An Africa Like Iowa

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An Africa Like Iowa
June 7, 2008; NationalJournal.com
By Corine Hegland; Excerpt

Iowa benefited from decades of investment in rural infrastructure, agricultural extension services, university research, and nutrition assistance efforts such as food stamps and the WIC program. Africa would benefit, too.

Seeds, Soils, and Markets

The keys to the green revolution in Asia were high-yield wheat and rice seeds, and fertilizer. The Rockefeller Foundation, together with the Ford Foundation, paid for the seed development, and USAID and host governments paid for the fertilizer. The result transformed the continent.

When the green revolution took off in India and Pakistan, the subcontinent already had the basic infrastructure...Africa, on the other hand, is virtually starting from scratch. Less than 10 percent of its farmland is irrigated. The rest depends on rainfall that is increasingly erratic because of climate change. Roads and railways connect mines, not farms, to markets, and funding for agricultural education and research is minimal. On top of that, Africa's soils are ancient...much of the land has been exposed to cultivation for centuries...farmers have essentially been mining their soils.

Everywhere else in the world, fertilizer replenishes the nutrients demanded by constant crop production. In Africa, sparse roads and suppliers in rural areas, and a transcontinental infrastructure that makes it hard to get imported goods to landlocked nations, drives fertilizer costs up by 200 to 600 percent, putting it out of reach for many farmers. African fields receive just 5 to 10 percent of the average amount of fertilizer used on other continents.

The Rockefeller Foundation spent $20 million and 15 years trying to solve the African soil problem without using fertilizer before giving up in 2000. "You can develop strategies that work on the research station and even in a test village, but they're not adopted by farmers because they require too much labor," said Gary Toenniessen, Rockefeller's managing director. "You have a woman farmer who's got to fetch water, watch kids, and do umpteen other things, and the option of growing some nitrogen-fixing trees that she'll cut the limbs of and bring in as a source of nitrogen just doesn't reach her priority list."

Rockefeller Revisits

In 1999, when African agriculture was still the last item on the global agenda, the Rockefeller Foundation came to the rescue again. It doubled down on its Nairobi-based programs, giving them almost all of the foundation's agriculture budget. In 2001, Rockefeller decided to take a closer look at agricultural inputs and education. If Coca-Cola could profitably deliver bottles of brown sugar-water to every small village on the continent, there had to be a way for agriculturalists to reach farmers. The foundation funded programs in Kenya, Malawi, and Uganda to train and certify rural shop owners as "agro-dealers"--essentially agricultural suppliers--who then received credit guarantees so they could purchase supplies. These dealers processed nearly $900,000 worth of fertilizer and seeds in the first two years, and they rapidly expanded from there.

One rural Malawian, Janet Matemba, sold $250,000 worth of seeds and fertilizer in 2007. "She does that by packaging seeds and fertilizer in small quantities and demonstrating new technologies behind the shop and in the community," said Akinwumi Adesina, who won last year's Yara Prize for an African Green Revolution for establishing Rockefeller's agro-dealer model. Like other dealers, Matemba provides most of the agricultural advice in her area. "The agro-dealers are beginning to fill some of the gap left by the demise of the public extension system," Adesina said.

The final element of Rockefeller's Africa program was plant research and development. The wheat and rice seeds for Asia's green revolution were developed by two Rockefeller-supported groups of national and international scientists. But Africans, unlike Asians, consume many more staple crops than wheat and rice, and Africa's growing conditions are more temperamental and varied: Seeds developed at the African Rice Center and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture are often defeated by local soil conditions, water shortages, and pests.

"In Africa, there's no such thing as one size fits all, and that's what international centers do," Toenniessen said. "What was lacking was the initial investment in building the capacity of the national programs to take what they get from the international research and adapt it to local programs."

So instead of one center in Africa, Rockefeller supported a loose network of them. By financing local seed companies and 25 teams of African scientists at various national institutes, as well as sending agriculturalists to graduate school, it helped develop more than 100 new African crop varieties.

Alliance for a Green Revolution

On its own, Rockefeller's seven-year, $150 million Africa program was good, but it wasn't magical. African governments and other donors and researchers were also working on the problems, developing similar solutions and coming to the same basic conclusions: Crop research, fertilizer, rural credit, and functioning rural markets could go a long way toward feeding the continent's 213 million hungry people.

Rockefeller's program finally got the magic touch in 2005, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation took a hard look at African agriculture development plans and the Rockefeller models for seeds, soils, and markets. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations catalyzed the green revolution in Asia. With enough money, could Rockefeller and Gates finally spark one in Africa?

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