Ending Africa's Hunger | The Nation


Ending Africa's Hunger

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About the Author

Annie Shattuck
Annie Shattuck is a policy analyst at Food Firstand has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Gimenez)...
Eric Holt-Gimenez
Eric Holt-Gimenez is executive director at Food First and has recently co-authored (with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck)...
Raj Patel

Also by the Author

The Gates Foundation in Africa


We hear from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation regarding our September 21 "Ending Africa's Hunger," and our authors reply.

Also by the Author

The Gates Foundation in Africa



Also by the Author




This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It's a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama's vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the '60s, we haven't yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you've got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."


But there's a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn't a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It's true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution.

At best, however, the first Green Revolution was an ambiguous success. As John Perkins writes in his magisterial Geopolitics and the Green Revolution, it was instigated by the US government not out of a direct concern for the well-being of the world's hungry but from a worry that a hungry urban poor might take to the streets and demand left-wing changes in the Global South. The term "Green Revolution" was coined by William Gaud, administrator of USAID in the late 1960s. Referring to record yields in Pakistan, India, the Philippines and Turkey, he announced, "Developments in the field of agriculture contain the makings of a new revolution. It is not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution." Steeped in the cold war, the first Green Revolution was designed to prevent any other revolutions from happening.


Beyond the massive displacement of peasants, the Green Revolution wrought other social damage--urban slums sprawled around cities to house displaced workers, pesticide use went up, groundwater levels fell and industrial agricultural practices began racking up significant environmental debt. Today, because of the Green Revolution's catastrophic economic and ecological consequences, even its strong advocates in India have recommended that up to 70 percent of farmers farm organically.

The architects of Africa's new Green Revolution at the Gates Foundation are sensitive to these flaws. In an interview, Roy Steiner, deputy director of agricultural development, was well versed in the history, emphasizing that the Gates Foundation's agricultural priorities are directed at small farmers (known as "smallholders") and women. The past offered some salutary lessons, he said, because "if you look at the depletion of water tables and the overuse of fertilizer, a lot of that has to do with very poor policy choices. It pushed a certain mode of agriculture that we know now was an overuse."

Nonetheless, the Green Revolution being prepared for Africa bears more than a passing resemblance to its predecessor. For starters, in the 1960s the push for a Green Revolution was accompanied by fears about national security and stability; the recent global spate of food rebellions, in dozens of countries from Egypt to Haiti to India, has made food a security concern once again. Furthermore, the first Green Revolution was made possible through the philanthropy of a billionaire American family--the Rockefellers; the second is bankrolled by Gates. This is not a superficial coincidence: the destinies of millions of the world's poorest farmers are again being shaped by the richest Americans, and philanthropic choices are very different from democratic ones.

One of the most important choices involves the role of technology. At the Gates Foundation, Roy Steiner emphasized that "we believe in the power of technology." It's a belief with clout: about a third of the foundation's $1.3 billion in agricultural development grants have been invested in science and technology, with almost 30 percent of the 2008 grants promoting and developing seed biotechnologies. Through a range of investments, the Gates Foundation is turning its faith into reality. This reliance on technology to address a growing political and social problem loudly echoes the thinking behind the first Green Revolution.

Why Africa Is Hungry and Knowledge Is Never Neutral





The first Green Revolution spawned and exacerbated many social divisions, especially around access to land and resources, since the scale required by Green Revolution technologies meant that it was systematically biased against smallholders. The Gates Foundation is clearly aware of the importance of smallholder agriculture; but a leaked internal strategy document suggests that something else is more important: "Over time, this [strategy] will require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production." "Land mobility" is an Orwellian term meaning the land stays where it is but the people on it are driven off. The foundation stands behind this idea, saying that peasants will head to cities "because there are a lot of them who don't want to be farmers [and] people make their own choices."





It was innovative ecological technologies like push-pull (and not traditional Green Revolution approaches) that were praised by a recent international effort to assess the future of agriculture. "The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development" (IAASTD), a report modeled after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, took more than four years to complete and relied on the expertise of more than 400 scientists. It was adopted by fifty-eight countries in the global North and South (though not the United States, Canada or Australia). The IAASTD found that a focus on small-scale sustainable agriculture, locally adapted seed and ecological farming better address the complexities of climate change, hunger, poverty and productive demands on agriculture in the developing world. That report--the most comprehensive scientific assessment of world agriculture to date--recommended development strategies that are in large part the opposite of those backed by the Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation acknowledges the relevance of the IAASTD's insights. But it continues to invest heavily in biotech solutions to the problem of hunger and gives short shrift to the agroecological approaches recommended by the report. What's more, there's empirical reason to doubt whether biotech can deliver what Gates is hoping for. Genetically modified (GM) seeds are expensive, proprietary and contribute to the corporate monopolization of the world's seed supply. Despite extraordinary restrictions on research into the effects of GM products--the industry refuses to allow independent researchers to study patented seed--evidence is finally emerging of the significant environmental and health risks they pose, prompting the American Academy of Environmental Medicine earlier this year to call for an immediate moratorium on GM food.


Africa's New Poster Child: The Malawi 'Miracle'


The Gates Foundation has been aggressively supporting the funding of fertilizer in Africa through grants to establish a network of private agro-input dealers. While the program doesn't explicitly subsidize the price of fertilizers to farmers, it encourages national policies to increase fertilizer availability. If the problem for African farmers is soil fertility, funding fertilizer seems unimpeachable. A closer examination of the data raises some troubling questions, though. It isn't clear whether it was the fertilizer or the rain that caused yields to increase. Worse yet, according to sources in Malawi, hunger has not abated at anywhere near the levels believed by the international development community.

