Category: Policy

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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?

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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.

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Scientific rabble drowns out debate on GM crops

London’s Science Museum, with support from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), has staged an exhibit to debate GM crops. Last night saw the actual debate. Our man in the hazchem suit reports:

“Future foods: join the GM debate.” The cry rang out from London’s Science Museum as it worked hard to assemble a public meeting (on 22 January 2009) to debate the issues raised in its temporary exhibition of the same name.

Despite fears from some observers that this debate and the accompanying exhibition were to be used to grace GM technology with phony public endorsement, in reality it all turned out rather different. Whether you were pro, anti or agnostic on the issue of GM farming and food, there was little appetite from the panel of speakers, let alone from most contributors from the floor, for the wholesale adoption of GM crops.

Defra (the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) chief scientific adviser Bob Watson stole the show with his blunt analysis of the real food and nutrition problems facing the world. The goal, he said, has to be how to feed 900 million hungry people in the developing world.

This is not a challenge for technology to solve alone; we need a pro-poor trade regime, we need real rural development; we must put farmers at the centre of the debate and pay them for global public goods as well as food production, said Bob Watson. ((This sounds faintly like a call to allow agrobiodiversity to do more than simply supply genes, but I could be biassed. Ed.))

“We may need GM in the future, but at present it is an oversold technique, which needs examination on a case by case basis,” he concluded.

Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, was equally lukewarm about the prospects for GM crops to solve what he termed the new fundamentals of farming and food production. Any solution has to operate under and — even better — help to solve the global pressures on energy supply, soil quality, water availability, the carbon cycle. To Professor Lang the key GM policy and political issue is ownership of the technology and its control.

As the debate opened up to comment and questions from the floor it soon became apparent that the organisers — who had feared hectoring, unruly behaviour from an anti-GM “rabble” — were in fact faced with irate researchers from such bodies as the John Innes Institute. Their degree of upset that society might wish to have a say on the direction that science is leading them was illuminating.

One such contributor asked why all the speakers were treating GM as a “generic science” with generic risk when each application was different and, in any case, merely mimicked “natural” processes. (All the speakers had carefully talked of “case by case” analysis.)

Bob Watson’s reasoned answer was lost in a cacophony of interruption from other researchers, forcing him to describe their approach as rude and uncivilised. An early retreat to drinks and an interval in debate was hurriedly called before the honour of the scientific establishment could be tarnished further.

Perhaps they do debate differently in Norwich?

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L’etat, c’est nous

We asked our friend Laurent Penet to comment on a recent news item that reported the Kokopelli Association is in hot water with the authorities again. Below is his report. Have you got something to add? Let us know.

The Association Kokopelli, a French non-profit that aims to conserve the seeds of old varieties directly with the help of gardeners and volunteers, has been declared “Persona non grata” and can no longer work with the famous Sun King’s Vegetable Garden at Versailles. The decision, by the French Agriculture ministry is a serious blow to the organization.

The decision seems to follow the sentence against Kokopelli in February 2008, when the Association was fined 23 000 euros after a case brought by the seed industry, which wanted to prevent Kokopelli from organizing a citizen-based seed bank service.

While it is true that many Kokopelli varieties are not registered on the official listing and therefore cannot be evaluated nor referenced (and thus may not be distinguishable from other varieties or genetically stable), the main issue revolves around the right to “sell”and multiply varieties. Dynamic conservation of old and therefore endangered stocks and varieties is not yet integrated in the idea of biodiversity yet.

The Ministry’s decision is even more amazing, given President Sarkozy’s declaration that French gastronomy should become part of world heritage, and the fact that even modern recipes often make abundant use of old fashioned vegetables and varieties.

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