Category: Policy

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Diversification of livelihoods

A 10-year study of Tanzanaia’s Kagera region concludes that:

  • households that have diversified their farming activities, growing food crops for their own consumption, cash crops for sale, and keeping livestock, have found it easiest to escape from poverty
  • households involved in business and trade have also been successful, though this option has only been open to households in better-connected villages with initial endowments of land and other wealth
  • good health and extensive trust networks have helped households move out of poverty
  • illness and agricultural shocks have important negative effects on everyone, except the most well-off

Good news, you might have thought, unless you were loaded for vampire.

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Will the “Green Revolution” Ever Hit Africa?

No.

Approximately two-thirds of Africa’s population labors on small, dusty farms, frequently failing to produce enough food to feed their families. Europe, North America, and Asia got their “Green Revolutions” and the ensuing productivity growth allowed small farmers to send their kids off to school in the big cities. Africa completely missed the boat.

A long article in the New York Times Freakonomics blog by Dwyer Gunn asks “Will the Green Revolution Ever Hit Africa“? It’s long, and very straightforward. While giving the naysayers a hearing, the article is firmly on the side of GMOs, fertilizer and irrigation. Oh, and forward contracts to supply the Gates Foundation’s ((And labelling it thus rather tells you where the story is coming from.)) Purchase for Progress program, cooked up so that the World Food Programme can buy emergency rations locally, injecting some cash into local economies. Because the two thirds of Africa’s people who labour “on small, dusty farms, frequently failing to produce enough food to feed their families” are going to be entering into forward contracts with WFP? Do me a favour.

I started reading the article in full optimistic flood; here was somebody who understood the issue, really understood it. I finished very, very disappointed. Round up the usual suspects. Luckily there were only three comments, and only two really annoyed me, ((Sturgeon’s Law: 95% of everything is crap really makes itself felt in large-traffic blogs)) so here’s my suggestion. Go there, but leave your comments, if you have any, here. Or, at the very least, in both places.

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Cold comfort on climate change

Andy Jarvis: hot stuff
Andy Jarvis: hot stuff
That paper on preparing for climate change in Africa is getting a fair bit of traction, not all of it quite as nuanced as Luigi might have liked. And as luck would have it, one of the things ignored in the paper blipped onto my radar via the CIAT blog. Our mate Andy Jarvis ((Gorging himself at Charles de Gaulle airport even as I write this.)) briefed his colleagues on climate change and research at CIAT. One of his conclusions:

We face a serious scientific gap in understanding crop substitution, current models assume that a maize farmer today will be a maize farmer tomorrow. In reality, many will need to select a different crop to what they have now.

Perhaps Marshall Burke and his team will now crank the machine and make some genetically nuanced predictions about how much change of crops — rather than varieties within a crop — might be needed. But that will require some pretty fundamental understanding of how and under what circumstances farmers adopt new (or old) crops and how best to facilitate that process. How much do the social anthropologists know about this?

Corn and Capitalism: How a Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance, which I’ve mentioned before, has many insights into the factors that resulted in the rapid uptake of maize in Africa. But can the factors that promoted maize be easily reversed to favour sorghum or pearl millet? I have no idea, but I doubt it. How many crop failures will it take before either farmers or their advisors are willing to try something new?

And in other climate change news, a series of policy briefs from the International Food Policy Research Institute sets out An Agenda for Negotiation in Copenhagen. Detailed proposals are in the briefs. Executive summary:

  1. Investments. There must be explicit inclusion of agriculture-related investments, especially as part of a Global Climate Change Fund.
  2. Incentives. There must be a deliberate focus on introducing incentives to reduce emissions and support technological change.
  3. Information. There must be a solid commitment to establishing comprehensive information and monitoring services in soil and land use management for verification purposes.

Stay tuned.