Four of the world’s largest agribusiness corporations are joining with the Rockefeller Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development in a major new effort to create a Green Revolution for hungry Africa. Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and DowAgrosciences say they will donate research tools seed varieties, patent rights, laboratory techniques free to African scientists through the new African Agriculture Technology Foundation being established in Kenya.
It’s about time we cut through the First World’s welter of anti-corporate and anti-technology sentiment to refocus on real human and conservation progress.
Southern Africa is currently suffering a drought-driven famine, and about one-third of the African population routinely suffers from inadequate food supplies. The International Food Policy Research Institute predicts Africa will have more than 200 million chronically malnourished residents by 2020, even after clearing a Texas worth of wildlands to plant more low-yield crops.
Unfortunately, the first Green Revolution’s “miracle†wheat and rice varieties aren’t suited to Africa. Africa also lacks roads and good irrigation sites, and its poor governance has kept fertilizers and pest control chemicals too expensive for its millions of subsistence farmers.
The first Green Revolution was driven by public-sector research. But our public sectors are no longer doing much agricultural research. Public funding for agricultural research has become politically incorrect in the well-fed First World where there is already more farm production than we can eat. Our consumers are more worried about their weight and activist-aggravated perceptions of risk from farm inputs than about hunger.
The new consortium is the brain-child of Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. That’s fitting. In the 1940s, Rockefeller founded the first agricultural research station for the Third World (in Mexico). Rockefeller’s Mexican research launched the Green Revolution of the 1960s, which is credited with saving more than one billion people from starvation in Asia and Latin America. At the same time, it tripled the crop yields on those regions’ best farmland–thus saving 12 million square miles of forest from being cleared for farmland.
Before 1960, India grew only 60 million tons of grain per year, instead of the 240 million tons per year it currently produces. Clearly, India would have suffered massive starvation and wildlands losses without the high-yield crops.
The new hope for combating Africa’s tropical insects, weeds and droughts is being pinned primarily to plant genetics and biotechnology that can inexpensively deliver seeds with higher yields, better pest resistance, and better nutrition.
Most of the world’s genetic engineering investments to date have been made by multinational corporations that have little hope for near-term sales to impoverished Third World farmers. However, the companies in the new consortium hope that, by first assisting Africa’s own farm research, they will unleash new crop productivity, ultimately helping to turn Africans into affluent customers.
The new Foundation will feature an African-majority of directors, chaired by Eugene Terry, a well-known and highly respected plant pathologist from Sierra Leone.
Even so, the new foundation can expect strong opposition from eco-groups that have long condemned both corporations and the first Green Revolution. (They claim it benefited only big farmers, and displaced thousands of low-yield seed varieties with a few new ones.) Some even blame higher crop yields for “global overpopulation,†rather than crediting the world’s recent one-time population surge to lower death rates triggered by clean water and vaccinations.
Several European governments are also demanding “sustainable†farming systems for the poor countries, even knowing that the lower yields from organic and traditional farming systems could not sustain today’s populations on today’s cropped area. These governments are also hostile to biotech crops even though the European Commission says biotech crop development is probably somewhat safer than conventional cross-breeding.
Few of the well-fed consumers in the U.S. and Europe feel an urgent need for biotech foods. Perhaps they don’t realize that genetic engineers are taking the allergy risks out of such allergy-dangerous foods as peanuts and soybeans and this will save thousands of first-world lives.
Dr. Conway recently published a commentary in Science, describing how both conventional and biotech research can help an African mother who farms two acres: by fending off the parasitic witchweed and streak virus that destroy her corn and sorghum, preventing the Black Sigatoka disease that threatens her bananas, and combating the cassava mealybugs and mosaic virus that attack her drought-staple cassava. As a result, she can double her farm’s production, which means feeding her own family better plus growing enough food for sale to send her daughters to school.
Multiplied millions of times, that’s the human goal of the new agricultural research consortium.
