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Whose Next “Green Revolution”?

By Hugh Hogan, Executive Director
North Star Fund

Note to reader: an abbreviated version of this article appeared in the Fall 2007 of the Environmental Grantmakers Association (EGA) Journal.

The Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller foundations made a philanthropic splash following their September 2006 announcement of a $300 million grant program across the African continent “to help millions of small-scale farmers and their families lift themselves out of poverty and hunger.” The plan, dubbed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), has sparked controversy, evoking as it does the techno-scientific effort of the industrialized North in the 1960s and ‘70s to help peasant farmers of the global South.

The Rockefeller Foundation was the main philanthropic engine that drove the previous Green Revolution, the paradigm on which AGRA is based. Today’s AGRA will focus on three central components: better seeds, better practices, and better markets -- all backed up by better trained scientists and extension services. In the first phase, AGRA will invest $150 million in Gates and Rockefeller monies in developing improved crop varieties for “larger, more diverse and reliable harvests.” AGRA’s focus on better practices will seek a “more astute application of science” to improve how fertilizers are applied, soil is sustained, seeds are sown, and water is used through irrigation or catchment. Finally, AGRA believes Africa’s farmers need “more robust markets,” meaning they will supply farmers with the aforementioned improved inputs and better public and private extension services to use these inputs. And it means “stronger off-farm systems and markets, from storage, to transportation, to processing and final sale.”

Few can question the what of AGRA; it’s the how that should make all grantmakers sit up and ask some very hard questions if they, too, wish to provide the most marginalized of Africa’s farmers –most often women without access to technology, markets, and credit – a hand up instead of a short-lived handout. In moving forward with AGRA and initiatives like it, philanthropy must not ignore the lessons of the past, lest African farmers face the unintended negative consequences of the last Green Revolution.

Rice Farming in Senegal

My thoughts about AGRA stem from ten years living and working alongside some of the farmers that the initiative seeks to help. In 1990, I began a Peace Corps assignment as an agricultural extension agent in the Foundiougne district of Senegal. Thirty-two months later, I had gained a journeyman’s education in the agro-ecological culture and practices of Mandinka and Serrer women, who have long farmed rice in the tidal salt flats of Foundiougne. The area lies in the coastal region of Sine Saloum. I also gained unsettling insights into the promises and pitfalls of Western industrial-style agriculture the Green Revolution promoted.

Foundiougne is a marginal zone for growing rice. In most years, the area receives just enough rainfall to sufficiently quench the thirst of tender rice shoots in the tidal flats and upland gullies where the women seed their rice. Their harvests vary considerably from year to year due to the marginal nature of local growing conditions. Nonetheless, women’s harvests – which are based on annually collecting and experimenting with dozens of rice varieties -- form a vital component of household and village food security. They are particularly important as villages approach the “hungry time” between the end of the dry season in April and the arrival of new crops in the summer.

The agricultural extension program with which I worked was co-lead by our Peace Corps director and a very wise Senegalese agriculture advisor, Alphonse Faye. Following a three-month agricultural, language, and cross-cultural training, we moved to our host villages, meeting individually and eventually en masse with women peasant farmers from about 20 villages to present our hopes and plans for joint research and experimental trials that would seek to use local resources to boost yields. Then we sat back to listen.

The women immediately began asking for fertilizer and pudeur, or pesticides. Alphonse replied that was not what the program was about, at least not for now. Rather it was meant to focus on strengthening what the women were already doing without depending on too many outsiders or their resources. He reminded the women of past efforts that focused on men’s farm work, peanuts and millet, and irrigation and machines in the case of rice. These programs brought better seeds, free fertilizer, and pudeur for a time, Alphonse reminded them. But the government did not see the women’s rice farming system as worthy of innovation or support.

High Input, Mixed Results

Years ago, French and Chinese agricultural advisors had come to Senegal to advise the government’s agricultural ministry. These well-paid advisors, working with Senegalese counterparts, had experimented with using machines to farm rice, which brought men into what had been primarily a women’s farming system. They installed irrigation equipment and distributed “improved” seeds that were not always ideally suited to the erratic rains and salt and iron intrusion that plague local rice fields in the Sine Saloum region. They also issued free or subsidized credits to local rice farmers to buy fertilizer and pesticides. But they did not take much time to talk with the women about their existing varieties and how agro-ecological conditions in a given year led them to their sowing decisions.

