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- The Weekly Trust
Original story on Nigerian Web site; 10/27/2006 - allAfrica.com
Another link to the complete story - AGRA homepage
Bill Gates and the Green Revolution to End Hunger in Africa
January 22, 2007
Excerpt
Source: AllAfrica.com; Weekly Trust
By Abdullahi Yahaya Bello
The Green Revolution to End Hunger
Sub-Saharan Africa is the only place in the world where people have less food year after year. Farmers in the region are today forced to contend with challenges their parents never dreamed of. They have no choice as the population grows but to cultivate their land more intensively, which takes nutrients out of the soil and increases disease and insect infestation. Add the increasingly volatile weather to the equation and tens of millions of Africans are condemned to live on the edge of starvation.
Starvation has long threatened the people of most developing countries. Starting in the 1940s however a concerted effort to improve crop yields, known as the "Green Revolution," swept through much of Asia and Latin America and gave small farmers there a measure of security for the first time ever. In 1970 Norman Borlaug, a Rockefeller Foundation scientist and pioneer of this effort, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on the Green Revolution. By the 1980s the Green Revolution had doubled the amount of food produced in the developing world.
The Rockefeller Factor
The Rockefeller and Ford foundations initiated the Green Revolution in partnership with the governments of developing countries. The idea was to make a comprehensive approach to the improvement of agriculture ranging from the seeds planted by farmers to the markets where their surplus crops are sold.
Rockefeller Foundation and its partners sponsored the breeding of hardier seeds that responded better to fertilizers and irrigation, and nurtured a group of agricultural experts to ensure the new seeds were well-suited to the local soil and climate of the developing countries. Governments working with the foundation made judicious investments in agricultural infrastructure to link farmers to more and better markets where they could buy improved seeds and fertilizer and sell their surplus.
The Rockefeller Foundation started a cutting-edge work in Mexico which soon spread to dozens of countries in Asia and Latin America. However the Green Revolution never reached most of Africa, where sixteen of the eighteen of the most undernourished countries in the world are located.
While much of the world has benefited from agricultural innovation, three-quarters of smallholder farmers in Africa still use the same unimproved seeds they used 50 years ago and have little or no access to fertilizers. Science has passed them by completely.
Africa's overdue revolution
On September 12, 2006 the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched a new partnership to help Africa start its own Green Revolution. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) will initially invest $150 million in what agricultural scientists call seed systems: developing appropriate seeds to attain the best yields in the diverse environments of Africa and working to ensure that these high-quality seeds are delivered to the farmers that need them. The hope is that the combination of Rockefeller and Gate's resources as well as Rockefeller's years of experience will eventually address the whole range of issues that has made agricultural development such a challenge in Africa.
Copyright © 2006 Copyright © 2006 Weekly Trust. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com)
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