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In Need of a Green Revolution: An Interview With Robert Paarlberg
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Robert Paarlberg is the Betty Freyhof Johnson Class of 1944 Professor of
Political Science at Wellesley College and Associate at the Weatherhead
Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. He has authored
multiple books on development, including Starved for Science: How
Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press,
2008), Food Trade and Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 1985),
and Countrysides at Risk: The Political Geography of Sustainable
Agriculture (Overseas Development Council, 1996).
Question: In terms of access to agricultural technology, how far do small-scale
African farmers lag behind farmers in developed countries?
Answer: They lack almost everything across the board. Farmers in advanced
countries exclusively plant modern seed varieties. In Africa, only
one-third of farmers use modern seeds, and the rest use the traditional
varieties that they have been using and reusing for generations. The
traditional varieties are hardy, but they don't respond to water or
fertilizer and they don't generate a high yield.
The other obvious deficits are water and fertilizer. In Africa, only
four percent of farms are irrigated and fertilizer use in Africa is the
lowest in the world. Fertilizer use, on average, is nine kilograms per
hectare, which is only one-tenth the level of the industrial world. And
that's one reason that yields per hectare in Africa are only about
one-tenth the level of the industrial world - and only about one-third
the level of the developing countries in Asia. African farmers also have
no access to electricity or to powered machinery, and many lack access
to transportation systems beyond carrying things in and out on their
heads. 80 to 90 percent of all household transport for farm families is
on foot.
It's an environment that is essentially unimproved by the uptake of any
modern technologies, and that is why in Africa the productivity of their
labor remains very low. Years ago, there was a Nobel Prize-winning
economist named T.W. Shultz who described their circumstances as
efficient but poor. Agricultural workers are very careful with every
action they take. They cannot afford to waste a thing because they are
so poor. They work from dawn until dusk - there is no laziness here -
and yet, because they don't have the technologies to increase the
productivity of their labor, their average income is about a dollar a
day, and one-third of [the workers] are malnourished.
Q: Should reaching parity in agricultural practices with the West then be a
top priority of African governments? Are African governments the right
vehicle for that push, or should some other actor(s) take the lead?
A: I'm not sure that parity should be the goal. There are some aspects of
agriculture in the United States and Europe that I hope the Africans
never imitate. The Americans, the Europeans, and the Japanese use too
much fertilizer, instead of too little. We [the developed world] have
agricultural systems that use too many chemicals rather than too few. We
have become excessively reliant on the burning of fossil fuels, engaging
in mechanized farming that is much more than any African farmer should
or ever could aspire to. So I wouldn't want parity with the advanced
industrial states, but rather a technology upgrade from where they are
now.
African governments have to play a role; you cannot ignore them. There
are some basic public goods that only governments can provide: rural
roads, rural power, schools and clinics, the protection of private
property, the maintenance of a sound macroeconomic environment, public
investments in agricultural science, public investments to improve
technologies for poor farmers who cannot afford to purchase things from
private companies, and so on. Private companies are not going to make
investments to improve technologies for poor farmers, because poor
farmers make poor customers. It has to be done through the public
sector.
That does not mean that there is no role for NGOs or for private
foundations. I would argue that their role is first to pressure and to
advocate public sector investments that are not being made. For example,
in Uganda, the government devotes less than two percent of its budget to
agricultural modernization even though 60 percent of Ugandans depend
upon planting crops and raising animals for their income. A number of
NGOs in Uganda are trying to do everything themselves. However, they
should devote at least some of their time to pressuring the government
of Uganda into expanding investment. As long as NGOs realize that they
cannot possibly substitute for the role of the government in providing
basic public goods and concentrate instead on what they are good at,
which is usually the delivery of private services, then there could be a
harmonious relationship between governments and NGOs.
