Fairtrade lite” — are increasingly popular: “firms are finding ways to improve the lot of small farmers, and burnish their own reputations, without signing up to Fairtrade’s rules.” The article describes the latest example.

It is called the “Cadbury Cocoa Partership,” and it commits that multinational to investing US$87 million over 10 years in increasing cacao yields in Ghana. That country provides Cadbury Shweppes with 70% of its global needs (100% of its UK needs), amounting to 10% of Ghana’s production. A recent study showed that yields have been decreasing and youngsters leaving the farms, imperilling supply. Cadbury does use a Fairtrade-certified cocoa (from Belize), but in this case it decided that the problem was not so much price as productivity, and came up with its own scheme.

Intercropping will be encouraged (peppers, mangoes, coconuts) as an additional income option, wells dug to free up the time of women and girls, and schools and libraries built, equipped and staffed. But it is unclear how productivity is to be increased. The article says that “the aim of the venture is to show cocoa farmers how to increase yields using fertilisers and by working with each other.” Surely that’s not going to be enough. Hopefully cacao genetic resources conservation, evaluation and breeding work will also be supported. 1

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Gates Foundation doubles aid for agriculture

Bill Gates announced new awards for agriculture totaling US$306 million. This doubles the amount committed to agriculture, and includes US$42.8 over four years to Heifer International. Interesting in light of the impact of “improved” cows on local livestock breeds. There’s also money for AGRA to improve soil health, to CARE for dairy farmers in Bangladesh, and to TechnoServe to help East African farmers get more for their coffee. The Foundation’s press release is here. New York Times article.

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An evaluation of Gates Foundation and agriculture

The Seattle Times (which one might consider Bill Gates’ local rag) has an interesting and to my mind well-balanced article that attempts to evaluate the Gates Foundation’s effort to support agricultural development in Africa. I’m not going to sum up the arguments here; there’s little point. I am, however, going to draw attention to two aspects of the article.

First, Rajiv Shah, the director of agriculture programs for the Gates Foundation, is “a young medical doctor with an economics degree and background in health policy”. He’s probably also stunningly bright and very able. But who is advising him, and how does he evaluate their advice?

Secondly, the article tells us that:

At a village in rural Uganda recently, Shah sat on the ground with a group of women readying large, round banana-tree bulbs for planting. A staple crop, the banana trees had been suffering from bacterial wilt that cut fruit harvests in half.

This is part of the search for permanent solutions, rather than Band-aid quick fixes, but the fact is, we know how to manage banana bacterial wilt. We really do, especially in the short and medium-term. So while breeding resistant varieties is one potential answer it is an answer to a not-very-urgent-or-important question. Is the Gates Foundation doing anything to help people manage banana bacterial wilt now? I don’t think so, and that’s why many people who are actually working on agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa find some parts of AGRA and the Gates Foundation’s efforts to be just a little wide of the mark.