Indeed, there's reason to think that fertilizer subsidies may render societies more vulnerable to famine. Roland Bunch, a former agronomist at World Neighbors and author of Two Ears of Corn, a handbook on people-centered agricultural development, explains the problem. "The indirect effects of subsidized fertilizer are that farmers stop amending their soils with organic matter because it is easier to apply fertilizer. When the subsidies dry up--as they invariably do--farmers are left with soils that are so inert that they can't even grow a good green manure to restore fertility. At that point, with neither chemical fertilizer nor green manures being feasible, we could easily witness a famine across Africa like nothing we have ever seen before."

This is a concern echoed on the ground. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, has been working in Malawi for more than a decade. She says that Malawi's fertilizer subsidies are "masking food security problems for the long term." Bezner Kerr works with a project in Malawi that takes a different approach to soil health by relying on local farmer experimenters. One village headman has, for instance, encouraged his village to adopt ecological agriculture, which not only improves yields but produces a diverse diet that has improved the health of the community's children, at a fraction of the cost of Gates's genetically engineered nutrition projects. Much like push-pull, the result of that project, which spread to more than 7,000 households, is that families--and the soil--are better off.

When asked about how AGRA affects projects like hers, Bezner Kerr says, "When farmers get vouchers [for fertilizer], they wonder, Why incorporate crop residues? If AGRA is putting all that money into fertilizer, it is taking away from efforts like ours." Like Bunch, she's concerned about the economic as well as the environmental sustainability of fertilizer giveaways. "What happens when AGRA leaves?" she asks.

Is Bill Gates Africa's Latest Strongman?


Stung by widespread criticism over its Green Revolution approach, AGRA representatives have begun participating in public consultations with NGOs and African farm leaders. While this dialogue is an important step, the farm leaders are unhappy about being consulted so late in the game. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, recently convened a dialogue on AGRA. There, Simon Mwamba of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small-Scale Farmers' Forum expressed this frustration in no-nonsense terms: "You come. You buy the land. You make a plan. You build a house. Now you ask me, what color do I want to paint the kitchen? This is not participation!"

Nnimmo Bassey, director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria, suggests, "If the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations wish to extend the hand of fellowship to the African continent, they should move away from strategies that favor monoculture, lead to land grabs and tie local farmers to the shop doors of biotech seed monopolies." This is feedback that can't so easily be shot back to base through a cellphone.

The calls from African organizations to be able to set the agenda for their own agricultural development are heard only faintly in the United States. That's largely because when it comes to African hunger, prejudices about the incompetence of African farmers and the marvels of biotechnology do a lot of the thinking for us. But the Gates Foundation isn't a victim of poor reasoning. It actively promotes an agenda that supports some of the most powerful corporations on earth. Far more than the peer-reviewed IAASTD study, Gates's strategy reflects another report, funded by the foundation itself: "Renewing American Leadership in the Fight Against Global Hunger and Poverty" from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Knocked out in a couple of months by a small team led by a Gates Foundation senior fellow and stacked with staff from institutions receiving substantial Gates money, the report, while rightly calling for renewed investment and education, again ignores the structural and political causes of Africa's hunger, ascribing it to a technical deficit. The report concludes that the United States needs to "reassert its leadership" in "spreading new technologies," because it will increase trade and "strengthen American institutions." Worse, the council's solutions--with classic Green Revolution hubris--ignore the successful endogenous solutions that have been spreading across the continent for three decades.

Rarely in the history of philanthropy has one foundation--or more correctly, one man--had this kind of power. When Obama made his remarks on the Green Revolution, one Seattle Times journalist suggested that "President Obama and other world leaders seem to be taking their cue from the Gates Foundation." It's not hard to see the paths through which the thinking in Seattle might have made it to Washington, DC. Many AGRA and Gates Foundation employees are former industry and government insiders. Rajiv Shah, a doctor with no previous agricultural experience who was headhunted by the Gates Foundation, is now at the Department of Agriculture, as under secretary for research, education and economics, and also chief scientist.


Africa's Green Revolution has another similarity with the first Green Revolution: the technological preferences of the philanthropist shape the approaches on the ground. For the Rockefellers, that meant agricultural technology based on industrial chemistry and oil. For Gates, it's about proprietary intellectual property. Africa's Green Revolution is, in other words, just a new way of doing business as usual.

In its push for technological solutions, its distaste for redistributive social policy and disregard for extant alternatives--as well as in the circumstances that have made food an international security concern--this Green Revolution looks very similar to its predecessor. The biggest issue, however, isn't one of commission but of omission. Just as in India, where peasant demands for land reform in the 1960s that might have led to more sustainable and durable progress (as such reforms did in China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) were ignored, African farmers advocating their own solutions to the food crisis are being marginalized. In particular, the vocally articulated demands--for agroecological alternatives, state support for farmer-led research, for land reform, for women's rights in agriculture, and for sharing access to water--all fade into the background when Gates's answers are amplified.


Models for this kind of change already exist. In Mali, peasant movements have successfully persuaded the government to adopt as a national priority the idea of "food sovereignty," a shorthand for the democratization of the food system. Similar efforts are happening at regional and local levels in other countries. But for those initiatives to register in the United States, the conventional wisdom regarding the Green Revolution needs to be replaced. The tragedy here is not that Africa hasn't had a Green Revolution but that the mistakes of the first may be repeated once more, and that one foundation has the power to make the rest of the world bend to its misguided agenda.

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