A Green Revolution for Africa

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A Green Revolution for Africa
October 26, 2007
The Wall Street Journal;
Excerpts from Commentary by Norman E. Borlaug

The World Bank, in its newly published "World Development Report: Agriculture for Development," takes stock of the [agricultural] sector and its potential for future sustainable development. This World Development Report comes 25 years after the last issue that featured agriculture and rural development. What has happened in the interim? The report card is not all good, particularly for Africa.

Most foods in Africa are produced under rain-fed, often drought-prone conditions...farmlands are generally isolated from motorized transport systems...Africa has few price-support systems for production inputs or farm output...Africa's political commitment to agriculture and rural development has been much weaker than what existed [during the Green Revolution] in Asia.

...Increasing population pressures have overwhelmed traditional systems of shifting cultivation to restore or recycle plant nutrients. This has resulted in a progressive -- and now often dramatic -- degradation of the soil resource base, while fertilizer use has hardly increased at all, and is the lowest in the world...A broader and more integrated perspective is needed for African agriculture, one that focuses on the entire farming enterprise -- food and cash crops, livestock and value-added processing...

Substantially greater investments in infrastructure -- roads, electrical power, water resources -- underlie all other efforts in rural and agricultural development. Unless infrastructure is improved, there is little hope for real progress...New science and technology, including the tools of biotechnology, will be needed to develop crops better able to withstand climatic stresses such as drought, heat and flooding. Such research will also contribute to helping the world prepare for future production effects anticipated from global warming.

The World Development Report is a milestone contribution to placing agriculture once again at the center of the development agenda. Achieving this priority shift will be fundamental to poverty reduction and sustainable development.

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