Q: Some NGOs, notably the International Federation of Organic Agricultural
Movements (IFOAM), have been critical of agricultural technology
developments, such as the use of nitrogen fertilizer. What motivates
these advocates, and is there any validity to their arguments in terms
of say, nitrogen fertilizer being detrimental to individual farmers?
A: There is merit to their arguments. In Germany or in the UK, nitrogen
fertilizer use is excessive, which can lead to the pollution of ground
water, thereby creating medical hazards. In Europe, where farmers use
too many chemicals, it is sometimes a useful corrective to have an
organic farming movement. The problem is, the model that they want to
follow would go from too many chemicals to zero. Their view is that you
cannot use any nitrogen fertilizers. You have to replace nutrients in
the soil instead by planting and plowing under cover crops, or by
collecting and composting animal manure. These approaches work well
enough on about four percent of the crop land in Europe in part because
these are more expensive processes that some wealthy European consumers
support enough to pay a premium price for crops grown this way.
What African farmers need is not to go from nine kilograms of fertilizer
a year to zero; they need to go from about nine to 50 and that is a
commitment that agricultural scientists in Africa have made through the
New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD). I think that
it gets in the way of those sound goals when organic advocates from
Europe come in and tell African farmers not to use any nitrogen
fertilizer at all. I think that it is an inappropriate export of a
European preference into a part of the world that needs more input use,
not less.
Q: In your book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out
of Africa (Harvard University Press, 2008), you describe yet another
inappropriate export from Europe to Africa: the misperception that
genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been proven to be detrimental
to public safety or the environment, when there is little research to
support that position. How pervasive is this view among average African
farmers if their governments have bought into strict regulatory
processes to support this perception of GMOs?
A: Most African farmers know very little or nothing about GMOs because it
is not yet legal for them to plant GMOs. African governments have not
yet permitted the use of this technology. The only government in Africa
that allows the planting of GMO crops is the Republic of South Africa,
which is an exception because it is a temperate zone country and it is
still dominated by commercial farmers left over from the apartheid era.
In the rest of Africa this technology is being kept at a distance from
farmers by governments and regulators who have adopted the European
approach of being highly precautionary and making it nearly impossible
to get an approval for this technology. They depend upon Europe for
foreign assistance; therefore they want to follow European policy. This
is in part because European-based NGOs like Friends of the Earth from
the Netherlands campaign against the use of this technology in Africa,
and in part because Africa exports a lot of agricultural commodities to
the European Union, so African governments worry that if they start
planting any GMO varieties, importers in Europe may stop purchasing
goods from that country.
In addition, African governments are anxious about the health and
environmental impacts of GMOs. Unfortunately, when European activists
campaigning against GMOs go to Africa, they repeat all of the
allegations against the technology, but they never mention the fact that
scientific authorities in Europe have thus far found no documented
evidence of any new risk to health or the environment from any of the
GMOs on the market so far. That is the official opinion of the Royal
Society in London, of the French Academy of Science and Medicine, the
German Academy of Science and the Humanities, and the Research
Directorate of the European Union. They are not significantly different
from the conventional crops on the market but Africans seldom hear that;
they usually hear only the worrisome scare stories.
Q: So, does this mean that the only hope for changing this anti-GMO mindset
in Africa is first a change in European policy?
A: I hope not, because European policy will not change any time soon. The
other path would be the development of genetically engineered crops in
Africa, specifically tailored to the needs of small farmers in Africa.
This path would not be undertaken by private companies like Syngenta,
Pioneer DuPont, or Monsanto, but by African scientists working in
African research institutes. It would be funded not by companies, but by
philanthropic foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The technology that is most promising in this regard is a new
genetically engineered variety of corn that is better able to tolerate
drought. That is exactly what farmers in Africa need more than anything
else.. If they were able to plant seeds that could do well even when the
rains dipped by 20 or 30 percent in the low end, it would help them
avoid falling back into poverty. The trick is to take this drought
tolerance gene that was discovered by corporate scientists in North
America, and with Gates Foundation money, help African scientists
transfer this trait into African varieties of corn before selling or
giving away these seeds to farmers in Africa. That's a project which
will take five years at least, but the Gates Foundation has just
announced its plan to spend US$ 45 million to achieve that objective.
