Seeds of Hope

By Christine Gorman

Walk through countless small villages in sub-Saharan Africa, and you will find the same scene repeated again and again: women bent over double, hoeing scrawny plants in dirt packed so hard it's tough to imagine anything ever growing in it. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent over the past half-century trying to do something about the region's crushing poverty, but the situation remains desperate. Rural Africa is hollowing out, unable to feed itself, let alone supply food to the continent's rapidly growing megacities.

In this context, the Gates and Rockefeller foundations announced last week their plan to spend $150 million over the next five years to boost agricultural productivity on the continent. The initial investments will go to developing hardy seed varieties of regionally appropriate crops, creating markets for the distribution of those seeds and educating a new generation of African plant scientists. It's a back-to-basics approach that avoids gambling on shortcuts. But to be successful the new initiative--dubbed the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa--will very soon have to address two equally pressing issues: the need for widespread use of chemical fertilizers to replenish exhausted soil and some sort of system to ensure greater participation of women--who perform the bulk of the work on Africa's farms.

Action is urgently needed. More than 80% of African soil is seriously degraded, and in many areas it is on the verge of permanent failure. For centuries, farmers survived by clearing new land for each season's plantings and allowing old fields to lie fallow and replenish their nutrients. But the continent's fourfold increase in population since the 1950s has forced farmers to grow crop after crop on the same fields, draining them of all nourishment. Do that for a long enough time, and the physical nature of the soil changes. It becomes so tightly compacted that it can't hold water or let roots spread. "Eventually you get to the point where even weeds won't grow," says Gary Toenniessen, director of food security at the Rockefeller Foundation. "Just adding fertilizer back doesn't help. You actually have to replace the soil." The loss of productive land has driven farmers to clear ever more marginal areas, including forests and hillsides, for agriculture.

Fertilizer has a bad reputation among environmentalists in the West because pollution from runoff can be such a problem. But replenishing Africa's soil before it's too late--and thus decreasing the amount of land that has to be dedicated to agriculture--is probably one of the most practical ways of protecting wildlife habitats and reducing erosion. And new micro-dosing techniques, in which a capful of fertilizer is applied to the roots of a plant, minimize the flow of chemicals into rivers and streams.

Many African countries that used to subsidize fertilizers stopped under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, forcing farmers to return to subsistence practices. Today farmers in sub-Saharan Africa use about 7 lbs. of fertilizer per acre, compared with 75 lbs. in South America, 87 lbs. in North America and 91 lbs. in South Asia.

Fertilizer doesn't apply itself, of course, which is why it's so important to involve the women of Africa from the start. It isn't just that women cultivate most of the food crops, like maize and cassava, while men typically focus on cash crops, like tobacco. Women--for better or worse--have generally stayed behind in rural communities, while men migrated farther and farther afield in search of employment and educational opportunities.

Fortunately, the proportion of women plant breeders and agricultural scientists has grown in recent years in places like Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania. Most African women scientists who are 40 or older "come from the land," says Margaret Karembu, director of the Nairobi office of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications. "Our lives really revolved around the village and food production. We know what it means to have to collect water, to have to harvest all day. When you have more women like that being exposed to technology, it helps because they are more likely to work on ways to help their sisters back in the village."

No one expects success to come easily. One of the reasons the green revolution flourished in Asia back in the 1960s and 1970s was that it focused on just a couple of crops--rice and wheat. But Africa depends on dozens of crops scattered across hundreds of different regions at different times of the year. "You're not going to develop a single crop that revolutionizes African agriculture," says Paula Bramel, a researcher who works in Tanzania for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. "This is a much more diverse place."

West African scientists have made significant progress in that regard since the 1990s by creating high-yielding varieties of rice that are well adapted to the dryer conditions of upland regions. Dubbed NERICA (New Rice for Africa), the plants were created through conventional breeding of a high-yield Asian variety with a hardier African one--something that had been tried many times before without success.

Asian farmers, however, have had more access to transportation, irrigation and robust regional markets in which to sell their products. (The Gates-Rockefeller initiative will start with developing markets and address the other issues later.) If there is a greater sense of optimism for Africa this time, it is at least partly because a number of African governments are taking the lead, promising to increase spending on agricultural development and earmarking money for improvements in infrastructure and research.

Even if the governments and farmers do everything right, it could take decades to see widespread improvements. But the countries of sub-Saharan Africa may have no choice. If they are ever to get their houses in order, they must first start with their fields.

reporting by Simon Robinson/ Johannesburg