WAGENINGEN, Netherlands: Bringing a green revolution to Africa and feeding the continent’s 200 million hungry people is one of the greatest development challenges of this century, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday.
Annan said a 50 percent jump in staple food prices in the last year has deepened the crisis for the average African farmer rather than helped him.
Farmers who lack fertilizer for poor soil, who have no access to high yield seed and who cannot move their crops to the market because of high fuel costs gain no benefit from higher farm prices, he said.
Africa needs to revolutionize the entire food chain, he said. That “will require one of the largest efforts in human history,” he said.
Annan is director of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, formed two years ago with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. He said he has committed US$330 million (€225 million) to help small scale farming in Africa.
Most farms in Africa are less than a hectare (2.5 acres) and only five percent of arable land is irrigated. Four of five people in rural Africa have no electricity, he said.
Annan spoke at the opening of the Academic Year at Wageningen University, an agricultural research institute involved in his program.
Read more at the International Herald Tribune…
… or read the speech Kofi Annan delivered at Wageningen University
Annan at the panel discussion with students, 1st september 2008.
1 comment
Molly Stevenson says:
Sep 3, 2008
Proposals for a New Green Revolution for Africa seem to rest on an important assumption: that countries in Africa must follow the development path of the rich nations, namely models of industrialised growth and corporate concentration in which large efficient industrialised farms will continue to replace the small family farm. As a result there has been no real attempt to examine the failure of previous attempts to introduce a ‘Green Revolution’ in Africa.
The Green Revolution was premised on the idea that in combination the use of improved seed varieties, fertiliser, pesticides and irrigation could raise crop yields on an unprecedented scale. That this succeeded in parts of South Asia and South America should not distract us from the impact of such production systems. Increased use of water has depleted underground water supplies thus lowering the water table, increased use of fertiliser and pesticides has led numerous health and environmental problems, and the increased use of a narrow range of improved varieties has led to crop uniformity with a decline in agricultural biodiversity. The responsiveness of crops to the increased use of fertilisers is in decline resulting in lower input/output ratios.
Attempts to introduce the Green Revolution in Africa failed due to a number of reasons for example: the variety of agroecosystems, climatic variability, the sparseness of the population, the lack of infrastructure to support an input driven agriculture with its need for good roads and market linkages and state failure.
However the New Green Revolution for Africa is premised on the same principles but a somewhat different formula namely:
• Nutrients for the soil but with an emphasis on inorganic fertilisers
• Small scale irrigation and rainwater harvesting
• High yielding varieties of seed
• Corps of master farmers
This formula will supposedly triple yields by 2015 in accordance with the MDGs.
Although there is some reference to the use of both organic and inorganic fertiliser the emphasis is on the latter. Agriculture once again is reduced to the old formula of hybrid maize seed, fertilisers, pesticides and irrigation. In this sense the old Green Revolution mirrors the new Green Revolution but in a new and more challenging context – higher population levels and climate change. Both Green Revolutions are premised on a techno-determinism which subsumes all other factors, simplifying the problem in which one size fits all, depoliticising the development context and creating a market driven solution.
Dr. Dan Taylor
Director – Find Your Feet