And my hope would be that a compelling technology such as this would
become available. It would be much more difficult for regulators and
governments in Africa to prevent their farmers from acquiring that
compelling technology because of the regulatory preferences of
Europeans.
Q: Are there any indications in the status quo that this sort of science
infrastructure is being developed by Africans?
A: African governments do not have any extra money. They are heavily
dependent on foreign assistance and on foreign governments for periodic
debt cancellation. They have government workers and army soldiers that
need to be paid. They have urban services that need to be delivered.
African governments have very little flexibility in their budget to make
investments in a long-term project like agricultural research and
development.
Historically, African governments have not spent money for agricultural
research and development unless it is made available to them by the
donor community for that purpose. The problem is - and here we have to
blame the US as much as Europe - the donor governments have withdrawn
their support for agricultural science in the last 25 years or so. The
US Agency for International Development (USAID) has reduced its
assistance to agricultural science in Africa by 75 percent over the last
25 years. USAID has reduced its assistance to agriculture overall, from
approximately 25 percent of its budget in 1980 down to only 1 percent of
its budget today. It is therefore no wonder that African governments are
not spending enough on agricultural modernization.
Q: You mentioned earlier that only four percent of African agricultural
land is actually irrigated. What sort of role can technology play in
expanding access to irrigation for drought-stricken regions?
A: Irrigation costs in Africa are much higher than they are in Asia because
the topography is less even, the road and power infrastructure for
developing irrigation projects is inadequate, and the population density
in Africa is much lower than in Asia. The benefits per person of an
irrigation scheme tend to be a little lower in Africa than they are in
Asia, and that has made it harder for African governments to justify
irrigation.
However, if you measure the benefits in terms of poverty reduction,
investments in irrigation in Africa are money well spent. The trick is
to decide what kind of irrigation works best. Do you build a dam and an
irrigation canal system, or do you drill separate wells?, Do you use
more traditional low technology water harvesting systems, or do you come
up with an intermediate technology, say a foot-powered travel pump that
allows you to lift water without electrical power? All these options are
available; what is holding them back in Africa is primarily a lack of
private sector money and a lack of public sector investments in the
countryside. As I said, Uganda spends only one to two percent of its
budget on any kind of agricultural modernization. I would like to see
more NGOs invest their resources in extending appropriate household
scale irrigation systems to farmers in Africa.
Q: At the household level, how do disparities like access to irrigation
impact the quality of life on the African farm, particularly in creating
conditions of hunger and poverty?
A: In much of Africa, rainfall is destiny for your crops and your
livelihood. African farmers need technologies that give them higher
yields in good years and stable yields in bad years. Our tolerant
varieties of maize will do that; access to irrigation and fertilizer
will do that; and access to veterinary medicine will help protect their
animals. They need all of these updates from science to be able to get
through bad years and start accumulating assets, instead of being
periodically being pushed back into poverty.
Q: In your article in the International Health Tribune on April 22nd , 2008
you indicated that it's poor investment in agricultural productivity,
and not the international rising food commodity prices, that drives
pervasive hunger in Africa. Is the rising price of food destabilizing
for the agricultural sector in Africa?
A: The rising price of imported food like rice, maize, and corn is a source
of acute economic stress for urban consumers who depend upon food
purchases from the world market. And it is appropriate to try to respond
to these short-term problems with more food assistance, which is what is
available presently. Efforts to stabilize international commodity
markets by discouraging countries from export bans are driving up the
international price. That is also appropriate. But even if you were to
stabilize prices for urban consumers in Africa, you would solve only a
small part of Africa's food and nutrition problems. 80 percent of those
in Africa who are poor and hungry live in the countryside, not in
cities. I therefore counsel against taking an urban-centric view of
Africa's food problems and focusing only on the current crisis in
international market prices. That is only a small part of the problem.