As one might expect, yields increased in many fields where the conditions were ideally suited to such “high input” agriculture. Over time, however, the advisors moved on. The machines broke down and, without a local infrastructure to fix or replace them, the broken bits were left to rust. Eventually the free inputs and credits dried up. By the 1980s, the rice-farming system across Foundiougne to the Senegambian border devolved fully back to the women who had been responsible for it for centuries – with no support from local extension services.

A Community-based, Farmer-driven Alternative

Alphonse’s experience led him to create a very different approach to agricultural extension and implementing change in Senegal’s rural communities. He focused on community-based work that put Fioudiougne’s women rice farmers more in control of how we went about agricultural research and experimentation.

Working with farmers who had been selected by their women’s associations, we conducted detailed surveys on local agro-ecological conditions, farming practices, calendars, and cultural beliefs. Understanding tenure, power, and local clan associations was never easy, but we were keen to ensure that information would be shared across different networks. The farmers picked the fields where we did on-farm experiments, and picked the experimental plots that we monitored and harvested together.

Our tests involved simple changes, such as a locally forged, appropriate technology seeding rake which the women used to sow their rice in rows. Sowing on line enabled the women to distinguish weeds from rice shoots earlier, so they could weed sooner and give more nutrition to growing rice plants, which in turn boosted yields. In a couple of plots, we also enlisted willing husbands to bring their animals down to plough the soil prior to sowing, as directed by their wives, and arranged to apply cow or sheep dung on a more precise schedule to coincide more tightly with the growth phases of the rice.

Fundamental to the success of Foundiougne’s rice farmers has always been their ability to collect a wide variety of rice seeds adapted to different growing conditions from year to year. Our goal was to support these practices, and we encouraged the women to be diligent in seed selection and sharing. The women were also given two pounds each of improved seed varieties that Alphonse had developed as a young researcher and breeder. They enthusiastically tested them in a variety of plots and returned the two pounds at the end of the season so others could experiment as well.

Right Path or Wrong Turn?

Success stories like this can be found throughout the global South (For a more recent example, check out the NY Times story of Zambian extension agent, Hammerskjoeld Simwinga, a recent winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize). Before grantmakers dive into the pool of funders focused on feeding 21st-century Africa, they should research at length what has worked, what hasn’t, and why. Some key questions include:

1. Who will benefit? Will subsistence farmers maintain control over their seed stock – both their diversity and best place to plant from year to year? It would be catastrophic if AGRA becomes simply about creating more customers for monoculture farming that relies on Western seed companies’ hybrid, genetically modified, or “terminator” seeds. This would erase farmers’ deep ecological knowledge in the name of progress and corporate profits.
2. Will scientists and extension agents trained by the program be required to carry out their research and training by living in the communities they serve? And who will decide what crops are prioritized for research? If AGRA is serious about supporting a farmer-led research and implementation agenda, then agenda-setting should be tied to village-based farmer associations empowered to help set research agendas, methods, and dissemination of results.
3. Does AGRA address the role of power in agricultural change and innovation in Africa? These huge new investments should not undermine food sovereignty or ignore cultural traditions. If AGRA is serious about bolstering the ability of farmers, especially women, then they should be helped to organize. Money should be earmarked for leadership training in many places where patriarchy and government neglect or corruption are well entrenched.
4. Will AGRA focus solely on cash crops? Will it seek to convince farmers through heavy subsidy or incentives to commercialize subsistence crops? This latter effort will be a tough sell and if successful could undermine rural food security. And if AGRA seeks to bolster African farm incomes derived from commercial crops, will it seek changes within the WTO and GATT to enable Africa’s poorest farmers to market their goods competitively in Europe, the U.S. and Asia?

Perhaps AGRA’s partners have answers to these questions, and the others coming from those familiar with the costs of the previous Green Revolution. At the very least, AGRA should seek out the Alphonses Fayes of Africa, learn from them and use their history and wisdom to guide the vision and implementation of this Promethean philanthropic undertaking.

To learn more about AGRA visit www.agra-alliance.org.

To respond to this “Perspectives” essay or submit one of your own, write to editor@ega.org. (For the Spring 2008 issue, we are seeking submissions on the topic of nuclear power.)