Since more than 80 percent of the population is satisfied from domestic
production, unless domestic production is increased, the people in the
African countryside are going to remain malnourished regardless of
whether we solve the international food price problem. Agricultural food
production is dramatically lagging behind population growth.
Agricultural production in Africa is 19 percent below where it was in
1970. If we focus only on solving the temporary instability in
international food markets without doing anything like raising
productivity in the countryside, the projection is that by the year
2080, the number of malnourished people in Africa will triple at the
same time that the number of malnourished people in Asia declines by 90
percent. A business-as-usual attitude for agricultural productivity in
Africa is not a formula for just standing still in today's
unsatisfactory situation; it is a formula for multiplying the number of
malnourished people in Africa threefold.
Q: Given how pervasive malnourishment - compounded by problems of global
warming - is expected to become in Africa, can we expect to see any
African popular movements that would bring about some sort of
reactionary change?
A: I would not wait for that to happen. The people in Africa who need more
productive agricultural technologies live in the countryside at a
distance from the power centers in the city. They cannot demonstrate in
the capital city because they are 50 kilometers away. And there is no
road to get them to the capital city, so it would be a two-day walk.
They are also illiterate and not able to be effective participants in
modern political activism. Moreover, they are disproportionately limited
and often legally second class citizens, not able to own or control
their own assets. Women, children, and the elderly are often stuck in
the countryside if the men look for better income opportunities in town.
These are not the kinds of people who would be likely to start a violent
insurrection.
The average day of a woman in rural Africa is work from dawn until dusk,
usually either in meal preparation, tending crops, or caring for
children. We complain about too much fast food here. In Africa the
problem is too much slow food. The average meal of maize requires
African women to first plant the maize. They then have to weed the
fields, harvest and store the crops; they then have to strip the maize
before winnowing and drying it. They have to pound the maize, then they
have to dry it again. To cook the maize, first they have to walk to
fetch firewood and water before they can prepare food for their family.
This is a set of timely demanding activities; just surviving leaves very
little room for political organization and activism.
Q: Is the introduction of simple machinery an easier way to move forward in
productivity investment?
A: You need everything, but electrification in rural Africa would be a
wonderful improvement. Electrification would be of considerable value in
doing any number of village tasks; from pumping water to cutting wood
and grinding meal. Every single technological upgrade works
synergistically with every other technology upgrade.
One thing that does not work is waiting for the private sector to
provide these things. That is one problem we have had in the last 25
years. It has become fashionable during the Thatcher-Reagan era to
discourage public sector-led development. Since governments always get
in the way of development, the best thing to do is to get the government
out of the way. Create a stable macro-economy, get the prices right, and
devalue the currency. Then private investment will respond to needs and
price signals. All of that is fine, if you have roads, power, public
schools, and clinics for basic human health. If you have the public
goods that private companies need in order to make safe and secure
investments, private companies will commit; but in Africa you don't have
those, so you need first of all to deliver the public goods. Only then
will the private sector do its job.
Q: Are there any encouraging signs of a "Green Revolution" on the horizon
for Africa?
A: The current spike in food prices may trigger a lot of responses that I
would label as only temporary band-aid solutions, like giving more food
aid. However, these band-aid solutions are dramatizing the needs of
African countries and giving more urgency to the imports of long-term
investments. Thus far, the United States has not done as much on this
front as Great Britain. Prime Minster Gordon Brown has already promised
larger investments in agricultural development in Africa. The World Bank
is finally waking up to this problem after allowing the agriculture
share of its lending to shrink to only eight percent of its portfolio.
The new World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has said that he is going
to more than double bank lending for agricultural development in Africa.
If high prices trigger these kinds of responses, and if significant new
investments are made, there is nothing to stop Africa from seeing its
productivity climb. |
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